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Dodd Has a Good Bailout Plan

It's not great, and I would like to see more things in it that can be negotiated away, but it still hits most of the points I raised. Outsourced to Ian Welsh: So yeah, the Dodd plan. Good plan. Buying up mortgages for 15% less than the current market value of the house, then reissuing a clean mortgage to homeowners helps the banks while still giving them a slight haircut (but only slight, odds are home prices will drop more than 15% before the slide is over.) It helps homeowners stay in their houses. It sets a market price so that banks know what mortgages are worth and thus what the…

Economist Paul Samuelson on Irrationality

I've written before (here) about the problems I have with the new trend in economics to misuse irrationality and to wrongly credit it for phenomena. So, a long-time reader sent along a Conor Clarke interview with Paul Samuelson, in which he discusses irrationality (boldface questions; italics mine): Okay, what's the distinction there? I'm curious what you think about some recent developments in economics, some of the movements that are hot right now -- like behavioral economics, part of which wants to challenge the notion of humans as utility maximizing rational agents. In my view behavioral…

So Much for Compassionate Conservatism: The Hunger Edition

Leave it to conservatives to actually conduct the War on Christmas (Got Scrooge?). I give you National Review editor Kate O'Beirne on the problem of hunger (italics mine): O'BEIRNE: And then the title of our gathering is so crucial; "Less of Washington and More of Ourselves". The federal school lunch program and now breakfast program and I guess in Washington DC, dinner program are pretty close to being sacred cows... broad bipartisan support. And if we're going to ask more of ourselves, my question is what poor excuse for a parent can't rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don't…

Low Input Projects

It is easy to get fixated on the big things that you need to do to have an impact.  You need to build a barn, buy a higher-mileage vehicle, pay down the mortgage, build a three month stash of food.  These are big or biggish projects, and often they depend on you finding time and energy and money in a world where those resources are limited. I notice that when I'm fixated on big projects I can't get done, I tend to ignore smaller ones that would be really useful.  If I don't have time or energy or money for the big things on my list, I can forget the other kinds of projects - low input, high…

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

You know you're getting old when you start liking Kipling. Still, at least I'm not quoting MacDonough's Song at you. The solstice is past and the bleak days are getting longer. Unless you're south, of course. As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all. We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But…

Counterknowledge, by Damian Thompson [Library of Babel]

This caught my eye at the library yesterday, because it looked like a compact survey of kookery, and I wasn't disappointed. Indeed, it's probably the most blog-like book I've read in quite some time-- bits of the chapters could easily be posted at Orac's place, and nobody would think it odd. The endnotes are even full of URL's, and there is the inevitable blog. Thompson defines "counterknowledge" on the first page, after listing off a bunch of popular kook theories: This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact-- packaged so effectively, indeed, that the twenty-first…

2006: The Best Music

It's that time of year, when people who write about music attempt to sum the year up in list form. And who am I to buck that trend? The advent of iTunes makes it much easier than it used to be for me to compile a "best of 2006" list, as it keeps records of when I added various songs to the collection, and also what I rated them. This isn't a foolproof method-- I bought some old albums and greatest hits packages, so the really basic algorithm would claim that "I Can't Hardly Wait" was among the best songs of 2006-- but it's better than relying solely on my memory. I tend to rate songs on…

Bird and Mammal Field Guides for Africa

As long as we are on the subject (this week) of field guides, I thought I'd go ahead and suggest what guides you might take if you happen to be planning a trip to Central, East or southern Africa1 But since we are doing Africa, we need to do mammals as well as birds. But let's start with the birds. The standard bird guide for southern Africa is Newman's Birds of Southern Africa and there was a time years ago that this was actually the best book for East and Central Africa as well, owing to a lack of other available field guides. Today, East Africa is well covered by the sometimes hard to…

Theory and Correlation

In quantum mechanics, particles like electrons can be observed in one of two spin states: up or down. The theory, however, doesn't require the state to be completely determined before we look at it. Any given electron doesn't have to be in one of those spin eigenstates; it can be in a superposition of spin up and spin down. It's like Schroedinger's cat being in a superposition of alive and dead, but less dramatic. For instance, a particular electron may be in a state which has a probability of 60% of being in an up state and 40% of being in the down state. Once measured it will…

Why the skepticism over the idea of consuming less? (plus a bit about Stevie Wonder)

There is, it appears, a nice discussion going on over at a post that Ben recently put up regarding the use of nuclear energy. And quite a few of the commentary take a stance that the ideal for citizens to consume less, is at best unrealistic and at worst an impedent to our right towards progression. I'm not sure if this sits well with me. It seems too easy to say that because humans have needs to expand, to produce more, to (dammit!) play around with charts and the like so that consumption needn't slow down, then why ask for the sacrifice? Indeed, no-one is really going to do it anyway.…

Immaturity Theory; Frankly I Resent That

Discovery News makes me wonder whether they will be reporting all new theories that come up, no matter how odd they are or how little evidence they have. This one argues that people are en masse becoming less mature. To whit: The theory's creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses, which will feature a paper outlining his theory in an upcoming issue. Charlton explained to Discovery News that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be…

Dear My Senator, Not In My Back Yard

A letter Dear My Senator, Thank you very much for being one of the 90 senators who voted for Amendment 1133 to H.R. 2346. I have long felt, as I'm sure you do, that keeping terrorists out of my own backyard is of vital importance to the security of our Great nation (not to mention to the security of my dog, who also uses my backyard. And I say this even though my backyard has lots of weeds and I could use some help cleaning it up.) It is, I'm sure you'll agree, completely and totally wrong to attempt to deal with these people by giving them the same sort of justice that we Americans enjoy…

Whooping cough on the rise

Apparently, it's time once again to remind people why vaccination is important. Pertussis ("whooping cough") is a nasty vaccine-preventable illness that is highly contagious and can be deadly to little ones. And it's making a comeback. The Michigan Department of Community Health is tracking this disturbing trend: Michigan saw a significant increase in reported cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in the second half of 2008 compared to the first half of the year, prompting officials to remind parents and doctors of the importance of vaccinating infants as well as teens and adults against…

More "support" for the troops.

Every time I see a yellow "Support the Troops" ribbon on a car that's sporting Republican bumper stickers, I want to vomit. Republicans love to talk up patriotism, and they love to use "support the troops" as a campaign slogan. But when push comes to shove, when the time arrives to actually support the troops, they are nowhere to be found. There are many, many examples of this, but it might just be harder to find a better one than the Pentagon appropriations bill that just came out of the conference committee. The military pay raise built into the bill is one issue. The bill provides for a…

Naming scents can help you imagine them (and better appreciate wine?)

In 2007 I received a really cool Christmas present that I still haven't used. It's a kit to help identify the various components of the aroma in a glass of wine. I haven't used it because I wanted to wait for the right occasion -- say, a party with some of my wine-loving friends. But I've also been secretly skeptical whether it would really help. The kit has tiny vials that are supposed to represent individual aromas: "oak," "hazelnut," "coffee," "cherry," and so on. What does identifying an aroma have to do with deciding whether you like a glass of wine? As it turns out, more than you might…

End of term textbook assessment

One of those things we professors have to struggle with every year is textbook decisions. Your standard science textbook is a strange thing: it's a heavily distilled reference work that often boils all of the flavor out of a discipline in order to maximize the presentation of the essentials. What that typically means is that you get a book that is eminently useful, but isn't the kind of thing you'd pick up to read for fun, and then we hand it to our undergraduate students, who may be in our class for only the vaguest of reasons, and tell them they must read it. Finally, of course, at the end…

The laws of conditional probability are false

This is all standard physics. Consider the two-slit experiment--a light beam, two slits, and a screen--with y being the place on the screen that lights up. For simplicity, think of the screen as one-dimensional. So y is a continuous random variable. Consider four experiments: 1. Slit 1 is open, slit 2 is closed. Shine light through the slit and observe where the screen lights up. Or shoot photons through one at a time, it doesn't matter. Either way you get a distribution, which we can call p1(y). 2. Slit 1 is closed, slit 2 is open. Same thing. Now we get p2(y). 3. Both slits are…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: No planes no brains

I've sort of alluded to it, but grant fever took over the last couple of days as the deadline approaches. Unfortunately, it happened right around the time when the GMC ruling on Andrew Wakefield came down and came down hard on him and his unethical behavior. Oh, well, as they say, it looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue. In any case, I doubt I'll get to Wakers before Monday, if then, given that there might be other things that catch my interest by then. In the meantime, as I recover from pulling a couple of near all-nighters in a row, check out this Classic Insolence from…

Ah, Zugunruhe!

How birds know when and where to migrate (from April 03, 2006) I've never ever expected to see the word "Zugunruhe" in New York Times! But here it is. It is one of my most favourite words of all times (right after "elusive"), and is even described pretty accurately: Zugunruhe brooks no confusion. It has a Germanic certainty, and there can be no doubt what it means, once you know what it means. I confess that I only learned the word this week. If I understand the paper about it by Barbara Helm of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Andechs, Germany, and the late Eberhard Gwinner in…

Open Access vs. genetic privacy

Is the case for open access truly "open and shut"? Will open access impede science by limiting genetic studies with families? tags: genetics, genetic privacy, bioethics, open access Microsoft's brave new world The April ALPSP conference began with songs for the open access choir. Microsoft's Lee Dirks painted visions of a utopian future where everything will be open, labs shall be judged by the worthiness of their databases, and even scientists will learn to share. According to Dirks, "Open access to scientific content, specifically data, will become the norm." Since I've had a few data…

What will it take to make every workplace as safe as the corner office? Some Labor Day thoughts

by Elizabeth Grossman "What kind of uproar do you think there would be if CEOs were dying at the same rate as workers, whatever the data?" asked Steve Mitchell UAW Local 974 Health & Safety Representative, just before Labor Day in an online discussion about current U.S. occupational health and safety statistics. As David Michaels, Assistant Secretary for Labor for Safety and Health, pointed out in his July 19th letter to colleagues marking the 40th anniversary of OSHA, "Fourteen workers die on the job each day, far from the headlines... [and] Every year, more than four million workers are…

ScienceBlogs Screws Up

ScienceBlogs has made a distressing move: they've given PepsiCo a blog. It's called Food Frontiers and will feature content written by PepsiCo scientists. For now, I'm not going to get into PepsiCo's contribution to public health problems or what kind of content we might expect to see on the blog. Instead, I want to focus on how ScienceBlogs works and what readers expect and are entitled to. ScienceBlogs, a venture of Seed Media Group, is a business. It looks for bloggers who are writing interesting science-related content and offers them a spot as part of the ScienceBlogs community. Bloggers…

Ah, Zugunruhe!

How birds know when and where to migrate (from April 03, 2006) I've never ever expected to see the word "Zugunruhe" in New York Times! But here it is. It is one of my most favourite words of all times (right after "elusive"), and is even described pretty accurately: Zugunruhe brooks no confusion. It has a Germanic certainty, and there can be no doubt what it means, once you know what it means. I confess that I only learned the word this week. If I understand the paper about it by Barbara Helm of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Andechs, Germany, and the late Eberhard Gwinner in…

Science Debate 2008 - my Question #2: Science Funding

To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate. The questions are far too long, though, consisting more of my musings than real questions that can be asked on TV (or radio or online, wherever this may end up happening). I want you to: - correct my factual errors - call me on my BS - tell me why the particular question is counterproductive or just a bad idea to ask - if you think the question is good, help me reduce the question from ~500 to ~20 words or so. Here is the second one, so…

Links for 2010-04-22

Scathing Amazon Reviewer Revealed as Author Orlando Figes' Wife - AOL News Why didn't I try-- oh, right. Because Kate has integrity, as do I. That's why. (tags: books literature history stupid internet) Backreaction: It comes soon enough "I think of the future frequently - and more often than not I think it could come sooner. But sometimes I am stunned when I read things I've been talking about actually become reality." (tags: computing internet society culture technology science) A gassy mystery: Researchers discover surprising exoplanetary atmosphere At what point does "New planet…

Richard Feynman, Placebo Technoradical

This past Monday, a lot of people in my social media feeds were passing around this Benjamin Bratton piece about the problems with TED, blasting the whole phenomenon as "placebo technoradicalism." The whole thing, he claims, is shallow pseudo-inspirational bullshit that makes people feel nice, but doesn't actually lead anywhere. As he notes at the opening, most of the grand promises made in TED talks have yet to pan out: "So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change." I found this kind of amusing, because a day earlier the link being passed around a lot of my social media…

Links for 2011-01-21

Surviving the World - Lesson 862 - Middle Aged "I like the idea that you are greeted by a yeti either as you leave this world or when you first arrive in the afterlife. If you're creating a new religion or lifestyle, may I suggest you implement this concept into your theology?" (tags: comics internet silly surviving-world) Community gun ownership and Tulsa at Tobias Buckell Online "I understand the momentum of gun ownership in the US, and find most people I know who own weapons do actually either hunt (and eat their hunt) or keep it for home protection (there are the nuts who fetishize…

Links for 2010-01-15

Pondering a Ponderous Pendulum : Built on Facts "Why the long discussion about the period of a pendulum yesterday? Because we're actually going to take a look at a particular pendulum today. This one hangs in the central atrium of the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, which constitutes half of the beautiful and brand spanking new two-building complex now housing the Texas A&M department of physics." (tags: science physics blogs built-on-facts education history) Cocktail Party Physics: shameless self-promotion The Damn Book is finally…

The ecology of HDTV

With a little over a year left for analog television broadcasts, just about every non-Luddite who hasn't already bought an HDTV will be doing so in 2008. For most, the selection process will boil down to getting the largest set in their price range. More sophisticated buyers will weigh the pros and cons of the plasma, LCD, rear-projection technologies. But there is another criteria that we should consider: the science of power consumption. Analog TV will be history on Feb. 17, 2009. The U.S. government has already started offering $40 coupons for those who want to continue using their old-…

Who ya gonna call?

Mark H at the Denialism blog asks if a story on CNN's website about how to get rid of ghosts in your house is a joke. Turns out the original story is from the online version of This Old House magazine (to which I subscribe, living as I do in an old house in need of renovations.) And considering how down to earth the magazine is, a seemingly serious piece on ghosts must be a joke, right? Perhaps it was intended that way, But it wasn't taken that wasy by many readers who posted comments. The story, by Keith Pandolfi, begins with an interview with a real, professional ghost-buster, Troy Taylor.…

Interview w/ The Scientist on Ida's Media Strategy

I did an interview this morning with Elie Dolgin of The Scientist magazine discussing the "going broad" media strategy surrounding Darwinius masillae aka Ida the fossil. The magazine has the Q&A interview up on their site. The user registration is free and well worth the 2 seconds in order to access the wealth of content at the magazine's Web site. Below are my comments. As I've noted, this week's events will serve as a long standing case study for science communication scholars and professionals to analyze and debate. The Scientist: How unusual is this amount of media attention for a…

Where do you think you are? A brain scan can tell

Spatial navigation is a complex mental task which is strongly dependent upon memory. As we make our way around a new environment, we look for easily recognisable landmarks and try to remember how their locations are related in space, so that when we return to it we can negotiate our path.  We know that spatial representations are encoded in the medial temporal lobe, and numerous studies implicate the hippocampus in particular as being crucial for the formation of spatial memories. Information about the environment is believed to be encoded by large populations of neurons distributed…

Half-brain micro-napping

Every autumn, millions of songbirds embark upon long distance southerly migrations to warmer climes. Some species migrate during the day, but the majority - including sparrows, thrushes and warblers - do so at night, leaving their daytime habitats just after dusk and spending the next 8-10 hours on the wing. Nocturnal migration has several benefits. Cooler temperatures reduce the risk of overheating; reduced turbulence allows for a smooth flight with minimal energy expenditure; and the cover of night provides good protection from predators. These fly-by-night migratory species lose…

The Missing News of the Missing Methane

Here's a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn't: a new study indicates that plants don't release lots of methane gas. You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists (mostly from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas--perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere. The result was big news for several reasons. It was a surprise just in terms of basic biology--…

Parasites as Neuropharmacologists

Reports are coming out this morning on a new study on one of the Loom's favorite organisms: Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite that lives in roughly half of all people on Earth and has the ability to alter the behavior of its host. I reported on the research last June in the New York Times, when the Stanford researchers reported their results at a scientific conference. It's nice to finally get the results on paper, though. The study is a fine example of an underappreciated part of science: replication. In 2000 British researchers carried out a study in which they put healthy and…

Book Review: The Black Cloud

I once said that 2007 on Universe would include many new features, one being an occasional review of a work of science fiction. Hello! The Black Cloud is a 1957 science-fiction novel written by British astronomer Fred Hoyle. Like the novels of Carl Sagan, and, often, Arthur C. Clarke, it's something of an extrapolation of the author's deeply-held scientific conceptions. Because it was written by a scientist, further, it's almost overwhelmingly dry at times; the narrative often gives way entirely to pages full of mathematical formulae, diagrams, and lengthy expository footnotes. The…

Placebo effect stronger if you pay more

With so much written here lately about placebos and drug effectiveness, I would not want to leave out this remarkable study: Placebo effect is stronger, apparently, if you pay more for the placebo. This is a fascinating study described in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association. A crudely shortened version: Some researchers at MIT (none of them Bill Murray, as far as I can tell) gave light shocks to volunteers, then gave them some placebos that were costly and some that were cheap. The costly ones worked better. It sounds like a bit of a stunt, but as Respectful…

Radio Stories and a Web Resource

These may be of interest to readers of this blog: A new web resource, that's really a catalog of many resources: [Ruta Sevo has] posted about 100 recommended resources on women in science and engineering, organized into small chunks, calling it "10 x 10 List." When you use Google to find things, or a large database, you have to decide, "Is it any good?" These are short lists of selected resources for people who are entering the field. There is much more out there, of course. And the WAMC Radio Series on the Role of Women in Science and Engineering is now available online. The program is…

Twenty Years Of Sexual Harassment (and other news)

Science policy, 20 years of sexual harassment, French women students as prostitutes: a round-up of stuff from the Chronicle: Dan Greenburg of Brainstorm complains that the U.S. has no national science policy. Some commenters say "that's a good thing". Over at Chronicle Careers, Julie Vick and Jennifer Furlong talk about how to write good letters of recommendation. They include this advice: The dean also talked about an issue that merits more discussion in academe: the difference in recommendation letters written for men and women. He suggested that people writing reference letters read…

How optimistic should you feel about having your first baby?

Like most parents, Greta and I were very excited about having our first baby (Greta, I imagine, might be somewhat less enthusiastic about me putting this vintage photo of her online...). We weren't naive, though -- we had heard from friends and family about the sleepless nights, the juggling of jobs and child care, the constant requirements for feeding, and the endless stacks of diapers. We knew it wouldn't be an easy task, but we felt we were up to it, and we were overjoyed to be having a child. But at what point does this optimism become a burden? If you're unrealistically hopeful about the…

Anti-vaccine contortions: They never end

Let's review. Once upon a time, according to anti-vaccine zealots, the MMR vaccine caused autism. Soon after that, the explanation morphed. No, it wasn't so much the MMR that caused autism; rather, it was the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to be in several childhood vaccines in the U.S. until the end of 2001. Then, as evidence accumulated exonerating mercury in vaccines as a cause of autism, it became the "toxins." (Antifreeze, formaldehyde, and human fetal parts, oh my!) Finally, it became "too many too soon." And the anti-vaccine movement rested, because its latest excuse…

The Conversation on climate change continues

The series of articles on climate change in The Conversation continues: Mike Sandiford: Our effect on the earth is real: how we're geo-engineering the planet: In Australia natural erosion removes about 100 million tonnes of sediment each year. With our annual exports of coal and iron ore now at about 600 million tonnes, we have increased the geological erosion rate of the continent by many factors. ... Our best estimates place human industrial emissions of sulfur dioxide and CO₂ at five and 100 times natural volcanic emissions, respectively. ... The rate heat is released from the earth - a…

Chemical Trespass Redux

So I if walked over to your house and dumped something over your fence, that's probably trespassing, unless that something happened to be a box of Krispy Kreme, then it's just tasty. If it's grass clippings, you'd be pissed off; if it's an industrial chemical, you might sue. If I came over with said chemical and spoon-fed it to your newborn, I'm pretty sure I'd be looking at a 12/12 bid in the joint. Which leads me to a paper in Environmental Health Perspectives that is a follow up to a paper published on-line in the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology by…

Minnesota Creation Science Fair

Scale Model of a section of the Ark by Russ McGlenn I blew it off again this year: I just don't have a strong enough stomach for it. Every year, the Twin Cities Creation Science Association sponsors a science fair, and I tell myself I ought to go see it, but I know what to expect, and I just can't bring myself to see a bunch of kids getting intellectually abused. It's pretty much like any other science fair, which means that 90% of it is utter dreck that kids have done because it was required of them, and 10% is real enthusiasm and an honest appreciation of good but simple science. The TCCSA…

Profile: Dryad

We have a guestblogger today! At my request, Peggy Schaeffer kindly sent me the following introduction to Dryad, which I reproduce as I received it (save for minor formatting details). I will happily pass any questions in the comments on to Peggy for response. ---- Dryad is a repository for data underlying scientific publications, with an initial focus on evolution, ecology, and related fields. It's not an institutional repository, or one focused on only a single type of data -- it's designed for the multitudes of data underlying published articles that would otherwise be scattered…

Antivaccinationists promote a bogus internet "survey." Hilarity ensues as it's retracted.

I don’t have many “rules” per se about blogging, but one informal rule that I do live by is that I never blog about a study if all I can access is the abstract. In general, I insist on having the complete study before I will blog it, because to me the abstract isn’t enough. Basically, if I’m going to blog a study, I generally want to do it right and be able to read the whole paper, because that’s the only way to properly analyze a paper. I find this rule particularly important when analyzing the latest bit of antivaccine pseudoscience, especially because most antivaccine activists don’t go…

Swine flu: what you don't know, hurts us all

The White House held a briefing this afternoon with the Secretary of Homeland Security, Acting Director of CDC and Nat'l Security adviser to the President in attendance. If you have been following this you wouldn't have learned much, but the overall tone was one of serious concern but steady confidence. It was good security theater, and I say that in a good way. Information was divulged (judging from some of the press questions there was no danger over estimating the knowledge of the audience) and a sensible plan described. There are now officially 20 confirmed cases in the US in five states…

Growing gap between wages, rents means healthy housing is increasingly out of reach

by Kim Krisberg In California, a minimum wage worker has to work at least 98 hours in a week to afford a two-bedroom unit at fair market rental prices. In Texas, that worker would have to work between 81 and 97 hours in a week, and in North Carolina it's upward of 80 hours per week. In fact, in no state can minimum wage workers afford a two-bedroom apartment working a standard 40-hour week without spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent — the percentage historically used to determine fair rental prices. "What we've been witnessing is basically exactly what we've been expecting…

Spring Cleaning Time!

Posting will be intermittent and light this week. It is time for spring cleaning around here - pretty much a full time job. Not only is there Pesach coming to motivate me, and my next home visit in the foster/adoptive parent prep cycle, but also there's the fact that our weirdly cold spring is supposed to warm up, at least a bit. Once the weather hits the 50s with any regularity, and the garden season starts, it is all "House? What house? Who even goes into the house anymore?" Add to that the fact that we've hit the critical "8 weeks before last frost" date in the life of a grower, and…

Immune to reality

I'm off to the west coast (of Michigan) for a few days, and if I don't blog, I shall die...or something. So I have a few posts from my old blog to share with you. Sure, we all have our biases about food and health. I think chicken soup is great when you're sick---but not because of any proven biologic benefit. It just tastes and feels good, which is about the best you can expect in treating a cold. But food claims are becoming more and more fanciful. There is a lot we do and don't know about nutrition. Many of these fanciful claims seem to be centered on "immunity". This is a word…