Politics
stoat | December 1, 2013 Suppose you were a citizen of the Ukraine. Which way would you rather turn: to Europe or Russia? The answer is so obvious its hardly worth asking the question.
Now suppose you're the rather thuggish Prez of the Ukraine, and that part of turning towards Europe involves cracking down on your own corruption, not to mention being forced to free the previous Prez PM, who you've banged up on spurious charges. Whereas Russia, in the person of Putin, doesn't give a toss about civil rights or corruption.
And so the scene is set for an exciting clash. Just like in Syria, just like in Uganda, the…
oracknows | November 29, 2013Well, Thanksgiving's over, and the orgy of consumerism known as Black Friday is in full swing. Personally, I have to work, at least part of the day, and I don't go anywhere near the stores on Black Friday anyway. I haven't for years. So we might as well briefly discuss a bit of science today. It won't be long (by Orac standards), but there was a tidbit of news that hit the blogosphere on Thanksgiving Day that caught my interest. Apparently the execrable study by Gilles Séralini on the effect of using feed made from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on rats is heading for retraction. You…
drorzel | November 26, 2013We had a very late colloquium talk on Monday-- on the next-to-last day of our fall term exam period, so student turnout was a little disappointing-- by the science historian Dieter Hoffmann from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, who was in town visiting a colleague in our history department. He told us the story of Fritz Reiche, a student of Max Planck's whoc ended up having a Union College connection (which was a part of why Hoffmann wanted to give the talk).
Reiche did his Ph.D. under Planck, in 1907, then spent time at a few other great institutions in Germany,…
oracknows | November 21, 2013Well, it's done. The server migration should be finished. I was out and about last night giving a talk; so I'll only have time for a relatively brief post (for me, at least). Once again, things happen while I'm otherwise...indisposed. This time around, it's something that warms the cockles of what antivaccinationists perceive to be my pharma shill heart. Normally, it's considered bad form to openly express schadenfreude, but I do make at least one exception, and that's when bad things happen to antivaccinationist plans, particularly after they've been crowing about them for weeks.
You might…
oracknows | November 19, 2013While I've been all tied up paying attention to the developments in the Stanislaw Burzynski case, it figures that President Obama would go and do something like nominating the next Surgeon General. Normally, this is not such a big deal, because there really hasn't been a Surgeon General who has really been particularly well-known or had much of an impact since Dr. C. Everett Koop, although back when President Obama first took office Dr. Sanjay Gupta's name was floated as a possibility for the position. Obviously, he didn't get it. (I'm guessing that being a neurosurgeon and CNN's chief…
oracknows | November 10, 2013It's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston cancer doctor who inexplicably has been permitted to continue to administer an unproven cancer treatment to children with deadly brain cancers for nearly 37 years now. Beginning in 1977, when he left Baylor College of Medicine and opened up the Burzynski Clinic, Burzynski has administered a cancer therapy that he calls antineoplastons to patients. After nearly four decades and several dozen phase II clinical trials started, he never published a completed phase II trial. The only evidence he's published consists mainly…
oracknows | November 8, 2013The other day, I pointed out that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, was following in the footsteps of the former chair of the committee, likely the quackiest, most antivaccine Congressman who ever served in the House of Representatives. Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN). I guess that since Burton retired at the end of the last Congress, someone has to step up to the plate when it comes to pushing the antivaccine agenda. Issa is doing that by holding a hearing a year ago on "autism" that was in reality a thinly disguised excuse to castigate…
oracknows | November 7, 2013About a year ago, I became aware of the latest celebrity antivaccinationist with a penchant for saying truly stupid things and thus making an even bigger fool of himself than he usually does. I'm referring to Rob "makin' copies" Schneider, who most recently has been making waves for narrating a misinformation-packed "viral" video about the Vaccine Court and the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP). It's a video that's so mendacious that it even amazes me, and I've been watching the antivaccine movement for a decade now.
However, back in 2012, Rob Scheider, apparently being a…
oracknows | November 6, 2013People who follow the antivaccine movement might remember that around this time last year, Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), a particularly antiscience legislator who appears to be trying to take up the antivaccine mantle left behind when Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) retired at the end of the last session of Congress. Given that he now chairs the House committee that Burton once chaired, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Issa decided to take up that mantle by following Burton's lead when he was the chair and scheduled an antivaccine hearing last November, right after…
catdynamics | October 30, 2013Tell me, O muse, of that ingenious ship which will peer far and wide...
The European Space Agency is being very sensible and mapping out its schedule for large and medium science missions for the medium term, under the Cosmic Vision program.
In particular, the first of the large missions, L1, has been chosen and is JUICE, Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer - a Jovian orbiter scheduled for launch in 2022, to study the three outer Galilean Moons.
Athena
The other mission concepts which competed for the L1 mission slot were Athena, a reformulated large X-ray observatory - Athena is revisit of the…
oracknows | October 28, 2013Yesterday's post about Sarah Hershberger, the Amish girl from northeast Ohio with lymphoblastic lymphoma who refused chemotherapy, prompting a court battle that led to the appointment of a medical guardian for her to make sure she receives treatment, got me to thinking (always a dangerous thing). Actually, I had to think back over the years about all the similar cases of unfortunate children with cancer whose misfortune was compounded by having been born to woo-loving parents, such as Daniel Hauser.
These stories are depressingly similar, as are the arguments that go on over them. First, a…
drorzel | October 28, 2013A couple of weeks back, DougT won this year's Nobel betting pool, and requested a post on the subject of funding of wacky ieas:
could you comment on this: http://www.space.com/22344-elon-musk-hyperloop-technology-revealed.html and the phenomenon of the uber-rich funding science in general. It seems to me that there used to be more private funding of science, and there still is a lot. But is government funding crowding out private funding (political question), is government funding necessary for Apollo and CERN b/c it’s so huge, is private funding more “out there” and therefore on the tails of…
oracknows | October 25, 2013Most, if not virtually all, of what is now referred to as "traditional Chinese medicine" is quackery. I realize that it's considered "intolerant" and not politically correct to say that in these days of "integrative medicine" departments infiltrating academic medical centers like so much kudzu enveloping a telephone pole, but I don't care. I'm supposed to be impressed that the M.D. Anderson and Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Centers, among others, have lost their collective mind and now "integrate" prescientific nonsense along with their state-of-the-art cancer therapy? I don't think so. I…
jdupuis | October 22, 2013Sarah Boon (Twitter, blog) has organized a series of posts on science policy in Canada over the next month or so to be published in the iPolitics online magazine. The first four are out with another eight (two approximately every Monday) between now and November 18th. Which is just in time for the upcoming Canadian Science Policy Conference in Toronto starting November 20th.
The articles are available open access. I'll list the first bunch here, including my own contribution comparing what's going on at Library and Archives Canada with similar assaults on science. I will update this post as…
oracknows | October 20, 2013Blogging is a rather immediate endeavor. Over the last nine years (nearly), I've lost track of how many times I saw something that I wanted to blog about but but by the time I got around to it was no longer topical. Usually what happens is that my Dug the Dog tendencies take over, as I'm distracted by yet another squirrel, although sometimes there are just too many targets topics and too little time. Fortunately, however, sometimes the issue is resurrected, sometimes in a really dumb way, such that I have an excuse to correct my previous oversight. This is just such a time, and the manner in…
drorzel | October 17, 2013Let me say these things, because they are important. Bora was wrong. Scientific American was wrong. Ofek was wrong, Wrong, WRONG.
If you follow science blogs beyond this one, you have no doubt run across the gigantic debacle that erupted this past weekend; if not the first few paragraphs of this Slate piece give a reasonably compact summary. The shorter short form is: an editor at a blog network called Danielle Lee a whore (which was wrong), she wrote a blog post about it (emphatically not wrong), and the responses to that splattered a gigantic festering mess of Wrong all over everything.
So…
jdupuis | October 17, 2013Chris Turner's The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada (website) is a book that absolutely must be read by every Canadian interested in the future of science and science policy in the country.
And the Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government is wagering that that's a pretty low percentage of the population. If Susan Delacourt and Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson are to be believed, the strategy that the Prime Minister is using focuses on an emerging coalition of western Canadians and new Canadians and suburbanites in eastern…
catdynamics | October 11, 2013"Text of Bolden Response to Wolf Letter Re Chinese Participation in Kepler Conference" - from spacepolicyonline.com
>From: Bolden, Charles (HQ-AA000)
>Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2013 12:20 PM Central Standard Time
>To:
>Cc:
>Subject: Response to Chairman Wolf
"It is unfortunate that potential Chinese participants were refused attendance at the upcoming Kepler Conference at the Ames Research Park. Mid-level managers at Ames, in performing the due diligence they believed appropriate following a period of significant concern and scrutiny from Congress about our foreign access to…
catdynamics | October 10, 2013 When it is darkest, men see the stars.
This afternoon I needed to check something urgently, and as is my habit in this day and age, I jumped to a website where I knew the information was available.
A few seconds later, with some irritation I went to hit "refresh" as the request failed to go through, and then realized that it was a *.nasa.gov address, at Ames, as it happens, and I was not going to be getting that bit of data this afternoon, not without some old fashioned legwork.
A bit later I realized with increasing dismay that a signficant fraction of the illustrations for my class…
oracknows | October 6, 2013For some reason, I can't seem to escape Chicken McNuggets. About a month ago, I expressed my complete amusement over an "investigation" of Chicken McNuggets done by everyone's favorite crank and quackery promoter, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com. I'm tellin' ya, it was like Inspector Clouseau with a microscope when Mike Adams expressed amazement that Chicken McNuggets looked strange and alien when viewed under a microscope. Hilariously, he's at it again:
The Health Ranger's forensic food investigation of Chicken McNuggets two months ago is making new waves…