Search Content

Displaying results 6901 - 6950 of 87947

Introducing Confined Space @ TPH

Yesterday, Jordan Barab mothballed his blog Confined Space, and workers and worker advocates lost a powerful online resource. The good news is that weâve gained a political resource, since Jordanâs departure from the blogosphere is due to his new staff position on the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor. Still, weâll all miss the combination of up-to-the-minute news, biting commentary, and ceaseless advocacy for worker health and safety that have characterized Confined Space since its inception in 2003. (See Revereâs post yesterday for more on how much Jordan has…

Do you love or hate Cilantro?

If you think that political or religious debates can get nasty, you haven't seen anything until you go online as see how much hate exists between people who love cilantro and those who hate cilantro. What horrible words they use to describe each other!!!! Last weekend, I asked why is this and searched Twitter and FriendFeed for discussions, as well Wikipedia and Google Scholar for information about it. First - cilantro is the US name for the plant that is called coriander in the rest of the world. In the USA, only the seed is called coriander, and the rest of the plant is cilantro. Second -…

Open Access Day - the blog posts

As you know, blog posts about Open Access - What It Means To Me? are in competition today! I will be posting and updating the links of entries throughout the day (until midnight Eastern) for all to see - if I miss yours, send me the URL of your entry. Caveat Lector: My Father the Anthropologist; or, What I Offer Open Access and Why Greg Laden's blog: A poem for Open Access Day A k8, a cat, a mission: Open Access Day Laelaps: Happy Open Access Day! Moneduloides: Why Does Open Access Matter To You? Stuff: Open Access Day - How are we sharing our knowledge? The Parachute: Open Access Day…

Great News!

HOUSE BACKS TAXPAYER-FUNDED RESEARCH ACCESS Final Appropriations Bill Mandates Free Access to NIH Research Findings Washington, D.C. - July 20, 2007 - In what advocates hailed as a major advance for scientific communication, the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday approved a measure directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide free public online access to agency-funded research findings within 12 months of their publication in a peer-reviewed journal. With broad bipartisan support, the House passed the provision as part of the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education…

San Francisco - a running commentary #2

Wow - this was (and still is) a very busy week. On most days, I just crashed early, without having the energy to blog very much (at least very much for me). In the last dispatch, I forgot to mention I met Jimmy Wales who came to visit PLoS and we talked about Wikipedia and building online communities. Under the fold are a bunch of new pictures... Professor Steve Steve got to meet the CEO of PLoS: ...and they quickly bonded: Yesterday, I went to lunch with the Editors: Then, after all the work was done, I was exhausted and I had to walk about 1.5 miles during the rush hour to meet…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Young Meerkats Learn The Emotion Before The Message In Threat Calls: It is well known that human speech can provide listeners with simultaneous information about a person's emotions and objects in the environment. Past research has shown that animal vocalizations can do the same, but little is known about the development of the features that encode such information. Tropical Birds Have Slow Pace Of Life Compared To Northern Species, Study Finds: In the steamy tropics, even the birds find the pace of life a bit more relaxed, research shows. Tropical birds expend less energy at rest than do…

Wednesday morning at Lindau

I'm here for another long session of talks. Unfortunately, this is Big Chemistry day, and I'm struggling to keep up with the unfamiliar. I need more biology for it all to make sense! Rudolph Marcus: From 'On Water' and enzyme caalysis to single molecules and quantum dots. Theory and experiment. I was afraid of this. This Lindau conference has a primary focus on chemistry, and I am not a chemist…and I just knew there would be a talk or two at which I would be all at sea, and that was the case in Marcus's talk, which was all hardcore chemistry. I got the general gist — he's making an argument…

Scott Rosenberg's criteria for evaluating web pages

From this day forward, Scott Rosenberg is an honorary librarian. One of the things that librarians talk about a lot is how to evaluate a random web page -- what signs and signals to look for that will give the unsuspecting student a clue as to whether or not they might want to use a particular web page in an assignment. We talk a lot about the various W's -- who, what, why, when and all the rest. Who created the page, what does it say, does their appear to be any bias, is it current. There has been tons of literature on the subject and a very large number of online tutorials. Scott…

Sub-Genius Social Hedonist

My traffic has been down a little in the past couple of weeks, which of course can't possibly be because I haven't posted anything really interesting in that time. No, clearly, it must be that I'm not playing the game right. Thus, I have performed an extensive study or high-traffic blogs, to determine what it is that they post that I don't, and the answer is clear: Internet personality quizzes. Thus, here are some quiz-type things for your amusement and edification: A timed online IQ test. You get 13 minutes to answer 38 true/false questions, and then it tells you how smart you are. (Via…

University of Qld/Skeptical Science survey of climate research

Well, I got this (some days ago; I got backlogged): As one of the more highly trafficked climate blogs on the web, I’m seeking your assistance in conducting a crowd-sourced online survey of peer-reviewed climate research. I have compiled a database of around 12,000 papers listed in the 'Web Of Science' between 1991 to 2011 matching the topic 'global warming' or 'global climate change'. I am now inviting readers from a diverse range of climate blogs to peruse the abstracts of these climate papers with the purpose of estimating the level of consensus in the literature regarding the proposition…

Parklife

Or rather, Parkrun which D+A introduced me to. Thats me, the one on the right: I wanted to be that dog, at least for the race. It looks so focussed and determined, even if it is just chasing a stuffed electric hare. And the running is good, so I'll tell you all about it so you can play too. It is a series of regular free 5km runs at various places in the UK. You have to pre-register a tag, but from then on you just turn up at the start and run. The Cambridge one is in Milton Country Park which is where I run at lunchtime, though on a different course. The results are now up: I came an…

Pianka and Mims

I'm getting some email requests to state my opinion on some claims by Forrest M. Mims. Mims attended a talk by Eric Pianka, in which he claims Pianka advocated the "slow and torturous death of over five billion human beings." I wasn't there, and I don't know exactly what was said, but I will venture a few opinions and suggestions. Read Wesley Elsberry, who does know Pianka's work and has his own take on the interpretation of the talk. I assure you that biologists do not have a secret plan to deliberately murder nine-tenths of the planet's human beings in order to make room for more bacteria…

Links for 2012-01-30

BOOK REVIEW: How To Teach Relativity To Your Dog By Chad Orzel - Science News It may sound like a strange setup, but the somewhat kooky concept works well for explaining a field of physics that can sound, well, kooky to the uninitiated. Emmy is the stand-in for the everyman (or everydog) who has never quite managed to grasp the idea of spacetime, or why moving clocks tick slower than stationary ones. The imagined back-and-forth banter between author and dog keeps the book engaging while Orzel lays out the theoretical framework of particle physics, explains why neither dogs nor neutrinos can…

Impossible Lyrics Answer

Pretty much all of the songs that I thought anybody might possibly guess were guessed, so I might as well reveal the answers. If you'd still like to try your hand, don't click through to the rest of this post until after you've finished... Those of you who have given up can find the full list of titles below the fold, with commentary on the songs that nobody recognized. "I Don't Like Mondays," The Boomtown Rats "I Wish I Was A Girl," Counting Crows "The Destruction of Lurel Canyon," Youth Group. Off Casino Twilight Dogs. I couldn't find lyrics for this online (though I didn't try all that…

Silly Unconventional Love Songs

Via Kate, a call for love songs. I like most of the songs on Kate's list, but as I tried to think of songs to add, I realized a couple of things: 1) I own more really good kiss-off songs than I do traditional love songs, and 2) even the songs that I like about loving relationships tend to be a little... odd. Make of this what you will. Anyway, as a complement to Kate's list of relatively conventional love songs, here's a list of some odder tracks, mostly by less well-known artists. They're all songs about love or people in love, but not quite the sort of thing you should expect to hear as the…

Hayes on Dembski

Over at Red State Rabble, Pat Hayes has some further thoughts on the Darwin quote I discussed yesterday. Turns out Dembski's even more vile than I thought. After reproducing the quote in question, Hayes writes: And Dembski, of course, drives home the point that these sorts of views, while once popular, are now beyond the pale by adding: "What a great mind, indeed. What a wonderful human being. What a marvelous vision of the human family." Is this what Darwin really believed? Is it true that Darwin's theory of evolution, as the comments to Dembski's post attest, is the basis for racism,…

Why Traditional Publishing Is Better Than Blogging

There's another round of "science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!" going on in connection with last week's World Conference of Science Journalists-- see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn't be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one of the best arguments you could construct for the superiority of the traditional publishing process to doing everything with blogs. As I said in my review of the book, there's really nothing in Unscientific America that will come as a surprise to…

Links for 2010-01-31

Axe Cop He's a cop, with an axe. His partner is a cop with a flute-- no, a dinosaur soldier-- no, an avocado. Can you tell this was written by a five-year-old? (tags: comics silly internet art kid-stuff) Malkin Grey's LiveJournal - Why Writers Go Nuts, Exhibit Number One Million and Something. "Speaking as both a reader and a writer, this sucks. I do not pretend to know what the ideal price point for an e-book might be (though my pocketbook has its own opinions -- I don't mind paying a higher price for an e-book that in its hardcopy form is fresh on the shelves, but I don't want to still…

Best since sliced bread: The Encyclopedia of Life

The new Encyclopedia of Life may be the best new thing since sliced bread, but not necessarily just because a catalog of every living species is a pre-requisite to understanding our planet. By making it clear just how little we actually know about life on Earth, EOL could be just the thing biology needs to spur new interest among students, government funding agencies, and the public at large in basic science. That might be overselling it a tad, but it's hard not to use hyperbole when addressing the enormous gap between what the average person thinks we know and what we actually do know. The…

Time-Reversal

Generally speaking, if you play a movie backwards everything that happens is still physically possible. If I throw you a baseball and you catch it, reversing the video is just the equally plausible situation of you throwing the baseball followed by my catching it. If entropy is changing in the video - e.g., breaking an egg - the time-reversed video will not be especially likely. But it doesn't break the laws of physics. This is called time-reversal symmetry (sometimes T-symmetry for short). If you're looking at planets orbiting in uniform circular motion about the sun, you know from your…

Is Biology Reducible to the Laws of Physics?

Alex Rosenberg, Philosophy Professor at Duke, argues so. John Dupre, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Exeter, isn't buying it. I'm not either, ever averse to such reductionisms.* Here is Dupre's review of Rosenberg's Darwinian Reductionism: Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (University of Chicago Press, 2006), from American Scientist on-line. For your benefit, these are the first few paragraphs of the review: Alex Rosenberg is unusual among philosophers of biology in adhering to the view that everything occurs in accordance with universal laws, and…

Technology and Orgasm on Film

Rachel Maines's book, The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (1999), is an exploration of the intersection of women's health, technology, gender, and broader social mores. It's now been used as the basis for a full-length documentary, Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm, which was screened at the recent meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). (Here is a synopsis of the film.) I dare say this might be the very first mention in the history of the internet about sex or orgasm. Call me naive, but I don't think those key…

How Likely is it that Fox News Falsifies Climate Science?

(updated below) Media Matters is reporting that on December 4th Fox News manipulated the evidence from a poll to suggest that 94% of the US population thinks that scientists falsified evidence to support their beliefs about climate change. As can be seen, however, their numbers added up to 120%. What happened? Well, here's the Rasmussen poll Fox & Friends cited. They asked respondents: "In order to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, how likely is it that some scientists have falsified research data?" According to the poll, 35 percent thought it very likely,…

Fat makes you healthier!

Ok, my title may be going a bit too far, but new research coming out of Harvard University has found a fat, an omega-7 fatty acid called C16:1n7-palmitoleate, which does just that. The lipid is the first of its kind found to act as a hormone, signaling muscles cells to react better to insulin and reducing levels of inflammatory chemicals produced by the body. The breakthrough came after previous studies led by Gökhan Hotamisligil, a geneticist at Harvard. His team had found that blocking two proteins which normally bind fatty acids actually led to super-mice, who were "almost indestructible…

How Jazz Players Get into the Zone

A jazz player's brain: Brain activation while improvising. Blue areas are deactivated comparable to normal, orange and read are ramped up. From PLOS One. An intriguing finding: While improvising, jazz players seem to turn OFF the part of the brain that (to quote a new study just published in PLOS One) "typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance." They're in what athletes call the zone, where they navigate the oncoming musical terrain by a sort of flexible trained instinct, like boulder-hopping downhill: Think about it and you stumble. Lovely…

Congrats, and stuff

One of my two favourite ethicists has just got tenure. Now she can say what she really thinks. [I don't know who started the canard that ethicists are unethical. The two I know are very ethical indeed. Probably a decision theorist.] Language Log gives voice to the oft-repeated but (so far as I can tell, rarely supported) claim that humans are somehow smarter than other animals when children because they can hold a conversation. Still, they are right to be critical of journalistic tropes. I nearly forgot to link to Kate Devitt's latest blog entry on memory. Here she discusses how…

I think Wayne Laugesen believes he's my nemesis — but his only superpower is bad polls

I hate to break the news to him, but he's just so Johnny Snow. I've grated against ol' Wayne a few times before to mock his awful polls, and now I think he has finally snapped, babbling out incoherent mush about how atheists are just like believers, only worse…and he really doesn't like me. I don't think. Hard to tell with mixed messages like this one. Just as James Dobson and other evangelists cultivate audiences in order to spread their beliefs, so do atheist evangelizers. The bigs are Britons Christopher Hitchens, who is battling cancer, and Richard Dawkins, who turns 70 in March. Myers,…

Mah-jong--Induced Seizures

An article in the Honk Kong Medical Journal reports on a seried of cases of Mah-jong Epilepsy.  This is something I had not heard of before: it is considered a subtype of cognition-induced epilepsy. rev="review" href="http://www.hkmj.org/abstracts/v13n4/314.htm">Mah-jong-induced seizures: case reports and review of twenty-three patients Richard SK Chang, Raymond TF Cheung, SL Ho, Windsor Mak Department of Medicine, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong Hong Kong Med J 2007;13:314-8 'Mah-jong epilepsy' is a rare reflex epilepsy syndrome, manifesting as recurrent epileptic seizures triggered…

Lobotomy & young-earth creationists

My recent post on prefrontal lobotomy has been the most popular thing on this blog so far, and the comments on it are worth reading. While searching for more information about lobotomies and the neuroleptic drugs that replaced them, I came across this fantastic webpage at NobelPrize.org, which contains more information about Egas Moniz, the Portugese surgeon who first performed the procedure. That's where I found this diagram of the instrument designed by Moniz for the prefrontal leucotomies he performed with his colleague. From the diagram, one can see how the instrument (called a…

"Brought to Life" today: a new medical history resouce

Wax anatomical figure of reclining woman, Florence, Italy, 1771-1800 Science Museum London Starting today, the Wellcome Trust and sciencemuseum.org.uk open a brand spanking new collection of medical history archives. "Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine" is searchable by people, place, thing, theme, and time. You can view a timeline of medical history in Europe next to similar timelines for the Islamic empire, Egypt and Greece (I do wish China and India were as prominently placed). You can read essays about larger questions, like what "wellness" means, or play with a cool…

Rudy Baum responds to questions about C&E News.

In response to my open letter to the ACS, Rudy Baum, the Editor in Chief of Chemical & Engineering News, emailed me some information which I am posting here with his kind permission: The editorial independence of editors of ACS publications, including C&EN, is guaranteed by the ACS Constitution, Bylaws & Regulations. There are no topics of interest to the general community of chemists that are off limits at C&EN. No one in ACS governance or on the ACS staff has ever suggested that we should or should not cover a topic for any reason. ACS has a clear and consistent policy on…

On my way to ScienceOnline'09

Once again, I'm sitting in my favorite airport with free wifi, bound this time for Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, for ScienceOnline'09. The conference has grown to feature two days of official sessions, plus a third day of semi-official goings on, and the place will be lousy with blogospheric glitterati. I'm going to be leading a session late Saturday afternoon on "Online science for kids (and parents)". I'll be highlighting a selection of the good content that's out there already, and I'm hoping that there will be some folks at the session interested in talking about how to create…

The Australian's War on Science 63: Quote mining

In a news story in The Australian Christian Kerr claims: Former US vice-president turned climate crusader Al Gore has used footage of the Queensland floods from earlier this year as proof of climate change, contradicting the findings of the Gillard government's Climate Commission. A new video posted on YouTube, narrated by Mr Gore to promote his Climate Reality Program, opens with footage of the wall of water that swept through Toowoomba in January. In the video, Mr Gore says "big oil and big coal are spending big money" to distort debate on climate change. Yet he has ignored the findings of…

Laptop Love

I've been in a creative mood this week, and I decided to take it out on my notebook pc: Many people like to personalize their laptops with a unique bumper sticker or something similar. I couldn't find the right sticker, so I ended up doing my own thing. I took a bit of inspiration from the week of spirals I posted this last November, especially the pop art mosaic spiral. First, I painted a black background, then used some decoupage medium (gooey stuff that dries hard and clear) to seal in the tiles. The "tiles" are bits of scrapbook and origami paper, mixed with a few photos and a few of my…

Taking Published Results out of Context

If anyone thinks I have sold out to the Seed Gods, let this be my exhibit A against such opinions. Seed has published a review of Funk et al's ecological divergence and speciation PNAS paper. The scientific content is not all that bad, but it blows the implications of the study way out of proportion. My thoughts are below the fold. The Seed article uses to the Funk paper to look at the role natural selection plays in speciation. The focus is put on whether allopatric speciation is a neutral process or if it depends on divergent selection in the two different environments. The article…

What is the impact of discovery tools on researcher self-archiving behavior?

This is the question I was asking myself while reading this fairly straightforward paper on open access in high-energy physics (hat tip to Garret McMahon). It's impossible to be in my particular professional specialty and not know about the trajectory of self-archiving in high-energy physics, but I learned a smallish detail from that paper that intrigues me rather: the existence of SPIRES, a disciplinary search tool that covers both the published literature and gray literature such as preprints on arXiv. This strikes me as a rare thing. We have disciplinary gray-lit search tools such as RePEc…

Talkin' 'bout my institution: A clarification

A comment Chris Rusbridge left on a previous post leads me to clarify the extent to which the subject matter of this blog draws on my own position in the institution where I work, and that institution's take on matters data-curational. In brief: It doesn't. I don't talk about my place of work here, and I have no plans to start doing so. I have no data-curation or other cyberinfrastructure responsibilities at my workplace save those that happen to touch on my position as institutional-repository manager. The day I acquire such responsibilities, which is not wholly impossible but by no means a…

Eldredge on Darwin

Niles Eldredge has a fine essay online on what it means to be a Darwinist (not the term as caricatured by creationists, but merely as someone who respects the work of Darwin while acknowledging the vast increase in understanding evolution since his time). It's also useful for explaining how creationists distort the concept of punctuated equilibrium. The creationists of the day got into the act as well. In a clear demonstration of how thoroughly political the creationist movement has always been in the United States, Ronald Reagan told reporters, after addressing a throng of Christian…

Just Science #1: What Is The World's Largest Invertebrate?

Just Science Entry #1 Kim didn't miss much. She went into Final Jeopardy with $15,000 and won the match by a scant $1 by correctly identifying the world's largest invertebrate (answer: "What is a giant squid?"). But was she right? There seems to be considerable debate about this. Steve O'Shea (giant invertebrate expert extraordinaire) says this (with his permission)... Architeuthis is frequently reported to attain a total length of 60 ft. The largest specimen known washed ashore on a New Zealand beach, Lyall Bay (Wellington) in the winter of 1887. It was a female and "in all ways smaller…

Challenger Expedition on Google Earth

People seem fascinated by the prospect of purchasing virtual real estate at Second Life, but if you ask me, Google Earth is a better place to stake your claim. For instance, I am studying deep sea-fans, or gorgonians, in the West Atlantic twilight zone between 50-150 m. Many of these have their first description in the reports by Wright and Studer (1889) of the HMS Challenger expedition 1873-1876. This expedition is a piece of history that could come alive again in a "Google Ocean" environment. The main difference between then and now is that 19th century biologists studied dead and broken…

Brain & Behavior and Technology Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large version of the Brain & Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Technology. Radio telescope on the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico. From Flickr, by Fort Photo Brain & Behavior. Academician Andrei Sakharov. From Flickr, by dbking Reader comments of the week: On the Brain & Behavior channel, Jonah of The Frontal Cortex discusses the importance of Daydreams. In the age of television, he explains in an excerpt from his latest column in the Boston Globe, kids don't have "empty time" to let their…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Monday - time to check out PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, as well as, of course, PLoS ONE. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing by Stuart M. Shieber: Scholars write articles to be read--the more access to their…

Indulging Idiots: TOO MANY TOO SOON!!!!!

Step 1-- Wooer makes some ridiculous claim about vaccines. This claim has no science supporting it, but it gets *worse*. There is actually not even a theoretical scientific framework where the claim could work.  Claim is antiscience right out the gates. Step 2-- Repeat wooer claim ad nauseum online. Step 3-- Scientists actually go to the trouble of officially debunking the claim in peer reviewed literature (even though there is not even a theoretical scientific framework where the claim could work!) because so many Average Joes/Janes think it might be true. Step 4-- Wooer et ass ignore the…

Surface Melting an Increasing Factor in East Antarctica?

Or so says Climate Denial Crock of the Week. There's no real text behind the headline, just a link to a WSJ video. This seems to be about Meltwater produced by wind–albedo interaction stored in an East Antarctic ice shelf, J. T. M. Lenaerts et al., Nature Climate Change (2016) doi:10.1038/nclimate3180, published online 12 December 2016. Here's the abstract: Surface melt and subsequent firn air depletion can ultimately lead to disintegration of Antarctic ice shelves1, 2 causing grounded glaciers to accelerate3 and sea level to rise. In the Antarctic Peninsula, foehn winds enhance melting near…

Mad Skillz

Things I can do that I no longer need to do (from here by way of here). Examining this list will no doubt tell you a lot about what I spent the past nearly forty years doing with technology. Adjusting rabbit ears on top of a TV Adjusting a television’s horizontal and vertical holds Adjusting a television’s color and hue adjustments Adjusting the tracking on a VCR Adjusting the head azimuth of a Commodore’s Datassette Archie AT commands for dial-up modems Autoexec.bat editing Backing up a PC using QIC-40 or QIC-80 tapes BASIC Booting off a floppy disk Burnishing a cartridge connector with a…

Pensacola hilarity

If you've been following the news from Florida, you must know that Kent Hovind's trial has begun. We've learned how profitable it is to be creation science evangelist… Heldmeyer said from 1999 to March 2004, the Hovinds took in more than $5 million. Their income came from amusement-park profits and merchandise -- books, audiotapes and videotapes -- they sold on site and through phone and online orders, she said. About half the money went to employees. …and that the IRS doesn't like him very much. Hovind attempted to manipulate funds from the start of his ministry, she said. In 1996, he filed…

Proper Procedure For Shutting Down A Blog

I wish more bloggers would read and bookmark this post (I don't know when I first wrote it, but I moved it up top on April 20, 2006): This is an old post but I wanted to bring it up to top as I recently saw some blogs shut down improperly, i.e., deleting the complete content. Every now and then a blog shuts down. There are as many reasons as there are bloggers, ranging from getting bored, through getting Dooced, to dying. Every blogger goes about shutting down the blog in different ways. I tried here to put down, in more or less systematic way, the dos and donts of shutting down a blog. If…

No alternative medicine ever disappears when shown to be ineffective: The case of laetrile

Everything old is new again, or so it always seems with alternative medicine. Before I explain what I'm talking about a bit more, let me just preface my remarks with an explanation for why there was no post tomorrow. I realize that most people probably don't care that much if I miss a day or two, but I care. Basically, I was in Chicago from Thursday through Sunday taking a rather grueling review course in general surgery offered by the American College of Surgeons. The reason is that I have to take my board recertification examination in general surgery in December. It was an amazing course,…

Choice, Value, and the Internet: The Sandefur Debate Continues.

In his opening remarks for the latest entry in our ongoing debate about public financing for science, Timothy Sandefur suggests that after this post, we move on to concluding remarks. That strikes me as a reasonably good idea (and not just because he's generously offered me the last word). We may not have yet reached a point where we're talking past each other, but we're definitely getting dangerously close to that point. After reading through Tim's latest post, I'm going to respond to his points out of order. I'm going to start out by looking at the more concrete examples that we've been…

And Who Elected These Guys Anyway?

One of the interesting things about blogging is that it has undermined the importance of the punditocracy. In the pre-interenet, and certainly pre-blog era, you had a very different relationship to politics, even if you were aware and relatively active: you were a consumer. By consumer, I mean that you used to have to wait around and hope that some columnist or editorial board would speak for you. There were some alternatives, such as writing letters to the editor, or in the early days of the internet, posting at electronic bulletin boards (remember those?). But now with blogging, it is…