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Idle griping about press releases supposed to look like "news"

A lot of things that seem on first glance to be "news" are really just reprints or slight edits of press releases written to tout a commercial product. This is also true of "Newsletters" that charge money for inside news. Datamonitor is a company that claims to be "the world's leading provider of online data, analytic and forecasting platforms for key vertical sectors. We help 5,000 of the world's largest companies profit from better, more timely decisions" (Datamonitor website). Some of the stuff they give away, since I see it and I don't subscribe to anything they sell. But based on its…

It is still Year of the Frog

Contrary to plans (you know how it is), I haven't had time to finish the phorusrhacid theme I started on Tuesday. Because it's important to keep it in mind, I feel we need a reminder about the fact that 2008 is Year of the Frog, and hats off to Carel for discussing this recently, and of course to Jeff Davis of Frog Matters for continuing to fight the fight... Among the latest froggy news is the auctioning of the name of a new species of Mannophryne (go here): you have until July 1 2009 to get an aromobatid species named after you (aromobatids are a recently recognised clade of dendrobatoid…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Size Doesn't Matter To Fighting Fiddler Crabs: A person's home may be their castle and in the world of the fiddler crabs having the home advantage makes it a near certainty that you'll win a battle against an intruder - regardless of your opponent's size. That's one of the findings of a new study by a research team from The Australian National University. The team, working from the University's Darwin research station, set out to discover why male fiddler crabs have an 'owner advantage' when defending their burrow that equates to a 92 per cent success rate. Related Researchers Use Magnetic…

Meeting a reader/commenter in RealLife is always fun!

Yesterday I had lunch (and coffee and another coffee - this lasted a while because it was so much fun) with Tanja and her husband Doug. Regulars here probably recognize the commenter who goes by the handle "tanjasova" - that's her. They just bought a nice house in Winston-Salem and will completely move to North Carolina next month, so we'll get to meet each other and indulge ourselves in Serbian cuisine often in the future. They have three teenage boys (from their respective first marriages) and they live on his salary as she is still looking for a job. Now that she will be here, she can…

Cynical Boardgame About Archaeology

Thebes is a multi-award-winning 2007 German board game by Peter Prinz. I just bought it on a tip from my buddy Oscar, who found a good offer on-line and thought of me because of the game's theme. It's about archaeological expeditions in the early 1900s. The box is big, the production values are lavish, and I really look forward to learning it. But before I can say anything about its qualities as a game, I have to share an opening paragraph from the rule book with you (and I translate from the Swedish version). The players travel as archaeologists through Europe to gather needful knowledge…

Loyal Rue vs. (?) PZ Myers

At some time, a recording of our 'debate' will be available online, so I won't try to do a play by play now. I will say that I found this one pretty much impossible to prepare for — there was no way this debate could be shoe-horned into a good vs. evil or smartness vs. ignorance conflict, making it a much more complicated discussion, rather than a television wrestling storyline. We'd had a few conversations in email and there were several points of disagreement, and in fact Dr Rue showed those points in a slide, but you know, he had good reasons for all the stuff he got wrong. I read his book…

Random sn and tech news

There will not be a Mark Zuckerberg action figure. After being told it can no longer sell its Apple CEO Steve Jobs action figure, M.I.C. Gadget has been ordered to kill off its Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg action figure as well. The lifelike Zuckerberg doll was available for $70 online, but now Facebook has had it banned, just like Apple did for the Jobs doll. This time around, M.I.C. Gadget made a point to call the action figure the "Poking Inventor" and not "Mark Zuckerberg." It wanted to avoid Facebook getting involved, since Apple threatened it with legal action if it didn't stop selling…

New Developments in Inscrutable Chemistry

Eurekalert has a press release from Yale proclaiming that: Chemists at Yale have done what Mother Nature chose not to -- make a protein-like molecule out of non-natural building blocks, according to a report featured early online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Nature uses alpha-amino acid building blocks to assemble the proteins that make life as we know it possible. Chemists at Yale now report evidence that nature could have used a different building block - beta-amino acids -- and show that peptides assembled from beta-amino acids can fold into structures much like…

Banking in the Future

I'm currently the president of the local chapter of Sigma Xi (an honor society, not a fraternity, thankyouverymuch), and as such have been collecting RSVP's and dues for this year's new inductees. As part of this process, I've been struck by how many students don't have checks-- I've had a couple of students give me cash, one cashier's check from a local bank, a couple of checks drawn on parental accounts, and one check from the roommate of a nominee. The first couple, I wrote off as individual eccentricities, but after a few more, and a little thought, I realized that this pattern is…

Angry

Apparently either Jo-anne or I share a name with, or similar to, someone on the U.S. government's secret terrorist watch list.  I can't say which of us it is; no one at the airport is authorized to tell us that. All I know is we were prevented from checking in at the Tucson airport on Thursday without additional identification. We can no longer check-in online or use the electronic kiosks until we go through a months-long process to try to clear whichever one of our names causes the problem.  During which time we're advised not to travel.  This latter bit is unfortunate, since both of us…

Any advice to medical/science journalism students on interfacing with science & medical blogs?

I am about to lead a discussion of science and medical blogs with a group of journalism students in a course entitled, Medical Journalism. While many of the students are specifically majoring in medical and science journalism in a master's program, some are undergraduates in general journalism and mass communications looking to get a flavor for medical writing for print and broadcast. My question to the valued readers of this humble blog is: What would you tell these young, knowledge-seeking minds about how science and medical blogs and bloggers might contribute to their future careers as "…

Academic medical journalism leader joins blogosphere

I'm happy to report that physician-journalist, Tom Linden, MD, has begun blogging over at Dr Mike Magee's Health Commentary. Dr Linden is currently Glaxo Wellcome Distinguished Professor of Medical Journalism and director of the Medical Journalism Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill J-school. As an example of the visibility of the program, one of Tom's current students, Kelly Rae Chi, just had an article posted at The Scientist on the history of the biotech industry in San Diego. Tom recognized early the power of the internet for health information and in 1995 co-…

Creationists unclear on the concept

While online polls are generally worthless when it comes to generating representative statistics - see this post and ensuing dicussion (sorry for being cranky, girlscientist) -- they can at time produce quite curious results. This self-described unscientific poll from the Australian science magazine COSMOS really has me wondering about the publication's readership. "Are humans still subject to natural selection?" asks COSMOS. Fair question. And more than three quarters of the respondents selected one of two quite similar variations on a theme of "yes." But then there were the other responses…

NSF Panel on Scientists, Journalists, and Climate Change

On January 8, NSF will be hosting a very important panel discussion on climate change and journalism. Details are below. NSF to Host Panel Discussion on Communicating Climate Change 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. January 8, 2009 Leading journalists and climate scientists will headline a January 8, 2009, program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Va., to discuss a newly released book on climate change science and journalism. Andrew C. Revkin of The New York Times and John Carey, senior correspondent for Business Week, will participate on the panel along with climate scientists Michael…

Indirect Truths: Gore Aims to Go Beyond His Base

I'm hitting the road for talks at Princeton, but a quick post on Gore's new ad campaign, launched officially with an appearance last night on 60 Minutes. I haven't see the ads yet and I didn't see last night's program, but from news reports, the campaign appears to incorporate the types of necessary strategies that I've written about at this blog, in articles, or that I have highlighted in talks over the past year. Gore and his Climate Alliance specifically: a) Attempt to reach non-news audiences, the type of people who have been tuning out the really good science coverage. b) In commercials…

Where exactly does food come from? I fear this artist's take on it might be all too real for many these days.

Coming off of Ben's recent hat tip to the paper published at PLoS ("The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact"), I was reminded of some great artwork by Marc Trujillo. I first heard of this artist by reading a nice profile of his work at a newish online literary journal called "/ONE/" (link). Marc Trujillo is an urban landscape painter who depicts the big box retail stores, self-service gas stations, and fast-food chains that make up a large portion of the urban environment. Free of political or moral overtones, these works function both as modern…

Colour is a universal

It seems that we do see colours the same, despite cultural differences. [The spelling of "colour" is not a universal, though, as Americans don't know how to spell it properly.] From Abidji to English to Zapoteco, the perception and naming of color is remarkably consistent in the world's languages. Across cultures, people tend to classify hundreds of different chromatic colors into eight distinct categories: red, green, yellow-or-orange, blue, purple, brown, pink and grue (green-or-blue), say researchers in this week's online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

The Machinery of Hair Cells

The Scientist has a fastastic illustrated feature on the workings of cochlear hair cells in their current online issue. In addition to pointing out the different cell types in the inner ear, there are a few informative blurbs about mechanotransduction and how stereocilia are organized and linked. This is part of the larger theme "Focus on Neuroscience" issue, which has lots of short articles about from channel dynamics to Alzheimer's disease. The hair cells of the inner ear are unique in that they are sensory epithelial cells, and not neural tissue themselves (like olfactory receptors or the…

Original Steampunk

This is a photo of the controls in the cabin of the Mallard, a steam locomotive built in 1938.  The Mallard was capable of traveling 202.7kph (126 mph), a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A14609333">record-high speed at the time.. The picture is from a series by href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/nov08/6928">David Mindell, posted at IEEE Spectrum Online.  Below is a photo of the Mallard, photographer unknown, from the Artehouse at trains.com. One of the stations served by the Mallard was Paddington Station (London), which opened in 1854 ( href="http://www.designmuseum.org/…

How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer: The thinking person's Blink

Review by David Dobbs, from Neuron Culture Originally posted on: January 25, 2009 10:45 PM The book opens so thrillingly -- a plane crash, a last-second Super Bowl victory, and a first chapter that comfortably reconciles Plato and Ovid with Tom Brady and John Madden -- that it spawns a worry: Can the book possibly sustain this pace? "How We Decide" delivers. Jonah Lehrer, -- author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," blogger at Frontal Cortex, and (full disclosure) an online acquaintance and sometime colleague of mine for a couple years now (I asked him to take over editorship of Scientific…

Wine is good for you

Grapes of gnash: Pomace, the residue of red winemaking, may help prevent tooth decay Red wine has long been known to contain a substance, resveratrol, that is heart-healthy. Now research shows that both red wine grapes and winemaking residue, known as pomace, contain substances that may help prevent tooth decay. A study published online in November in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry suggests that specific polyphenols -- chemicals present in large amounts in fermented seeds and skins that are cast away after grapes are pressed -- interfere with the ability of bacteria to…

I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like to read my blog.

So I've been bumping into this idea on several blogs (idea? or is it a cult? ... I refuse to call it a meme, sorry Richard). I have some trouble understanding what it all means. Is it hard, as in hard core? To help us understand the meaning of all this rhetoric, they (a bunch of hard core German Science bloggers) even have a manifesto: I am a hard bloggin' scientist. This means in particular: 1. I believe that science is about freedom of speech. 2. I can identify myself with the science I do. 3. I am able to communicate my thoughts and ideas to the public. 4. I use a blog as a research tool.…

Best of Deep Sea News 2006

Our Best of the Abyss awards were conceived to recognize important deep-sea happenings around the world, and intended to pay our humble respects to all the hard working scientists, technicians, and policy makers that make our postings possible here on the blog. If it wasn't for these people, we would have precious few good things to report. This post, the "Best of Deep Sea News 2006", is a little different because these awards are intended to recognize our best attempts to deliver something fun and interesting. However, rather than turn the contest into a mutual self-admiration society, we…

The Whale Hunt Project

In the department of amazing photojournalism projects we have The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris. "The Whale Hunt is an experiment in human storytelling. In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States. The first several days were spent in the village of Barrow, exploring ramshackle structures, buying gear, and otherwise helping the whaling crew to prepare for the hunt. We then traveled by snowmobile out onto the frozen Arctic Ocean, where we camped three miles from shore on thick pack ice, pitching…

Some Sunday Links

Merry Columbus Day! Here are some links. The science-related stuff: Go buy schoolkids science stuff. It will make ya feel good... After you're done with that, go wash your hands. Senator Clinton joins the Coalition of the Sane and details her science agenda. Giardia is one more reason why intelligent design creationism is really stupid. The environmental science of parking: some commentors came up with really interesting ideas. All hail our giant jellyfish overlords!! The Voltage Gate discusses the best kind of rhodopsin: bacteriorhodopsin. Here's a cool new technology: nanobodies.…

Is the Discovery Channel Store Run By Sexist Pigs?

A colleague looking to buy Christmas gifts went to the Discovery Channel store page and noticed that boys and girls had two different pages. It's nice to see that a company supposedly dedicated to scientific inquiry has decided that girls don't like or want science. What do I mean? Well, here's the first five gifts for the boys: Discovery Whodunit? Forensics Lab Discovery Fingerprint Lab Discovery Speed Detector Radio Control Equalizer Stunt Car Discovery Remote Control Chromashift Roboreptile Here's what the first item looks like: Very sciency. Now for the girls: Discovery Ultimate…

The Real Flaw with Scratch Lottery Cards

Wired has a fascinating article about a statistician who figured how to beat the odds on the scratch-off lottery tickets--that is, pick cards that are more likely to produce winning combinations. And "more likely", I mean getting it right up to 95 percent of the time. But the article mentions only in passing the real problem with lotteries: While approximately half of Americans buy at least one lottery ticket at some point, the vast majority of tickets are purchased by about 20 percent of the population. These high-frequency players tend to be poor and uneducated, which is why critics…

People are inconsistent and crazy

So the alties hate real medicine. They come over here and bemoan modern medicine's failure to address behavioral changes that affect health, such as diet and exercise. Then I write a long post about internists' duties viz public health and health behaviors, and the gun nuts think I want to disarm them and PRY TEH WEAPON OF GUNZ OUT OF OUR COLD DED HANDZ!!111!222!!!11! I think of my writing as "reality-based". I have opinions, and where my opinions intersect with real-world activities, I try to back up my opinions with facts. I don't (usually) resort to wishful thinking, religion,…

Roy Zimmerman: You're Getting Sleepy

I've been following Roy Zimmerman's output of musical satire since his 2004 album Faulty Intelligence, and I was certainly not disappointed by the recent You're Getting Sleepy. The CD's title is shared with the opening song and refers to the hypnosis that must be going on when half of the US electorate votes for the increasingly insane Republican Party. (Remember, Mitt Romney is their low-key, sensible and uncontroversial alternative!) As resident of a country whose entire spectrum of mainstream politics lies to the Left of Barack Obama, I of course have no problem with Zimmerman's stance.…

Another Review of the BECB

Another day, another review of of the Big Evolution/Creation Book. This time it's Matt Young over at The Panda's Thumb. His verdict? Among the Creationists is well written, well formatted, and well organized (though I thought that most of the content of the endnotes should have been incorporated into the text). It has a good list of references and a good index. It is barely 230 pages long, and it is a pleasure to read. May I recommend that anyone with an interest in creationism go straight to your local independent book dealer, buy a copy, and read it through? Score! As with yesterday's…

How homeopathy works

Follow this link to the amusingly bizarre webcomic about homeopathy behind it. I'll just share with you the story behind the artwork: So this might seem to make very little sense at all. Fair enough, it's sort of supposed to. But this did actually happen to me at work — A guy came in to buy some homeopathic tablets, and was quite insistent that I not let them touch the large tub of ice-cream that he was also purchasing. Assuming that it had something to do with astronomically minute quantities of poison that such remedies are reputed to contain (they don't, by the by — it is entirely water,)…

Bioware wishlist

Here's a list of things I want to be able to buy in the near future: Better eyes. Check this news at beebs on a man with bionic eyes. I am very hopeful. Spectacles suck, contact lenses suck. I want a pair of bionic eyes. Better memory. No news on this. Cognitive enhancement drugs will not cut it. I want a prosthetic that adds to the sorry excuse of a memory that evolution has endowed me with. If we can interface with the optic nerve (above), we can interface with any nerve, the brain included. Better legs - so I can run to the office a dozen miles without breaking a sweat. Sitting inside a…

The trials of a postdoc

There's a reason why I haven't posted much lately. No, not the drinking, work. That stuff that gets me paid and occasionally moves forward, but alas, not this week. I just found out that I didn't get my grant. It took me the better part of a month and a half to prepare. All gone. Wasted. (Well, not exactly wasted - they say you can recycle these things indefinitely until you succeed). And of course the end of my postdoc is creeping closer rather more rapidly than I'd like. So papers, papers, papers, and job applications, job applications, job applications! Presently I'm working on revising…

Dog Treats

Our dog has developed a fear of traffic. Since we live on a busy street, this is a problem. It all started when he was crossing the street with Carmen and a car went through the red light without even slowing, passing less than a metre in front of him and smashing into the side of another car just a couple of metres away. After that he wouldn't cross the street at that intersection, which is sort of understandable, but his fear quickly grew so that he would freeze up walking on the footpath beside a busy road. Did I mention that we live on a busy road? Naturally I searched my…

Come in, spinner

Earlier, Glenn Reynolds accused me of spinning because I wrote that "the [Australian] election was not about Iraq---it was hardly an issue.". Now he approvingly links to a piece by Greg Sheridan Labor did not buy a single ad on Iraq. Nor did Latham mention his troops-home-by-Christmas pledge in his policy speech. Indeed Iraq only figured in the last line on page 13 of a 16-page speech by Latham. ... It was rather strange that we have troops at war and they were hardly mentioned in the campaign. Why, that's what I was saying! Do you think Reynolds…

My week in the Pacific Northwest

Today it's family day with a mob of Myerses hanging about and bickering opinonatedly at a picnic. You aren't invited unless you can show evidence of a recent family relationship; showing evidence that all primates are related is nice, but won't get you in the door. Tuesday at 6ish I'll be at the Pike Brewing Company waiting upon Ophelia Benson. Come on out! Buy us beer! I'm also thinking I might head up there a little early to visit the Seattle Aquarium, since it's right there in the neighborhood. Friday at noon I'll be at Room B101, University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford BC. This is a…

The Vatican has been beaming cancer rays into children!

That's the latest news, anyway: radio masts operated by the Vatican have been implicated in an increased incidence of cancers nearby. It is such a juicily evil story — it would just fit the Pope's Bond villain image so well — but, and I really, really hate to defend the Vatican, I don't buy it. Sorry. I know it's my mission to smack the Catholic church around, but this is a case where I just find it highly unlikely. I have not read the report; all I've seen so far is the accusation, the small numbers (19 deaths in 23 years) and the excessive charges — 6 people are being investigated on…

Helping Haiti

There's much that needs to be done to assist the recovery in Haiti, but the consensus of those on the ground is that what's needed now is money. Don't mail blankets or whatever, just let the aid agencies buy what they need and ship it in. The airports and seaports are clogged and there's minimal capacity to offload supplies, so let the aid groups make decisions about what's needed and when. The Intersection has a good roundup of the top aid groups. Personally, I've always been happy with Oxfam. They have a longstanding presence in Haiti, and I know that they'll be working not just on the…

The ten commandments of student science blogging

Yesterday, I wrote about students using science blogging as a way to develop an on-line portfolio and document their skills.  One friend wrote me this morning and asked if my instructions to our students were really as simple as I described. Well, no. In fact, it wasn't easy to persuade my colleagues that we should let students blog.  I had to promise them I would scrutinize every post and make sure no one got in trouble.  Luckily, our student bloggers are responsible adults.  Reading their posts has been a pleasure and there have only a couple of cases where I checked with them to make sure…

Product Defense Wolf Tries on Sheepâs Clothing

The Weinberg Group is one of the product defense firms I write about in my new book âDoubt is Their Product: How Industryâs Assault on Science Threatens Your Health.â These firms help polluters and manufacturers of dangerous products avoid regulation â only now the Weinberg Group is not a product defense firm, itâs transformed itself into a âproduct supportâ firm. Changes to the companyâs website, like transforming the âProduct Defenseâ category of services to âProduct Support,â suggest that the Weinberg Group has a new awareness of its online audience â itâs no longer just potential clients…

How to read a scientific paper

I was waiting until the last installment was up to post about this. Revere on Effect Measure took a recent paper about a mathematical model of the spread of anti-viral resistance and wrote a 16-part series leading the readers through the entire paper, from the title to the List of References and everything in between. While the posts are unlikely to garner many comments, this series will remain online as a valuable resource, something one can use to learn - or teach others - how a scientific paper is to be analyzed. As you can see, it takes a lot of time to read a paper thoroughly. It also…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Influence Of The Menstrual Cycle On The Female Brain: What influence does the variation in estrogen level have on the activation of the female brain? Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Jean-Claude Dreher, a researcher at the Cognitive Neuroscience Center (CNRS/Université Lyon 1), in collaboration with an American team from the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, Maryland) directed by Karen Berman, has identified, for the first time, the neural networks involved in processing reward-related functions modulated by female gonadal steroid hormones. This result, which was…

OSHA at 35: Your Comments Welcome

By Michael Silverstein Thirty-five years after the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the promise of worker protection remains substantially unfulfilled. Over the past several months, I have been traveling across the country and talking with people experienced in worker health and safety to gather ideas about what we can do to protect workers better. The more I hear, the more I am certain that we canât achieve this by simply trying harder to do more of the same. The draft paper âGetting Home Safe and Sound? OSHA at Thirty-Fiveâ summarizes what Iâve learned and suggests three…

Big Brother Is Evaluating Your Teaching

The New York Times ran a couple of op-eds on Sunday about education policy. One, by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari is familair stuff to anyone who's heard me talk about the subject before: teachers in the US are, on the whole, given fewer resources than they need to succeed, paid less well than other professions with comparable educational requirements, and then castigated as incompetents. And we wonder why top students aren't interested in education. The other by R. Barker Bausell, offers a simple and seemingly objective standard for evaluating teacher performance: measuring their…

Wind Power Economics and the Ability to Focus

Kevin Drum re-posts a chart on wind power made by Stuart Staniford showing that the number of new wind power plants installed in 2010 was way lower than in 2009 or 2008: This is meant as a starting point for discussion about the big economic issues that might've caused this. One of the many, many reasons I'll never make it as a political pundit, though, is that when I see a graph like this, I'm inexorably drawn to speculating about aspects of it that really have nothing to do with the intended point. In this particular case, I look at this graphic and ask myself "Why are there so many wind…

I love Google Books

It can really be a chore to track down old papers. While many journals have digitized their collections and placed them online, a subscription is often required to access old papers (even from the 19th century!)*. That's if the paper you're looking for was published in a journal that still exists, of course. There are plenty of journals that have gone defunct or are otherwise unavailable, a sad fact that keeps important papers out of the hands of students and scientists today. [*This really aggravates me. Shouldn't these papers, in many cases nearly 100 years old or more, be freely available…

Friday Sprog Blogging: co-evolution

Have you ever tried to have a conversation about one thing and found that, almost immediately, the conversation veered someplace else entirely? This is one of those. I had heard the horrifying news that there are high school teachers -- in our pretty good school district -- who actually tell their students that it's OK to cut and paste stuff from the internet into their papers without quotation marks or citation, and that Wikipedia is a great source of authoritative information (which, again, one need not cite, seeing as how the internet is like our shared brain). My response was to launch a…

Shrinking budgets + skyrocketing subscription fees = UC boycott of NPG.

Economic recovery has not yet made its presence felt at public universities in California. (Indeed, at least in the California State University system, all things budgetary are going to be significantly worse in the next academic year, not better.) This means it's not a great time for purveyors of electronic journals to present academic libraries in public university systems with big increases in subscription prices. Yet Nature Publishing Group has, apparently, done just that by some 400%. And, as noted by Christina Pikas and Dorothea Salo and Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher…

Links 3/19/11

Links for you. Science: The Electric Taxi Company You Could Have Called in 1900 Glimpses of the Fourth Domain? Natural-Born Homophobes? Other: Tripped Up At The Finish Line: The Perils Of Unemployment After 50 San Francisco to Start Smart Parking Management Trial Soon Annual Mis-Reporting on Graduation Rates Times paywall (this is the smartest solution to making online journalism profitable) Red light camera nabs drivers for blocking crosswalk, rolling right on red The Ethics of The Quote

Our god is an awesome thixotropic blob of goo

This is what happens when you can't comprehend the ordinary physical properties of fluids: you start hailing grungy old bottles of gloppy stuff as your salvation. Naples has gotten all excited about a bottle of "liquifying saint's blood" — it's incredibly silly. And just as silly, there is an online poll: Do you believe in miracles?. So far, 64% of the respondents say they do. They should have asked, "do you believe in gullible people?", because then I would have voted yes.