Wasting your time
sb admin | August 15, 2008The recent uptick in troll traffic here and at Orac's place got me thinking. Many of the trolls have been making unsophisticated attacks on the truth without actually stating a hypothesis. And that got me thinking even more. If they could only state their questions properly, there would be some useful fodder for discussion. There are few stupid questions, but questions can be asked in a fairly useless way. Why not invite people to make interesting assertions, and help them frame the question properly?
The object of this thread is to invite folks to ask questions that are sometimes…
sb admin | August 12, 2008OK, here's the deal. Seed Media Group, the folks who run this joint, want to give you free stuff. They are taking a reader survey and to encourage you to participate, they are giving away a bunch of cool Apple stuff. The good news is, you guys have been a bunch of losers and haven't been doing the survey, so those who've entered so far have a better chance of winning something. I'd do it myself, but the damned Overlords won't let me.
So go and enter, and if you win, let me know how much you like your free iPod, iPhone, or whatever.
denialism | August 8, 2008This is meetup weekend for the sciencebloggers and remember, we're planning to hang out with readers at 2:00 pm on Saturday, August 9, at Social (795 8th Ave).
Drop by, say hello, and meet the scibs!
choofnagle | August 8, 2008Is Obama the Antichrist? No, according to Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series, who told the Journal that:
"The antichrist isn't going to be an American, so it can't possibly be Obama. The Bible makes it clear he will be from an obscure place, like Romania," the 82-year-old author said.
Phew! Maybe it's George Soros, then? He's from Hungary. Here's a list of Romanian candidates.
denialism | July 21, 2008Any native New Yorkers out there that read denialism blog? If so, I'll be in town for the Sb meetup in NYC on August 9th. If anyone would like to meet me or the other sciencebloggers, let us know. And if you have a good idea where a bunch of people could find an air-conditioned space to do it, feel free to suggest away.
sb admin | July 6, 2008GrrlScientist inspired me to upload some of my Up North pics.
Red pine groves on granite outcrops are a characteristic feature of Algonquin Park.
Red Pines have reddish bark which flakes off in thin scales.
Their needles come in groups of two.
choofnagle | June 27, 2008I wonder whether the Heller decision is broad enough to give me an individual right to own a poop gun, AKA, the "Brown Note."
choofnagle | June 27, 2008Mark, I find your post on DC v. Heller lacking in enthusiasm. It is not often that our Supreme Court finds a new constitutional right (except when big business wants more rights). We should celebrate this, thing--the Second Amendment. It must be important, right, since it becomes before the Third and Fourth!
We should exercise it too. I'm a fan of the old school Colt 45 Auto:
What handcannon are you going to buy?
choofnagle | April 26, 2008You've probably heard that Wesley Snipes received the maximum sentence for not paying his taxes--3 years based on 3 misdemeanor violations. His "advisors," tax fraud denialists with crackpot legal theories received 10 for conspiring to defraud the government of tax revenue:
Snipes' co-defendants in the case,Lake County anti-tax guru Eddie Ray Kahn, 64, and tax preparer Douglas P. Rosile, 59, face up to 10 years in prison. Both were convicted of conspiracy and tax fraud for their work with American Rights Litigators and Guiding Light of God Ministries, two Lake County-based "tax-fraud" mills.
choofnagle | April 22, 2008An oped in today's Journal by Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, argues that he left the organization because it abandoned scientific justifications for its advocacy. Moore argues:
At first, many of the causes we championed, such as opposition to nuclear testing and protection of whales, stemmed from our scientific knowledge of nuclear physics and marine biology. But after six years as one of five directors of Greenpeace International, I observed that none of my fellow directors had any formal science education. They were either political activists or environmental entrepreneurs.…
denialism | March 20, 2008Well, since we first wrote about losing Plan9, Higher Grounds, Satellite Ballroom and Just Curry for a worthless CVS, the C-Ville has picked up the story (here too) as well as the Hook. Good for them. I take back my sniping comments about them ignoring the Corner district.
A few things are clear from these articles. One is that Terry Vassalos is using weasel-talk. He says in the C-Ville article:
"They look at the space, yes," says Vassalos. "I cannot go into the details. There are a lot of people involved, the people that are there, the new people, and I cannot say anything about the…
denialism | March 20, 2008
The NYT reports on a this article by Tomas Grim of the Dept of Zoology at Palacky Univ purporting to show a negative effect on numbers of scientific publications for scientists correlated with increasing beer consumption.
According to the study, published in February in Oikos, a highly respected scientific journal, the more beer a scientist drinks, the less likely the scientist is to publish a paper or to have a paper cited by another researcher, a measure of a paper's quality and importance.
The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to…
denialism | March 1, 2008I've lived in Charlottesville Virginia now for about 8 years and one of the great things I love about it is the Corner community. I have a bar I like, there is a good music at the Satellite Ballroom where I plan on seeing They Might Be Giants this month. We've got lots of local businesses and restaurants where you feel like you're experiencing something unique and your money goes to local people you know and like.
Then you hear crappy news like 4 local businesses are going to get shut down to put in a national chain store like a CVS and it's like a punch in the gut. In this case, the…
choofnagle | February 27, 2008I've been AWOL from Denialism Blog because one of my UC-Berkeley projects has become all-consuming.
I'm interested in sparking a market for identity theft protection. A real one. One where consumers can actually make choices among banks based on their actual ability to address security attacks. Last year, I published Identity Theft: Making the Unknown Knowns Known, (PDF) an article making a legal and policy argument in favor of mandated public disclosure of identity theft statistics by banks.
In this vein, today, I'm releasing "Measuring Identity Theft at Top Banks (Version 1.0)," my…
choofnagle | February 12, 2008I've spent the last few months working with an excellent journalist on the Anonymity Experiment, which will appear in this month's Popular Science magazine. In it, Catherine Price attempts to live a normal life without revealing personal data:
...when this magazine suggested I try my own privacy experiment, I eagerly agreed. We decided that I would spend a week trying to be as anonymous as possible while still living a normal life. I would attempt what many believe is now impossible: to hide in plain sight.
[...]
Tall and friendly, Hoofnagle has an enthusiastic way of talking about privacy…
choofnagle | February 10, 2008Today, I joined about 100 hooligans in the anti-scientology protest in San Francisco, as part of Project Chanology, a large-scale effort to call attention to abuses committed by the cult of Scientology. Many protestors had serious signs that called attention to the various ways in which Scientology censors speech and defrauds people. But after watching this crazy video of Tom Cruise, the Viking and I decided that the real victim of all this craziness is Katie Holmes. Poor Katie.
denialism | January 28, 2008For the benefit of Teresa and her son, here's a description of a day in the life. This may not be all medstudents on the surgical rotation, but at the moment it's what I'm doing.
I wake up around 4AM, put on scrubs (usually, but on clinic day you dress nice), and go to work. I spend about an hour going over labs, checking vitals from overnight, in and outs as they say, and visiting with patients to ask them how their night was as well as performing a brief physical exam. I then round with my team for about half an hour, and for the patients I track, I try to present them to the residents…