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Boots Vitamins will make you levitate

Boots is a big healthcare/beauty store here in the UK. I buy a lot of shit-gear for my daughter there. Like all other stores out making a quick buck Boots too harps on the vitamin supplements theme and sell things that would make you levitate, help your mother, and transport you to paradise. But, is there a line which they would not cross, like saying Vitamin B keeps your energy level up? Well, shame on you if you thought they wouldn't. Read DC's Improbable Science on a sting operation that shreds Boots disingenuous marketing.

Software piracy case in Russia

Microsoft on Monday rebuffed a public appeal by Mikhail Gorbachev for its chairman, Bill Gates, to intervene on behalf of a Russian school principal charged with software piracy. -IHT Many may have noticed this case where Gorbachev asked and Bill Gates declined. It bears repeating. Personal computers do not need proprietary software. There are excellent alternatives like Ubuntu and a host of useful applications that come with it (read my story). Whatever machine you buy or acquire, you can wipe the harddrive and install free software alternatives. There are numerous local linux groups that…

ScienceBlogger Meetup Location Changed!!!

Please note, if you were planning to attend the ScienceBlogger meetup in New York City this coming Saturday, the location has changed. Here are the details about the new location: The new spot will be at a bar on the west side called Social. Seed has reserved a room in the back, and it's three floors in case we need even more room. Seed will buy the first round of pitchers (alcs and non-alcs). Details: 2pm-4pm on Saturday, August 9 Social 795 8th Ave (close to 49th St.) New York, NY 10019

In Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006

Well...I am not bringing this blog back to life for the moment...but I also can't avoid a major update like this. I'm happy to announce that an article I did for Seed last year, about the Dover evolution trial, is now contained in Houghton-Mifflin's Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006, edited this year by Brian Greene. Obviously this volume, by definition, has lots of great stuff in it, including articles by Daniel Dennett, Dennis Overbye, Charles Mann, and many others. I hope you'll check it out. You can buy the book here.

Glutton for punishment

Deepak Chopra is incredible. After sticking his foot in his mouth once already with an awful article on genes, he then proceeds to kick himself in the teeth, followed by an attempt to turn himself inside out. No, I'm sorry, I simply can't read the Huffington Post as long as this clown graces its pages…and I'm ashamed that he can misrepresent himself as knowledgeable about science and medicine in this country, and that people buy his books. Quacks ought to be tarred and feathered (metaphorically) and run off, I think.

Now I understand how Bush can be President

He's a miracle worker and a creative genius. How else can you explain his proposal to add or train 70,000 new math and science teachers while cutting the proposed education budget by 20%? I'd like to be able to explain to my wife how we can buy a brand new MacBook Pro while saving money, but either I'm not as smart as George W. Bush or she is much, much cleverer and less credulous than Republicans. Also note that our pro-science president wants to freeze the NIH budget. Isn't it amazing how he does that?

Cephalart

Did I say it was St Patrick's Day? I was mistaken…it is actually AIR KRAKEN DAY! While you're celebrating with excessive imbibage today, keep scanning the skies—about the time you fall over backwards and your eyes are glazing and defocusing, you might just spot the fabulous air kraken gliding overhead. It's been a light week for cephalopod art, and I just have a few more examples below the fold. Someone in Hawaii needs to find this, buy it, and ship it to me: This splendid image is actually how I see myself—it's very revealing.

Dewy Propionate (Funny functional group names)

I love reading lists of fragrance chemicals. The assignment of pleasant, qualitative fragrance descriptions to chemicals with hard-nosed, rigorous functional group names always makes me giggle a little. Acetophenone, for instance, smells of orange blossoms. Today, I came across one that has both in the name: dewy propionate: The Good Scents Company reports dewy propionate smells of dew, which I think is nonsense. Because odor is subjective, and because a surprising amount of overlap exists between unrelated things, odorants are usually reported with a few characteristics (or more). Flowery,…

A request for Skepticon 7 from Orac

I don't recall if I've mentioned this before, but I will be speaking at Skepticon in November. (Holy crap, that's just over two months away. I'd better get my talk ready.) In any case, now's crunch time, the time of year when Skepticon's fundraising needs to go into high gear, given that the bills are coming due for the conference. So give. Give until it hurts. Or buy swag. Or both. And if you're planning on going, register now instead of later. You'll be glad you did.

Does anyone else get this error from John Stewart and the rest of them at Comedy Central?

I've stopped paying attention to John Stewart and that other guy what's his name at Comedy Central because over the last month or so every single video form that source I've looked at produces this error: I've checked for this on three different linux machines running two different Ubuntu distros, all with Firefox and Flash, across one service upgrade for Firefox and Flash. So it is not just a unique strange thing with one computer. Rather, it seems to be a conspiracy against Linux. Did Microsoft buy Comedy Central or something?

A new venue for the ScienceBlogs Meetup!

Remember how I mentioned that the venue for the ScienceBlogs Readers Meetup was going to be changed? Well, the new venue has been announced: The new spot will be at a bar on the west side called Social. Seed has reserved a room in the back, and it's three floors in case we need even more room. Seed will buy the first round of pitchers (alcs and non-alcs). Details: 2pm-4pm on Saturday, August 9 Social 795 8th Ave (close to 49th St.) New York, NY 10019 Be there, Aloha.

Journal Print-E mix: one, the other, both, or neither?

Sometimes so many things come up at the same time it becomes difficult if impossible to ignore. Here's just a brief list: An oceanographer came to me and asked to see a print copy of an AGU journal article. If you've followed me here from elsewhere, then you'll know my place of work was mandated to discard all print materials (we did actually make the case for maybe 4 journals that are both not available online and are not widely held - there was a 5th but it got discarded by accident). Turns out that the entire point of the article was to show two color graphics on the second page. Well…

ScienceOnline'09 - How was it for you?

ScienceOnline09 is over, people are going home, and the online coverage so far appears to be very positive. I hope that conversations started at the conference continue, online and offline. In the meantime, if you have participated either in RealLife or virtually, and while the memories are still fresh in your mind, please take a minute and fill in the feedback form, to help us make the next year's conference even better. Thank you!

Monkey Economics

The Freakonomics guys have a simply hysterical article in the New York Times magazine about monkey economics. The article discusses how monkeys possess the mental apparatus for economic valuation including the use of money. They train the monkeys to use silver tokens as currency to trade for food, and then they show that the monkeys behave very similarly to humans in a variety of situations. Money quote: The capuchin is a New World monkey, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ''The capuchin has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Brain's 'Hate Circuit' Identified: People who view pictures of someone they hate display activity in distinct areas of the brain that, together, may be thought of as a 'hate circuit', according to new research by scientists at UCL (University College London). Soybeans No Longer 'A Musical Fruit?': Soybeans may drop off the list of musical fruit. Scientists in Singapore are reporting victory over some consumers' No. 1 complaint about soy products -- the "flatulence factor" caused by indigestible sugars found in soy. Red Enhances Men's Attraction To Women, Psychological Study Reveals: A…

More from Michael Mann

Now on CNN: Imagine you are sitting in your office simply doing your job and a nasty e-mail pops into your inbox accusing you of being a fraud. You go online and find that some bloggers have written virulent posts about you. That night, you're at home with your family watching the news and a talking head is lambasting you by name. Later, a powerful politician demands all your e-mails from your former employer. It sounds surreal. But it all happened to ... Michael Mann.

US tell Pakistan to do as they say, not as they do

'We'll bomb you to Stone Age, US told Pakistan' - World - Times Online. How interesting - one of the more democratic Islamic countries was told by the US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, that the US would "bomb them back into the Stone Age" if they didn't cooperate in the war on terror, and to curb the free expression of support for terrorism. The nation that began by asserting its sovereignty from foreign control, and which counts freedom of expression as a basic freedom, did that...

BMC Biology Image Library

BioMed Central has just launched an online collection of biological images, film clips and animations. The Biology Image Library is intended for educational and research purposes, and contains more than 11,000 images covering subjects which include neuroscience, developmental biology, and microbiology. Although BioMed Central is an open access publisher, the Biology Image Library is only free from within academic institutions which are subscribed. A personal subscription costs $293 a year, and the publishers are offering a free trial which provides access to the whole site for 7 days.

Home, safe and sound

I'm back home! I'm tired! I have to go take care of flies and fish! If you want to read some science, though, my cavefish article for Seed is online, so you can do that while I try to recover from all the traveling. But of course, you all already subscribe, so you probably read it last week. I just plowed through all the comments on the delurking thread—you know you can all keep talking, don't you? I only bite the heads off creationists, so you're safe.

Hating the Very Word "Blog"

A very important, ground breaking survey was released today, revealing shocking news... about which words spawned from the internet were the most "irritating": Wikipedia already has thousands of people logging on at their homes and offices. "Blog", "netiquette", "cookie" and "wiki" have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to a poll... "Blogosphere", the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; "blog" itself was third; "netiquette", or Internet etiquette, came fourth and "blook", a book based on a blog, was fifth. Fascinating.

Yankee Doodle Dandy

Here's a little pronounciation quiz that diagnoses if you are a Yankee (northern USA) or a Rebel (southern USA). The Alpha Dictionary will compute your score and tell you where you're coming from: are you (all) speaking Dixie English or are you(se) a Yankee Doodle Dandy? The higher your score, the deeper from the south you are coming; the lower your score, the more northern you are. What's your score? My score: 25% Dixie. I am a Yankee Doodle Dandy. This makes sense since I am a true northern bicoastal grrl, and have been so my entire life (well, I've lived farther south on the west…

How to implement IT role changes

Free-Dos Fearless Leader and IT Manger Jim Hall has a post at Almost Diamonds that some of you will be interested in. Some time ago, I posted an online poll to survey the relative importance of four qualities at various levels in an IT organization. With the help of other bloggers, and through retweets, we got the word out to as many IT folks as possible. We received responses from all across the globe (though most were from the U.S.) representing private industry, higher education, and government. The poll was up for about two months, but most of the responses came within the first few…

Hot Times in Deep Time: My New Piece for the New Yale Environment 360

We've all heard about the dire straits polar bears are facing if they lose their icy habitat to global warming. But just how many species may global warming drive extinct? One way to find out is to look over the mass extinctions of the past--and the picture there's not pretty, as I explain in my new article, "Biodiversity in the Balance." It appears today in the new publication Yale Environment 360, an online environment magazine from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. They've already got some pieces from some big names, like Bill McKibben and Carl Safina. So check the…

Selected #Scio10 Videos

There are a LOT of videos coming out on Science Online 10. Go to YouTube and enter Scio10 in search and you'll see them. Here are a few chosen from what is there already. This is not comprehensive ... but will give you a flavor of the event. Enjoy: (Caution: The sound levels change dramatically from video to video.) The Saturday Night Banquet. SEe all the people tweeting. By next year, I gotta get me one of those phones. Scott Baker and Darlene Cavalier on citizen science Dr. Kiki Sanford Intro: Melina Interviews Artist Glendon Mellow Here's a still picture with me in it And go…

The continuum of expertise

Over the weekend I stumbled upon two phrases, new to me, which I instantly loved - "monitorial citizenship" and "temporary experts". And I thought they both say something important about the role of expertise in journalism as a whole and in science journalism in particular. Temporary Experts If you are a very regular and careful reader of my blog, you may remember that I totally adore the student journalists now in charge of UNC's Daily Tarheel - they 'get it'! I follow them on various online places, read some articles online, occasionally pick a hard copy of the paper from the news-stand. So…

Two new studies find food policy interventions have support and impact

Five million dollars. That’s how much the fast food industry spends every day to peddle largely unhealthy foods to children. And because studies have found that exposure to food marketing does indeed make kids want to eat more, advertising is often tapped as an obvious way to address child obesity. Fortunately, a new study finds that the public agrees. As part of the Los Angeles County Health Survey, researchers with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health asked nearly 1,000 adults four food policy questions: would they support a tax increase on sodas to discourage kids from…

Disco. Inst. builds Guillermo Gonzalez a telescope

Disco. Inst. flack Rob Crowther is crowing about a grant they gave to Guillermo Gonzalez. Gonzalez was the Iowa State University astronomer who got tied in with the ID creationists at Disco. and with the old-earth creationists at Reasons To Believe, then was denied tenure when his publication rate dropped precipitously. Disco. responded to the tenure denial by insisting simultaneously that Gonzalez's ID research was powerful evidence of the scientific validity of their theological views, and that it was improper for ISU to consider this supposedly scientific work ("viewpoint discrimination…

Money and Happiness

For more than 30 years, it has been a truism of social science that, once our basic needs are met, money doesn't buy happiness, or even upgrade despair. In one well-known survey, people on the Forbes 100 list of the richest Americans were only slightly happier than the American public as a whole; in an even more famous study, done in 1978, a group of researchers determined that 22 lottery winners were no happier than a control group. This is commonly referred to as the Easterlin paradox, after the economist Richard Easterlin who first proposed it in 1974. But new evidence suggests that the…

When You Believe In the Power of Personal Action...

...you just gotta love The Onion. Not only is it a lazy-ass blogiste's best friend, providing amusing commentary when you just can't get a post up, but it also does a lovely job of illustrating the scope of our ecological problems now and again. You'll enjoy this one. "It's not like I don't care, because I do, and most of the time I don't even buy bottled water," thought Missouri school teacher Heather Delamere, the 450,000th caring and progressive individual to have done so that morning, and the 850,000th to have purchased the environmentally damaging vessel due to being thirsty, in a huge…

New on.....Publishing

In the wake of the signed omnibus bill that funds NIH and ensures open deposition of NIH-funded research, here are some thoughtful questions: Why the NIH bill does not require copyright violation: The great advantage of the requirement to deposit in Pubmed (rather than simply to expose on a publisher or other website) is that the act is clear. You can't "half-deposit" in Pubmed. They have the resources to decide whether any copyright statement allows the appropriate use of the information or is suffiently restrrictive that it does not meet the NIH rules. At some stage the community will get…

If It Was Green, Then I'll Replace It

Here's a translation of one of my first brushes with absurdism, Swedish rocker Eddie Meduza's 70s song "Va den grön så får du en ny" (original lyrics here with ugly popups). If It Was Green, Then I'll Replace It By Eddie Meduza I'd bought myself a vacuum flask In a store down in Målilla It was real pretty until I poured coffee into it But then it broke into pieces So I called Mr. Chin He's the man with the store (You see, he's got a really big chin) And I told him, my flask is busted Do they come with a guarantee? Yeah, said Mr. Chin, gravelly and really slowly He was speaking really slowly…

Nose Balloon

[More blog entries about health, ears, cold; hälsa, öron, förkylning.] When she has a cold, my 5-y-o daughter often suffers temporary hearing loss. Her ears don't get infected, there's no pain or fever -- she just can't hear very well, sometimes for weeks. The reason is that the lining of her eustachian tubes becomes swollen, obstructing them, and then fluid leaks out of the walls of the middle ear, flooding it and putting a damper on her audio. These days Swedish doctors try to avoid putting drainage pipes through kids' ear drums. Instead the excellent Dr. Claes Wibom (who's now treating…

Modest Proposals Regarding Underage Drinking

The recent news about the Amethyst Initiative, in which a number of college and university presidents are calling for a lowering of the drinking age from 21, has sparked a bunch of discussion. Jake Young and Mark Kleiman have good contributions. There are two main arguments against lowering the drinking age: 1) Raising the drinking age to 21 led to a decrease in drunk-driving fatalities 2) Lowering the age to 18 would mean a rampant increase in high school drunkenness, as there are a fair number of 18-year-old high school students. Just in the interests of being provocative, let me throw…

Links for 2010-12-21

Tron | Film | Better Late Than Never? | The A.V. Club "What's odd about all this is that the more I see these movies, the more I become convinced they could have been used in happy little object lessons about how God wants only to save us. That includes Tron, a mostly mediocre-to-awful film with some fascinating ideas about the nature of divinity and the relationship between God and humanity rattling around in its empty little skull. At the time, I wasn't allowed to see it, because it placed computers at the same level as humans. Now that I've actually seen the film, it's hard to see how it…

My year of travel

Okay. It's been another month since I blogged. But since I last wrote, my dad wrote the family holiday letter and asked me how many places I've traveled to. Here's the list. January To Detroit to look at the SWE Archives To RTP for ScienceOnline2009 February To Arizona, invited to a workshop on engineering and ethics education To Washington DC for a panel on research in engineering education March To Kentucky, to do some intense PEER mentoring in engineering education April I think nowhere May To Madison for my dad's retirement To a room at Purdue for a week's development of a…

Vote for the nerds!

Help two nerds win a crate and barrel wedding contest! Our love story. We met in a hallway at the Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chris was on his way to the lab where he researched birds and I was working as a scrub for a famous professor. We realized that we both loved wine, food, music, dogs and all things of a dorky nature. Game on! Three important details about our Ultimate Wedding. 1. Chris' parents are doctors who immigrated from Sri Lanka to New York in the late seventies. I am wearing a sari for the wedding as part of tradition. I hope the wedding is really…

Cellular wallpaper gives "accent wall" a whole new meaning

"Fossil geometry" (detail) Based on Eschschottzia Californica seeds collected by Mr W Reeves, April 1864. From the collection of the Royal Microscopic Society. UK sci-artist Heather Barnett has created a line of wallpapers using micrographs of cells, crystals, seeds, nanofibers, etc. They'd be particularly striking in a loft or other industrially inspired space - including a lab or a clinic waiting room. Come on, PIs, you can squeeze a wallpaper budget in your next grant application, can't you? "Fossil geometry" (repeat) Check out more of Barnett's biological wallpapers below the fold…

Fumento unhinged

Michael Fumento is making even less sense than usual: Lambert is one of the most obnoxious trolls on the Internet. He produces nothing; he exists to tear down other people to make up for some perceived deficiency on his part. Perhaps it's a deficiency that can be measured with a three-inch ruler; I don't know. Some people buy a flashy sports car in his case, but Troll Lambert uses all his spare time to write fraudulent Wikipedia biographies about people who get more attention than he does (approximately 6.3 billion) and to try to poke fun of them on his blog. In his desperation he often makes…

Recycling: Wasteful?

I'm a big fan of recycling. I try to recycle whatever I can -- paper, plastics, glass, aluminum -- whenever I can. I was under the impression that recycling produces less waste than dumping in landfills and is better for the environment in general. Because of this, I was willing to pay the extra costs (indirectly through taxes) to support municipal recycling programs. Penn and Teller beg to differ: If you don't want to watch the entire thing, here's the take home message: recycling paper and plastic is wasteful and costs a lot more than landfilling. Penn and Teller linger a lot on the wasted…

Mine eyes have seen the glory

Tired of the sanctimonious appropriation of all that is good in American history by the Christian right? Roger Ailes delivers a magnificent denunciation of the WSJ's attempt to claim the abolitionist movement as a blessedly Christian endeavor by quoting Frederick Douglass. Revivals in religion, and revivals in the slave trade, go hand in hand together. (Cheers.) The church and the slave prison stand next to each other; the groans and cries of the heartbroken slave are often drowned in the pious devotions of his religious master. (Hear, hear.) The church-going bell and the auctioneer's bell…

Climate Science Roundup

Chris Mooney has a well-written review of Michael Crichton's State of Fear. I picked up a copy at the book store and read a couple of pages from the middle. It was like a Tech Central Station column, except that it was a speech by one of the characters, with occasional lame objections by another character. Oh, and it had footnotes. I don't know if you were supposed to imagine Crichton's character speaking the footnotes or what. I didn't buy the speech or the book. John Quiggin also has a book review. His is of Lomberg's new book. Over at RealClimate Michael…

That danged exasperating caution

I'm feeling a bit peevish about the Democrats right now. I got some email from people promoting Gary Hart, mentioning that he is berating congressional Democrats for failing to stand up against the administration. There is integrity, there is conviction, and there is courage. History's jury will sit in judgment today on those Democrats and will find wanting those without the conviction and courage to say "enough". I'm sensing a pattern here. Democrats run for president as cautious cowards who avoid standing up for progressive policies, they get mauled by the media anyway, they lose, and then…

From the Archives: Two 2005 best science writing books

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 covers two books and is from March 7, 2006: The Best American Science Writing 2005 by Alan Lightman, editor & Jesse Cohen, series editor The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2005 by Jonathan Weiner,…

Around the Web, Apocalypse Edition: The End of the Universtiy as we know it, Librarians as baristas and more

The End of the University as We Know It The future of online vs. residential education by futurist Ray Kurzweil Librarians or Baristas? Prioritizing Academic Programs Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College Assessing Campus Libraries (space, yes, services...) Where is Library Technology going? MLA President Offers a Sobering Critique of Graduate Education in the Humanities Confessions of a (former) gatekeeper Full Text Of The Grim Meathook Future Thing Massive Open Online Courses -- A Threat Or Opportunity To Universities?

MindPapers

David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University and director of the Center for Consciousness, has just announced the launch of MindPapers, an online database of papers about the philosophy of mind. The database is very comprehensive indeed - it includes about 18,000 published and online papers, subdivided into sections such as the philosophy of neuroscience, perception, synaesthesia, language and thought and vegetative states, coma and the minimally conscious state (which are disorders of consciousness).

Open Lab Cover!

Just now, attendees of Science Online 2011 are getting their #scio11 Swag Bags as they register and prepare for the Keynote. And in those swag bags are postcards revealing the cover of Open Lab! But even if you're not at Science Online, you, too, can revel in the awesomeness of the brand-spankin'-new cover. Behold! (Click to behold even larger!) Thanks to science illustrator extraordinaire Andrea Kuszewski (blog, twitter) for the art and design.

"Popeye, Don't You Think You Should Try Something New for Lunch?"

Olive oil diet cuts your risk of cancer A new study suggests that consuming 5 teaspoons of olive oil - either virgin, common or refined - reduces one's risk of developing cancer. Here's how they came to this conclusion: People in Mediterranean countries such as Spain and Italy live longer than those in other European countries, while rates of breast, colon, ovarian and prostate cancer are much lower. Very interesting, but we already know this. Would a volunteer please raise his or her hand and ask "Why?" Dr [Henrik] Poulsen and his team at Copenhagen University Hospital studied a large…

An Online Subscription Model for News Organizations...

...which were formerly known as newspapers. A recent column by Frank Rich makes me think that news organizations can be viable using a paid subscription model--in fact, I think they can be very successful. The problem is that they might not be very widely read. Rich, discussing the looming demise of many newspapers, writes (italics mine): But opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive. Some of it -- monitoring the local school board, say -- can and is being done by voluntary "citizen…

Doing Science at ScienceOnline2010 - data, search, publishing and putting it all together

Of course, this conference would not be itself if it was not full of Open Access evangelists and a lot of sessions about the world of publishing, the data, repositories, building a semantic web, networking and other things that scientists can now do in the age of WWW. This year, apart from journalists/writers, the largest cohort appear to be librarians and information scientists. So it is not surprising to see a number of sessions (and several demos) on these topics, for example: Repositories for Fun and Profit - Dorothea Salo Description: Why are my librarians bothering me with all this…

Doing Science at ScienceOnline2010 - data, search, publishing and putting it all together

Of course, this conference would not be itself if it was not full of Open Access evangelists and a lot of sessions about the world of publishing, the data, repositories, building a semantic web, networking and other things that scientists can now do in the age of WWW. This year, apart from journalists/writers, the largest cohort appear to be librarians and information scientists. So it is not surprising to see a number of sessions (and several demos) on these topics, for example: Repositories for Fun and Profit - Dorothea Salo Description: Why are my librarians bothering me with all this…