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From tropical forests to peer mentoring, Erika Marin-Spiotta is an emerging force in Earth Science

After tropical forests are cleared for agriculture and then abandoned, secondary forests regrow on the site. But how do plant species composition, biomass and soil organic matter differ through this succession of primary forest, pasture, and secondary forest? Employing tools of biogeochemistry, ecosystem ecology, and land-use/land-cover change to examine those and related questions, Erika Marin-Spiotta earned a Ph.D. in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California at Berkeley, a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and…

Social exclusion literally feels cold

Our languages are replete with phrases that unite words evoking a sense of cold with concepts of loneliness, social exclusion or misanthropy. When we speak of icy stares, frosty receptions and cold shoulders, we invoke feelings of isolation and unfriendliness.  But cold and solitude are more than just metaphorical bedfellows; a new study shows that social exclusion can literally make people feel cold. Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto recruited 65 students and were asked to recall a situation where they either felt included within a group or left out of…

Anatomy of a 300 million year-old brain

Nervous tissue is extremely fragile, and so is very well protected. The brain, which has a jelly-like consistency, is encased in the skull, and is surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid, which acts to cushion it against blows that might cause it to come into contact with the inside of its bony case. Likewise, the spinal cord is surrounded by the vertebrae, the series of bones which runs down from the base of the skull.   Being so soft, the brain and spinal cord decompose quickly. When an animal dies, the nervous system begins to disintegrate immediately, until the armour in which it was…

Encephalon 54

Welcome to the 54th edition of Encephalon, the neuroscience and psychology blog carnival. This edition has everything from the perception of colour and shapes to behavioural economics, the neuroscience of sports and squabbling psychologists. First up is the editor's choice: an in-depth review of the evolution of modularity in the brain by Caio Maximino. A brain module is a functionally and cytoarchitectonically distinct region of the brain. In his post, Caio begins with how the concept of modularity arose historically. He then explains how the developing neural tube becomes segmented and…

Are faces immune from attentional blink? If so, why?

Attentional blink is a fascinating phenomenon that occurs when we see images, words, or numbers presented in a rapid sequence. As images flash by at about one every tenth of a second, you're asked to look for two in particular. If you were looking for numbers in a sequence of letters, the sequence might be SDLX3DJ9WVNBDR. The number 3 would be easy to spot, but 9, which follows 3/10 of a second later, is spotted much less frequently. The effect works for images as well. You might be asked to look for flowers in a sequence of furniture pictures. Again, flowers that follow between 2/10 and 4/10…

Course redesign cont: thinking through the context

I'm working on re-designing an upper level general education course called "The Control of Nature. Yesterday, I talked about the problems I've had in the past. Today, I'm going to start thinking about the context of the course, and what that means for improving it. One of my commenters yesterday made exactly the same suggestion as the course design tutorial that I'm working through. Yes, I've been doing it all backwards, deciding what I want my students to read and discuss and write about before I've defined my goals. The first step is recognizing that things aren't working. The next step is…

Moving on to cancer quackery...Zeolite and other oddities

Over the last few days, it seems to me, I've been blogging so much about antivaccine lunacy that I was beginning to wonder whether I should rename the blog "Respectfully Insolent Antivaccine Slapdowns." As good as it's been to dwell on seeing the antivaccine movement suffer two major setbacks in 2009 even before we've reached the end of February, it's time to move on for a while; that is, unless the antivaccine movement does or writes something stupid enough to tempt my attention back. In the meantime, as I get back into the swing of blogging again, I haven't yet gone through my pile of…

Individual vs. Group Learning Redux

So, this post is almost ten days old, but I just now found some time to actually read the 35 comments on it as well as what others wrote about it on their blogs. I guess it is time to continue that conversation now. First, let me be clear about the origin of that rant: I've been teaching for quite a long time now and always graded individuals without ever thinking about that assumption. The Facebook scandal triggered the new thought that perhaps all grades should be group grades. As a blogger, I put up a rant, spiced it up with strong language to elicit commentary (which bland stuff cannot…

What Does It Cost to Run a Small College Lab?

Over at io9, they have a post on the finances of running a research lab at a major university. It's reasonably good as such things go, but very specific to the top level of research universities. As I am not at such an institution, I thought it might be worthwhile to post something about the finances of the sort of place I am at: a private small liberal arts college. I'll follow the io9 article's format, but first, one important clarification: Do you really do research at a small college? Yes, absolutely. At the upper level private liberal arts colleges, faculty are expected to be active…

Life for faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions (Guest Post by Kim Hannula)

Sciencewoman says: Some of readers have been wondering about what life is like for those jobs at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). Alice and I are indubitably unqualified to answer that question, so Kim Hannula of "All of my faults are stress related..." graciously offered to provide some perspective. Kim is an incredibly thoughtful blogger about teaching and about geology, so you should all be reading her. In the comments on Alice's post about grad students and balanced careers, there was some discussion about working at a primarily undergraduate institution, and questions about…

The Australian's War on Science 65: Stuart Rintoul misrepresents a scientific paper

Phil Watson, Team Leader of the Coastal Unit in the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water was probably pleased when The Australian's Stuart Rintoul asked to interview him about his work. Watson was the man who organised A snapshot of future sea levels: photographing the king tide. The photographs of the king tide in 12 January 2009 are intended to help prepare NSW to adapt to a possible 90cm of sea level rise this century. So I'm guessing he wasn't too pleased when Rintoul's front page story about his work claimed that "Watson has written a report stating that global…

Reading Diary: The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

I am not trying to deny the transformative nature of the Internet, but rather that we've lived with it long enough to ask tough questions. ... I've tried to avoid the Manichean view of technology, which assumes either that the Internet will save us or that it is leading us astray, that it is making us stupid or making us smart, that things are black or white. The truth is subtler: technology alone cannot deliver the cultural transformation we have been waiting for; instead, we need to first understand and then address the underlying social and economic forces that shape it. Only then can we…

Dear Dad, With Love (repost)

This is a repost of my reflections on my father who passed away 13 years today. It took me 12 years to write the following eulogy and remembrance. While quite personal, I posted it here last year because I felt that my experiences were quite universal, shared by the families of the ten or twenty million alcoholics in the US and the hundreds of millions worldwide. Moreover, I wanted to provide a face for my colleagues who work in the area of substance abuse and a reminder for my clinical colleagues of the people behind those they may dismiss as drunks and junkies. In becoming one my most most…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Over the past week or so, PLoS IT/Web team made some serious upgrades to the site, including a much better, faster search - go and test it! Friday is also the time to point out cool new papers from four out of seven PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Shearwater Foraging…

Liveblogging From London

I'm sitting in the Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution right now, at the Nature Network's Science Blogging 2008 conference. There are about 100 people in the room, 90% of whom I don't recognize at all. 90% of the people I do recognize are people I've met for the first time somewhere in the last two days. There's a list of the attendees and their blogs on the conference website. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't had the chance to read all of those blogs yet. At the same time, it's also great (in a way) that I don't know who most of the people are or where they blog. If nothing else…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Scott Huler

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Scott Huler to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?…

Fuk-D: what happened to the reactors?

It will probably be some years before we get the full story of what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex after the earthquake. Information has not exactly been put out coherently or comprehensively, but we can make some inferences from the data that is out there. It is likely that one or two reactor vessels were breached with release of fuel and radioactive ash into the containment vessel. There are a lot of nuclear agencies in Japan: the JAEA - Japan Atomic Energy Agency - whose online environmental radiation monitors are now online (Oarai is the interesting one, between…

Thoughts on the LHC and ILC

Back in late July, I got email from a writer for Physics World magazine (which is sort of the UK equivalent of Physics Today), asking my opinion on a few questions relating to particle physics funding. The basis for asking me (as opposed to, you know, a particle physicist) was presumably a post from April in which I ranted a bit about the justification of Big Science projects. The article is now out, but not available on-line, so I haven't read it. I spent a fair amount of time typing up my response, though, so I'm going to recycle it into a blog post, because I can do that. The original…

Multiverses

The current issue of Scientific American has an article, by George F. R. Ellis, expressing some skepticism about the multiverse. Sadly, it seems that only the beginning of the article is freely available online. However, replies to the article by Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark are available online. And since Tegmark so perfectly summarizes my own views about multiverses, I'd like to take a look at his remarks. After a brief introduction Tegmark gets down to business: By our universe, I mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us during the 13.7 billion…

The Friday Fermentable: Some Old World vs. New

Another Wine Escapade - "Some Old World vs. New" by Erleichda Our wine and dinner group known as Jim's Disciples met recently at a BYOB neighborhood Italian-American restaurant. It wasn't my neighborhood, as there is nothing close by to the woods where we reside, but the sort of place a neighborhood would be proud to call its own, a gem of a place, tucked away on a darkened side street. The organizer for this evening's entertainment thought we might scrutinize old world versus new, of whatever grape varieties we felt like comparing. And, to make it interesting, each pair of wines brought…

Chris beat cancer? He did indeed, but it wasn't quackery that cured him

I like to think that one of the more important public services I provide is my deconstructions of alternative cancer cure testimonials. After all, one of the most powerful marketing tools cancer quacks have in their arsenal is a collection of stories of "real patients" with cancer who used their nostrums and are still alive and well. These sorts of analyses of alternative cancer cure testimonials began right near the very beginning, way back in 2004 and have continued intermittently to this very day, most recently with a bevy of posts showing why the testimonials of Stanislaw Burzynski's…

Rudeness required

The concern trolls are very concerned. They are responding to my posting of Sonia/Tanja/Rosa/Whoevera Jensen's crazy email — she's disabled! She's mentally ill! It's cruel to post her wacky screeds publicly where people will point and laugh! You're picking on her! <ChrisCrocker>LEAVE SONIA ALONE!!!</ChrisCrocker> No. Crazy people — and I don't mean clinically ill people who need medical/psychiatric help — are everywhere, and they are saying and doing stupid things, and they are sending their nonsense to me, and they are engaging in their foolishness in public places where they…

Advice for atheists?

We're getting advice from Christians now! Look and laugh at this list: Five things that would make atheists seem nicer. It's gone awry even with the title. I especially appreciate the word "seem," because Lord knows there's nothing that could make us actually nice, and obviously we need the suggestions of a Christian, since we're all such not-nice people. I should make a counter-list of "five things that would make Christians seem intelligent" — maybe then one of them would notice the nasty implications of this clown's title. But I'm the wrong guy to do it. You see, I'm not nice, and proud of…

Getting scansoriopterygids, terrestrial-stalking azhdarchids, sauropod pneumaticity and the word palaeontography into a kid's book

Another book with my name on it has just appeared. Again it's a kid's book: Dorling Kindersley's Know It All (Baines 2010) - a fantastically well illustrated, fact-packed encylopedia of everything science (and the successor to the highly successful 2009 Ask Me Anything). It's a multi-authored book (authors: Simone Bos, Julie Ferris, Ian Graham, Susan Kennedy, Darren Naish, Jim Pipe, Carole Stott and John Woodward). My section - titled 'Dinosaurs' - isn't just on dinosaurs; it also includes spreads on Palaeozoic tetrapods, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, Pleistocene mammals, and hominids. Does it…

I get email

I'm getting a sudden surge of hate mail, and most of it seems to revolve around the Daniel Hauser case. I assume something I wrote has been reposted somewhere frequented by morons. Anyway, these are a bit weird. Some people really hate chemotherapy, I think, because it has them extremely upset. So upset that I've put some examples below the fold, because they use very naughty language. Bonnie Howard doesn't use bad language, she just hates Big Pharma, to the point where she even thinks insulin is a conspiracy. Chemotherapy KILLS We have epidemics of heart, cancer and diabetes. Ever asked…

Don Feder on Katrina

One of my favorite nutballs, Don Feder, has now chimed in with his divine conspiracy theory of Katrina and he's firmly on the side of the Christian whackos and the Jewish whackos. Katrina, you see, was God's punishment for sodomy and for Israel pulling out of Gaza. He lists all of those "coincidences" between the pullout from Gaza and the hurricane aftermath in New Orleans that were cited in the Worldnutdaily last week, including mystical numerology: Numerology is important in traditional Judaism. Each Hebrew letter is assigned a number value. Many scholars believe the Bible has hidden codes…

Framing and Coordination

I haven't been following the discussion of the Mooney/ Nisbet "framing" article in Science all that closely, because most of the commentary has tended to be uninteresting in predictable ways. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of links from Bora (who else?), and Matt and Chris respond to most of it. There was one response that struck me as worth highlighting, though, from James Hrynyshyn of the Island of Doubt: Essentially, my response is that it is neither realistic nor fair to ask scientists to ditch their penchant for the facts and wander into territory more familiar to the…

Testosterone-fuelled traders make higher profits

Financial trading is really risky business for individuals and economies alike. Millions of pounds and dollars rest on the fast decisions of stressed people, working under extreme pressure. With such high stakes, it's worth remembering that traders, regardless of their intellect or experience, are as fallible as the rest of us and their brains and bodies are influenced by the same ensemble of hormones. Testosterone is one of these, and it's of particular importance to traders for it can influence a person's confidence and attitudes to risk during competitive encounters. While it seems…

Psychiatrists of old, never gave advice. But here's some advice:

Psychiatrists of old, never gave advice.  But here's some advice: And never trust with your money anyone making a potential bonus. From href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fa89be08-02aa-11de-b58b-000077b07658.html">Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Black Swan; HT: href="http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/02/february-25-2009-put-it-all-on-red.html">Automatic Earth. How bank bonuses let us all down By Nassim Nicholas Taleb Published: February 24 2009 19:53 One of the arguments one hears in the compensation debate is that the bonus system used by Wall Street - as John Thain,…

Different Thinking about Drinking on College Campuses

There is an interesting article by Brandon Busteed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about college drinking. Busteed argues that the problem is not the population that addiction specialists tend to focus on: the really heavy drinkers. Rather the problem is in the much more numerous group of moderate drinkers with infrequent binges: Despite conventional wisdom, the alcohol problem colleges face is not mainly about high-risk drinkers, and the solution is not about intervening with them alone. If it were, we'd have declared success long ago because we have invested so much time, money, and…

What's your favorite MTV memory? (redux)

Thanks to all for coming over and sharing your MTV memories earlier this week. Our SciBling editor and cat-herder, Katherine, came across with a very vivid list of great memories and Orac was able to bitch about being ever so slightly older than me. Then, Karmen surprised me by intimating that cable TV actually existed in Colorado in 1981, at least at her Grandma's house. I said I was going to tell you some of my general recollections of MTV, but I have very specific memories of this very week 25 years ago thanks to my personal archivist, number one fan, and all-around keeper of my life…

Federal Judge Orders Endangered Species Act Protections Reinstated for Grey Wolves - At Least For Now

Yesterday afternoon, Judge Donald Molloy of the Federal District court for Montana issued a preliminary injunction reinstating Endangered Species Act protections for grey wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. This is very good news for the wolves. Although a preliminary injunction will only protect the wolves until the lawsuit is resolved, a judge will only issue one if it appears likely that the party requesting the lawsuit is going to win at trial. A friend of mine emailed me a copy of the decision. It's forty pages long, and very little of it is kind to the Fish and Wildlife service.…

The President's Plan to help the uninsured: tax cuts for the rich

In his State of the Union Address tonight, Bush will announce a new "plan" to address the need for more affordable health care insurance. After reading the White House "Fact Sheet" on the plan, a phrase quickly jumps to mind - "dead on arrival." That one is quickly joined by others - "smoking crack," "bloody stupid," "give me a break," and "what mentally defective chimpanzee came up with this one?" The funniest thing about this particular proposal is exactly how stereotypically Bush it really is. Stripped down to its bearest essentials, there are two parts to this health care plan. One part…

Quacks everywhere

David Colquhoun has posted an excellent series of posts on the Steiner Waldorf schools, 19th century crackpottery that persists even now, by hiding their fundamentally pseudoscientific basis under a fog of fancy invented terms. He discusses their goofy philosophy of anthroposophistry, their devious efforts to get state funding, and their unfortunate buy unsurprising history of racism. It's wild and crazy stuff, and it's been sidling under the radar for a while. What initially drew me to DC's site was his article on quackery in retreat: the University of Westminster has discarded some of…

The Mona Lisa, Genes, and Money

One of the questions an artist hates most is what is your artwork worth? Price is a subjective, unsatisfactory proxy for emotional angst, frustration, eyestrain, and time. Sometimes I find that NO (reasonable) value can compensate for the emotional investment I've made - in which case I either keep the thing myself, give it away, or throw a tantrum and rip it up. Other variables also influence price - the artist's fame and skill, obviously, but also whether the work has been copied. People are willing to pay a premium to own original art, even if a reproduction is virtually identical in…

Ka-BOOM! (A few words on fireworks.)

It's the 4th of July, and here in the U.S., that usually means fireworks.* What could be better than explosions in pretty colors? Maybe a few details of how firework makers get those colors into the fireworks. If you've taken a chemistry course with a lab, you may remember having done "flame tests" of compounds. You dipped you little wire loop in the compound you were characterizing, stuck it in the Bunsen burner flame, and watched what color the flame turned. (You had to pay attention; if you missed the color your compound burned, you were left looking at the plain old Bunsen burner flame…

Money Illusion

Here's a question: Consider two individuals, Ann and Barbara, who graudated from the same college a year apart. Upon graduation, both took similar jobs with publishing firms. Ann started with a yearly salary of $30,000. During her first year on the job there was no inflation, and in her second year Ann recieved a 2% ($600) raise in salary. Barbara also started with a yearly salary of $30,000. During her first year on the job, there was 4% inflation, and in her second year Barbara received a 5% ($1500) raise in salary. As they entered their second year on the job, who was doing better in…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Lots of good stuff today - hard to pick favourites: Human Preference For Other Species Could Determine Whether They Survive: As humans exert ever-greater influence on the Earth, their preferences will play a substantial role in determining which other species survive. New research shows that, in some cases, those preferences could be governed by factors as subtle as small color highlights a creature displays. In the case of penguins, mostly black-and-white flightless birds that live predominantly in the Southern Hemisphere, those most popular with humans appear to be the ones that display…

How I discovered Holocaust denial

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…

Melissa Hussain committed Thought Crime!

And she may be fired for it. Hussain is an eighth grade science teacher in North Carolina who was getting harrassed by bible-thumping students in her classroom — harrassment that was apparently encouraged by their red-necked ignorant parents. The kids were giving her Bibles and Jesus postcards and reading Bibles instead of doing their classwork, and seemed to have enjoyed flaunting their dumb-ass religiosity at her. So she vented on Facebook. The parents got indignant that she would dare to express her unhappiness with their darling little children, and are pressing to have her fired — but…

Patriot Bible University has a website!

Kent Hovind's infamous alma mater has put together a collection of responses because they are "under attack!" Only they aren't—they're being laughed at. And whoa, these pages are even more hilarious. (Warning: all of the links below go to pages that fire up some tedious piano music on autoplay…that you can't turn off.) The first one is offended at the falsehoods their critics promulgate. For instance, people have passed around this photo, claiming it is a picture of the Patriot University facilities: It is a filthy lie! That is the minister's house. To show how wrong this portrayal is, the…

Experimental Heart: A Novel

tags: Experimental Heart, cancer research thriller, Jennifer L. Rohn, book review Reading science fiction books about scientific research inevitably inspire me to claw my eyes out from sheer frustration with the many shocking inaccuracies before I reach page 100 -- Michael Crichton's truly stupid books crammed with scientific faux pas scream immediately to mind. So I was skeptical about reading and possibly reviewing another such book. But this novel, which is part of the newly identified reality-based genre known as laboratory literature or "LabLit", pleasantly surprised me: I truly enjoyed…

First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb? Really? [Culture Dish]

A press release landed in my inbox today with this headline, which raised my eyebrows (as it was obviously intended to do): "First Experiment to Attempt Prevention of Homosexuality in Womb."  It starts with this quote from Alice Dreger, a Northwestern University bioethicist: "This is the first we know in the history of medicine that clinicians are actively trying to prevent homosexuality." The release was announcing the publication of a piece at the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum titled, "Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb? -- it was written by the same authors that…

The power of blogs, or #OccupyScholComm

I've long been a believer in the power of blogs to drive and aggregate conversations at every level. Frivolous, for sure. But also serious and scholarly. The rise of science blogs over the last few years has certainly demonstrated that. In librarianship as well, blogs are a powerful source of comment, theory and practical advice. I've always thought that the practical side of the library world was ripe to be the first field to truly leave journals behind and embrace blogging as a kind of replacement. It would be messy, sure, but it would be democratizing and re-invigorating. The kinds of…

From the Archives: Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, is from May 18, 2008. ======= It seems that at least half the time I mention this book to someone interested in the way the web is changing social patterns the…

Using Bioinformatics to Study Evolution, intro

An introduction to our Alaskan NSF Chautauqua course and a pre-course assignment. I don't know how well this will work, but I thought it might be interesting this year to experiment with blogging about our course and sharing some of our experiences with the rest of the world. Here's your chance readers, if you'd like to do some of the assignments, you are very welcome to follow along and give it a try. tags: plants, Alaska, NSF Chautauqua courses, bioinformatics, sequence analysis, evolution, wound inducible genes, moose I'm not likely to get all the assignments or course info posted on-…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: the answer, my friend . . .

Newsweek's Editor, Jon Meacham, himself a "liberal Episcopalian" and author of a book on the religious views of the Founders (American Gospel), has raised a large cloud of dust with a Newsweek cover story, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." I saw Chritopher Hitchens on TV refer to it as "thoughtful." I read it. It's OK. I guess anything in the mass media that takes a relatively clear-eyed look at the state of religion in the US would have to look relatively thoughtful, but I don't see much depth. My yawn isn't typical, however, as the declining and falling Christian talking heads…

Happy that the Common Ancestor is Common

As we age, our sleep gets less well consolidated: we take more naps during the day and wake up more oftenduring the night. This happens to other mammals as their age. Now we know that it also happens in Drosophila: "As humans age, so I'm told, they tend not to sleep as well. There are all sorts of reasons -- aches and pains, worries about work and lifelong accumulations of sins that pretty much rule out the sweet sleep of innocence. But what about fruit flies? Not as a cause of insomnia. What about the problems fruit flies have sleeping? Yes, Drosophila melanogaster also suffer sleep…

Seed Dreaming

Sorry for the extended radio silence. A combination of Apprentice Weekend, followed by Fellowship Application due, followed by ice storm related power outage, followed by internet outage of indeterminate cause, followed by visitor, followed by a series of family administrative things put off because of all the previous means that I'm just now online, and my email is still down, so if you've tried to contact me, please be patient! I'm not ignoring you, just discombobulated. I apologize for the difficulties - especially if you have tried to register for the garden design class and been…

JPANDS and HIV denialsim

This entry needed migrating from the old blog. Thank you for your indulgence. --PalMD JPANDS, the mouthpiece of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, is a well-known organ or quackery, so it seemed like a good idea to see what they've been up to lately. It's not good. The most recent issue publishes a screed on HIV denial that is so blindingly stupid, I developed a cluster headache on reading it. Now that I've recovered, let's risk a closer look. The Author Henry Bauer is a chemist, or at least I think so. He doesn't have a CV on his website. He says that he is the…