hrynyshyn | July 13, 2007One question keeps rising out of the ScienceBlogosphere muck: Are PZ "Pharyngula" Myers and his ilk doing more harm than good by relentlessly and mercilessly attacking religion? Rob "Galactic Interactions" Knop apparently has had it up to here with Myers's brand of anti-faith rhetoric, and started one of those neverending comment wars on his blog yesterday -- except that he did end it by removing the post. Fortunately, I saved a copy first because the exchange really does get to the heart of the question.
Out of respect for Rob, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt…
hrynyshyn | July 12, 2007The fine folk at DefCon (shorthand for the imprecisely named Campaign to Defend the Constitution) have released a poll showing that intelligent design hasn't made much headway into the evangelic right wing. The polls also suggests that the new Creation Museum does not exhibit a vision of the past shared by most anyone. If true, that's good news. But as you might expect, there's bad news in the poll (a pdf), too.
According to the poll, 95% of Evangelicals reject the Creation Musuem's strange, dino-friendly version of Creationism. In addition, only 10% of self-identified Evangelicals support…
hrynyshyn | July 12, 2007I love music as much as the next guy, just not when I'm actually out in the real world, which offers much more interesting -- and often critical -- sounds. But I had no idea just how dangerous iPods and their ilk could be until I read this.
From the current New Scientist:
A man in Vancouver, Canada, has discovered the hard way that listening to earphones in a thunderstorm can be a very bad idea. He was jogging while listening to an iPod, when he was struck by lightning. The earphones conducted the electricity through his head, bursting his eardrums and fracturing his jaw.
...
Two long, thin…
hrynyshyn | July 11, 2007So Michael Moore the documentarian takes on CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta the medical science guy in the former's first appearance on the network in three years, arguing that the latter committed libel by claiming the filmmaker "fudged the facts" in the new documentary Sicko. The two argued vociferously on Wolf Blitzer's "The Sitation Room" the other day. Who won? This being television news, no one, really. Moore came off as an obnoxious and impatient guest and Gupta as an inexcusably sloppy journalist. But Wolf was the real loser for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is failing get to…
hrynyshyn | July 11, 2007"In public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds." So says former U.S. surgeon general Richard H. Carmona (2002-2006). Worth a read, if your day isn't already shot. Then there's NPR's All Things Considered, which has a beaut of a quote:
Carmona said when he first came to Washington in 2002, he was somewhat naïve.
He recalled a meeting where senior White House officials talked about global warming as a liberal cause with no merit.
"I remember thinking, 'I know why they want…
hrynyshyn | July 10, 2007Martin Durkin, the science documentarian responsible for the most irresponsible documentary ever made on global warming, lashes back at his critics (those who understand the science), in an op-ed for The Australian. It is perhaps the most audacious attempt to defy the facts I've come across since Scooter Libby testified before a grand jury. The language chosen by the maker of "The Great Global Warming Swindle" is simply astounding:
It's all codswallop. The notion of man-made global warming started life as a wild, eccentric theory and, despite throwing billions of dollars at it, scientists…
hrynyshyn | July 10, 2007Could autism be caused by not enough sun? I sincerely hope that parents of children with autism-spectrum disorders apply the appropriate degree of skepticism and caution to the latest possible explanation for this most maddening of diseases. The absence of a convincing explanation for the recent increase in children diagnosed with autism must be exasperating -- witness the willingness to embrace and cling to the discredited theory that vaccines containing mercury are the culprit. This new suspicion is little more than that, however, and it may prove just as wrong.
The theory, propounded by…
hrynyshyn | July 9, 2007I don' t know and I don't much care why the number 7 is considered lucky. But I do know that people who hold to such nonsense seem incapable of making sense even of their own superstitions. Consider this pitch from the marketing department of mydomains.com:
7-7-07 is your lucky day at MyDomain.com!
The 7th day, of the 7th month of the 7th year happens only once per millennia. We're celebrating this rare day with a group of incredible weekend specials.
First of all, while it is true that the 7th day, of the 7th month of the 7th year of each of millennium only happens once every millennium, a…
hrynyshyn | July 9, 2007I promised myself I would go easy on the Live Earth spectacle, despite the easy pickings on the hypocrisy watch. But just how much can one skeptic take? Watching Sting admit he could do more to reduce his carbon footprint was one thing (ya think?), but the Pledge and the only "actions" being asked of those paying attention put me over the edge.
On the one hand, my man Al Gore and his fellow climate action campaigners did work a policy goal of an international treaty that calls for a 90 percent reduction in "global pollution" by developed countries (50 percent for everyone else) into the…
hrynyshyn | June 27, 2007You know how some people can't just leave that half-pint of ice cream sitting in the fridge? You know you shouldn't, but you can't resist. I'm that way with climate change stories. So when a friend called to alert me to a local NPR call-in show with a climate change dissident, I couldn't resist. The guest of Monday's episode of WFAE's hour-long "Charlotte Talks" was one Joel Schwartz, who seems to be an intelligent and fairly decent guy. But as the man (Dylan, not Schwartz) says, "sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace." In this case Satan was a "scientist."
This Joel Schwartz is described…
hrynyshyn | June 26, 2007The New York Times Science section today is devoted entirely to evolution. Wonderful stuff, including a review of the idea that it is possible to encode messages in DNA, and the news that a team of biologists has done just that with E=mc2. For the essay's author, Dennis Overbye, the whole thing brings to mind fjord architect Slartibartfast of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy. But there's an even better sci-fi tie-in:
In the Star Trek: TNG epsiode "The Chase", Picard and the gang race to re-assemble bits of a message encoded in the genomes of disparate species throughout the galaxy…
hrynyshyn | June 25, 2007London's often trigger-happy Independent reports today that Al Gore is criticizing climatologists for not reaching a strong consensus on global warming soon enough. That's a switch. The quotes that reporter Jonathan Owen provided, lifted apparently from a forward to a new edition of Gore's Earth in the Balance, may have lost some of their context, however...
Here's what the Independent says warrants the headline "Too little, too late: Gore blames scientists for climate crisis"
In an extraordinary outburst aimed at America's failure to tackle global warming, Al Gore says that if scientific…
hrynyshyn | June 23, 2007It's hard to believe that a dog can understand four languages, discuss the intricacies of Christian theology, and perform complex mathematical operations, including calculus and algebra, but it's even harder to believe that the editors of an until-now reputable newspaper would be so hard up for local news that they'd be able to find space for 1,500 words on the subject. But the Asheville Citizen-Times did just that. On the front page. I can't remember when they gave 1,500 words to anything.
Never mind that the video accompanying the story gives away the trick -- the dog's clearly following…
hrynyshyn | June 21, 2007Implicit in every "clean coal" advocate's pitch (no pun intended) for subsidizing the technology to free us from our oil addiction is the assumption that we have at least 200 years' worth of the stuff under American soil -- and plenty more around the world. That could be very wrong, according to a new National Academy of Sciences study.
Matthew Wald has the story in today's New York Times. Here's the relevant section from the study itself (bold emphasis mine):
Despite significant uncertainties in existing reserve estimates, it is clear that there is sufficient coal at current rates of…
hrynyshyn | June 20, 2007Everyone's glommed on to a revived story about a study that found more "feminine" names undermine a girl's chances at success in science and engineering, and much gnashing of teeth ensued. (See here, here, here, here and here.) Then the Scientific Indian noted the tendency for his culture's tendency to give girls names with a certain vowel ending, lamenting that such habits are foolish. But is there something more substantial at work? One researcher thinks so.
A brief item in New Scientist appeared a little while back with this headline: "Are you too sexy for your name?" How can you resist?…
hrynyshyn | June 19, 2007The headline for this post is stolen verbatim from a section headline in a paper on climate change just published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A. It's yet another depressing read by NASA's Jim Hansen and five co-authors from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Hansen has been trying to get our attention for some 20 years now with a series of papers laced with alarmist language, but in an email to the Independent, says "this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously…
hrynyshyn | June 19, 2007Scienceblog posts tend to revolve around current events, almost to the point where history is irrelevant, and the Island of Doubt is no different. I try to put things in historical perspective, but concede that I tend too often overlook what has gone before. In an effort to undo a little of that cognitive damage, here's a humbling quote from a surprising place and time: Persia (or thereabouts) in the ninth century:
And we are the heirs, and transmitters to our heirs, of heathenism, which is honored gloriously in this world. Lucky is he who beareth the burden with a sure hope for the sake of…
hrynyshyn | June 18, 2007I take a keener interest in the autism-vaccine conspiracy nonsense, now that I'm taking my very young son to the doctors every few months for his shots. It bothers me no end that not every parent does the same, and that some are stubbornly clinging to the discredited notion that autism is caused by non-existent mercury-containing vaccines. Absent anything original to add to the debate, I recommend a column by Apoorva Mandavilli, which the editors of Nature have seen fit to make freely available to one and all. Here's a bit of what she has to say:
I sympathize with these parents and can…
hrynyshyn | June 18, 2007Business Week recently published an odd little essay by Greg Blonder, someone I've not come across before. He posits that painting your roof white will do more to offset anthropogenic climate change than installing photovoltaic panels. Seriously. The science appears to be pretty sound, but it has the whiff of a thought experiment rather than a practical idea.
Here's the essential section:
...imagine a solar photovoltaic panel. Unlike burning coal or oil, the production of photovoltaic electricity does not add to the stock of global warming gases permeating our atmosphere. The panel's surface…
hrynyshyn | June 15, 2007Remember a few months ago, when the news came that circumcision can cut the risk of contracting HIV through sex by 60 percent ... at least, in males, in some parts of Africa? Now we get the bad news. A study just published in the British Journal of Urology finds that what boys lose in the process turns out to be the most sensitive part of the penis. This consequence, one would assume, is universal.
Such conclusions have been elusive until now. Most studies in the past were based on questionnaires, not physical investigation. Which is problematic because most males that do undergo the knife do…