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Gullible Gunners

I wrote earlier about the Tony Martin case. Martin shot a fleeing burglar in the back and left him to die. He was convicted of murder (reduced to manslaughter on appeal). Pro-gunners such as John Lott, Glenn Reynolds and John Derbyshire have written about the Martin case, apparently unaware of the facts that showed that the killing was not in self defence, and proceeded to make bogus claims that self defence was against the law in Britain. Claims which they have never bothered to correct. Last week this story appeared in the Scotsman: A man who stabbed to…

The "God" Particle

Let's talk about the God Particle. It strikes me that people refer to the Higgs boson as the "God particle" in the same way some call the iPhone the "Jesus phone": with an almost pointed disregard for what such a prefix actually means. Considering the intensity of the culture wars, the popularity of the moniker is baffling. Is this about contextualizing the abstraction (and grandeur) of particle physics in a way "regular" people can understand? Does this represent a humanist concession to the religious? If so, can religious culture really be swayed by such a transparent ploy -- y'know, it…

String Theory, Part Three

Definitely the final essay in this series. And no more politics. In a Universe first, I received in my cool email "box" yesterday a piece of rebuttal about the political implications of the tokes on String Theory in my last essay. What my correspondent pointed out to me was that my comparison of Intelligent Design and String Theory gave me away as an unabashed leftist (duh), and that, furthermore, positing ST as the intellectual's antithesis to ID is only a detriment to critical thinking, since all I am doing is enacting a typically American (my correspondent is a European) structure of polar…

What is e-research?

That would be the question, wouldn't it. Unfortunately, such fundamental definitions are never simple to create, and even less simple to agree upon. A little history may help explain how we got into this parlous uncertain state, but it may not get us out of it. The short version of the history (which all and sundry may feel free to correct in the comments) is that the Anglophone world had a terminology breakdown right from the start: what the English called "e-science" the Americans (with our customary tin ear) dubbed "cyberinfrastructure." Then the humanities reared back on their hind legs…

Closing a door, without realizing it necessarily

In the midst of all of the end-of-classes and journal deadline and too-many-projects and holiday and general craziness around here, it was almost lost on me that I have inadvertently let a door close this year: I apparently have decided, by my inaction, not to go on the market this year. Now of course, it's never too late to do anything, and I suppose if I really wanted to, I could get some job materials together and track down some reccommenders and send out some applications by the first of the year, or at least shortly thereafter. I mean, that would be the smart thing to do, right?…

Transparency and tenure

I have a number of friends at various institutions that are up for tenure this year. Every school is on its own unique schedule, of course, so some of my friends are finding out right about now, officially or unofficially (mostly unofficially) whether they will be tenured or not. I am going to concentrate on two such friends and their situations in this particular post. Friend #1 is at a school where the tenure requirements are very vague, and where there is almost zero transparency in the tenure process. Junior faculty have to rely on what amounts to smoke signals from departmental…

Kellermann's case-control study on gun ownership and homicide

Dr. Paul H. Blackman writes: But let's get back to the estimates of gun ownership by the cases and the controls. OK. Unlike Dr Suter's straw man argument this is a real threat to the study. If gun ownership of the cases is under-reported more than gun ownership of the controls is under-reported, the correlation between guns and homicide is weakened. If gun ownership of the cases is under-reported LESS than gun ownership of the controls is under-reported, the correlation between guns and homicide is strengthened. The cases were, of course, proxies for them. But the situation was that a…

President panders to anti-manimal lobby! Dr Moreau flees country in rage!

I didn't listen to the State of the Union Address last night, preferring to maintain my equanimity by attending a talk on quantum physics, but I knew I could trust my readers to email me with choice weird science bits. I'm getting a lot of "WTF?" email about this statement from Bush: Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos. It's pure political calculus. He throws away the mad…

Torture

You may have seen the WIRED interview with Psychologist Philip Zimbardo and the mind-numbing pictures of torture linked there. A recent New Scientist interview of Darius Rejali( more, his book) is a necessary read on how torture deeply breaks both the sufferer and the torturer. Part of the NS interview: Why is torture so hard to control? Usually the top authorises it and the bottom delivers. Then it's a slippery slope as torturers quickly become less responsive to centralised authority. One reason is competition between interrogators. When policemen track down information, they cooperate. In…

Encounters with Shakespeare

Don Pedro: You embrace your charge too willingly. I think this is your daughter. Leonato: Her mother hath many times told me so. Benedick: Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her? -From Much Ado About Nothing My first encounter with Shakespeare was in school at the age of 13. We had the play Julius Caesar for our english course (not summaries, the original work). Julius Caesar in all its english glory was a play that was next to incomprehensible - both in words and historical details - for us not-so-literary children of Jolarpettai. Jolarpettai is a town that grew around a large railway…

New Yorker essay on Atheists with Attitude

Read a New Yorker essay on Atheists with Attitude by Anthony Gottlieb where books by Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens are reviewed. Religious belief is as diverse as the number of living species in amazon, many of them, I am sure, are yet to be discovered and evolving rapidly. It is impossible for a book to contain all the diverse beliefs in its scope. Of the three books above, I have only read Dawkins book and Dawkins clearly restricts his book to monotheistic religions that have a personal god as their central dogma. Still, diverse religious beliefs is a swamp with many lurking things that…

Et tu, Francis Collins?

The Raw Story reveals that D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries will be a hosting a program that blames Darwin for Hitler. Orac has going to have to resurrect an entire zombie Wehrmacht to handle this one: look at the unholy corps of creationists he has assembled to defend this outrageous claim: The one-hour program features Ann Coulter, author of Godless; Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler; Lee Strobel, author of The Case for a Creator; Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution; Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial; Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box; Ian…

What other factors could have caused the decrease in NSW homicides?

What on earth do you mean by 'the "nothing else happened" parameter"? Andy Freeman said: Lambert's model is for a transition between two stable situations with some "noise". He uses it to argue that gun control explains the transition. Yet, he doesn't bother to show whether or not anything else happened at the relevant time, whether or not the situations were in fact stable, and so on. You call this a "parameter"?? This is a bizarre usage even by your standards. Your claim that I have not shown that the situations were stable is false. The homicide rate was roughly constant in the…

Charles Darwin's Reception in Germany

In a review in PLoS Biology Axel Meyer discusses a new book by Sander Gliboff on the history of evolutionary biology in Germany following the publication of On the Origin of Species. While many are familiar with evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, few may know about the scientist who is primarily responsible for the wide acceptance of Darwin's work in Germany: Heinrich Georg Bronn (see right). A paleontologist by training, Bronn translated Origin into German within four months of its initial release. He also provided extensive commentary within the published translation as well as…

The National Review Wants to Poison Your Children

Mark Hemingway, the Conservative "tough-guy" for the National Review, has just posted a rant against health concerns for the endocrine disruptor Bisphenol A. I've seen some estimates that over a billion people have had exposure to BPA and there isn't proof of anything. So why the big scare? I assume trial lawyers are involved in the fear mongering. That's a given. But then I saw that last year two reporters from the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel won a George Polk Award-- a major journalism honor -- for reporting on the "dangers" of BPA. It's another reminder that there are some perverse…

Does TV make you hyper? dumb? lazy? distracted? What was the question?

Jim Schnabel has an interesting story at Nature, free to all viewers, on the tetchy difficult of assessing how TV affects kids. I've often wondered whether the rise in ADHD diagnoses was due at least partly to TV. This story looks at a researcher who -- amazed at how riveted his infant son was by TV -- found this seems to be the case. Christakis decided to try to address these questions with research. Together with several colleagues, he examined a database called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. After analysing some 1,300 children for whom the appropriate data were available, they…

Tiger Wine

Tigers are the largest of the big cats in the Panthera genus which also includes the Lion, Jaguar, and Leopard. There are six living subspecies, of which all are endangered. They occupy only 7% of their original range, and population estimates are perpetually declining. There are only somewhere around 4,900 tigers left in the wild. One subspecies, the South China Tiger, is almost certain to go extinct in our lifetime with only about 20 individuals left in the wild. So, normally, you'd be happy to hear that they can be bred in captivity in China, and routinely are. Normally, you'd think 'that…

1/4 of mammals on the brink of extinction

How's that for a frightening figure? 1/4 of all mammals on earth are on the IUCN's newest "Red List," animals threatened with extinction - that's 1,141 of them, at least, with 188 being 'critically endangered.' I say 'at least' because almost as many - 836 of them - are 'data deficient,' which means there aren't enough studies on their population numbers to say one way or the other. But many of these are species that are hard to find in the wild, possibly because they're going extinct. âThe reality is that the number of threatened mammals could be as high as 36 percent,â says Jan Schipper,…

So I walked into the women's locker room and no one saw me!

And you can too! All you have to do is win this gorilla costume. This is guaranteed to work in a women's locker room*. I can't vouch for its success rate in men's locker rooms since.. well... I don't really have to sneak in there. Anyway, all you have to do to have a chance of winning this amazing gorilla suit is to pre-order the new paper back version of Dan Simons' and Chris Chabris' book The Invisible Gorilla. If you're not into sick horrible ideas like sneaking into locker rooms (because clearly, that is the only thing you could possibly do with that costume) you could also pre-order…

Events of the Mind at the Exploratorium

Check out the newest events at the Exploratorium. They Sound Great! Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow/Optimal Experience Researcher) Among Renowned Speakers To Appear Mind Lecture Series Continues February 2, 9, and 23, 2008 "Flow" (Optimal Experience) researcher Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (February 9) is among the renowned speakers featured in the Exploratorium's continuing Mind Lecture Series in February 2008. The series is presented in conjunction with the opening of Mind, a major new Exploratorium collection, four years in the making, made possible by the National Science Foundation.…

Homo naledi

I got up all bleary-eyed this morning, and before I got my first sip of coffee, the first thing I saw, blasted across Twitter and all the popular news sites, was the news that a new species of human, Homo naledi has been discovered in South Africa. They have the partial skeletons of 15 different individuals, over 1500 bones, all recovered from a single cave. They're calling it a new and unique species, and further, they're claiming that the site is a ritual burial chamber. Whoa. Brain is whirling. This thing is all over the net, over night. Better drink more coffee. OK, that's better. I'm a…

Men are dense - go figure.

If you've ever been interested in a guy and tried to subtly hint that you like him, you know exactly how dense men can be. The fresh research from Bucknell University doesn't tell you anything new. The study, in press in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, has found that men are a bit thick when it comes to opening lines. If you want to flirt, it's best to be direct with them - go figure. The researchers noted that previous research had looked into what pick-up lines or conversation starters worked best for men trying to date women. Women preferred lines that displayed…

Cohabiting with females boosts male fertility

How many times have you heard a guy say "Women - can't live with them, can't live without them." Well, they just might be onto something. At least kind of. You see, living with a woman might just make you fertile longer. New research published in Biology of Reproduction has found that male mice stay reproductively active longer if they live with a female mouse than if they live alone. The study, from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, sought to see whether living with a female mouse had any affect on a male mouse's fertility as he aged. To do this, male mice were…

How to Best Help Pay for College: Sec. Duncan Goes to the Hill

Education Secretary Arne Duncan testified for the first time in front of the House Education and Labor Committee yesterday, on the topic of the President's education plan. Duncan was the only witness for the hearing, and his testimony covered the broad spectrum of federal involvement in education. (As someone with a Bachelor's degree who is moving toward a secondary education career, I was particularly happy to hear discussion about the need for more of a focus on non-traditional routes toward teacher certification.) One area that received a great deal of attention (and which will receive…

The Torture Memos, Our Safety, and the Quote of the Day

First, the Quote of the Day: we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. If you're an American, those fourteen words will hopefully look at least vaguely familiar. They're the closing words of the Declaration of Independence. Those words weren't tacked on to the end of the document as a fancy ending. That was the price that the Declaration's signers were willing to pay. When they signed, there was a very real chance that they would in the end pay that price. Over the weekend, Newsweek's Joe Meacham published an editorial that managed to miss the…

Gotta Love Politico - "Franken" puts Pawlenty in a jam.

Politico's Manu Raju wrote an interesting article on the Energizer Bunny Election in Minnesota yesterday. His analysis of the situation focused on the political bind that Minnesota's Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty seems likely to find himself in within the next month or two: if and when the Minnesota Supreme Court rejects Norm Coleman's election contest, who does he decide to piss off: Franken won big Tuesday when a three-judge panel allowed the review of no more than 400 absentee ballots in a race he currently leads by 225 votes. Coleman's camp says an appeal to the Minnesota Supreme…

This is absolutely, completely, and utterly insane.

The Catholic Church in Brazil is off its frigging rocker. I'm not talking about being a tiny bit nuts here. We're talking over-the-top sheer gibbering insanity. The kind of insanity that's indistinguishable from pure evil, and has much the same effect. The BBC is reporting on a hideously tragic child abuse case - a nine year old girl was found to be pregnant, with twins, as the result of sexual abuse inflicted upon her by her stepfather. I know you really don't want to, but try to wrap your mind around that concept. A nine year old, reportedly raped repeatedly by this monster over a period…

ScienceBlogs 1 Million Comments Party at Farmacia

That would be Ronnie, Becca, Clare, and Andre, who joined me at Farmacia in Philadelphia this past Sunday for a delightful brunch and lots and lots of good talk. Many thanks to the benevolent Seed overlords for subsidizing our little get-together. I had the frittata. . The food was wonderful. I had a blueberry-pomegranate sorbet that was unbelievably delicious - intensely flavorful and silky smooth, not at all grainy or icy. They make their own ice creams and sorbets. Nice job! We sat in our booth throughout the brunching hour and well into mid-afternoon; the waitstaff was gracious…

Does "Right-to-Work" equal "Right-to-be-Uninsured"?

I've spent part of this morning doing some fairly serious research on health insurance in the United States, and who doesn't have it. My curiosity on the subject was stirred up by a couple of things: after looking at a lot of DonorsChoose proposals from schools with high poverty rates, poverty is on my mind; and the President's veto of the Children's Health Insurance Program expansion got me thinking about what it actually means to be poor in this country, and what (if any) relationship the official poverty threshold has to actually being able to afford to provide for your family. I was…

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...

There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again. George W. Bush 17 September, 2002 It seems like just yesterday that AT&T was telling us that their decision to silence Pearl Jam's critique of President Bush during their webcast of the Lollapalooza concert was an "unfortunate mistake" that shouldn't have happened and wouldn't happen again. Hopefully, it won't. But based on the past behavior of AT&T, I'm not making any large bets on that. That's because it…

An open letter to my Representatives and Senators

Senator Daniel Inouye, Senator Daniel Akaka, Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Charles Schumer, Representative Eliot Engel, Representative Neil Abercrombie, I am the husband of a currently deployed Army officer stationed in Hawaii, and with a home of record in New York. I'm writing today for two reasons: to thank you for your support of emergency war funding legislation that included a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq and to ask you to take an additional step and require that any additional funding for the current conflict be paid for immediately, through a tax increase. When my wife was…

It's never safe to ignore the dog.

PZ has a brief post up commenting on an article on the Lippard Blog about a "dog" target that is routinely shot by DEA agents training for raids. Both link to an article that provides a list of numerous cases where police have killed pets. I think my take on the situation is a bit different from either of theirs, probably because of my past EMS experience. At the start, I want to be clear that I am in no way shape or form endorsing the routine slaughter of pets. I am also not endorsing or excusing the examples of violence against animals that were given in the reason.com article. There is no…

Quote of the Day - 22 November 2006

In part to counteract the limited amount of time that I have available to write posts, I've decided to start a "quote of the day" series. Most of the quotes will be related to science or academics (or any of the other central issues I talk about here). Some may be chosen because they seem to be relevant to something going on in the world today; most won't be. The quotes will usually be short, but this first one isn't. Feel free to use the comments section of this post as an open thread, to talk about whatever. Knowledge has been accumulating at an ever increasing rate, and knowledge, once it…

Age and Abortion

This weekend, an issue that came up in a post by Kevin Beck over at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge really got me thinking. Kevin was amusing himself by shredding one of the denizens at Stop the ACLU, who was complaining about a Florida court decision that permitted a minor to bypass the state's parental notification law, and obtain an abortion without informing her parents. The post got me thinking about parental consent and notification laws in general, and my own views. I have to admit that this is an issue that really makes me uncomfortable. Personally, I think that abortion is a…

Giraffes win by a neck

Darren Naish has a typically wonderful post up about the evolution of giraffe necks, with the delightful snippet that until 1999 people thought they had fewer neck vertebrae than they do. I can't add to the biology, so allow me to make a few comments about the role of the giraffe in the history of biology. In the middle ages, the giraffe was known to most Europeans only by travellers' reports, and from classical times it was called the "cameleopard", as it was thought to be a hybrid between a camel, which was a familiar enough animal, at least to the eastern Mediterranean Europeans, and…

Atheism and agnosticism... again

Brent Rasmussen, at Unscrewing the Inscrutable, has a nice smackdown of the atheism-intolerance of Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College and Distinguished Scholar of the City University of New York, with which I agree totally. But in the course of it, Brent shows a taxonomy of the so-called "weak" versus "strong" atheism that is so common on the internet, but which is what I dispute. More below the fold... Here is Brent's taxonomy in a diagram: My problem lies in the primacy of the questions that are asked, to which these axes are…

Pope reveals, finally, what is wrong with evolution

LifeSite has this: Pope Preaches Against Chance Evolution: "Man is Not the Chance Result of Evolution". Yep, it's the old "evolution implies chance and a lack of meaning" trick. Second time we've fallen for that this week. Would you believe...? For reasons that I can't quite put my finger on, this seems very Controlish. The pope is worried about KAOS. They had a Cone of Silence conversation, which pretty well everyone in the world overheard, and while I'm very pleased that the Catholic Church isn't about to go ID on our asses, we might perhaps think a little bit about this. In a homily in…

Homoploid speciation - what is it, and why does it matter?

A recent paper in Nature, Speciation by hybridization in Heliconius butterflies is getting a fair bit of comment on the internet. This is a case where the researchers, wondering if an Andean butterfly species was a hybrid of two others, decided to test the hypothesis by re-evolving it deliberately. The process is called "homoploid" because there was no change in chromosome number. Previous studies in various organisms, particularly in plants, but not restricted to them, had shown cases of speciation by hybridisation where disparate numbers of chromosomes in the hybrid were equalised by a…

In which I resist writing the obvious headline

I've just read an engrossing report about some very promising research in a an exciting field. The researchers combined fMRI research with genetic analysis to see if they could identify a genetic basis for anger. And they actually found something quite interesting. If I was writing for the New York Times, the headline might read something like this: "Researchers identify gene responsible for regulating anger." For the Washington Post, it could be "Is there an anger gene?" For the New York Post, perhaps simply "RAGE GENE FOUND." But those headlines, while they are in some ways accurate, don't…

A "lie detector" test -- and how to cheat it

Implicit attitudes and associations can tell us a lot about a person. It's a way to find out if they might have a racial or gender bias, and recently there has even been some work suggesting that an implicit association test can tell us whether someone is lying -- it's called the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT). Here's how it works: Suppose you're an American soldier and you want to know if an Afghan you've captured is really a member of the Taliban, despite his assurances that he supports your side and only carries a Kalashnikov for self-defense. You fire up the aIAT…

Musical SNARC: Do we have a musical scale in our heads?

There's lots of research suggesting that we may have something like a "number line" in our head: The SNARC effect says that if you normally read numbers from left to right, you're faster to react to small numbers with your left hand, and big numbers with your right hand. Similar research has also found a SNARC effect for letters (a SLARC effect?). So it might make sense that there would be a similar effect for musical notes. You might call it a SMARC effect, but if you only hear one note at a time it's not really "music." Undaunted, a team led by Pascale Lidji has conducted several…

Casual Fridays: What's sexist? Depends on what order you read the story in

Last week, we asked our readers whether certain characters or "stories" were sexist. I said that the survey was inspired by the story I had told the previous day: Joe and Michelle are having dinner at a romantic restaurant. It's their first anniversary, and everything is perfect -- until an attractive woman walks past the table. Michelle notices that Joe casts a quick glance at the woman. Michelle flashes an annoyed glare at Joe, who knows he's in trouble. "I didn't mean to look at her," he pleads, "guys just can't help it when a pretty woman walks by." Michelle gasps. "B-but she's not as…

Random thoughts, evolving...

OK, I can't be hedgehogged doing a coherent post today. I'm tired and shagged out after a long talk (lecturing for others who went and had fun somewhere, the bastards!). So instead here are random links and thoughts that happen to be open in my browser right now... The first is the notion of an "error theory". This is a term derived from the writings of John Mackie, who thinks that objective moral values would be very odd things, and that people who think they are looking for them are just in error (hence "error theory"). This came up because we were doing the Friday evening drinks thing,…

Water in Australia, and a threat to lungfish

I sometimes wonder why anyone ever tried to make a living in Australia. Although it is the least wet continent (unless it is an island) on Earth apart from the Antarctic, where they don't grow a lot, Australians have always used water as if they were still living in Britain, or some other well watered place. We grow rice and cotton, for gods' sakes, in some of the most arid land there is. We water lawns, and use massive amounts of water in industries and domestically. We now use five times as much water as we did back in the 1980s, in dishwashers, showers, swimming pools and toilets. So…

Dave Ng is a scientist who can help you with your research grant renewal by providing useful feedback on your lousy excuses for not being very productive

Example 1: It was difficult to get motivated knowing that both Season 9 of Friends and Season 4 of Felicity came out on DVD at the same time. This particular excuse would be completely ineffective. The review panel would need to be told that Season 9 of Friends is where Joey and Rachel almost get together and that Season 4 of Felicity is where Felicity finally graduates and decides on whether she loves Noel or Ben. Example 2: I've been mentally drained - thinking about the Avian Flu Virus has given me a serious case of the heebie-jeebies. Scientific grant reviewers are generally very…

SCQ Journal Club: Part II

Pure Pedantry (link) BABY STUDIES BIO Baby studies bio, and I study biochem. Baby studies bio, and I study biochem. She likes her bio buddies, But they don't like me and I don't like them... Pharyngula (link) LIMULUS & CHARLIE Charlie wears broken glasses held together with tape and toothpicks. He is unemployed and occupies a one-bedroom apartment in Westchester, California, a half-mile northeast of LAX. Charlie eats in his car. His 1991 Nissan Stanza is a mausoleum of fast food, Frito Lay and Little Debbie wrappers. When Charlie was in the sixth grade, some of his classmates took to…

SAYING HELLO: PART III

continued from part II | from the beginning DN: ... or how's about Jake and Elwood? (maybe, we should get Fedoras after all). You know, we do both dabble in the science writing game. BRC: This is true, though there you go bringing this back to a relevant center, keeping this sensical/as opposed to nonsensical...while I'm aching to spiral away chaotically...and you mean "science writing" like writing science? Scientists do that, I'm told. You're one of them. Or science writing like writing about science? Science journalists do that, right? Of course you do that too. Or science writing…

Suppose the Republicans win, or lose

I haven't seen a lot of commentary about what it will mean if the Republicans go down or if they win the White House and Congress. From half a world away, some reflections beneath the fold. Republicans win the White House but lose the Senate This will reinforce the politics of smear and division used by the Republicans against Gore, Kerry and now Obama. Karl Rove's legacy will become a permanent part of the political landscape, further devaluing democracy in the US. However, if they lose the Senate, there will be a continuing deadlock between the representatives of the states and the…

The Dark Knight

Wow. Just... wow. This is not the best superhero film I have seen. This is perhaps the best film I have seen for over a decade. It is replete with moral problems, Greek tragedy, farce, some serious character development, and it moves from being a crime film to a war film at some unspecified point. And it has the best film explosion I have ever seen, because it was not CGI and it actually does what it purports to do. Below the fold are SPOILERS, so click on at your own risk. The thing that most affected me was the Joker, not just because Ledger actually invents a new kind of character (…

Prescription diet-pill reclassified for US over-the-counter use

My apologies to those regular readers who may have noticed my recent case of blogger's malaise. A combination of family sicknesses and having to write a fair bit for the day job seems to have interfered with this week's blogging. So, what to do? Link to other worthy blogs! This gives me an opportunity to introduce our fairly-recent addition to the ScienceBlogs corral, Karen Ventii and ScienceToLife. Karen is a late-stage biochemistry Ph.D. student down the road apiece at Emory University and posted earlier this morning on the FDA decision to reclassify the prescription diet pill, Xenical (…