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Science Online Advice: Long Term Blogging

This is the second post in which I'm pulling a revise-and-extend job on some things I said at Science Online at a few panels on bloggy stuff: in the how-to-do-outreach session (posted yesterday, the blogging long term session, and the what-to-do-when-people-start-taking-you-seriously session. In order to get these out in a timely manner, while catching up on all the work I have to do, I'm splitting these up into individual posts, though really they all kind of fit together. Blogging for the Long Haul There were two easily misinterpretable things that I said at this one, that deserve a bit of…

Mastermind by Maria Konnikova

I saw Maria Konnikova's Mastermind on the book lottery stacks at Science Online, and the subtitle "How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes" practically screamed "This is relevant to your interests!" Not only am I writing a book about how to think like a scientist, one of the chapters I have in mind uses mystery novels and the reading thereof as an example of scientific thinking. I didn't score a copy of it at Science Online, but I did pick up the ebook shortly thereafter, and have been working through it during baby bedtimes for the last month or so, a process prolonged significantly by having to…

Birds in the News 177

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter The first Seychelles Paradise-flycatcher chicks, Terpsiphone corvina, to fledge successfully outside La Digue Island, Seychelles for over 60 years are flying on Denis Island. Image: David Hosking [larger view]. Birds in Science One of the fifteen Frisian 'transmitter godwits', which was still in Friesland on one week ago on Saturday, arrived in Senegal in West Africa on Tuesday morning. The bird, nicknamed Heidenskip, appears to have flown from Friesland via Spain and over the Sahara in one go. The distance, over…

Piped water: two edged sword

If you want to know what advances in public health and medicine in the last 150 years have done the most for the overall health of the community a major contender for the top spot would have to be the provision of safe and abundant drinking water. The first piped water supplies for major American cities date to shortly before the Civil War (mid nineteenth century) and disinfection with chlorine didn't start until the end of the first decade of the 20th century. The results for major waterborne infectious diseases like typhoid fever and various maladies just categorized as diarrhea and…

Findings from China show the post-antibiotics future approaching

Last week was World Antibiotics Awareness Week, and a new study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases showed just how dire the antibiotics situation has gotten. Authors from the South China Agricultural University, the China Agricultural University, and other institutions identified a gene that confers resistance to a last-resort antibiotic, and then found that gene in E. coli isolates from 15% of raw meat samples, 21% of pigs about to be slaughtered, and 16% of hospital patients with infections. (The study is behind a paywall, but there's a helpful summary here.) The authors warn that given…

SLIDESHOW 1C: It's the end of the world as we know it.

Continuing on from our previous lecture notes (the last being about historical awareness of "global" - i.e. characterization of the Earth from both a physical and place context), we have planned that Immediately after that lecture, Allen would next go over a "State of the World" type summary. A bit of a "we're all going to die" type of thing, which would nicely prelude 20 minutes of me talking about why we've kind of been there before. In other words, there have been many instances in the past, where events (often tied into the amalgamation of the humanities and sciences) have essentially…

Dyslexia and the Cocktail Party effect

IMAGINE sitting in a noisy restaurant, across the table from a friend, having a conversation as you eat your meal. To communicate effectively in this situation, you have to extract the relevant information from the noise in the background, as well as from other voices. To do so, your brain somehow "tags" the predictable, repeating elements of the target signal, such as the pitch of your friend's voice, and segregates them from other signals in the surroundings, which fluctuate randomly. The ability to focus on your friend's voice while excluding other noises is commonly referred to as the…

RoundUp Ready Round-up is Ready: (a) Atrazine and (b) Big Organic

Environmental Science/Studies in Review, Volume 1 Here is a rundown of some recent pieces of note w/r/t environment, science, and technology -- specifically, a few on atrazine and hermaphroditic friogs, and then a few on Big Organic (farming and planting and eating and such). From the August issue of Harper's comes an article (not available on-line - I'm just saying, maybe go read it at a newsstand, like one of those guys who stands there reading select articles and learning for free) "It's Not Easy Being Green: Are weed-killers turning frogs into hermaphrodites?" by William Souder . The…

Friday Random Recipe: Homemade Tonic Water

This is an interesting recipe, in a very unusual vein for me. Homemade tonic water. I hate tonic water. I really despise the stuff. But like a lot of people, I have some strange twitchy muscle ticks, in my legs and my eyelids. A few years ago, I was talking to my opthamologist about the eyelid twitch thing, and he said that while there was a prescription drug that he could give me for it, he'd found that most people got more relief from just drinking tonic water. The quinine that gives it its distinctive bitter taste works better than the prescription. So I gave it a try. It didn't actually…

Harry Potter Visits Chicago Museum of Science and Industry

tags: Harry Potter, Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, books, film, movies, streaming video Image: Garrett Hubbard. In what is probably the cleverest scheme to capture any remaining pocket change that Bernard Madoff has not swindled out of the average American, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry is slated to open a Harry Potter exhibit on Thursday, 30 April. According to what I've read, Harry Potter: The Exhibition takes visitors from the Hogwarts Express train platform through the Gryffindor common room, classrooms, the Great Hall, the Forbidden Forest and Hagrid's hut…

Shout out to The Open Helix Blog!

I recently discovered this blog post from early January that mentions the USA Science and Engineering Festival. We would like to give a Shout out to Mary at The Open Helix Blog for her post on January 4th covering the science festival! Do you have a blog and would like to help us get the word out about the science festival? Contact us if you have written a post about the festival. We will re-post it here and link to your blog. Thanks! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ USA Science and Engineering Festival 2010 4 January, 2010 (10:31) | General Science | By:…

Pandemic planners and the wisdom of crowds

There is an apocryphal story of a politician during the Revolution of 1848 desperately running after a crowd in Paris's Jardin du Luxembourg. "I'm their leader," he cried. "I must follow them!" A couple of years ago most national pandemic planners were occupied with procuring stockpiles of antivirals, worrying about the lack of a vaccine and reassuring people that they had the matter under control if a pandemic were to strike. No one believed them and they knew they were whistling past the graveyard, but the poverty of vision was amazing. There has been much progress since then. Now there is…

Why should I trust you?

On call one night as a medical student, I was presenting a case to my intern. As I recounted the patient's ER course, the intern stopped me and said, "Pal --- trust no one." That sounded a little harsh to me, but the intern was nice enough to explain further. "Look, you're going to be taking calls from doctors and nurses the rest of your career. They are going to give you information about a patient, but it's you who will be responsible for everything that goes right and wrong. Do you want to hang yourself on someone else's evaluation?" As any internist knows, there is a perpetual tension…

Could the Cervical Cancer Vaccine Gardasil also Protect against Breast Cancer?

This is the first of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease. by Matthew Fitzgerald Viruses cause cancer? Cancer researchers have for decades known that viruses can cause cancer. It is now estimated that 15% of the world's cancers are caused by infectious diseases including viruses. Some of these include: Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and cervical cancer; Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) and nasopharyngeal cancer & lymphoma; Hepatitis B and liver cancer. In fact cancer researchers use this knowledge of viruses causing cancer by utilizing EBV and SV40 and other viruses to "…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Science Professors Know Science, But Who Is Teaching Them How To Teach?: U.S. science and engineering students emerge from graduate school exquisitely trained to carry out research. Yet when it comes to the other major activity they'll engage in as professors - teaching - they're usually left to their own devices. That's now beginning to change, thanks to work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the Nov. 28 issue of Science, a team led by bacteriology professor Jo Handelsman describes its program of "scientific teaching," in which graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are…

Evolutionary Trade-Offs: Big Brains or Big Balls?

Okay guys, if you had a choice between having a big brain or big .. er, testes .. which would you choose? A recent scientific paper reveals that as sexual selection pressures increase in promiscuous bat species, males evolve larger testes and smaller brains. But in bat species where females remain faithful, males had comparatively smaller testes and larger brains. Conversely, male sexual behavior had absolutely no effect on either brain or testes size. Because brains and testis are the most metabolically expensive tissues to grow and maintain, the balance between their relative sizes…

The OpenOffice challenge: can you do what needs to be done?

Okay OpenOffice fans, show me what you can do. Earlier this week, I wrote about my challenges with a bug in Microsoft Excel that only appears on Windows computers. Since I use a Mac, I didn't know about the bug when I wrote the assignment and I only found out about it after all but one of my students turned in assignment results with nonsensical pie graphs. So, I asked what other instructors do with software that behaves differently on different computing platforms. I never did hear from any other instructors, but I did hear from lots of Linux fans. And, lots of other people kindly…

Luskin Keeps Digging

Everyone knows the first rule of holes: When you're in a hole, stop digging. Apparently no one told Discovery Institute lackey Casey Luskin. He's still trying to pretend that their inane charges against the Judge in the Kitzmiller decision have any merit. Recall that their latest brainstorm is that Judge Jones, in following standard procedure by using verbatim portions of the plaintiff's proposed findings of fact in his opinion, somehow rendered himself a pawn of the ACLU. Luskin persists in trying to make an issue out of this. Over at The Panda's Thumb, Tim Sandefur offers a reply. So…

Harsh Criticism From An Unexpected Direction

Here's my reply to the reader's question about the effects of being harshly criticised by a colleague you respect. I was a highly independent grad student. Some might say obstinate and unruly. This was due to a combination of my personality, my tender age and the science wars of the 1990s. I came to the university of Stockholm as a science major right about the time that Northern European archaeology fell into its belated infatuation with post-modernism and went badly anti-scientific for a while. At age eighteen, after fifty pages of Ian Hodder's turgid Reading the Past, I decided I would…

Open Source Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology is the study of tree-rings to determine when and where a tree has grown. Everybody knows that trees produce one ring every year. But the rings also vary in width according to each year's local weather conditions. If you've got enough rings in a wood sample, then their widths form a unique "bar code". Collect enough samples of various ages from buildings and bog wood, and you can join the bar codes up to a reference curve covering thousands of years. Dendrochronology has a serious organisational problem that impedes its development as a scientific discipline and tends to…

Nordita Workshop for Science Writers, aka "Quantum Boot Camp"

Since this part of the trip is actually work-like, I might as well dust off the blog and post some actual physics content. Not coincidentally, this also provides a way to put off fretting about my talk tomorrow... I'm at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers on quantum theory, which a couple of the attending writers have referred to online as boot camp, though in an affectionate way. The idea is to provide a short crash course on cool quantum physics, so as to give writers a bit more background in subjects they might need to cover. The first talk was from Rainer Kaltenbaek (whose name I…

The Friday Fermentable: Wedding anniversary champagne and some bad juju in Denver

As a former resident of The Queen City of the Plains, my goal today was to write some travel tips for those bloggers attending the DNC in Denver next week. However, I got a bit sidetracked by the case a couple of weeks ago about the gentleman who died of cyanide poisoning at a hotel near the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. You'll recall that "a pound" of sodium cyanide was also found with his dead body in room 408 of The Burnsley Hotel at 10th Ave. & Grant St. one needs only 50-100 mg of sodium cyanide to kill oneself so I still don't know what the other 453.9 grams was intended for.…

Ghosts and Kamikazes

Another grad student potluck today! Not sure what I'm going to make, as I'm writing this yesterday (relative to you reading it on Saturday). Last time I posted my recipe for praline bacon, so continuing the tradition today I'm going to post a cocktail of my own invention: The Pearl Harbor 1 part vodka 1 part blue curacao 6 parts lemonade, frozen into cubes Combine in blender, blend to a slush. Enjoy. The curacao and the lemonade combine to form a nice sea blue color. This is essentially a more tropical variation of the Kamikaze, thus inspiring the name. Now, some news. This has been…

Which Came First, the Snake or the Venom?

Back in February I discovered the remarkable work of Australian biologist Bryan Grieg Fry, who has been tracing the evolution of venom. As I wrote in the New York Times, he searched the genomes of snakes for venom genes. He discovered that even non-venomous snakes produce venom. By drawing an evolutionary tree of the venom genes, Fry showed that the common ancestor of living snakes had several kinds of venom, which had evolved through accidental "borrowing" of proteins produced in other parts of the body. Later, these genes duplicated to create a sophisticated cocktail of venoms--a cocktail…

The External Reality Filter: A Right-Hemispheric, Ventral Attention Network

A variety of new cognitive neuroscience shows how our ability to ignore distractions - to "perceptually filter", in a sense - is based on a ventral attentional network, is related to working memory, and may be involved in putative inhibitory tasks. First, a little background. In 2004, Vogel & Machizawa showed that some people may appear to have a lower working memory capacity merely because they are unable to filter distractions from their environment. The authors found a particular wave of electrical activity on the scalp - over the parietal cortex - which corresponded to subjects'…

What's the best way to report car fuel-efficiency?

Suppose you're running a small organization with five motor vehicles used by your staff and you want to replace them with more fuel-efficient versions, both to save money and reduce your organization's carbon footprint. Each vehicle travels 10,000 miles a year. Based on your budget and the requirements for each vehicle, you can do the following, but you can only afford to replace one car every six months: Replace a 16-MPG car with a 20-MPG car Replace a 22-MPG car with a 24-MPG car Replace a 18-MPG car with a 28-MPG car Replace a 34-MPG car with a 50-MPG car Replace a 42-MPG car with a 48-…

Considering learning styles

There's a little tangent in the course design tutorial I'm working through, and I think it's worth considering outside the context of any particular course. How are my students different from me, in terms of how they learn best? The tutorial uses the Index of Learning Styles to get participants thinking about how they like to learn, versus how their students like to learn. There's an online questionnaire that anyone (students, teachers, blog-readers) can use to assess their own learning styles, and a description of learning styles that explains the results. The results are plotted on sliding…

The Island Effect in Dinosaurs

Everyone these days knows about the "island effect" where certain animals evolve to a diminutive size because they live on islands. You know this because of the Flores hominid. Now, it has been shown to have operated in a dinosaur. Thecodontosaurus Thecodontosaurus is also known as the Bristol Dinosaur. It is one of the first named dinosaurs, having been found in 1834, even before dinosaurs were recognized as a phenomenon. It is a diminutive dinosaur that was originally thought to have lived in an arid area of the mainland. Research just published in Geological Magazine shows that…

A Topical Issue

Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a strong recommendation to citizens of this country: Stop drinking anti-itch gels. They're meant to go on your skin. People who swallow them - and the FDA has been tallying up a series of cases - tend to suffer from dizziness, hallucinations or fall unconscious. At that point, they probably aren't too bothered by itching, of course. But I have to think there's an easier way. Most of those who mistakenly gulped down a few squirts of gel were consumers of Benadryl Itch-Stopping Gel. They apparently assumed this was just another…

Dems: Romney Is Our Worst Nightmare

Other than Atrios, I'm the only one who thinks Romney would be the hardest Republican for Democrats to beat. Here's why. The Somerby Effect. One thing to keep in mind is that the traditional media narratives, while trivial for all politicians, are strongly biased against Democrats ("Obambi", obsessive hatred of the Clintons, "The Breck Girl"). Second, on a factual claim, a counter-argument always receives less attention than the original argument because political reporters are stupid and ignorant (not necessarily true of beat reporters), and after adding in the bias, if a Democrat has to…

Reading Recommendations: Books about Clocks and Sleep

This list, written on December 17, 2005, is still quite up-to-date. There are also some more specialized books which are expensive, and many of those I'd like to have one day, but I cannot afford them (though I have placed a couple of them on my wish list, just in case I see a cheap copy come up for sale): I know the holidays are coming in just a couple of days, but perhaps you still have time to order a book or two for your friends and family. There are tons of books about sleep out there, mostly of suspect quality. Books about clocks tend to be either very old (thus out-dated) or far too…

"Before his Throne a Trump is blown"

Thus one and all, thus great and small, the Rich as well as Poor, And those of place, as the most base, do stand the Judge before. They are arraign'd, and there detain'd before Griffin's Judgement seat With trembling fear their Doom to hear, and feel his Anger's heat. with apologies to Wigglesworth, doesn't scan anymore... Craig mongers... NASA rumours "I understand that heads of all major departments will be briefed on Sept. 5th, and the public press conference on the 6th. I also understand that the true result has been leaked and is out there (somewhere); and also that there are…

Twitter Is Kind of Useless

The AAAS annual meeting was last week, which apparently included some sessions on social media use. This, of course, led to the usual flurry of twittering about the awesomeness of Twitter, and how people who don't use Twitter are missing out. I was busy with other stuff, so I mostly let it pass, and of course I can't find representative examples now because Twitter. The truth is, though, Twitter is kind of useless. Or, rather, it's only useful for certain kinds of things-- it's social media, and much more social than media. So it's a great medium for talking to people you're not physically…

What happened to the Blizzard of 2015?

What happened to the Blizzard of 2015? Well, it happened. Despite breathless complaining about how the forecasters got it all wrong, they didn't. As the storm was predicted, there should have been close to about two feet of snow in the New York City metropolitan area, but as it turns out, there was between 8 and 12 inches. That means that New York City experienced a typical winter month's worth of snow in one day. Also, most snow that falls on The City falls a few inches at a time and melts more or less instantly, as few cities can match New York in its heat island effect. So, 8-12 inches…

Science News Update

Jerome Horwitz, the man who invented AZT, died-- Being in the basic virology realm of HIV Research World, I dont always pay as much attention to the clinical side of things as I should.  Thus I didnt know about the really interesting history of Jerome Horowitz and AZT.  Apparently he invented it as an anti-cancer agent, it didnt work, and they forgot about it... until someone tested it as a therapeutic agent for HIV, a moment that changed the course of the HIV epidemic.  Sure it wasnt a perfect drug (drug resistance when used alone, terrible side-effect profile), but it gave everyone hope…

Harriet Miers?

Like everyone else around the country, I'm asking, "Who???", right about now. Bush has chosen another stealth candidate, but this one is about a thousand times more stealthy than the last one. Since I know virtually nothing about her, I will reserve judgement until I've got a lot more information to go on. My initial response is that she's a Bush political crony and that never sits well with me regardless of political party. White House Counsel to Supreme Court Justice is a HUGE leap. I'm sure she's very intelligent and accomplished, but I need to know a lot more about her before I jump on…

Tenure and Drinking Age

When I was an undergraduate, we had more or less annual alcohol crackdowns on campus. My sophomore year, it was a series of "open container" stings, with cops hiding in the bushes outside various dorms, and leaping out to arrest anyone who walked outside with an empty keg cup. My classmates and I were outraged. My junior year, there were a couple of arrests for underage drinking, and a significant tightening of the alcohol policy. My classmates and I were outraged. My senior year, the police got hold of a college-approved party plan for a couple of freshman entires that included kegs of beer…

The clean energy technology gap: An urban legend?

It shouldn't be all that difficult to figure out. Do we have the means at our disposal, now, to replace fossil fuels with clean alternatives that won't bankrupt us all? The only two variables we need consider are the energy conversion efficiency ratios of each candidate technology and the costs, up front or amortized, of same. So why can't we agree on this simple question? Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress, and the blogger responsible for Climate Progress, sums up the disparity in an opinion piece in Nature: Although it has recently been argued that "enormous advances in energy…

Do Social Movements Affect History? Alternative Pathways Part III

Part 1 | 2 | 3 - - - Part III with David Hess, author of Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series are here. - - - TWF: You think all these farmers markets will really do anything? Or do they just make for a more fun middle class weekend? DH: There are actually two or three complicated questions here. Even though one can demonstrate significant growth trends in many localist institutions (such as farmers' markets), does the localist movement really have any long-term economic significance? I'm doing a lot of thinking about…

Carbon capture made easy

There's talk of "a low-cost, safe, and permanent method to capture and store atmospheric CO2." All it would take is some conventional rock drilling and a little energy in the form of warm water. That's what the authors of a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say is theoretically possible thanks to natural weathering processes at work in the Sultanate of Oman. It's geo-engineering for those who don't much like geo-engineering! "In situ carbonation of peridotite for CO2 storage" appears this week in PNAS. The authors, Peter B. Kelemen and Jurg Matter of Columbia…

A Gas Tax Holiday is a Horrible Idea

(Keeping with our trend towards a week of economics -- see here and here -- I have another post where I attempt to talk above my pay grade.) I am as unhappy as anybody about high oil prices making everything on Earth expensive, but I am getting a little annoyed by the Presidential candidates glib statements about how the intend to make it better. Both Clinton and McCain have come out for a gas tax holiday over the summer. This is a horrible idea for at least two reasons. (1) It will just be a wind fall for oil producers. (2) We need to lower our oil consumption, and high prices are the…

In health care, the needs of the patient usually outweigh the needs of the provider

A frequent commenter on the conscience issue has raised a lot of questions on an recent post. He seems somewhat frustrated that I don't understand his point. What I think he doesn't realize is that I do understand his point all too well---he is just wrong. Here is an example: You also still haven't cleared up that little inconsistency regarding the matter of whether or not there is a professional obligation to provide elective services. Or is it just physicians, but not pharmacists or other healthcare professionals, who have rights of conscience? OK, I'll clarify it for you. It's not that…

$29 billion/year industry thrives despite negative clinical trial outcomes

Frequent commenter, anjou, just sent along a link to a MSNBC article by Robert Bazell entitled, "Ignoring the failures of alternative medicine." The article is subtitled, "The U.S. spends millions testing popular supplements. It's a futile effort." Bazell is chief science and health correspondent for MSNBC. Most striking about Bazell's article is that the mainstream media has generally remained quiet on criticizing the alternative medicine industry. In contrast, the scientific community has long questioned both the legitimacy of NIH's alternative medicine-focused center, NCCAM, and their…

Where to buy dichloroacetate...

...has been the number one Google search term leading people to the blog this week - and that worries me. As I wrote about a week ago, dichloroacetate, or DCA, is the molecule tested recently by a team at University of Alberta for its ability to slow the growth of human lung cancer in immunocompromised rats. Among DCA's action is the ability to prevent cancer cells from producing lactic acid via aerobic glycolysis, a process used by more than half (but not all) tumors. Scientists continue to debate whether this process is a cause of cancer, or just a byproduct of malignant cell…

Stylized Substance

Style and substance. When it comes to communicating, that's what matters. This is the central premise of Randy Olson's new book Don't Be Such a Scientist. It might be the central premise of existence. To understand this book, you have to understand Randy Olson, so the book is part advice, part autobiography--tales from Olson's career as a tenured academic and his unique and therefore bumpy transition to Hollywood. Because he is a bit of an outsider in both worlds, Olson is well positioned to examine the strengths and shortcomings of both science and communicating. For the sake of…

Multi-Author Papers and Ads for Molecular Biology Reagents

Gregg Easterbrook -- good sportswriter, crappy at pretty much everything else he does -- likes to take pot-shots at scientific research in his ESPN column "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" (TMQ). In this week's edition he tells us how he doesn't think scientific papers should have multiple authors and how he doesn't like the advertisements in the journal Science. TMQ dislikes the modern convention of listing multiple people as "authors" of a work written by a single person; this is part of the overall cheapening of the written word. Several previous items have concerned the absurd number of…

Marthe Gautier, another woman scientist trivialized

I had known that Jérôme Lejeune was the fellow who had discovered that Down Syndrome was caused by trisomy of chromosome 21, but it seems there were many other things about him I had not known -- he was just a name. But there were a few things that set me aback. Lejeune became not just a renowned researcher but the darling of the French Catholic right-to-life movement.  You can read long flattering Wikipedia biographies in both French and English. He was showered with awards and given a prestigious Chair of Human Genetics at the Paris School of Medicine, bypassing the usual competition. When…

Shopping, Depression and Dopamine

The Christmas season is conspicuous consumption time. I recently made my annual trip to the mall, and couldn't help but think that, somehow, the consumption gets more conspicuous every year. The antiqued jeans get more expensive, the televisions get higher definition, and the Starbucks in the food court keeps on inventing newfangled flavors to mix into my coffee. I guess that's the genius of capitalism: it keeps on inventing new things for us to want. But as I observed this frenzy of consumption - there was a long, long line for the new Elmo doll - I couldn't help but muse on the neural…

Neuroeconomics and Paternalism

In response to my recent post on governmental regulation and energy conservation, an excellent debate has started in the comments. On the one hand, there is a long list of areas in which governmental regulation has forced corporations into making decisions that are beneficial for society at large: Catalytic converters? Mileage requirents on cars? Unleaded gasoline? Clean water act? Clean air act? Endangered species act? Vaccination requirements for public schools? Building codes? OSHA regulations? Fire codes? Why do we have these things? Were they decided on by consumers? Nope. Nearly every…

More on the Worldnutdaily and Wiccans in the Military

In following up on yesterday's post, I thought it would be fun to go back in time to 1999 to see what the Worldnutdaily was saying about the issue of Wiccans in the military when the big stink over the issue was going on and Christian groups were telling their followers not to join the military as a result of it. It was even more idiotic than I expected. In a "Worldnetdaily exclusive commentary" (which, as previously stated, means that no other outlet would publish anything so monumentally stupid), Jon Dougherty declared that allowing Wiccans to practice their religion the same way that…