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What the Heck Happened?

In my last post, more than four months ago (oy, that's bad!), we had just acquired four new children, 11, 3, 3, and 16 months, and were settling in and getting adjusted.  And then I didn't blog all summer.  Or for most of the first month of autumn.  A few people wondered whether I was eaten by a Yeti or had gone entirely feral.  Neither is true (that I know of - I'd probably have noticed the Yeti thing.)  It just turned out that going to nine kids, four of them 3 and under, several with major disabilities, pushed my limits a little.  Or a lot.  We pulled it off.  We settled in, we did it, but…

PZ's Galápagos Adventure

Here follows a brief account of my sojourn in the Galápagos Islands, just to give you all a rough idea of what I was up to all this time. I've tossed in just a few pictures to illustrate what we experienced; I'm planning to dole out the rest a little bit at a time, each week. I took a lot of pictures, and I was a real piker compared to a few other people on the trip — I'm thinking that if I use mine and some of the other photographs people took, if I post one a week, I'll be able to keep the blog going for about 3800 years. This cruise was organized by the James Randi Educational Foundation,…

Christensen, Clayton M. The innovator's dilemma. New York: Collins Business Essentials, 2006. 286pp.

This book is about the failure of companies to stay atop their industries when the confront certain tyupes of market and technological change. It's not about the failure of simply any company, but of good companies -- the kinds that many managers have admired and tried to emulate, the companies known for their abilities to innovate and execute....It is about well-manged companies that have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance. (p. xi) Clayton M. Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma isn…

From the Archives: An update on my Computer Science & Engineering blog

During my winter blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 24, 2007. This post follows up on my initial 2007 post which I reposted yesterday. It's worth noting that the blog has evolved such that it's hardly about or for engineering or computer science students at all; it's more for the sessions I do for "science for non-science students" courses. Also, the use of Meebo has been a huge hit for me, really creating a new way for me to interact with students. ===== Way back in…

No shortage of ideas from OSHA staff to improve oversight of agency's Voluntary Protection Program

As first reported yesterday by Chris Hamby at the Center for Public Integrity's IWatch, an internal report on the agency's Voluntary Protection Program (VPP), submitted in November 2011 to OSHA chief David Michaels is now public. Over the months, I'd made my own inquiries to OSHA's public affairs office wondering when the public might be able to read this report.  I never received a response, but understand it appeared on OSHA's website on Friday, August 17.  Thanks to Hamby for bringing it to our attention. OSHA's VPP dates back to 1983, and recognizes worksites that, in OSHA's words "…

Weathering heights: The lives and deaths of communications tower climbers

By Kim Krisberg Wally Reardon stopped climbing towers for a living back in 2002 due to an injury. He had spent years putting up communication antennas anywhere employers wanted them — smokestacks, buildings, grain silos, water tanks. Just about anything that rose up into the sky, Reardon would find a way to scale it. It was exhilarating. "I can't explain that freedom that we felt," Reardon told me. "I just liked the adventure of climbing towers. I just totally loved it. It was a crazy lifestyle and we were like a bunch of nomads. We lived by our own rules." It was also dangerous. In fact,…

PZ Myers: godless babykiller

Forgive me, for I am guilty of the sin of false pride. I'm wont to judge Christians by the worst of them, and in contrast, to regard atheism as the refuge of the more worthy. I am chastised by the existence of The Raving Atheist, however, who shows me that godlessness is not necessarily correlated with rationality. He's a useful reminder that a reasonable philosophy is not a guarantor that one is on the path to a truth. If you haven't been following along, The Raving Atheist is definitely an atheist, but he's also an odd duck who has gone a bit unhinged on a few subjects. He's strongly anti-…

Latest GOPcare bill brings back hated pre-ACA conditions while still slashing Medicaid

Remember in the bad old days before the Affordable Care Act, when those who bought individual plans on the private market faced unpleasant surprises – like finding at out very inopportune times that their plans didn’t cover hospitalization or maternity care, or that they’d reached a lifetime limit and their insurer wouldn’t pay for any more care at all? When dysfunctional insurance markets meant individual coverage was effectively impossible to purchase for all but the healthiest or wealthiest? If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has his way, we’ll be going back to those hated…

Congressional budget proposals slash OSHA funding, push back on silica exposure standard: ‘These cuts and these riders are unconscionable’

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration is no stranger to budget cuts — the agency is already so underfunded that it would take its inspectors nearly a century, on average, to visit every U.S. workplace at least once. In some states, it would take two centuries. Unfortunately, appropriations bills now making their way through Congress don’t bode much better for OSHA. Earlier this month, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) and Public Citizen, along with 74 fellow organizations that care about worker health and safety, sent a letter to…

Contraception and Colorado’s dropping teen pregnancy and abortion rates

Last week, Vox’s German Lopez highlighted a recent study that demonstrates how improving access to the most effective contraceptives can slash the rates of unintended pregnancies and abortions among teens. After the Colorado Family Planning Initiative (CFPI) started providing free IUDs and implants to low-income women at family planning clinics, the teen birth rate and abortion rate dropped sharply. Lopez notes that the teen birth rate has been declining nationwide, but Colorado’s has dropped more quickly: “Between 2008 and 2012, the state went from the 29th lowest teen birth rate in the…

No ID Research: The Latest Excuse

Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute provides us with the latest excuse for why ID has produced no supporting research: it's being done under double secret probation at an undisclosed location. He begins with this lurid metaphor: The most important is that the Darwinist establishment would like nothing better than to "out" research programs before they are finished. The idea is to shut down damaging evidence as early as possible. Strangle the infant in the crib. Demand answers now to questions still being explored. Ah, the ubiquitous "Darwinist establishment", that evil cabal of…

Claybourn on Gay Adoption Laws

Josh Claybourn of In The Agora has written a law review article on state laws against gay adoptions. Jason Kuznicki and I provided some constructive criticism of that article while he was working on it, for which he thanked us in the article. Sadly, the journal it was to be published in has gone under. Josh has now made a PDF of that article available on his website and I think it's well worth reading. He analyzes the application of precedent on the basis of four basic questions: Do laws against gay adoptions violate substantive due process rights under a strict scrutiny review? Do they…

Evolution: With or Without Purpose?

Please allow me one more post on the subject of DaveScot's comments about guided vs unguided evolution. This is a familiar refrain from ID advocates, what we might call "ID minimalism" - the position that even if the theory of common descent is absolutely true and all modern life forms are related via descent with modification, that descent was guided by God (no, I'm not going to engage in their ridiculous sophistry of calling it "the intelligent designer" - they're talking about God, they know it and so does everyone else, and there is no reason to play pretend in this regard). Here's how…

A mistake with consequences?

There is an interesting new post up at KlimaZweibel about a paper by Smerdon et al.. This is going to be all over everywhere very soon, so I may as well jump in. The title, of course, is a snark at RC; see the article A Mistake with Repercussions which points out some errors in a Zorita and Von Storch paper (they got their model setup wrong). [I've just snarked them in their comments; it will be intersting to see if it stays] In this case the problem is rather more arcane, but worth explaining, so let me do that first. [Update: no, let me first point out that there is a response by Rutherford…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 6

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 5 Table of Contents Chapter 7 Chapter 6 The Great Hunger, May 19, 2055 I took my bike to university the next day so I could go grocery shopping on the way home. After two classes in the afternoon, the last one spent trying to fire some enthusiasm for the computational beauty of genetics in a dozen second years when the only thing on their minds was the end of term exams, I was more than ready to leave. At the co-op store, an unhappy knot of customers clustered around the profile tills. The iris scanners were offline. The profile economy was a…

Beyoncé and LIGO: Stochastic Awareness of Science Is Probably Okay

I've had this piece by Rick Borchelt on "science literacy" and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on "echo chambers" open in tabs for... months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won't be read much, and I find it frustrating to put a lot of work into a blog post only to be greeted by crickets chirping. But, now I find myself in a position where I sort of need to have a more thought-out version of the general argument. So I'm going to do a kind of slapdash blog post working this out as I type…

Why there are (and should be) eight planets in the Solar System

“I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to the public.” -Giuseppe Piazzi So it begins again: the neverending debate about who gets to be a planet and who doesn't. Everyone can bring their own interpretation of the science to the table -- and everyone has their own preferred naming scheme -- but when I think about the Solar System, I try to…

How to find your very own supernova

"Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me!" -Ronald Moore Well, you probably don't actually want to feel the wind of a supernova flowing over you; trust me on this. Image credit: ESO / L. Calçada, of the remnant of SN 1987a. But to find one for yourself, that's definitely within your reach, if you know where to look.…

Learning all about the Eagle, all over again

"We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known Universe." -Edwin Hubble While large parts of the internet are blacked out today, in protest of SOPA and PIPA, I could think of no better way to highlight the importance of free exchange of information on the internet than by showcasing one of the most interesting, varied and intricate objects in the entire galaxy: Messier 16, better known…

Global Warming Changing Weather in the US Northeast

A newly published study has identified changes in precipitation patterns in the US Northeast, which are likely caused by human pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, which has resulted in global warming. According to the study, there has been an increase in extreme precipitation events, and an increase in the clumping across time of precipitation, with longer or more intense rainy periods, and longer dry periods. Generally, climate and weather watchers have noticed that arid regions are drier, wetter regions are wetter, and many feel this is a consequence of global warming.…

Striving for the Speed of Light

"The very closest stars would require many years to visit, even traveling at the speed of light, which is impossible according to Einstein's theory of relativity. Today's fastest spaceships would require 200,000 years to travel to Alpha Centauri, our closest bright star. The energy required to send a hundred colonists to another star, as Frank Drake has pointed out, would be enough to meet the energy needs of the entire United States over a human lifetime. And these estimates are regarding nearby stars. When we consider the distances across the entire galaxy, and between galaxies,…

Telescope! Give me sight beyond sight!

"The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow outvalues all theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry." -Ralph Waldo Emerson As a theorist, one of the challenges I face is bringing the experimental and observational sides of what we study to all of you. I understand its importance, its significance, and how it is the ultimate arbiter of our understanding. And yet, it is not my strongest…

Good ideas, Bad ideas, MOND, and Dark Matter

"There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good." -Stephen Colbert Let me start by telling you a story about an old problem. Take a look at the planet Mercury, one of the five planets (not counting Earth) visible in our night sky to the naked eye. And I can see some of you at home squinting at your screen, asking why I'm showing you a picture of the Moon right after sunset. Well, Mercury's in that picture, I promise. Let me make it a little easier for you. No less a naked-eye astronomer than Copernicus had difficulty seeing the planet Mercury, and…

Mad About Science Denial? This Book Is For You and your Uncle Bob!

Michael Mann has a specialty or two. Climate simulation modeling, analysis of proxy data, the study of global teleconnections, Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures over historic time scales, etc. A while back, Mann's research interests and activities converged, I assume by some combination of design and chance (as is often the case in Academia) with a key central question in science. This question is, "What is the pattern of surface warming caused by human effects on the atmosphere, including changes in greenhouse gas concentration and other pollutants?" Mann and his colleagues…

War in the Pro-ID Camp

I've said many times that there are clearly problems between the Discovery Institute, the primary thinktank of the ID movement, and the Thomas More Law Center, the legal group defending the school board in Dover (and involved in the Gull Lake situation here in Michigan as well). Three DI fellows pulled out as expert witnesses from the trial, and even before that it was clear that the DI did not want the Dover case to go to trial. As I've explained before, they know that this case could be the legal end of ID in terms of access to public school science classrooms and they also know that the…

Rusty and the "Evolutionary Paradigm"

Once more into the breach, dear friends. Rusty has posted a reply to me on the subject of evolution and morality, but the issue is really whether evolution equates with atheism or not. I'm getting a bit tired of hashing and rehashing this with both he and Ilona, primarily because they keep moving the goalposts. To wit, Rusty says: Its interesting to note his response to my rhetorical request, I would ask Ed to give me a list of those people who hold to the evolutionary paradigm who also believe that the supernatural exists in the form of some sort of deity that interacts with the natural…

Free Speech and Patriotism in Times of War

It has become a truism that the American people are "too cynical" about their government. We hear this repeated often, but I think the truth is quite the opposite. I think most Americans are still entirely naive about their government, even after having our trust betrayed by the government so many times. The nature of government - all governments - is to increase its power, to protect its privelege by abusing and circumventing the law and by expanding the scope of its authority. At no time is this tendency more obvious than in wartime. In the US, as in most countries, we have a prevailing…

Sandy Hook: Their Horror, Our Country, Your Guns.

Let me start with this. People talking about Sandy Hook need to stop saying that "20 children between the ages of 5 and 10 were killed." That is technically true but misses an enormously important point and indicates that you really haven't thought this through. All of the children who were killed were born between September 2005 and December 2006. They were all in the first grade, all in the same school year, and most of them in the same exact class. Sandy hook had about 100 students in that year. Now, the class is 20% smaller. This means that every year for the next few years there will be…

The Rape Switch, Again

Stephanie Zvan wrote a post re-addressing a few earlier posts she and I had written a few years ago which caused a firestorm of testosterone drenched reaction from men (and a few women) who somehow had a problem with the political, social, and scientific investigation of wartime rape. (A rape in progress, A rape in progress, Part II, Is there a rape switch?, and When Is a Rapist?) In my view, and those of you who know me will recall that I’ve noted this before, this set of posts was actually the first Internet Event in the current Holy War against women and their allies. Certainly,…

Nisbet and Mooney in the WaPo: snake oil for the snake oil salesmen

Nisbet and Mooney do it again, with an op-ed in the Washington Post … and I'm afraid they've alienated me yet further. I am convinced now that theirs is not an approach that I could find useful, even if I could puzzle out some useable strategy from it. In the very first sentence, they claim that Richard Dawkins gives "creationist adversaries a boost" — it's the tired old argument that we must pander to religious belief. This is their rationale: Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins's arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate…

Climate Change, Cat 6 Hurricanes, Al Gore

These things are all connected. A couple of days ago a good ally in the climate change fight ... the fight to make people realize that climate change is not some librul conspiracy to raise taxes on the rich ... goofed. It was a minor goof, barely a goof at all. We do not yet know the nature of the goof but it was somewhere between saying something in a slightly clumsy manner and a bit of misremembering something that happened in 2005 during an interview. That's it. Nothing else to see here. But that goof has been wrenched form its context and turned into a senseless and embarrassingly…

Coyne and Wray at the Oregon symposium on evo-devo

So here I am at the IGERT Symposium on Evolution, Development, and Genomics, having a grand time, even if I did get called out in the very first talk. There were two keynote talks delivered this evening, both of which I was anticipating very much, and which represented the really good side of science: two differing points of view wrestling with each other for consensus and for testable, discriminating differences. They also had dueling t-shirts. Here's the argument in brief. The functional part of the genome can be roughly broken down into two components: the coding regions, or the actual bit…

Problematic Tigers

SteelyKid is, as I have noted previously, half Korean, a quarter Polish, and an eighth each Irish and German. Her parents are irreligious, the extended family is Catholic (more so on my side than Kate's), and she goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center. In other words, a thoroughly American sort of upbringing. I can't wait to see what she finds to rebel against when she hits the teenage years. For no obvious reason, three of the four kids she's most likely to play with on the playground when I pick her up in the evening (we play at the JCC for a while before going home, to give Kate…

Making libraries safe havens for the ignorant once again

A Canadian school board has decided to remove Philip Pullman's books from its schools' shelves because people complained that the author is an atheist. This is a remarkable objection, obviously. I mean, we don't see school boards screaming to remove Chuck Colson's books from the shelves because the author is a convicted felon, which seems to me to be a much more serious indicator of moral turpitude than atheism, nor do we see a call to eject books by Ann Coulter because she is incredibly stupid, and is therefore a poor role model for students. It's just atheism that spurs this objection. I…

AIDS: Cured by a spambot.

Something odd has been happening recently. Every time I make a post on HIV, I get the same comment from someone named 'Apostle Shada Mishe'. The first time I didnt let it through because its over 1,000 words long, and just looks like spam, but if he came back and protested, I woulda approved it. But he didnt protest. He just posted the exact same comment with the exact same formatting (including pressing 'enter' before he started typing). Never 'I tried to post this before, blah blah blah.' Never 'UR A NAZI AND SUPRESSING MAH MESAGGE!' The exact same comment, once, on every post on HIV. So…

The Right to Die, Political and Personal

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Gonzales v Oregon a couple days ago, a case where the federal government is asserting that the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) - or at least this administration's interpretation of it - trumps the Oregon assisted suicide law, which was passed by popular referendum not once but twice (and remember, this is the same administration that screams bloody murder about those "unelected judges" subverting the "will of the people" whenever they rule in a way they don't like). John Ashcroft, then a Senator from Missouri, was furious and attempted to pass a…

An Open Letter to Gay Marriage Opponents

Recently I was watching an HBO comedy special starring Ellen Degeneres. I only watched her sitcom a few times when it was on, but I've always thought she was quite funny and original. And I've always respected the way she handled that big "coming out" show that got so much attention. She didn't lose sight of the fact that it had to be funny, and it was. At the end of this special, she did something unusual - she turned up the lights and took questions from the audience. And after a few questions, a young woman stood up and started talking about how Ellen's coming out gave her the strength to…

Rusty Lopez on Morality

Rusty Lopez at New Covenant has responded to my post on the evolution of morality. Well, he's kind of responded, by which I mean his response doesn't actually engage what I said very much at all. He doesn't deny the fact that today's common moral precepts are significantly different from those found in the bible as it regards either the conduct of war or the institution of slavery (the claim that morality has evolved) or that today's outrage at slavery is better than the bible's acceptance of it (that it has evolved for the better). And those were, after all, the central claims of my essay on…

What's a Topological Insulator?

Yesterday's post about how nobody cares about condensed matter physics produced a surprising number of comments of the form "I was really hoping you would post about topological insulators," which surprised me a bit. Anyway, since people asked for it, I'll give it a shot. The important caveats here are that 1) this isn't my field, and 2) I have not read a great deal of the primary literature on this, so my understanding is not that deep. We'll do this in Q&A format, as that's been working well for ResearchBlogging posts lately. So, what's a "topological insulator," anyway? You make a…

"False Pearls before Real Swine"

A falsehood is an incorrect or muddled belief widely enough held to be notable, and possibly dangerous. A falsehood is also a potentially powerful teaching tool. Evolution generally, and human evolution in particular, is loaded with them. [Previous post: "The Falsehoods"] "False Pearls before Real Swine" ... I won't tell you who said that, but when he did say it it was in front of a classroom of several hundred Harvard freshmen, and he was referring to the idea of telling little white lies to the unwashed masses in order to achieve the dissemination of greater truth. No one in the room…

Major Blunder in Science Reporting will Fuel Creationist Claims

Life Science Teachers: Take special note! This is not yet an error in the mainstream press, but there is an error afoot, currently represented in the widely read slashdot, which I imagine will propagate. The purpose of this post is to alert you to this problem and prepare you for the occasion when you run into a wackaloon creationist waving their arms around and screaming "Carbon dating does not work! It's been proven." This story also has a Global Warming Denialism component. What I'm going to do here is give you the basic facts, then the misinterpreted text. We start with the basic…

Probability and Evolution

Returning now to my radio debate with Sean Pitman, another issue that arose involved the use of probability theory in understanding evolution. Sean argued, indeed, it was really his only argument, that natural selection was incapable in principle of crafting complex adaptations. He chided me for not including in my book any probability calculations to show that natural selection can do what I say it can do. I replied that probability theory was simply the wrong tool for that particular job. Sean was aghast, suggesting, bizarrely, that this somehow rendered evolution unscientific. In his…

Religion is Sensible to the Extent That it is Vacuous

This essay by Peter Bebergal is getting some bloggy attention. Chad Orzel liked it. John Wilkins calls it “lovely, lyrical and wistful.” P.Z. is less impressed. I'm with P.Z. Surprise! The essay starts off strong with a condemnation of the Creation Museum. Hard to object to that! Sadly, the essay quickly veers off into an all-too-familiar defense of the allegedly good sort of religion, as opposed to the simplistic kind represented by the fundamentalists. His message can be summed up as follows: “Sure, if you take religious claims seriously then of course you will think religion is…

More Tidbits From the Debate

Moving on, we then had an interesting exchange with Governor Romney: MR. MATTHEWS: Governor Romney, what do you say to Roman Catholic bishops who would deny communion to elected officials who support abortion rights? MR. ROMNEY: I don't say anything to Roman Catholic bishops. They can do whatever the heck they want. (Laughter.) Roman Catholic bishops are in a private institution, a religion, and they can do whatever they want in a religion. America -- MR. MATTHEWS: Do you see that as interference in public life? MR. ROMNEY: Well, I can't imagine a government telling a church who can have…

Phrases I Hate

I spend a lot of my free time reading, one result of which is a long list of rhetorical pet peeves. Little phrases and expressions that, for me at least, immediately make the writer look like an amateur. Starting a sentence with “Uhm” or “Hmmmm,” for example. This is an especially common one among blog writers. It's a silly and cliched way of suggesting that your opponent has not merely made a weak argument, but has actually said something unhinged and foolish. In the early days of blogs this might have been a clever way of achieving a conversational tone, but now it's so overused it just…

Going Squishy on the First Amendment

Let's get clear on one thing. Terry Jones, the delightful Florida pastor who burned the Koran the other day, thereby setting in motion a sequence of events that has led to several days of violence and bloodshed, is a bigot, and a jerk, and many other unsavory things. But if he is made to suffer anything more than the severe disapprobation of every reasonable person it will be an offense far greater than his actions themselves. It's been very depressing to find so many bloggers desperately longing for the law to catch up with the wicked pastor. Here's Laurie Essig expressing a common…

Seven Essential Elements of Quantum Physics

The previous collection of things everyone should know about quantum physics is a little meta-- it's mostly talking up the importance and relevance of the theory, and not so much about the specifics of the theory. Here's a list of essential elements of quantum physics that everyone ought to know, at least in broad outlines: 1) Particles are waves, and vice versa. Quantum physics tells us that every object in the universe has both particle-like and wave-like properties. It's not that everything is really waves, and just sometimes looks like particles, or that everything is made of particles…

Lab Visit Report: Unusual Lattices

In one of his March Meeting posts, Doug Natelson writes about laser cooling experiments that explore condensed matter phenomena: While the ultracold gases provide an exquisitely clean, tunable environment for studying some physics problems, it's increasingly clear to me that they also have some significant restrictions; for example, while optical lattices enable simulations of some model potentials from solid state physics, there doesn't seem to be any nice way to model phonons or the rich variety of real-life crystal structures that can provide so much rich phenomenology. I would dissent…

True Science Blogging, or "Hey, Check Out This Navel!"

The kerfuffle over the Bayblab incident has produced no end of discussion here and elsewhere. Hilariously, this included a lengthy discussion of why they see ScienceBlogs as cliquish, conducted entirely in the private back-channel forum that nobody else can read. Irony: it's like gold-y and bronze-y, but made of iron. I realize that there's nothing you'd rather read than noodly explorations of the true essence of science blogging, except maybe copies of the Federal income tax code. But since I'm sitting here in the lab waiting for the turbo pump to spin down so I can break vacuum (because I…

Michael Jackson: Cherilyn Lee, Diprivan® (propofol), and Myers' Cocktail

Judging from the press inquiries I've had since 5 am EDT today, expect today's focus in the Michael Jackson case to be on the anesthetic drug, propofol (Diprivan®). Last evening, California nutritionist and registered nurse Ms Cherilyn Lee gave an interview to Campbell Brown on CNN (and this AP exclusive report) describing Michael Jackson's repeated requests of her for the intravenous sedative drug for his insomnia. She wisely rejected his requests, instead providing him with a vitamin and mineral "energy" injection called Myers' cocktail. However, four days before Jackson's death she…