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"Naturopathic obstetrics"? Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Despite having found my niche long ago in the medical blogosphere as a skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine, not to mention a scourge of quacks and anti-vaccine activists (no little ego mine!), I rarely, if ever, write about obstetrics. It's always been one area of medicine that I've felt least comfortable with. True, there are some areas of O.B. woo, such as home birth ideology that directly contributes to the deaths of babies, and perhaps I should mention such incidence more often. They are, after all, just as egregious an example of ideology triumphing over science and harming…

Danish investigator Poul Thorsen: Custom-made for the anti-vaccine movement to distract from inconvenient science

Here we go again. If there's one thing about the anti-vaccine movement, it's all about the ad hominem. Failing to win on science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other objective evidence, inevitably anti-vaccine propagandists fall back on attacking the person instead of the evidence. For example, Paul Offit has been the subject of unrelenting attacks from Generation Rescue and other anti-vaccine groups, having been dubbed "Dr. Proffit" and accused of being so in the pocket of big pharma that he'll do and say anything for it. I personally have been accused by Jake Crosby of a conflict of…

Day-to-day Labor: The Hazards of Low-wage Temping in America

by Elizabeth Grossman The news of increased hiring in the January jobs report has been greeted as a sign that the US might finally be emerging from the Great Recession. But a look at the kind of hiring that's been on the rise over the past few years raises important questions about the changing nature of the relationship between workers and employers - questions that have serious implications for occupational health and safety as well as workers' financial security. Reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that temporary employment is on the rise: In 2010 more than 27% of the 1.12…

Cleaning up scientific competition: an interview with Sean Cutler (part 1).

Sean Cutler is an assistant professor of plant cell biology at the University of California, Riverside and the corresponding author of a paper in Science published online at the end of April. Beyond its scientific content, this paper is interesting because of the long list of authors, and the way it is they ended up as coauthors on this work. As described by John Tierney, Dr. Cutler ... knew that the rush to be first in this area had previously led to some dubious publications (including papers that were subsequently retracted). So he took the unusual approach of identifying his rivals (by…

The invasion of well-meaning quacks into West Africa continues apace

Here we go yet again. I’ve been interested in the Ebola outbreak that’s been going on for months in west Africa for a number of reasons. First, it’s a bad disease, and this is the largest outbreak in history. over 5,000 people have died. Second, there’s been a lot of unreasonable fear mongering about the disease here in the US far beyond its actual threat level to the country. Third, of course, and perhaps most pertinent given the usual subject matter of this blog, is that the Ebola outbreak in Africa has been a godsend for quacks, cranks, and conspiracy theorists. There is no quackery or…

"When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do, Sir?"

(The title of this post is a quote from John Maynard Keynes.) Today I want to look at different responses to new information about global warming. I'll go first: In my archives I found a Usenet post of mine from 11 Aug 1988. In response to a suggestion that global warming was caused by waste heat from power plants, I wrote: Waste heat does not contribute significantly to global warming. It is all (if it's really happening---we probably won't be sure until its too late) caused by the greenhouse effect. I agree with Brad---burning fossil fuels could well be more…

Adapting In Place - Preparing for a Larger Household

There are ten children in my house, but six of them are phantoms. No, we haven't gotten a foster placement or heard anything new since the two weeks in August when we were asked to take two separate groups of five kids each. Both of those placements fell through, and there has been nothing since, which is sort of the problem. I have little patience with being expectant, whether pregnant or waiting for a foster placement, and the six (this is a totally arbitrary number that I'm using only because it represents the number of van seats, and thus the maximum placement we could take) "ghost…

Giant furry pets of the Incas

Another one from the archives. It's one of several articles I wrote in 2006 on obscure tropical rodents, was originally published here, and appears here with new pics and a few new details... If you've read Scott Weidensaul's excellent book The Ghost With Trembling Wings (2002), you'll recall the story of Louise Emmons and the giant Peruvian rodent she discovered. But before I get to that, let me say that The Ghost With Trembling Wings isn't about ghosts at all, but about the search for cryptic or supposedly extinct species. Think thylacines, British big cats, Ivory-billed woodpeckers, Cone-…

UC Berkeley Genetic Testing Affair: Science vs Science Education - guest post by Dr.Marie-Claire Shanahan

Marie-Claire Shanahan is an Assistant Professor of Science Education at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. As a former science teacher, she was always surprised by the ways that students talked themselves out of liking science - and she decided to do something about it. She now researches the social and cultural aspects of science and science education, especially those related to language and identity. Marie-Claire and I first met online, then also in Real World when she attended ScienceOnline 2010, after which I interviewed her for my blog. You can check out her…

Two Stanislaw Burzynski's "success stories"

One of the strategies that Stanislaw Burzynski will undoubtedly use to "prove" in Eric Merola's new Stanislaw Burzynski movie that antineoplastons work in cancer will be to highlight "success stories." Last year, Burzynski apologists frequently pointed to a girl with an inoperable brain tumor named Amelia Saunders as a success story when the U.K. press widely featured her going to school in September but, very sadly, her family saw her tumor begin to progress again in December, ultimately resulting in her death about a month and a half ago. In the process, Burzynski did what he all too often…

Another Week of Climate Disruption News - December 29, 2013

Happy New Year!!This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Information Overload is Pattern Recognition December 29, 2013 Chuckles, COP20, Brulle, Retrospectives Potash, Accountability, Pricing Nature, Cook Fukushima: Note, News, Policies Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food: Crisis, Fisheries, GMOs, Production Hurricanes, Notable Weather, Abrupt CC, Extreme Weather, New Weather Solar, Climate Sensitivity, Temperatures, Satellites Oceans, Ocean…

Mercury and autism: Well, look at what the Geiers are up to now

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been a while since I've written a substantive post on the fear mongering and bad science that are used by activists to support the claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as preservatives in vaccines is the cause of an "autism epidemic." The closest I've come is using Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s credulous reporting and conspiracy-mongering, in which he uncritically parroted the claims of the worst of the mercury militia and arguing that his recent article in Rolling Stone uses the same sort of dubious and fallacious techniques, showing…

An appropriate topic for April Fools' Day

In the three years that I've been blogging, one thing I've learned about myself is that I'm not very good at coming up with good April Fools' Day posts. Yes, I have tried it before. For example, a couple of years ago, I tried to make everyone believe that I had gone soft on woo, that I had had a change of heart. No one was fooled, for even a moment, and if there's something a good April Fools' Day post has to have if it's going to be believable long enough for the "April Fool!" punchline to be surprising, it's a plausible story. Let's face it, Orac saying he's starting to groove on homeopathy…

Are Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop winning against skeptics?

One of the problems we as skeptics and advocates for science-based medicine face is that quackery and pseudoscience are legion. They are everywhere. Worse, in many cases, they can be a good business model. For example, back when Oprah Winfrey was peddling The Secret, the magical mystical belief that if you only want something badly enough, the universe will somehow provide it, and promoting Jenny McCarthy's antivaccine beliefs, skeptics were all over her. Many were the refutations of the nonsense that she promoted published in a wide variety of blogs, websites, and magazines; yet her brand…

Erich von Däniken: Twilight of the Gods

[More blog entries about archaeology, astronomy, pseudoscience, skepticism, vondäniken; arkeologi, astronomi, pseudovetenskap, skepticism, vondäniken.] In this guest entry, German SciBling Florian Freistetter of Astrodicticum Simplex offers a translation of his report from a recent lecture by a spaced-out visionary. Now if only I could say that I've never been fooled by this sort of thing... A few weeks ago, on 17th October, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a lecture by Erich von Däniken with the title Götterdämmerung, "Twilight of the Gods". The great hall in Jena's Volkshaus…

Slumming around The DCA Site (TheDCASite.com), appalled at what I'm finding

Yesterday, I wrote about how anti-science pro-"intelligent design" kook extraordinaire Dave Springer (a.k.a. DaveScot) has taken to promoting dichloroacetate as a treatment for cancer and one website in particular, The DCA Site that claims to exist to "help inform people of the exciting research done on DCA [dichloroacetate] by scientists at the University of Alberta. In January 2007 a team of scientists at the University of Alberta published a paper in the scientific journal Cancer Cell describing the discovery that a simple, cheap molecule, DCA, worked to reactivate the apoptosis mechanism…

Atheism and Suspicion

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth... What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great…

NIH budget woes: Spin versus reality

As I mentioned before, I was at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting in Los Angeles last week. During the meeting, I happened to attend a plenary session talk by the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Dr. John Niederhuber, whose topic was the rather dire NCI funding situation. I've written about this topic before, both in general, in terms of my personal experience "sweating to the NIH paylines," to lamenting at how we as biomedical researchers are in essence treated as freelance money sources for medical schools. Coupling Dr. Niederhuber's talk at the meeting…

My (least) favorite geologic misconception

Modern geology is dictated by uniformitarianism as proposed by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology, a book that rightly displaced the "armchair speculations" of catastrophists. In nearly any book about 19th century science, Charles Darwin, paleontology, or geology, the name Charles Lyell shows up at least once, even if only to state his connection with the idea of uniformitarianism. This important concept, often summarized as "the present is the key to the past," has often been described as triumphantly kicking catastrophist explanations out of geological science, researchers like…

Growing Up With Science...and Ethics

A few months ago, in practice for his first standardized testing (my three younger sons are homeschooled), Simon, my 9 year old (then in his last few months of fourth grade) took the New York State Regents 5th grade science exam from the previous year. He aced it. Actually, as long as Simon was taking it, his brothers wanted in too. Isaiah, his 7 year old brother (in second grade at the time) also aced it, missing only one question. Asher, my five year old youngest, in kindergarten, needed a little help sounding out the words, but when he was helped over the hard bits, also passed the…

Reading Diary: Sawyer, Turtledove, Bacigalupi and more

I'm just finishing four weeks of vacation, a nice break from the regular routine. No, I don't get the whole summer off because I work at a university. I do get four weeks of vacation every year and when you work at a university it just makes sense to take it all in the summer. Anyways, we didn't really go anywhere this year, for a variety of reasons. And hence, no summer blogging break, only perhaps a tendency to slightly lighter, summery blogging topics. And since we didn't spend much time at a secluded cottage with nothing to do but read, well, I didn't quite read as much as in previous…

The Richard Dawkins Incident

A couple weeks ago I referred to an incident involving myself and Richard Dawkins and allegations of creationist dishonesty and I promised to write up the whole story soon. Let me preface this by saying two things. First, I am, as should be obvious to everyone who has read any of my writings on this page, a staunch advocate of evolutionary theory and a dogged opponent of the attacks that creationists of all types make against it. I have spent many years actively fighting against creationism and defending evolution and I'm the co-founder of an organization that exists solely for that purpose.…

Wedding bells and wagon wheels (Development on the Front Range; Part I)

In May of 1861, George Henry and Sarah Church set out on their honeymoon, into an unfamiliar frontier. They loaded their cart with a variety of comforts, from a stack of homemade potato pancakes to Milton's Paradise Lost and a tome of "Grecian mythology." Then, hitching up their team of oxen ("Buck and Bright, Tom and Jerry") they headed west. Along the way, others told them to head back. Colorado was a bust, they heard. "There was no gold and no farming as it never rained." They wouldn't give up. Sarah looked at the bleak weather outside, where rain had been pouring for weeks. "It would be…

Donald Trump is not a "slow vaxer." He is an antivaxer.

If there’s one thing about the reporting of the 2016 election that irritated me, it was the massive underreporting of certain antiscience views held by the man who is now our President-Elect. Sure, there was coverage about his denial of anthropogenic climate change from time to time. Much less reported was his long history of antivaccine views, a history I’ve been documenting since 2007. I started documenting it again in September 2015, just before the first Republican Presidential Debate. Then, the vaccine issue came up during that debate, and the mainstream media took notice—briefly.…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

As you may be aware, there was a non-review review of OpenLab 2008 in The New Scientist. I thought about fisking it line-by-line, but Passover interfered, and anyway, Brian, SciCurious, Ed and Blake already did it very, very well, so I can just move on...you can also see a discussion here. Any reputable media outlet out there that would be interested in doing a real review? Contact me. In the meantime, the reaction to the review brought in some new sales of the book (as well as sales of the previous two anthologies), so it worked out fine in the end. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008…

Framing the Economic Crisis: Bailout or Rescue Plan?

How critical is framing to effectively communicating about complex policy problems, especially under conditions of uncertainty? Just take a look at the debate over the economic crisis. As I noted last week, the term "bailout" has locked in a specific framing of the issue that inflames populist anger and caters to House Republicans' efforts to exploit the situation for political gain. The "bailout" triggers thoughts of saving irresponsible wealthy bankers who got greedy, whereas economists view the problem more along the lines of jump starting an economy that is collectively a stuttering…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 370 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 360 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You…

The monster sheep that wasn't, and other tales of African Bovini

If you're a regular reader you'll have seen the recent article on those African 'great bubalus' depictions and on how they might (or might not) be representations of the large, long-horned bovin bovid Syncerus antiquus. As discussed in that article, S. antiquus - long thought to be a species of Pelorovis - is now regarded as a very close relative of S. caffer, the living Cape buffalo. As usual though, there are quite a few additional things that I wanted to cover, so here's an attempt to tie up various loose ends [the illustrations above show radically different reconstructions of…

Facebook - Political Affiliation on Campus

About a year ago, on October 01, 2005, I did a little stats on the self-described political affiliation of NCSU students with Facebook profiles and posted it here. I reposted it here on January 16, 2006. I was thinking about doing the same thing exactly a year later, but the new Facebook News-Feed is making many students nervous, so they delete a lot of their information from their profiles. Political and religious affiliations are usually the first to go. I was interested if there would be any noticable change from one year to another, particularly in light of increased dissatisfaction…

Cyber Wars: liveblog

Ok, straight from cosmology to cybersecurity: the Aspen Institute is running an "Aspen Security Forum" with several days of events. Tonight General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA is doing a forum with NBC's Pete Williams. I got a ticket and got here early, as the heavens opened up and the lightning flashed. Despite the weather a lot of people are trickling in. The Homeland Security folks are discretely tucked away behind the pavilion under the trees - seem to be trying to stay out of the rain. Don't expect much news stuff, more here for curiousity and to hear the tone. Aspen Institute…

REPOST: OOPS! They did it again!

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science have a special online edition focused on the place of evilution in medicine. Shorter Michael Egnor: :-O Hat tip to Pharyngula. Oops. Dr. Egnor, Mr. Professor of Neurosurgery, doesnt seem to have learned a lesson from Mr. 99. And now hes going to get made fun of by a 23 year old girl, too. Someone get a Ziploc bag for his testicles. Really, it's a funny question. Think about it. Would anyone sponsor an essay contest on 'Why I would want my doctor to study anatomy' or 'Why I…

Reading Diary: Les Rêveurs lunaires: Quatre génies qui ont changé l'Histoire by Cédric Villani and Baudoin

A bit of a change of pace for me and my reviewing habits -- a book written in French! Of course, books about science or scientists are pretty typical review fodder for me. And even more typically, graphic novels about science or scientists are incredibly common for me to review. But books in French? This is a first. During my recent month-long stay in Paris (sabbatical life FTW!) one of the things I really enjoyed about the City of Light was the profusion of bookstores. Bookstores, record stores, bandes dessinées stores, every neighbourhood had a least a handful of good ones. Which is in…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 150 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): A Blog Around The Clock: Yes, Archaea also have circadian clocks! A Blog Around The Clock: Why social insects do not suffer from ill effects of rotating and night shift work? A Blog Around The Clock:…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper:…

Study finds high support for public health interventions, few worries about encroaching 'nanny state'

by Kim Krisberg When it comes to public health law, it seems the least coercive path may also be the one of least resistance. In a new study published this month in Health Affairs, researchers found that the public does, indeed, support legal interventions aimed at curbing noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity. However, they're more likely to support interventions that create the conditions that help people make the healthy choice on their own. They're less likely to back laws and regulations perceived as infringing on individual liberties. It's a delicate…

Trump Won. What Next?

Remember those clowns a few weeks ago? The scary clowns? I think they were trying to tell us something. Did you know that 235,248,000 people are eligible to vote in the United States? Fewer than 120,000,000 of those people bothered to show up to vote this year, and turnout was considered high. Of those, about half, or one quarter of the voting population, elected a clown as our leader, because the clown promised to take steps to ensure a continued white majority in the United States. That’s what happened in my world last night. What happened in your world? Between the bouts of…

Who Really Needs Math?

The Washington Post recently published an op-ed by mathematician G. V. Ramanathan. The subject? Mathematics education. It is a mix of good points and bad points. Let's have a look. Twenty-seven years have passed since the publication of the report “A Nation at Risk,” which warned of dire consequences if we did not reform our educational system. This report, not unlike the Sputnik scare of the 1950s, offered tremendous opportunities to universities and colleges to create and sell mathematics education programs. Unfortunately, the marketing of math has become similar to the marketing of…

Boobquake: Valid science communication event or just a bunch of boobs ... quaking?

This is a somewhat stream of consciousness response to an interview of Michael McRae by Tokenskeptic followed by an interview with Desiree Schell of Skeptically Speaking. Please go listen to the podcast, it is quite good. How much change has happened in the way the world views crazy religious beliefs because of boobquake? How much change in the way we cause change has happened because of the critique of boobquake? I'd say a little of each, but not much of either. I think that the critique of boobquake is somewhat disproportionate to the event. Boobquake was clearly never meant to be that…

Another enemy of the Hitler Zombie

Via Ed Brayton, I've learned of an interesting commentary by Sasha Abramsky on a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Well, its' more like a major pet peeve, one that irritates me so much that two years ago I even created a character who's made regular, albeit increasingly infrequent, appearances on this blog. I'm talking, of course, about the Hitler Zombie, everybody's favorite undead Führer whose chomp on a pundit's brain results in stupid and ridiculously overblown Nazi analogies. Indeed, such analogies irritate me sufficiently that at times my attacks on them have been described by…

Oh, no! GMOs are going to kill your babies and permanently change your gene expression!

Heidi Stevenson amuses me. I know, I know, I've started a previous post with exactly this sentence a mere month ago, but it's so damned appropriate that I can't help but try it again. A homeopath (which means that she's reality-challenged to begin with), she's produced some of the most hilariously off-base, pseudoscientific, and downright antiscientific articles I've ever seen. Examples include the times when she launched a truly nonsensical attack on Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch, lectured scientists about anecdotal evidence, or, most hilariously of all, utterly misunderstood the concept of…

The Tragic Sense and the Need for Connection

Dave Pollard's latest at Salon is an interesting cry in the dark about how hard it is to connect with others when you see collapse coming. My guess is that some of my readers will respond with a great deal of identification, while others will be annoyed by Pollard - but I think it bears some considering. For me, what's interesting about this is the most basic and ordinary social challenge - because this is a painful, hard and ugly place to do the most important work of adaptation from - building community. But in observing that it is painful, hard and ugly, I do not mean to imply it is…

We'll always have Paris

If you are upset about Trump and upset about Trump pulling the US out of the Paris agreement, please let me help you get through the day. Trump announcing that the US is pulling out of Paris does not mean the end of Paris, the end of action on climate change, or much else about global warming. I'll explain why in a moment. The US pulling out of Paris could even be interpreted as better than the US staying in. I'll explain that too. I'm not saying that Trump should have pulled out, I'm just saying that at the moment, if you are deeply concerned about the climate and the future, which you…

Promoting a scientific mind

Posted by LisaJ I find it astounding in this day and age, with the many grand scientific discoveries and advances we've seen and in our increasingly technologically dependent world, that a large proportion of our population (at least in Canada and the US, with which I have more personal experience) seems uninterested in understanding and learning about science. We have a wealth of information available at our fingertips and an educational system with the potential to accommodate any type of scientific mind, but yet we science-minded individuals are not in the majority. We are a culture that…

By the Pricking of My Thumb

Something Wicked This Way Comes Friday, August 13th the Astronomy Decadal Survey Report is released... Good thing we're not superstitious, eh? The Decadal Survey is a clever thing, that Astronomy invented. Every 10 years, natch, a panel of astronomers, and sub-panels, and sub-sub-panels, and ad-hoc-sub-sub-sub-panels, get together under the leadership of a senior and unimpeachable scientist, and prioritize US national efforts for the field for the next decade. Last year was a decadal year, and Roger Blandford (Stanford) chaired it. The panel is run by the National Research Council and…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Americans increasingly want to know that their steaks were humanely raised or their produce was organically grown, but what about the people who picked that produce or cared for those cows? Where’s the concern for the workers behind our food? Reporter Stephen Lurie explored that question in an article published last week in Vox. He writes: Organic and environmentally sustainable certifications lead consumers to supposedly wholesome products, but they hold no guarantees about the wholesomeness of the companies that produce those goods. Sitting down to a farm-to-table meal at a chic restaurant…

Evolution vs. Lit Crit (Part One)

The Autumn 2006 issue of The American Scholar features a lengthy article entitled, “Getting it All Wrong: Biolculture Critiques Cultural Critique. It's author is Brian Boyd, a professor of English at The University of Auckland in New Zealand. The premise of the article is that English professors have rendered themselves irrelevant and even a bit silly by refusing to acknowledge the role of biology, especially evolution, in shaping human culture and knowledge. In particular that branch of study known as literary theory comes off looking foolish because it makes pronouncements completely…

A Constructive Rebuttal To "The Body Impolitic"

Recently, an older post I made regarding AIDS in Africa was included in a Feminism carnival. The Body Impolitic saw fit to take my assesment of the situation to task, and I feel the need to respond to what I believe is a gross mis-representation of my post. Specifically, that it was somehow derogatory to people of size. My post was this: As more and more women are acquiring AIDS in South Africa, a new trend is emerging: in order to not look HIV positive, women are becoming obese in large numbers. According to the Independent Online, half of all women in South Africa are overweight, and almost…

Questionable Classic: Boy Was That Stupid

Since I'm currently out of town, original content is going to be in short supply for a few days. Fortunately, there are a few things I've written over the years that I think people might still enjoy (or at least tolerate). Since they didn't get read much when I first posted them, I thought I'd give them another chance. This one threatens to get a bit recursive - it's a trip down memory lane to look at another trip down memory lane. It was originally posted at the old blog on 6 September 2005. Just when I had begun to think that we had pretty much scraped the bottom of the barrel of…

Ode to Rocky

A nostalgic post, reposted. Nostalgically. Analyzing 30 years of data detailing a large rabies virus outbreak among North American raccoons, researchers at Emory University have revealed how initial demographic, ecological and genetic processes simultaneously shaped the virus?s geographic spread over time. The study appears online in the Proceedings of The National Academy of Sciences. That?s the start of an interesting report on Science Daily. And it reminds me of living through the Great Rabid Raccoon Outbreak in Massachusetts about 15 years back. (Not to be confused with this rabies…

Anthropology of Charlie Sheen's "Jezebels"

Today/NBC Source. Charlie Sheen with his live-in girlfriends Rachel Oberlin, center, and model Natalie Kenly, left. The Charlie Sheen media storm this week has invoked a wide range of responses, from the inane to the profane to the profound. One commentator referred to this coverage as a reality TV "Rorschach test" {those ink blots that reveal psychological insights, some believe.) Frankly, I did not pay attention beyond the ambient noise produced by my TV set while getting ready for a new day, until I came across an Op-Ed in The New York Times by Anna Holmes, "The Disposable Woman."…