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The Senate Likes DNA Too!

Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life, 1953 Via eliz.avery's flickr stream Happy DNA Day! It's been slow here on the blog lately, for a number of reasons - the most salient of which is that I've been on the Hill all week at the Congressional Operations Seminar sponsored by the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown. I highly recommend this course - it was a lot of fun. But unfortunately I didn't have a functional laptop this week, and thus couldn't blog. (At one point, my poor Mac burped up a blue screen of death - I didn't even know such a thing was possible!) Yesterday, I just missed…

The Cross-Cultural Meanings of a Smile

If I'm on a date (which believe me, doesn't happen often) I can usually tell how its going by how, and how much, my date is smiling. Is the smile genuine or forced? Polite or flirty? Or worse yet, not smiling at all?? Either way, a lot of emotional content can be found in a person's smile. But wait, is smiling universal? What I mean is, is the emotional content constant across different cultures? There isn't much to smile about when you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, but you're still asked to when you get your picture taken for your driver's license. Most people comply. However I…

Schmidt Pain Index (Which Sting Hurts the Worst?)

Getting stung by insects hurts, and some hurt (a LOT) more than others. Of course, this necessitates a 'sting pain' index by which to compare the aftereffects of meeting the business end of a stinger. Why, just last weekend when i was on an ill-fated canoe trip (I dumped out twice, in freezing water) and was stung by a particularly unruly bee, I was remarking on how useful it would be to place my excruciation in the context of other nasty bugly-bites. Lucky for all of us, an entomologist named Justin O. Schmidt decided to take one for the team and let a lot of bees, ants, and wasps sting him…

The teeny-tiny bit of my TAM talk I had to cut short

I just gave my talk at TAM on likely paths of alien evolution (my conclusion: humanoids are extraordinarily unlikely), and there was one awkward bit I have to fix. Here's the problem: these were short talks, only a half hour long, so I designed it so there were some optional bits I'd only get to if time allowed, and I also had a couple of places where I could naturally bring it to a close if I ran over time. I was not able to show the last two slides I'd prepared, which was OK, I was ready for that. However, when we were setting up, the technician accidentally flashed the very last slide to…

Art, Medicine, and Feeding Funnels

Without Hope Frida Kahlo, 1945 Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino, Mexico City I ran across an extremely interesting article by Richard and Maureen Park in the December BMJ. It focuses on the decidedly unfestive procedure of force-feeding via funnel, and how that medical procedure has been represented in art. I don't think I've ever really thought about this topic before in a medical context. The term "gavage," from the French "to gorge," is used to describe the force feeding of ducks and geese for the production of pâté de foie gras using funnels. For many centuries funnels have also been…

The Henrietta Lacks Foundation: Medicine Paying Something Back

Last week, I braved a nasty sleety Cambridge evening to see Rebecca Skloot read from her excellent new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I'm thrilled to tell you it's finally being released on Amazon tomorrow, so if you haven't already been to your local bookstore, go snag a copy (or enter to win one from Sb, through 2/23/10!) In case you don't know the story, Henrietta Lacks was a young African-American mother who was stricken with a particularly invasive form of cervical cancer back in the early 1950s. She died within months, but her cancer cells remain alive today - millions of…

Prion-free cows are viable, develop normally

Prion diseases such as mad cow disease or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) are caused when normal proteins adopt an adverse conformational state. The protein sequence is the same as a normal protein; it has just adopted a conformation that causes it to aggregate or do other bad things. These diseases are transmissible because the protein is capable of inducing that conformation state in other normal proteins. If you get a little bit of the bad protein, it can make all of your proteins go bad as well. (It is so sad when good proteins start running with a bad crowd.) These diseases…

Goethe was a Game Theorist

A favorite professor of mine once told me that it's always impressive to start with an example from the 18th century. So in deference to him and with a nod to Jonah Lehrer's forthcoming book, I'd like to mention Goethe's anticipation of one of the pillars of auction theory, as elaborated in an article by Moldovanu and Tietzel in JPE 1998. In 1797, one of the central features of the book market in the (not yet unified) German states was the absence of copyright protection. An author sold his work to a publisher for a set fee, thereby fully relinquishing his rights to it. Publishers could…

Friday Grey Matters: Grey Parrots Don't Always "Parrot"

Dr. Irene Pepperberg has recently published an interesting paper in Language Sciences, regarding the ability of grey parrots to learn new words for unfamiliar objects using phonemes they already know. But, intuitively, the ability to create new words out of known phonemes would require that a parrot grasp that object labels are composed of individual parts which can be interchanged and applied to new objects. Do parrots really have that ability? The answer may hinge on whether parrots engage in mimicry (mindlessly "parroting" back noise) or imitation (intentional copying of a novel act to…

New strategy: if we sow enough confusion about what knowledge is, we can win!

I've never heard of Alex Beam before, which is a good thing — he seems to be some kind of journalist at the Boston Globe, and that's about all I know about him, other than that he seems to be an oblivious idiot. He has a column up in which he rages about the phrase "knowledge-based", apparently because he doesn't understand it. His first target is to fulminate against that expression, "reality based", which many on the left adopted after the lunacy of the Bush presidency, a phrase invented by the Bushies to describe us: The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based…

The Truth About Pfizer's "Pet Obesity Drug"

I'm sure you've heard of it by now, as numerous blogs (from Big Fat Blog to Effect Measure to Corpus Callosum) have been buzzing with the news of Pfizer's pet obesity drug Slentrol. As a very brief re-cap, this liquid drug is administered to overweight dogs and cats to induce a sense of 'full-ness,' and reduce their food intake. Why this couldn't be accomplished by feeding them less rather than relying on them to voluntarily eat less ('fat' chance), I'm not sure. But, fact is, the drug is now here and its going to make Pfizer a boat-load of cash (as planned) despite it seeming to fill an non…

Cool Visual Illusions: Audivisual Fission and Fusion, I

You may have seen this illusion in a post from earlier in the week over at Cognitive Daily, but I thought I'd say a little bit more about it, and talk about a related illusion. First, click play (from Sham's demo site) If the illusion is working -- Dave at Cognitive Daily had a bit of trouble getting it to work for his readers -- you should see the dot flash on the screen twice. However, the dot only flashes once. If you don't believe me, go to Sham's page and watch the single beep movie. It's the same movie, but with one beep instead of two. The illusion is pretty strong for me, but as Dave…

The curiously limited argument from convergent evolution raises an ugly tentacle/fin again

I am not a fan of the convergent evolution argument for humanoid aliens. I can well believe that it's likely that intelligent aliens exist out there in the universe, but I'm not even going to try to predict what they look like: there are too many alternative paths that are possible. But for some reason, many people like to insist that it's reasonably likely that they'd resemble us in general, if not in detail, and they'll then go on to extrapolate that behaviorally and culturally they'll share many properties with us. Usually, as with Simon Conway Morris and now George Dvorsky, this argument…

Taking Sax and Brooks to Task

Mark Liberman has two great posts over at Language Log debunking first a claim made by David Brooks in this article on the gender gap in education, and then Leonard Sax's poor use of science that inspired Brooks' claim. This is what Brooks wrote: There are a couple of reasons why the two lists might diverge so starkly. It could be men are insensitive dolts who don't appreciate subtle human connections and good literature. Or, it could be that the part of the brain where men experience negative emotion, the amygdala, is not well connected to the part of the brain where verbal processing…

The War and Peace Phenomenon

Here's a little tidbit from my personal life that I thought I'd share, because I find it pretty amusing. I've always ridden the bus to work, because as anyone who's spent time on a college campus knows, it's impossible to get good parking spots unless you show up at about 4 am. On the bus, and while waiting for the bus, I read. I don't read work-related stuff, because I like to underline and take notes, and with the bus bouncing me around, my underlines become strike-outs (when I go back to the paper, I wonder, "Why did I dislike this passage so much that I struck it out?"), and my…

Cool Visual Illusions: The "Ghostly Gaze" Illusion

UPDATE: I've messed with some of the images below the fold, which will hopefully make it easier for people to see the illusion without having to move all round the room. Last year, Rob Jenkins published a seriously spooky-looking illusion (it freaks my son out) in the journal Perception (1). Take a look at this face (from Jenkins' paper, Figure 1, p. 1266): Spooky, right? Hopefully you all see a spooky looking woman (it's actually a combination of two female faces, which is why it looks so creepy) who is looking to your left (her right). Now take a look at the face again, only this time,…

The Simulation Theory of Aesthetics

With a paper by Freedberg and Gallese, to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, mirror neurons have made their way into neuroaesthetics (at some point, someone like Gallese will publish a paper arguing that mirror neurons explain everything, and we'll begin to wonder what the hell the rest of the brain is for). Here's the abstract from the paper1: The implications of the discovery of mirroring mechanisms and embodied simulation for empathetic responses to images in general, and to works of visual art in particular, have not yet been assessed. Here, we address this issue and we…

The Rightful Place

Today I received an email from the hivemind, saying, in part: In his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama reminded us of the promise of "a world connected by our own science and imagination."  He recently stated, "promoting science isn't just about providing resources--it's about protecting free and open inquiry... It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient--especially when it's inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a greater understanding of the world around us. That will be…

Jet Streams Shift Toward Poles; This May Increase Hurricanes

Meteorology is outside of my usual topics for posting, but this particular news item seems to have received little attention elsewhere: there is evidence that the jet streams are moving, systematically, toward the poles.   The jet streams are high-altitude streams of air, about 7 to 16 kilometers over sea level.  They blow air from west to east.   Jet streams are important factors in the causation of weather patterns.  Therefore, systematic changes in the jet streams are expected to cause changes in weather patterns.  Now, we have evidence that the jet streams are changing. href="http…

Quick Message

Hello world. Once upon a time, I had a laptop. As time went on, its hard drive filled up with pdfs, music files and an enormous (well, relatively enormous) operating system. This pattern of exponential expansion continued for a few years until, the imbalance between data and storage capacity, just like the overpopulation of the Norwegian hills by lemmings with prolific breading capabilities, could no longer be sustainable. A change was needed before the impending threat of mass suicide. And so on January 7th, having realized that my data needed more fertile ground to colonize, I bought a new…

Prehistoric Inca neurosurgery

The procedure known as trepanation, in which a hole is scraped or drilled in the skull, is an ancient form of neurosurgery that has been performed since the late Stone Age. Exactly why ancient peoples performed trepanation has remained a matter of debate: some researchers argue that it was performed for medical reasons, as it is today, while others believe it was done for magical or religious reasons. A new study by two American anthropologists now provides evidence that the Incas performed trepanation to treat head injuries; that the procedure was far more common than was…

Entropy Driven Entry

By now I should be flying in to Paris to meetup with some old friends. Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at the Universite Pierre & Marie Curie entitled: The Signal Sequence Coding Region: promoting nuclear export of mRNA, and ER targeting of translated protein. Here is a post from a year ago. At the time I was visiting Edgar who was then living in New York ... After the death of my computer I decided to take the Chinatown express (15$ buys you a ticket from Boston to Chinatown NYC) and visit some old friends. Last night, what we call the Portuguese Mafia (aka the Federation of Portuguese…

Scifoo - Day 3 (well that was yesterday, but I just didn't have the time ...)

Our session on Scientific Communication and Young Scientists, the Culture of Fear, was great. Many bigwigs in the scientific publishing industry were present and a lot of ideas were pitched around. I would also like to thank Andrew Walkinshaw who co-hosted the session, Eric Lander for encouraging us to pursue this discussion, Pam Silver for giving a nice perspective on the whole issue, and all the other participants for giving their views. Now someone had asked that we vlog the session, we actually tried to set it up but we didn't have the time. In retrospect I'm glad we didn't. This became…

Carboxy-Tail-Anchored Proteins

I finally got off of my butt and read the latest paper from the Hegde group at the NIH. They answered a fundamental problem in membrane biology: how do you insert tail-anchored proteins into the membrane. When proteins are synthesized, any newly made signal sequence or transmembrane domain that pops out of the ribosome will be recognized by the signal recognition particle (SRP; click here for some beautiful SRP-signal sequence-ribosome images). This large complex will then inhibit further translation of the protein and target the newly made signal sequence or transmembrane domain and the…

Tid Bits

I've been so busy. But I have 15 minutes to spare and so I'll attempt to give a quit session of Tid Bits (including a mention of The Daily Transcript in ... Nature!): Others seek more of a balance, such as the cell-biologist postdoc author of The Daily Transcript (http://scienceblogs.com/transcript), who mentions other blogs that detail "the woes of postdoc-hood" as well as what it takes to be a pioneering scientist. Apart from linking to both, the blog expands on the second, discussing the "fine line between doggedness and dogma". (Thanks Tara for the heads up.) So what else is out there…

A silent mutation affects pain perception?

Earlier this week you probably read the whole saga of how researchers tracked down some individuals who could not sense pain. They then identified the gene responsible as SCN9A, a voltage-gated sodium channel and that was published in Nature. But in Science there was another report of a gene, Catechol-O-Methyltransferase (S-COMT), that is critical for pain perception ... Well it turns out that the data in the Science paper is much more interesting than the flashy (yet uninsightful) observations of individuals walking on hot coal and receiving knife stabs into their arms without even flinching…

Biological Lingo for the Masses?

In yesterday's NY Times, James Gorman laments that lingo from molecular biology and cell biology hasn't yet permeated society. As Gorman states: Molecular biology is the science of this century. We should be able to build some great clichés on it. This topic reminds me of a conversation that I once had with my academic advisor and a certain Caveman. Why is that when you open the paper, you never read about all the cool developments in Cell Biology? Lets face it. The paper is full of headlines such as "New Planet Discovered" or "Extinct Species Makes a Reappearance" or "Probing the Realm of…

5 Years Since September 11th

It does not seem like 5 years have gone by. I remember waking up that morning in our apartments in Washington Heights. I was washing the dishes and there were all these sirens. I looked out the window and saw police cars, firefighters and ambulances going down the Henry Hudson Parkway. I was thinking that there must be some big fire somewhere and that we would hear about it later in the day. Then I got a phone call from my father in Montreal. A plane crashed into the Twin Towers he told us. Strange. That Friday we were suppose to see the Cirque du Soleil performing a free show in the Twin…

Fabulous prizes for your donation to my DonorsChoose challenge.

You already know that we're working with DonorsChoose to raise some money for public school teachers who are trying to give their students the engaging educational experiences they deserve. You also know that our benevolent overlords at Seed will be randomly selecting some donors to receive nifty prizes (details about this to be posted as soon as I get them). As I did last year, I'm going sweeten the deal by offering some incentive to everyone who donates to my challenge. And I'm adding a few new options this time around. Here's what you can get: An original (and probably nerdy) poem,…

The love/hate relationship with academia.

Maria has an awesome post about her thoughts upon wrapping up her Master's thesis. It captures the kind of shifts one can have in figuring out what to do, who to be, and how schooling fits into all of that -- and how what's at stake is as much emotional as it is intellectual. She writes: I have found that clinging too stubbornly to long-term goals is actually bad for me. Not because the goals themselves are bad, but I tend to become emotionally overinvested in them, and then I freak! out! at the slightest threat to my success. Learning to keep things in perspective has meant, for me,…

Friday Sprog Blogging: psychoanimalists.

Of all the Looney Tunes characters, I was never a fan of the Roadrunner. (I liked Wile E. Coyote well enough, and wish him well in his lawsuit against the Acme Company.) However, there was one Roadrunner cartoon where the focus pulls back from the eternal struggle between coyote and prospective dinner and shifts instead to two little cartoon kids watching the Roadrunner on their TV. If I recall correctly, at least one of these kids expresses a less-than-favorable opinion of the Roadrunner. And, one of the kids (might be the same one) mentions that he wants to be a psychoanimalist when he…

Raising money for classroom projects to create a more scientifically literate society (DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2007)

Maybe you remember that fund-raiser we did for DonorsChoose last June. We're kicking off another today. But this time, it's not just ScienceBlogs bloggers -- partners like Google, Yahoo!, Six Apart, and Federated Media are watching the efforts across the whole blogosphere to see which blog has the most generous and engaged readers. But before we get to the frenzy of competition, let's start with what matters: the school kids yearning to learn. As I wrote last year: Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the…

UCSF sued by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine over treatment of lab animals.

Today a number of doctors affiliated with the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) filed suit against the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) alleging that state funds are paying for research that violates the Animal Welfare Act. Among the big concerns raised in the suit: Experiments that were "duplicative" -- i.e., whose outcomes were essentially known before the experiment from experiments already conducted. Experiments where there was no documentation that the researchers had considered alternative that would minimize the animals' distress.…

Pushing the juggling metaphor a little further.

An old friend turned up to comment on my post about juggling, and as a woman in academia she has some familiarity with the metaphor and with the reality it's supposed to capture. She writes: The department chair when I was hired ... suggested that although we're juggling lots of balls, the ball representing our families and home life is made of glass. I COULD take that as a message that taking care of my family is my most important job (and my work is not? grrr.) but I think he meant it more as that part of our lives outside of work supports our lives IN work, and if that one cracks, it's…

Friday Sprog Blogging: pest management.

Are our friends growing paper bags? (If so, could some clever grafting set them up so they could grow the lunches right in the bags?) Probably not. Dr. Free-Ride: Ooh, I wish these snails would stop munching my delicate plants! I'd really have no problem with them if they ate the weeds instead. Elder offspring: It's like the weeds are protecting themselves. Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, by being tough or spiky or yucky tasting. Elder offspring: Hey, I read about a snail called the wolf snail that eats other snails. Dr. Free-Ride: Does it also eat tender garden plants? Elder offspring: I think they…

Rules of engagement.

To address an issue that came up in discussion of posts on other blogs, I want to make clear the principles I follow when dealing with real-world scenarios here or via email: My overarching goal is to foster reflection and dialogue among people (particularly scientists) working out how to behave ethically. Talking about different scenarios can provide good material to sharpen our ethical intuitions and to try to formulate courses of action that are both ethical and do-able (from the point of view, say, of not wrecking one's career). I don't believe that scenarios lose their usefulness if…

Friday Sprog Blogging: what's the buzz?

A conversation while walking to school with the Free-Ride offspring: Younger offspring: Look out, a bumblebee! Dr. Free-Ride: We're far enough away that we're not bothering it. I doubt it would sting you unless it was scared you were going to hurt it. Elder offspring: Hey, did you know that bumblebees make their nests underground? Dr. Free-Ride: No, I didn't. How do you know that? Elder offspring: I saw one fly out of a hole in the ground with [Dr. Free-Ride's better half] once. Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. Do you think you want to draw a general conclusion on bumblebee nesting habits on the…

What part of 'course requirement' isn't clear?

On my last post, Kristine commented: My favorite "finals week activity" was defending to two students why they couldn't take the lab exams three weeks after all of their classmates took it, just because they realized now that they never showed up for class that week. Whew. Ten minutes each, and as emotionally draining as grading 100 exams. I feel Kristine's pain. And, I think this raises the larger question of what the problem is that keeps these students from understanding that "course requirements" are things that are required for them to do. Seriously, given all the time we academics…

Honor among journalism students.

Uncle Fishy and RMD pointed me to this story in the New York Times about a last-minute extra assignment (due today) for students enrolled in "Critical Issues in Journalism" at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Not an extra credit assignment, mind you -- an extra assignment they all get to do just to pass the course, on account of the fact that the 200+ students enrolled in the class apparently had some trouble handling the exam without cheating: ...a Web site, RadarOnline.com, posted an account, attributed to an unidentified source, that said the Columbia Graduate…

Friday Sprog Blogging: random bullets edition.

Dr. Free-Ride: So, what kind of science are you learning in school these days? Younger offspring: I don't know. Dr. Free-Ride: You don't know?! You have been going to school, right? Younger offspring: Of course. Dr. Free-Ride: When [Dr. Free-Ride's better half] was in the classroom helping with the lesson this week, what did you learn about? Younger offspring: About Fall, and pumpkins, and pumpkin seeds. Dr. Free-Ride: There's science in that, isn't there? Younger offspring: I guess. * * * * * Let the bullets commence! With the younger Free-Ride offspring's kindergarten science curriculum…

"Desert Island Lists" for the educated person.

This was asked on a listserv I'm on, and I decided that the question is interesting enough to share here -- largely because I'm interested in how you would answer. In an article titled "What is a Generally Educated Person?" in the Fall 2004 issue of AAC&U's Peer Review, Jerry G. Gaff asks readers to list 5 answers to each of these questions: 1. What are the ideas and skills students should learn? 2. Who are the people (living or dead) students should know? 3. What are the places students should visit? 4. What artistic or musical performances should they see or hear? 5. What are the books…

Viral information outburst: cool things are more fun when you share them.

David at The World's Fair has posed another, "Ask a ScienceBlogger, Sort Of" question: Essentially, as scientific types who tend to analyse, over-analyse, supra-analyse things, and who like to categorize and follow empirical trends, I'm interesting in hearing what you think it is that sparks these viral outbursts of information outreach? This question (and apologies for its convolution) also relates directly to your role as a blogger, where the assumption is that you revel in increased traffic, and are kind of looking for these tricks anyway. I guess, I'm just interested in hearing a…

Friday Sprog Blogging: Antarctica: Land of Endless Water.

Last week, I noted that the Free-Ride offspring are off kicking it with The Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment, and that, to ensure that you would not have to endure a Friday without a Sprog Blog, I gave each of the sprogs a book to read during their visit with their grandparents and asked them to report back on their books via email. At the conclusion of the elder Free-Ride offspring's book report, emailed to me last Thursday night, I wrote: Major props to the elder offspring for doing blog-homework without any prodding. This sets the bar pretty high for the younger offspring next…

I get letters.

This just arrived at the email address associated with my blog (rather than the email address associated with my university appointment): Dear Sir, I am [Name Redacted] a student of [Institution Redacted], currently in 3rd year pursuing Integrated M. Tech. in Polymer Science and Technology. I learned about you through your website and I am extremely impressed with your research interests, I think they are an excellent match to my skills. I have an intense urge towards the development and enhancement in the field of polymers and now I want to be associated with a diversified group like yours…

Time to get mad. Time to speak up.

I need to share with you a situation that is infuriating. It's infuriating to me, and I believe it should be infuriating to anyone who values a civil society worth the name. Harassment drove UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach out of primate research in 2006. This was not just angry phone calls and email messages. We're talking about people in masks banging on the windows of his house in the night, scaring his kids. Without support on this front from other scientists or from UCLA, Dario abandoned research that he believed to be important so that he could keep his family safe. Since then,…

Friday Sprog Blogging: soda pop stand.

The elder Free-Ride offspring is lobbying to try an experiment this weekend. The working title of the protocol is "homemade soda*" but I suspect it may be described differently in the final report. Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me about the experiment that you proposed to your teacher. Elder Free-Ride offspring: I'll mix four cups of baking soda and vinegar and put each in its own bucket to keep the bubbles from spilling over, and take what remains in the cup and add fruit juice to it, and taste it, and if it's not sweet enough add sugar to it, and then pass it off as soda! Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me more…

Friday Sprog Blogging: leverage.

This morning, I came upon the younger Free-Ride playing a game. Younger offspring: I'm playing "launch the bear". Dr. Free-Ride: Oh, really? Younger offspring: Yeah. I put the bear on the edge of the piece of cardboard and hold my hands on the other end with the fingers on top, and then I flip it! Dr. Free-Ride: And there goes the bear. Younger offspring: Yeah! I flip to try to get the bear past this finish line I made on the floor. Dr. Free-Ride: That's pretty cool. Have you tried using something longer to do the flipping? Younger offspring: Like this blue box lid? Let's see ... FLIP!…

R.I.P., Billie Bainbridge

A very sad bit of news has come to my attention, courtesy of a reader. Billie Bainbridge has died of her brainstem cancer. Regular readers might remember this unfortunate young girl, who was diagnosed with a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma of the brainstem last year. The tumor was inoperable, and, unfortunately, Billie's parents turned, as all too frequently happens, to a dubious doctor by the name of Stanislaw Burzynski. Dr. Burzynski, as you will recall, is a doctor in Houston who claims to have discovered and purified anti-cancer compounds from urine (which he dubbed "antineoplastons")…

Apologists Ambiguous

Lots of you have been alerting me to this op-ed in the NY Times, but I have to confess that I read it, and Richard A. Schweder makes no sense at all in his "Atheists Agonistes" article. His conclusion seems to be that we should stop "waging intellectual battles over the existence of god(s)", but everything preceding that point doesn't seem to make any kind of sensible case for much of anything. Here's the heart, I think; he's wondering why we're seeing this resurgence of godlessness as a literary genre: Why, then, are the enlightened so conspicuously up in arms these days, reiterating every…

In Memoriam: Wallace Sampson, MD

I have some sad news for my readers today. It's even sadder given that it's only been two and a half weeks since I last had to mourn the passing of one of our own, a champion of science-based medicine, a regular commenter of five years, lilady. Unfortunately, this time around, it is my sad duty to inform you that Dr. Wallace Sampson has passed away at the age of 85. I knew about it late last week, but I wanted to wait until official obituaries were published, such as this one in the Mercury News. I first encountered Wally (as his friends called him) through his writings deconstructing various…