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Project TENDR: A call to action to protect children from harmful neurotoxins

Just 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible to bring leading physicians, scientists and advocates together in a consensus on toxic chemicals and neurological disorders in children, says Maureen Swanson. But with the science increasing “exponentially,” she said the time was ripe for a concerted call to action. Swanson is co-director of Project TENDR (Targeting Environmental Neuro-Developmental Risks), a coalition of doctors, public health scientists and environmental health advocates who joined forces in 2015 to call for reducing chemical exposures that interfere with fetal and child…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At Vox, Sarah Kliff writes about the side of medical errors we rarely hear about — the doctors and nurses who make such errors and the mental health toll of living with that responsibility. In an article that explores whether health care workers are getting the support they need to deal with such experiences, Kliff begins with the story of nurse Kim Hiatt: Kim Hiatt had worked as a nurse for 24 years when she made her first medical error: She gave a frail infant 10 times the recommended dosage of a medication. The baby died five days later. Hiatt's mistake was an unnecessary tragedy. But what…

The spread and toll of Zika

A public-health nightmare is unfolding in Brazil, where the mosquito-borne virus Zika has been linked to nearly 4,000 cases of microcephaly – infants born with abnormally small brains and heads. Around 20% of adults with Zika don’t develop symptoms, which include fever, rash, and joint pain, so pregnant women may not even know they were infected. The list of places with active Zika transmisison currently includes 19 countries plus Puerto Rico in the Americas, as well as Samoa and Cape Verde. While the link between Zika and microcephaly “hasn't been proved definitely,” NPR’s Jason Beaubien…

Adult Vaccine Access Coalition launches to rally efforts to increase adult immunization rates

When it comes to immunization rates in the United States, the story is a mixed one. Among children, we’ve absolutely excelled. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers the nation’s childhood vaccination rate as one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. But when it comes to American adults — 50,000 of whom die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases — it’s a very different story. Earlier this year, CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report reported that uptake of recommended adult immunizations remains low and is far below Healthy…

Researchers: Beyond social justice and fairness, income inequality is a matter of health

The public health literature is pretty clear when it comes to income status and poverty and their profound effects on health, disability, disease and life expectancy. But what about income inequality? Does a rising gap in wealth and resource distribution affect people’s health too? In a commentary published last week in the American Journal of Public Health, two researchers posit that growing income inequality is a contributing factor to poorer health among American workers. In “Squeezing Blood from a Stone: How Income Inequality Affects the Health of the American Workforce,” authors Jessica…

Recent Archaeomags

Current Archaeology #254 (May) has a pretty funny 6-page feature by Spencer Smith of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. He claims to have found the site of a Surrey manor house that saw the birth of the last Prince of Wales who was actually an independent Welsh prince: Owain Lawgoch, Owain of the Red Hand (b. c. 1330, d. 1378). But reading the article, I found that it is actually a long piece of special pleading to explain why Smith did not find the desired remains on site! The whole thing was prompted by a TV documentary, where of course you have to put a…

Major Victories in Michigan and Ohio

Yesterday was a very good day for science education in the midwest. I wrote last week about ongoing controversies in Michigan and Ohio as advocates of intelligent design (ID) were trying to find a way, any way, to weaken science education and open the door at least a crack for the introduction of ID in public school science classrooms. I'm happy to report that we won major victories against the anti-science crowd in both states, and on the same day, both involving the state Boards of Education. In Michigan, the BOE has been trying to adopt new statewide standards in every area of study, as…

Your mama's soul doesn't love you

If it existed, it might also be profoundly autistic and … diabetic? So science cannot disprove the existence of a soul, but one thing we're learning is how much valued human properties such as love and attachment and awareness of others are a product of our biology — emotions like love are an outcome of chemistry, and can't be separated from our meaty natures. The latest issue of BioEssays has an excellent review of the role of the hormone oxytocin in regulating behaviors. It highlights how much biochemistry is a determinant of what we regard as virtues. Anyone with a little familiarity with…

Saying Goodbye to Agassi

I've mentioned before that I was a big tennis fan growing up and for most of my adult life. Like so many other tennis fans, the game has lost my interest more and more in the last few years. I grew up watching first Borg and McEnroe, then Lendl, Becker and Edberg, and finally the greatest generation of American players in Sampras, Agassi, Courier and Chang. Agassi is the last to retire, at 36 years old, and I share the universal feeling that his retirement represents the end of an era. And frankly, I'm quite surprised that he's the last one standing. Early in his career, I didn't care for…

Stop H.R.2679

The House Judiciary Committee held hearings yesterday on HR 2679, the "Public Expression of Religion Act of 2005." This bill is being pushed heavily by the religious right because it would prohibit the awarding of legal fees to successful plaintiffs in establishment clause cases. Currently, if you sue the government for a constitutional violation and are successful - if the court agrees that the government has acted unconstitutionally - the judge, at his or her discretion, may order the agency that violated the constitution to pay reasonable legal fees for the other side. This is mandated in…

Gribbit's Latest Lunacy

Okay, enough of being nice and civil in order to give Gribbit a chance to do the right thing and just admit he was wrong about the ACLU, the Equal Access Act and the Good News Club case. I think this post makes it crystal clear that this guy is just an irrational loony who wouldn't know the truth if it crawled up his pantleg, perched on his ass and yodeled the Ave Maria. Just compare these two statements found in the very same post. Comment #1: Due to previous encounters with these specific two, they were automatically banned without my reading their stupidity. Why? Because they result to the…

Where Anti-Judicial Rhetoric Leads

Rhetorical bombs thrown at courts and judges are a common theme on the right and have been for quite some time. Any judge who rules against them is branded an "activist judge" seeking to impose "judicial tyranny". We hear constant screeds against "unelected judges" who "subvert the will of the people" (curiously, and tellingly, they were dead silent when the courts struck down California's medical marijuana law, passed by popular referendum, or when they struck down Oregon's assisted suicide law, passed twice by popular referendum). Religious right groups have held conferences to do nothing…

The Roman God of ID

A couple years I wrote an essay called Intelligent Design as Roman Mythology, in which I noted that the most appropriate symbol of the ID movement was that of Janus, the Roman god of gates that is generally portrayed as having two faces. Here is a bust of Janus that can be found in the Vatican museum: By this time, of course, ID advocates are so accustomed to presenting different faces to different audiences that it has become old hat. The central deceit at the core of their PR campaign is the one that says that their motivations aren't religious and that ID is nothing more than a "…

Are the (Dimensionless) Constants Constant?

In the previous post, I said that the fine structure constant alpha provides us with a way to measure whether the fundamental constants making it up (the electron charge, Planck's constant, and the speed of light) have changed in the last few billion years. How, exactly, does that work? The easiest way to see how the fine structure constant leaves a signature that can be detected millions or billions of years later is to think about its effect on atomic states. In the picture where you think of it as describing the ratio of the speed of an orbiting electron to the speed of light, it's easy to…

Fun With Diode Lasers

I ended the previous laser post by noting that diode lasers need some additional wavelength selection to be done in order to be useful as light sources for spectroscopy experiments. In their natural state, they tend to emit light over a broader range of wavelengths than is really ideal, and we'd like to narrow that down, and also to be able to control the emission. (I should note that, while the emission of a typical diode laser is broader than people doing atomic physics experiments would like, it's still incredibly narrow by normal standards. The actual width, in wavelength, of the light…

La recolte

It is early autumn, so an old man's thoughts turn to his bees. Sadly neglected again, I wonder what they are up to? Have they produced a good honey harvest or - more likely given the rather unfortunate summer here - have they just survived? Happily I have some Apistan all saved up, and its, harumph, only a few months past its best-before date, so that'll be fine. This is going to be a long tedious post, since it occurs to me I've never done a proper one showing all the steps, and it might be fun. Its also a diary entry for my future reference. The first pix shows the hive as I found it -…

Dumb America

An unfair headline; but I think it is a known phrase: the "Dumb America" phenomenon, wherein the public has the hubris to believe that they really have something valuable to contribute to discussions that they can hardly begin to understand (I'm assuming that if you aren't part of DA then you're intelligent enough to realise I'm not talking about all Americans). Yes, I'm talking about the comments in Under the Volcano, Over the Volcano by Willis Eschenbach at Wattsup (ht: mt). Incidentally, anyone tempted to complain about my sneering or elitist tone is invited to comment somewhere else. If…

Dembski's Decline

While I was away, William Dembski offered up this revealing post. He describes how he met philosopher Barbara Forrest and asked her to autograph his copy of Creationism's Trojan Horse. She signed it, “To Bill, With Thanks.” Dembski writes: Indeed, what is she thanking me for? If ID is such a vicious evil, a more appropriate inscription might have read: To Bill, You malignant subverter of science, you despiser of all that is wholesome and right. May you rot in hell, if there is such a place (which I doubt). With all good wishes, Barbara Forrest But she didn't. She thanked me. Why was…

The Passion of the Superman

I managed to find time during my break to catch the new Superman movie. It mostly holds your interest, though it could certainly have been thirty minutes shorter without losing anything. The action sequences are impressive, and the acting is good (especially Kevin Spacey, whose even better than the always excellent Gene Hackman as Luthor). On the other hand, Luthor's evil scheme is utterly preposterous and Superman himself is such a stiff, humorless, bore that you find yourself sympathizing with Luthor. More below the fold, including a few spoilers. So, let's see. Luthor's big plan is to…

The Emergence of Angular Momentum

The third of the great physics principles introduced in our introductory mechanics courses is the conservation of angular momentum, or the Angular Momentum Principle in the language of the Matter and Interactions curriculum we use. This tends to be one of the hardest topics to introduce, in no small part because it's the last thing introduced and we're usually really short on time, but also because it's really weird. Angular momentum is very different than linear momentum, and involves all sorts of vector products and things going off at right angles. This leads to some of the coolest demos…

Weekend Diversion: Party with the Stars (and me)

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!" -Ralph Waldo Emerson If you're a regular here, you're no doubt more connected and interested in what lies beyond this world than most. But how often do you truly get to experience the wonder of a dark night sky for yourself? Like a great many of you, I live in the city, and in a particularly cloudy, overcast part of the world. During much of the year, it's far too cold to be out stargazing, and for perhaps the…

What is dark energy?

“Because dark energy makes up about 70 percent of the content of the universe, it dominates over the matter content. That means dark energy will govern expansion and, ultimately, determine the fate of the universe.” -Eric Linder It's been a while since we've spoken about dark energy, and we were just talking about Einstein's greatest blunder, so let's just dive right in. Image credit: S. Beckwith & the HUDF Working Group (STScI), HST, ESA, NASA. This is our observable Universe, as unveiled by the Hubble Space Telescope. With hundreds of billions of galaxies stretched out some 41…

Deeper into the Universe

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." -Joseph Campbell Space, as you know, is mostly empty, as the typical distance between galaxies far exceeds the size of the galaxies themselves. But in a few select regions of the Universe, where the mass density is unusually above average, galaxies cluster together by the thousands. The closest huge cluster to us like this is the Coma Cluster, containing more galaxies than 95% of all known galaxy clusters. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / L. Jenkins (GSFC). One of the first thing you'll notice about these galaxies is, unlike our…

Does global warming destroy your house in a flood?

Joe and Mary built a house. They built it on an old flood plain of a small river, though there'd not been a flood in years. This was a 500-year flood plain. Not a very floody flood plain at all. The local zoning code required that for a new house at their location the bottom of the basement needed to be above a certain elevation, with fill brought in around the house to raise the surrounding landscape. But Joe's uncle was on the zoning board, and it wasn't that hard to get a variance. This saved them thousands of dollars, and they built the house without the raised foundation or the fill.…

Climatology Versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics

Dana Nuccitelli is a key communicator in the climate change conversation. He is co-writer with John Abraham at the Climate Consensus - the 97% blog at the Guardian, and has contributed hundreds of entries to John Cook’s famous site SkepticalScience.com. He has measurably helped people to understand climate change science and the nuances of the false debate based over climate manufactured by science deniers. And, he’s written a book! Graphic from Cook, Nuccitelli, Et Al 2013 paper quantifying the consensus on climate change. This figure also appears in "Climatology and Pseudoscience"…

That Facebook Book Meme Thing

My friend Iain Davidson tagged me with the facebook novel meme. Here are the rules: Oh, hell, never mind the rules. I wanted to provide links to the books so I decided to do this as a blog post which I'll paste on my facebook page (and of course tag some unlucky facebook friend). Here it is. I broke some rules. So what? Moment in the Sun: Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment by Dr. Robert Reinow was my Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. As a child I watched Reinow’s Sunrise Semester course on TV a couple of times. He would give a lecture on some manner or other by…

Who Will Win The Next Several Primaries: Clinton or Sanders?

I recently developed a model of how the primary race will play out between Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. That model made certain assumptions, and allowed me to produce two projections (well, many, but I picked two) depending on how each candidate actually fairs with different ethnic groups (White, Back, Hispanic, since those are the groupings typically used). The two different versions of this model were designed to favor each candidate differently. The Clinton-favored model started with the basic assumption that among white Democratic Party voters,…

The Physics of Global Warming

"Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life." -Hal Lewis The most valuable natural resources we have at our disposal during our brief lives are the following. That's right, the Earth and the Sun. And if we want life on Earth to continue as we know it, we have to avoid destroying our own natural environment. The big questions are whether we're actually damaging it to the point of devastating destruction, and if so, what we need to do to fix it. One of the things we've measured reasonably well -- at, for instance, weather stations all…

America is part Mexican

The Dogs Still Bark in Dutch I grew up in the old Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, now known to you as the State of New York. There, I carried out extensive archaeological and historic research, and along the way, came across that phrase, “the dogs still bark in Dutch.” It is an idea that might occur to a denizen of Harlem, the kids off to Kindergarten, sitting on his stoop eating a cruller, or perhaps some cole slaw with a gherkin, and pondering the Dutch revival architecture down on Wall Street. There was a war between the Dutch and the English in the 17th century, and as a result of that…

Write Computer Games In Python

Ah yes, I remember it well. "Hammurabi, Hammurabi, I beg to report to you, In Year 1, 0 people have starved. 101 people came to the city The population is now 124 We harvested 4.5 bushels per acre We planted 998 acres of wheat But rats at 300 bushels of wheat You now have a surplus of 1443 bushels of wheat How many acres do yo uwish to feed to the people? How many acres do you wish to plant with seed? Oh, and you have died of Cholera!" Or, this one: Remember? I went to a special high school, in an era when individuals and high schools alike did not have computers, but we did. Since we were a…

The Argument Against Anthropogenic Climate Change Is On Drugs

First, a note on Lewis Carrol, Alice and Wonderland, and drugs. The current revisionist version of that work is that Carrol was not referring to drugs when he has Alice or other characters imbibe or smoke various substances (including 'shrooms) and in so doing experience dramatic changes in reality. Uh huh, sure. The argument is based on the belief that Lewis Carrol did not do drugs. That argument is absurd, of course, because Alice in Wonderland and related works ARE FICTION. If these stories can only involve thematic metaphor to drug use by the author actually being on drugs while…

Basics: Allometry

One of the common principles used to characterize the rules of growth in developing systems is the idea of allometry. Here, I'll briefly summarize the concept with a few clear illustrations and a tiny amount of simple math. "Allometry" means "different growth or measurement", and it refers to the fact that different body parts grow at different rates during development—we aren't simply linearly scaled up versions of our younger selves, but instead we have different proportions. One vivid and familiar example is the growth of our heads. Look at a baby, and their heads and eyes seem huge…

The Best Children's Books #1

It is hard to find a good book for kids between the ages of 5 and 9. These are kids who can read, but at varying (and rapidly changing) levels, and who are too fancy for the little kid books (thick, big pictures, few words, boring). Amanda and Huxley spend a lot of time figuring out what the good books are. They forage at two different libraries, they take home huge piles of possible good books, then narrow that down even more to identify just the best, and then, those are often re-acquired and re-read multiple times. We purchase some of these knowing that we can pass them on to the…

ACLU Sues NSA Over Wiretapping

The ACLU has filed an unprecedented lawsuit against the National Security Agency over what they say is illegal wiretapping of American citizens in contact with people in other nations. The lawsuit is filed on behalf of numerous journalists, scholars and organizations whose members have reason to believe that their phone calls and emails may have been among those listened in on and read without a warrant from the FISA court by the NSA, including James Bamford, a journalist who was threatened with prosecution in the 1970s while researching NSA wiretapping, Tara McKelvey, the Council on American…

Interesting Items in Dover Briefs

There are many compelling arguments made in the briefs filed by the plaintiffs in the Dover trial. I'll post a few excerpts of some of the more interesting ones. One of the keys to this trial is establishing that the board acted with the intent of promoting a religious viewpoint in adopting that policy. Under the Lemon test that the courts use to determine an establishment clause violation, a policy must have a clear secular purpose. The plaintiffs cited numerous statements by school board members testifying to their religious intent; the defense countered by arguing that there was in fact a…

Creationist Home Schooling Science Fair

"You will be a restless wanderer on the earth" -Genesis 4:12 Today, a few of us visited the Twin Cities Home School Creation Science Fair of 2013 at its new location. The fair used to be held in the historic Har Mar Shopping Mall but for some reason it has wandered up the road and across Snelling Avenue to a nearby Christian college on the shores of beautiful Lake Johanna Lake, in Roseville, Minnesota. We were, verily, Mike, Angry by Choice, and me. Angry arrived separately and reviewed the exhibits on his own, and Mike and I visited nearly all of the 23 posters together and spoke to many…

Do crosswalk buttons really do anything? And other pseudoscientific matters

This is important stuff. Along the lines of whether or not Bigfoot is real. So let’s talk about it for a moment. The crosswalk buttons in my neighborhood work. At least some of them. Last summer and the summer before, Huxley and I would walk around quite a bit, crossing through intersections that at other times I would drive through, and from the latter vantage (driving) I’d observe people at intersections trying to get a walk light. Between our pressing of the buttons, and my observations of others, I’m pretty sure that the lights change to “walk” during the traffic signal cycle far more…

I personally put Al Franken in the Senate

Today is Minnesota Senator Al Franken's Birthday. In honor of that, I'm reposting this historically accurate and important essay, which first appeared on this blog on April 23, 2009 at 3:56PM: I personally put Al Franken in the Senate Al Franken is about to be seated as the Junior Senator from Minnesota after a long and costly battle between loser Norm Coleman and Senator Franken. Al won the election by just a few hundred votes, and three of those votes are mine. So, we have me and about 100 other people just like me to thank for overthrowing the Coleman Regime. Let this be a lesson to…

The death of Darwin

Today is the anniversary of Darwin's death in 1882, and I am prompted to post this in response to a peculiar question. "Just read Carl Zimmers Evolution, a triumph of an idea. In it he states that Darwin, on his death bed cried out to god? How could this be if he had denounced religion and god?" It's quite true that Zimmer does briefly mention the death of Darwin: ...Emma caught him in her arms when he collapsed at Down House. For the next six weeks she cared for him as he cried out to God and coughed up blood and slipped into unconsciousness. On April 19, 1882, he was dead. The question is…

A True Ghost Story, Part 6: But first, since we're talking geology ...

... Continued ... Since we are talking about geology, I do not want to give up the opportunity to bring up one of the coolest stories of geology ever, given the present day discussion of science and religion. You will be asking for a source for this story. Look it up in Wikipedia, where all knowledge resides, and you will not find it there. There are things, it turns out, that The Great Knowing Web Site does not know. My source is a combination of primary and secondary documents, written histories, and a documentary that is not generally available. Barney Barneto nee Barnet Isaacs was a…

A True Ghost Story, Part 6: But first, since we're talking geology ...

Since we are talking about geology, I do not want to give up the opportunity to bring up one of the coolest stories of geology ever, given the present day discussion of science and religion. You will be asking for a source for this story. Look it up in Wikipedia, where all knowledge resides, and you will not find it there. There are things, it turns out, that The Great Knowing Web Site does not know. My source is a combination of primary and secondary documents, written histories, and a documentary that is not generally available. Barney Barneto nee Barnet Isaacs was a key player in the…

Global Warming's Impact on Hockey: NHL is concerned.

The original hoser, I'm told by an unimpeachable source from way up in Canada, was the guy who went out to his front yard in the middle of the winter and hosed down the lawn in order to make some flat ice, so he and his friends could play hockey. A better way to get ice is to find a cove or embayment along a small lake that is protected from the wind; clear off the snow and you've got a nice flat surface. If that is not available, clear the snow off the rugged and rough ice that forms on many lakes, build a dam of hard packed snow around it ... and hose that down. Even better, build a…

Fisking Henry Markram's Comment About "Recursive Fury" and the Frontiers Retraction

Henry Markram Henry Markram, a chief editor at Frontiers, the journal that recently retracted (resulting in multiple resignations of editors from that journal), inappropriately, an important paper on climate change denialism, just made the following comment on a post on that journal's blog. My own personal opinion: The authors of the retracted paper and their followers are doing the climate change crisis a tragic disservice by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study. They made a monumental mistake, refused to fix it and that…

The Global Warming Hiatus, 2013, And Some Data (#FauxPause)

First, there is no hiatus. Climate science skeptics claim that warming stopped in 1998. It didn't. Stefan Rahmstorf has a nice post placing 2013 in context with the most recent data, HERE. Just click the "translate" button to read it in your favorite language. UPDATE: Stefan's post is now HERE on Real Climate, in English. Stefan has a bunch of great graphics that you will enjoy. Following his lead I've decided to make a graphic or two myself. First, the data. NASA has this data to which people often refer when discussing global warming. I took that database and fixed it up a bit. I…

Active Learning Experiment: The Aftermath

As I said last week, I recently wrapped up a term experimenting with "active learning" techniques in the two intro courses I was teaching. The diagnostic test results were a mixed bag-- one section showed really good improvement in their scores, the other was no better than the same class with traditional methods-- and the exam scores weren't really any different. There was probably some slight improvement in the multiple choice-- fewer students got trapped by the Newton's First Law questions than usual-- but in the free-response problems, they did about the same as usual. So, having turned…

Statistical Significance Is an Arbitrary Convention

In typical fashion, no sooner do I declare a quasi-hiatus than somebody writes an article that I want to say something about. For weeks, coming up with blog posts was like pulling teeth, but now I'm not trying to do it, it's easy... anyway, that's why there's the "quasi-" in "quasi-hiatus," and having been reasonably productive in the early bit of the weekend, I have a few moments to comment on this column by Ben Goldacre about bad statistics in neuroscience. It seems lots of researchers are not properly assessing the significance of their results when reporting differences between measured…

The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves

Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC: It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society. It's a nice line, but it doesn't entirely make sense. When I hear the term "grass-roots movement," I think of something that has widespread popularity among the public at a low level, with that public support forcing political elites to take notice. Things like organized labor back in the day, or antiwar activism in the Vietnam era. That's almost the opposite of how the term is used here. If we…

Weary Po-Mo Platitudes

Browsing through the reviews section of the current issue of Antiquity, I came across a confusing and irritating piece (behind a paywall) by one Dr. Charlotte Whiting. She works for the Council for British research in the Levant and is based in Amman in Jordan. Her review article treats three recent books on the Iron Age of the southern Levant, in other words, what is commonly known as Biblical archaeology. Though I entered archaeology as a shovel grunt on Tel Hazor in the Galilee, I know very little of this subject. I have read none of the books Whiting discusses; my complaint isn't about…

How Good Is My Starbucks Cup?

It's been a while since I've done a post over-analyzing some everyday situation, because I've been too busy to do any silly experiments. We're on break this week, though, so I took a little time Monday to bring excessive technology to bear on the critically important scientific question: how good is my insulated Starbucks cup? To back up a little bit, because it's always important to provide background and motivation when writing a lab report, I spend a lot of time working at Starbucks these days, because when I try to get work done in my office, people keep showing up wanting me to do stuff…

Disappointed again

Somewhere south of San Francisco, there is a billboard that declares that there is physical proof of the existence of a god, and which suggests that you read their website. A reader sent it to me, and being the sort of open minded fellow who doesn't believe in any gods but is happy to look at any evidence someone might find, I looked. I'm still an atheist. You can stop here if you want. This thing is one big tease. It starts with a splash screen: THE TIME HAS COME FOR YOU TO WITNESS A MIRACLE ARE YOU READY? Sure, I'm ready. Although, really, this is the web, that nest of lies, so it's…