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Cheap Heroin

Wait, I thought the war on drugs was supposed to make heroin more expensive: Grams of highly pure Afghan heroin are now trading at $90 in LA. That's about a dime per pure milligram, compared with $2.50 a pure milligram in New York during the "French Connection" days. For a naive user, 5mg of heroin is a hefty dose, so your first heroin experience is now available for less than the price of a candy bar. That's from Mark Kleiman. As far as I can tell, the only good reason for continuing our futile drug policy, and locking up millions of addicts and dealers (not to mention our military aid to…

Fractals and Jackson Pollack

Remember that controversy last year about the Jackson Pollack paintings that were found in a closet, only to have their authenticity dismissed by a physics professor who used "fractal analysis" to prove that they were "substantially different" from real Pollack paintings? Well, it turns out that his fractals weren't that useful after all. On a related note, I still remember a great exhibit at the Met back in 1996, which showcased paintings that were formerly attributed to Rembrandt, but were now just attributed to "the school of Rembrandt". The exhibit was a humbling lesson in…

A shout-out to science

From the President's Inaugural Address: For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act -- not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform…

Evolution, genetics & behavior

Two posts for your consideration. On the Less Wrong weblog, Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych. I am not one to make blanket dismissals of "evolutionary psychology." But, there are structural problems with the strong incentives toward generating hypotheses at the equipoise of novelty and intuitive plausibility. In other words, much of the evo-psych which penetrates the broader public mindspace is driven by demand-side forces. Over at EconLog Bryan Caplan has a post, Born Gay, where the newly famous Ryan Sorba is shown to be pretty close to a total behavior genetics denialist. Until…

Review of the Hobbit paper

Excellent one at A Primate of Modern Aspect: Okay, so we've got lots of increases in brain size, and a few decreases. In the cases where we have decreases, we usually have body size decreases as well. More often than not, we have body size decreases which result in a disproportionately large brain size, but occasionally we have a body size increase which results in a disproportionately small brain size. And all of that brings us to the Hobbit. The authors looked at Homo floresiensis in relation to the Dmanisi hominids, Homo habilis, and a Homo erectus from Ngangdong and found that if we…

Dog selection

Tracking footprints of artificial selection in the dog genome: The size, shape, and behavior of the modern domesticated dog has been sculpted by artificial selection for at least 14,000 years. The genetic substrates of selective breeding, however, remain largely unknown. Here, we describe a genome-wide scan for selection in 275 dogs from 10 phenotypically diverse breeds that were genotyped for over 21,000 autosomal SNPs. We identified 155 genomic regions that possess strong signatures of recent selection and contain candidate genes for phenotypes that vary most conspicuously among breeds,…

Welcome a new island to the world

NASA reveals a new island off Greenland. Well, not necessarily new: Long connected to Greenland’s coast by ice, the island escaped recognition for what it was for nearly a century. As you can see from the Landsat images, the island was covered by ice 20 years ago, and an ice bridge connected it to the mainland only 5 years ago. The warming trend that humans have caused over the last half century removed those connections, driving the ice back 6 miles in 5 years, revealing an undescribed island to an intrepid pilot. Because of our actions here in Kansas, maps of other countries will have to…

Nail gun injuries on the rise: Is this actually good news?

Nail gun injuries on the rise with growth of DIY trend: Doctors in the nation’s emergency rooms are used to seeing so-called bagel cuts — the injury that results from slicing a finger or palm instead of a bagel and is most common on weekends. Now North Carolina researchers report that ER physicians are increasingly treating another kind of painful household injury: wounds inflicted by pneumatic nail guns wielded by weekend carpenters who bought the machines at home improvement stores. Such accidents more than tripled between 1991 and 2005, the researchers found, and 96 percent of victims were…

Brownback's intolerance

A few days ago, General Pace tried to back the Don't Ask, Don't Tell program, claiming that homosexuality is immoral, like adultery. In fact, Don't Ask, Don't Tell is immoral, and has sapped our military of soldiers with vital skills. Anyway. Senator Brownback came out in favor of Pace’s homophobic comments, writing: The question is whether personal moral beliefs should disqualify an individual from positions of leadership in the U.S. military? We think not. General Pace’s recent remarks do not deserve the criticism they have received. In fact, we applaud General Pace for maintaining a…

Overzealous spam filter gobbles legitimate comments, posts.

So, because of assorted commenting issues across the ScienceBlogs galaxy, our tech gurus installed a new spam filter. And apparently, it's quite the enthusiastic little spam filter. Word is that it has swallowed a number of legitimate comments (known with some certainty to be legitimate because they were composed by the blog owners). And blog posts (which I would have thought, as an outsider to the wonderful world of software architecture, were presumptively not spam). Possibly, particular words are triggering the activation of the spam filter's voracious jaws. I can't type them here (…

It would make our start-of-the-year faculty orientation meetings interesting, anyway

A Muslim cleric thought he'd discovered a loophole in Islamic religious law that would allow the restrictions on Muslim women in the workplace to be loosened. He said that if a woman fed a male colleague "directly from her breast" at least five times they would establish a family bond and thus be allowed to be alone together at work. "Breast feeding an adult puts an end to the problem of the private meeting, and does not ban marriage," he ruled. "A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breastfed." Just when you think the Abrahamic attitude…

Southern California Says No To Coal

Speaking of Los Angeles, the city just announced that they are weaning themselves off cheap coal power: Southern California is gambling its future power needs on its constant sunshine, wind and the ability of engineers to effectively harness those and other alternative energy sources. Officials in Pasadena, Anaheim and several other large cities notified the Intermountain Power Agency this week that they would not be renewing their contracts for cheap, coal-fired power. Those contracts expire in 2027. That leaves the cities two decades to secure the alternative energy sources they'll need,…

How to Tell if Al Gore Is Running For President

When Al Gore started to run for the presidency in 2000, he was thin. By the time the race was over, he had gained a lot of weight (like Clinton in 1992), and then he kept on gaining weight in the months after the election. (Who could blame him?) He also grew a beard. However, by December of 2002, by the time he announced he was not running for the presidency in 2004, he had slimmed down again. That meant that he had strongly considered running, was getting himself into presidential trim and then decided against it. Big Al is back to being pretty big right now, or at least he was a few months…

Yay! We're now free to join campus Christian hate groups!

This makes me so happy. I've long wanted to join those lovely conservative Christian groups on campus that have until now restricted membership to heterosexual believers, and now I can. The Supreme Court has ruled that universities may refuse to recognize campus groups that violate non-discrimination policies. Hey, but I didn't want to join them. I guess the good news is that any organization that tries to claim university affiliation while telling the gay kids at school that they're hellbound will get slapped down hard and cut off from funding. That's good news, too! Oh, and that reminds me…

Is this the battery that will save the world?

Nobody knows much about this "ultracapacitor" technology - and one must always be skeptical of technological utopias - but it sure sounds promising: Imagine the day when cellphones charge up in seconds, laptop batteries never degrade, and electric cars have the same power, driving range and purchase price as their gas-powered cousins. It's a consumer's dream and an engineer's fantasy: Safe, affordable and eco-friendly batteries that can store immense amounts of energy, allow for lightning-fast charging, and handle virtually unlimited discharging with little affect on quality. Such a battery…

Special K and Depression

Special K - active ingredient ketamine - is an illegal club drug that was originally used as a medical anesthetic. But now scientists are reporting that it might be a useful ally in the fight against depression: Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health announced a study recently in which 18 chronically depressed patients infused with low dosages of ketamine improved within two hours. Seventy-one percent improved within a day, and nearly 30 percent were depression-free by that time. In 24 hours! These were people who had been dealing with depression from three to 47 years. They…

A successful protest in Chicago

There was an anti-vaccination rally yesterday in Chicago — boring and silly! What's more interesting is that Women Thinking Free (a fabulous new organization) had a counter-demonstration. You can read an account or two or three of the event from the rational perspective; it sounds like the anti-vaxers are also anti-science. The rally and anti-rally also made the news, and that's actually a good account, which plainly states that there is no evidence of a link between autism and vaccination, that Wakefield's study was flawed, and that Wakefield has had his license to practice medicine revoked…

Horse Racing

I completely agree with the sentiments voiced in this column, by William Rhoden: Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass? Is it the tradition? The millions upon millions invested in the betting? Why isn't there more pressure to put the sport of kings under the umbrella of animal cruelty? The sport is at least as inhumane as greyhound racing and only a couple of steps removed from animal fighting. It's hard to think otherwise after watching the brutal death of Eight Belles. And, of course, it's not just high-stakes races like the Derby that are so hazardous. A recent article in…

Shattered Glass

First, read this: Prince Rupert's Drops are a glass curiosity created by dripping hot molten glass into cold water. The glass cools into a tadpole-shaped droplet with a long, thin, tail. The water rapidly cools the molten glass on the outside of the drop, while the inner portion of the drop remains significantly hotter. When the glass on the inside eventually cools, it contracts inside the already-solid outer part. This contraction sets up very large compressive stresses on the surface, while the interior of the glass is placed under tension. It can be said to be a kind of tempered glass. The…

Melodic Rhetoric

This video is shamefully manipulative. It's just a bunch of celebrities, from Scarlett to John Legend, harmonizing over a particularly eloquent Obama speech. The rhetoric is beautiful, poetic and vapid. The camera work is a little too artful. The crescendo at the end is a little too obvious. And yet, it works. The short video manipulates you even though you know you're being manipulated. I'm not a big fan of celebrities mixing with progressive politics, but I still got shivers at the end of the song, right when the "Yes we can!" chorus picks up speed. Those shivers are the sole message of…

Winter and Global Warming

One of the unfortunate consequences of Iowa and New Hampshire getting so much snow this December is that it has really muted the discussion of global warming. I've now been to enough campaign events to realize that the weather definitely affects political discourse. On a hot summer day, just about every presidential stump speech - and I'm referring here to the speeches of Clinton, Obama, Edwards and McCain - referred at least once to the prospect of global warming. However, when the outside world is coated in a thick slick of ice, I've found that presidential candidates tend to steer away…

Manual Transmissions

I've always wondered about why manual transmissions generally get better mileage than automatics. The answer is surprisingly simple: humans are better shifters. According to the Environmental Protection Agency's fuel economy ratings, cars with manual transmissions typically beat their automatic peers by a mile or two per gallon. This is largely because manuals give you more control over an engine's exertions. Despite recent advances in slushbox design, humans are still better than automated systems at recognizing precisely when to shift gears. And smart shifting enables you to limit an engine…

Did the rich support Barack Obama?

Andrew Gelman reports the finding from the national exit polls that the highest income brackets seem to be leaning toward the Democrats this cycle. The difference between 2008 & 2004 is striking and of note. But, remember that $100,000/year in Palo Alto is a working stiff. $100,000/year in Little Rock is a very good living. I suspect that throwing all the data together into one pot and not correcting for regional differences in cost of living removes important information. The correlation between income and region, and voting and region, might mask the true relationship between income…

It's the 21st century, Wisconsin!

A Lutheran church in Wisconsin runs a school (unfortunately). The school council has 'doctrinal issues' with the fellow they hired as principal — he seems to think that the idea that men have authority over women is invalid. So they had a meeting to fire John Hartwig, and something at the meeting shocked the audience. Supporters of Hartwig said they were shocked to learn that women church members would not be permitted to speak during a meeting to decide Hartwig's fate. I'd be shocked, too. Except that I'd also be shocked by this, which everyone there seemed to take for granted. Females do…

Wednesday Whatzits: Taal quiet and quite tall

A few very quick hits: Ever-looming Mt. Rainier, with Tacoma, Washington in the foreground. PHIVOLCS is pondering whether to lower the Alert Status at Taal back to Level 1. The volcano has been on Alert Level 2 for the past month after increasing signs of potential eruptive activity. However, seismicity is down at Taal, so PHIVOLCS will be sending a ground team to do a survey before deciding whether to lower the Alert Level. The heightened state of alert at Taal has lead to some people taking advantage of the populace, with little more than a fake text message to cause panic. Just how tall…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Report for 2/17-23/2010

The flu has retreated and I'm getting back on track. Huzzah! I'll get back to the blog by posting this week's new USGS / Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcano Report. Looks like some interesting stuff in it ... Looks like there were some small eruptions from Oldoinyo Lengai in Tanzania. The volcano is one of the few (only active?) carbonatite volcanoes in the world, erupting a lava composed primarily of calcium carbonate and sodium minerals with very little silica. It leads to the odd lava that erupt black (and cool ~ 500C) and cool to white, making it one of the…

SI/USGS Weekly Volcano Report for 1/6-1/12/2010

The weekly volcano report, brought to you by our friends at the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program and the U.S. Geological Survey. Highlights (not including Mayon, Nyamuragira and Turrialba): Eruptions continue at Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island - heck, this would be the volcano news if it wasn't for all these other, more explosive systems getting in the way. Lava fountains, flows and pools were the order of the day in the SW Dolomieu crater until the 12th of January. Chaiten in Chile continues to chug along - block-and-ash flows were seen and ash plumes continue to emanate from…

Seismicity increases at MachÃn in Colombia

Undated image of Cerro MachÃn in Colombia. I just picked up on this story over on the Volcanism Blog, but I want to post it here too. MachÃn, in Colombia, has experienced a sharp increase in seismicity at the volcano - maintaining the Yellow status for the volcano. 54 earthquakes were recorded at the volcano over the weekend, prompting the INGEOMINAS to raise the alert status. The volcano had a swarm in 2008 that did not lead to any eruption - but remember, better to be safe than sorry. If MachÃn were to erupt, it would join Galeras and Huila as erupting volcanoes in Colombia. Not much is…

Mystery Volcano Photo #15

It has been a slow week for volcano news (and a busy week for me), so I apologize for the abundance of MVPs this week. I've tried to find a good one in the many images submitted to me by Eruptions readers, and #15 is just one of those photos. If you have images you'd like to share with me for MVP or other uses, please email them to me at . (However, I should note that you can't win by identifying your own volcano photo!) MVP #13 was Lava Butte near Newberry volcano in Oregon. It is a lovely small scoria cone that you can walk/drive to the summit. From there, you get a spectacular view of the…

Quick Update on the Saudi Arabian Earthquakes

One brief note before I head out the door ... Fissures formed in western Saudi Arabia during the earthquake swarm near Harrat Lunayyir during May and June 2009. Image courtesy of Ahmed Al-Hussaini. The earthquakes in the Harrat Lunayyir region of western Saudi Arabia seem to be like a character out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: they're just not dead yet. Two more earthquakes, these in the M3 range at 8-9 km depth, hit Thursday morning, further delaying the return of evacuees to the Al-Ais region. This bring the total earthquakes to over 150 since seismicity began a few weeks ago.…

Redoubt back to Yellow Alert

Image from AVO Hut webcam for Redoubt After an exciting few days ... well, OK ... after an exciting few hours on Sunday, AVO has decided to lower the alert level at Redoubt in Alaska to Yellow/Advisory. The alert level was lowered last week after seismicity at the volcano returned to normal after weeks of rumbling (at Orange/Watch status), but then we are all caught by surprise when a phreatic explosion occurred (and AVO returned the volcano to Orange). However, this didn't lead to a new period of heightened seismicity, so back to Yellow we go (even with elevated gas emissions and a nice…

Move over Redoubt ... Okmok shows signs of life

Count this as your mini-update for Redoubt, with the news being no news. Even AVO seems a little bored with Redoubt lately (not to say they aren't watching it as vigilantly as ever) as their last three updates have been exactly the same: Redoubt volcano has not erupted. Seismicity is low, but above background levels and consists mainly of small discrete earthquakes. Night has fallen and no image is visible in the webcam. However, down the road (arc-wise) in the Aleutians, AVO has raised the alert level at Okmok Caldera. New volcanic tremors were felt yesterday at Okmok, averaging about one…

The first stage of mitigation: education

When people think about volcanic mitigation, a lot of time is spent worrying about monitoring and science. There is nothing wrong with this as we need to know what the volcano has done in the past and what it is doing now to predict its future activity. However, a very important piece of the mitigation puzzle is education, because without educating the public of the dangers of the volcano, many times they will not listen to officials when time for evacuation comes (see Nevado del Ruiz, Colombia in 1985). That is why this report from Tanzania is great: scientists going out and educating the…

Signs of activity near Mt. Kurikoma, Japan?

I am always amazed by the number of volcanoes that show signs of activity every year that I have never heard of before. Case in point is this report of activity near Mr. Kurikoma, on the island of Honshu in Japan. The last known eruptions at Kurikoma were back in 1950, and they seem to be water-magma interactions that produce phreatic explosions - and even beyond this 1950 eruption, there isn't much information about the eruptive history at Kurikoma. However, if you look at the report, the activity is actually rather far from the summit of Kurikoma - a full 7 km to the southwest. There are…

Endlessly classy

ThinkProgress reports, Kansas House Speaker Won't Apologize For Praying For Obama's Death: Kansas House Speaker Mike O'Neal (R) has apologized for forwarding emails from his personal account referring to First Lady Michelle Obama as "Mrs. YoMama," but he has not apologized for another email using a Bible verse to essentially call for President Obama's death. Psalm 109:8 became a conservative meme in 2009 to symbolize making President Obama a one-term President, but it speaks to ending his term of office by ending his life: "Let his days be few; and let another take his office." The following…

Santorum smears climate science

Politico reports on on Rick Santorum mixing it up with Rush Limbaugh: "I believe the earth gets warmer and I also believe the earth gets cooler," Santorum said. "And I think history points out that it does that and that the idea that man, through the production of CO2 ... is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd when you consider all the other factors, El Niño, La Niña, sunspots, moisture in the air. There's a variety of factors that contribute to the Earth warming and cooling." ... "It's just an excuse for more government control of your life," Santorum…

Who to blame for the oil spill?

Everyone knows by now that there has been a catastrophic oil platform disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the biggest oil spill in American history…and it is still spewing and people are still talking about expanding offshore drilling. The actual causes of this accident stem from deregulation and exceeding legal restrictions, but you know, that assumes that no one wanted this environmental disaster to occur; we are presuming that it actually is a horrible accident. It takes a mind unfettered by the constraints of reason and evidence to assume otherwise. It requires the brain of Rush Limbaugh. The…

The new Technorati

The past few months Technorati really stopped working for me. Hardly any new links back in, at least that they detected. They unveiled a new site recently, you can read about it at TechCrunch. I really hate it, though to be honest I'd stopped using Technorati for a while. It looks like they pruned a lot of blogs, and that might be why I stopped seeing new links. In any case, here's an unrepresentative and personal reason why I really think it's a step back: The page for Gene Expression at ScienceBlogs (this domain). The page for Gene Expression at gnxp.com, the original blog I started in the…

New Agers are more delusional

Relative to atheists, and conventional religious people (though conventional religious people are more delusional than atheists). Tom Rees has more: Overall, the New Agers were more delusional than the Religious. That was particularly true for belief in witchcraft and telepathy (not shown in the graph). But the New Agers were also more likely to think that people are not what they seem, that they are being persecuted, that electrical devices like computers can control their thoughts, and that their thoughts are 'echoed back'. On a mass scale people with orthodox beliefs who are affiliated…

Happy Monkey, Paul Nelson! It's been six years now

It's Paul Nelson Day, the yearly event in which we make ludicrous pseudo-scientific claims and promise to back them up tomorrow, as celebrated last year. Nelson, some of you may recall, is a creationist who made up this wacky claim of "Ontogenetic Depth", saying he had a way of objectively measuring the complexity of the developmental process in organisms with a number that described the distance from egg to adult. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell us how one calculated this number, or how it actually accounted for the complexity of a network, or even how we'd get a number that was different…

The Illumina whole-genome-sequence

I notice that Fortune has a story on personal genomics up, Genetic sequencing gets personal Biotech firm Illumina will sequence your entire genetic code -- and throw in a Mac -- for $48,000: So far, personalized genomics make up just a small fraction of Illumina's revenue. High costs keep sequencing out of reach for most people. But prices will fall substantially as the technology improves. In fact experts say costs could reach $1000 within three to five years, making more people privy to their entire genetic code. ... One area Illumina is not diving into is sequence analysis. Instead, it is…

Abs & back

Is Your Ab Workout Hurting Your Back?: Instead, he suggests, a core exercise program should emphasize all of the major muscles that girdle the spine, including but not concentrating on the abs. Side plank (lie on your side and raise your upper body) and the "bird dog" (in which, from all fours, you raise an alternate arm and leg) exercise the important muscles embedded along the back and sides of the core. As for the abdominals, no sit-ups, McGill said; they place devastating loads on the disks. An approved crunch begins with you lying down, one knee bent, and hands positioned beneath your…

Staring at "freaks"

Why We Stare, Even When We Don't Want To: "When a face is distorted, we have no pattern to match that," Rosenberg said. "All primates show this [staring] at something very different, something they have not evolved to see. They need to investigate further. 'Are they one of us or not?' In other species, when an animal looks very different, they get rejected." And so, we stare. (An averted gaze is triggered in some people. This too can be overridden only with great difficulty.) It doesn't take much of a facial anomaly to trigger a transfixed response; a normal human face upside down will do it…

The two gay-friendly cohorts

Matt Springer's comment that while differences in regards to abortion remain important among the young, but that there no deep fissure in regards to homosexuality, rings true. I decided to look at the same variables as I did below across the years, but limited to the age group 18-30. In other words, each year from the early 1970s to the 2000s you are looking at the opinions of individuals who are in the age range 18-30 during that year. An interesting trend popped up. The trends for abortion and opposition to interracial marriage are familiar (though the latter exhibits differences by…

And yet another political roundup

Under the fold, as we do here every day.... The Wars of John McCain: John McCain believes the Vietnam War was winnable. Now he argues that an Obama administration would accept defeat in Iraq, with grave costs to American honor and national security. Is McCain's quest for victory a reflection of an antiquated pre-Vietnam mind-set? Or of a commitment to principles we abandon at our peril? Is there any war McCain thinks can't be won? Numbers are Fun: McCain/Palin Bankrupts America edition: To understand what that means in the context of a national campaign, all it takes is a little arithmetic.…

How Long Should Kids Stay in Foster Care?

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption has done more to get kids in care adopted than just about anyone else - their facebook page and websites have done a lot to draw attention to the needs of kids for families.  The biggest new face of foster adoption comes from an adoptive family that put up an image that has their adorable little girl holding up a sign saying "I was in Foster Care for 751 Days But Today I got Adopted!"  The image has been liked almost a million times, and the site's FB page crashed because it was viewed so often.  11,000 people requested information on foster care…

My Atheist Talk Stuff

I've been a guest or interviewer on Minnesota Atheist Talk radio a number of times. I never talk about atheism because I'm nothing close to an expert on that or related issues (though I do have a chapter in a book about it, here!). And, of course, I'm very involved, professionally, in certain church-state separation issues (like this and this). But on Atheist Talk Radio I mainly engage in either science (lately climate change science but also evolution) or the afore mentioned church-state separation issues vis-a-vis the evolution-creationism "debate." Anyway, I've been meaning to finally…

Respect my authoritah on "integrative medicine"!

David Katz doesn't much like skeptics, particularly those of us who question the value of "integrative medicine." In fairness, I can't say that I much blame him. We have been very critical of his writings and talks over the years to my criticism of his statement advocating a "more fluid concept of evidence" more than once, to my pointing out that his arguments frequently boil down to a false dichotomy of either abandoning science or abandoning patients. Last week, my friend Jann Bellamy discussed an unfortunate special supplement of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine (AJPM)…

The Guatemala syphilis experiment, human subjects research abuses, and CAM

If there's one thing that burns me about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) clinical trials, it's how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success that it is unethical to subject patients to risk with close to zero potential for benefit. Perhaps the most egregious example of such a clinical trial is the Gonzalez protocol in pancreatic cancer, a cornucopia of woo and quackery including up to 150…

Overdiagnosis of breast cancer due to mammography

Screening for disease, especially cancer, is a real bitch. I was reminded of this by the publication of a study in BMJ the very day of the Science-Based Medicine Conference a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, between The Amaz!ng Meeting and other activities, I was too busy to give this study the attention it deserved last Monday. Given the media coverage of the study, which in essence tried to paint mammography screening for breast cancer as being either useless or doing more harm than good, I thought it was imperative for me still to write about it. Better late than never, and I was…