“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” - George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure…

Being back in blogging mood, I decided I would make a poll among the most affectionate readers of this column - those who will come here to read "blog" pieces and not only "articles which are…

When a system is well understood, a well-constructed mathematical model of that system can make realistic predictions based on the data sets fed into it. However, when a system is not well-understood…

Sexual Harassment in federally funded research should be considered a federal crime.   This blog post originates as a comment on this blog at Forbes  "Advice For The Reformed Harasser On…

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist I and many other astrophysicists look up to has been accused of rape by Tchiya Amet  who was a student at UT Austin at the time that Neil DeGrasse Tyson…

How do you know the paper claiming GMO toxicity is in a journal that isn't very reputable? They don't have $9 to renew their domain. It seems like only yesterday (oh wait, it was) that I wrote about…

At all levels of academic science men outnumber women by a great deal.  Whites outnumber black by a even larger margin regardless of sex or gender.   Out LGBT are outnumbered by an…

I live north of Harbin Hot Springs, a "health resort," which catered (it burned in the 2015 Valley Fire) to new-age types  who have yet have to find an alternative-anything that they don't like.…

I don't like using the term "consumer" because it implies an economic function of the searcher.  There is certainly an economy (exchange of value) in the Searchable Web Ecosystem but "consumers"…

The few of you who regularly follow this blog may be rightly wondering why I have not published new posts in the last two weeks. The reason is overload. I have a few deadlines on January 31 that I…

Brain training has come into the spotlight with Tuesday’s announcement by the Federal Trade Commission that the popular website Lumosity will be forced to pay a $2 million settlement for making false…

Farmers jumped in because higher prices due to clever marketing meant higher profits - but demand for feed caused expenses to rise.  That has meant consolidation because smaller farmers cannot…

Lisa Jackson is leaving the EPA, she has announced, and virtually no one is going to be disappointed. The EPA was created to be anti-business so no one can really claim that being anti-business is a…

http://www.cdph.ca.gov/certlic/drinkingwater/Pages/MTBE.aspx http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/web/2012/05/BPA-Replacement-Permeates-Pa… http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/08…

Science writing resists metaphors because no one seems to a Science journalists don't think much of science bloggers (1) and they have a good reason, at least given the bulk of blogging.  It is…

The United Kingdom Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation has  http://blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk/index.php/2014/04/practical-school-science-is-v... Before a bunch of people go off on some…

A short history of IQ - it wasn't the worst thing from 1920s education theory we are still stuck with What to do?  If there is no metric, there is no way to educate http://www.thestar.com/living…

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005738http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124http://pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1302997110…

Open-Sourcing Chicken: Breaking Free from Corporate Genetics “These are corporate genetics from huge companies,” says Nigel Walker, proprietor of Eatwell Farm outside Dixon, Calif. “I’m embarrassed…

What's next after the success of the Large Hadron Collider and its success in finding the Higgs boson, the so-called God Particle? America begged off the LHC because of a failure to keep the…