During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
Unless you are a true baseball fan, you have probably never heard of Bob Feller. Maybe you have heard of Nolan Ryan. They were classic power pitchers. They threw hard and they threw for strikes.Even if you are a baseball fan, unless you live and breathe the Detroit Tigers, you have probably never heard of Joel Zumaya.Right. Who? While playing in the American League Championship in 2006, he threw a fastball clocked at 104.8 MPH, the fastest in history. How can a guy who threw that fast not be on the cover of every Wheaties box in the civilized world? Because the following year he was 1-4 with a 4.28 ERA; hardly the stuff of legends.
Okay, I am going to do something that will cost me my Republican voter card - I am going to recommend we reopen a government agency, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).
As I briefly laid out in The Science Of Baseball: Coefficients And Happy Haitians, people like home runs though baseball purists don't necessarily think much of them - unless their team gets one.
Important business has taken me out of sunny California and across the country to the slightly warmer March days of Florida; baseball spring training.I maintain an affection for spring training even though I no longer live in a winter climate where a few days of sunshine after 5 months of cold can truly be appreciated. But I spent my childhood in Florida, in a baseball haven aptly called Dodgertown, so cold climate or not baseball in spring is a necessary ritual. It gives me a reminder I haven't seen my family in a year and spring baseball is somehow both better and worse than regular season baseball, when it becomes more of a business and obviously played by the best of the best.
If you're in the racism industry, an icy chill has gone down your spine in 2009, with an African-American president and both major political parties run by black people. As always, a psychologist will find an answer for how society can do those things and still be racist; it turns out you will be less biased against people of other races in your social group but you will still be prejudiced against people of other races you don't have beer with. Likewise, if you voted for Obama he is not the black person you automatically dislike the way you automatically dislike all other black people.
If you read Geek Logik,you may have found, at least for a while, that you lost control over your own decision-making ability.
You may recognize the title most recently as a humorous jab at people who want to teach religion in science classes and, failing that, at least teach why they think there is a controversy. Of course there isn't any controversy at all. Biology is as imperfect as every science in existence and explaining the world we live in according to natural laws is tough because there are always new things to learn.The only place where rock solid 'proof' exists is in mathematics, which some people think is science. Yet even in mathematics there are disputes and one of them has long been Pi - or π, if you prefer. That's right, someone once may have insisted we teach the controversy about Pi, which is a delightful sort of irony.
You wouldn't think that tanking an economy would make anyone happy but it puts a spring in the steps of a small group; economics professors. If the lousy economy is cause for a party, the election of Barack Obama and more government meandering is apparently icing on the cake. Witness Professor Panicos Demetriades of the Economic and Social Research Council's World Economy and Finance Programme, who is today speaking at the 'Politics of Macro-Adjustment and Poverty Reduction' Conference.
Economics is always called the dismal science, because it has science pretensions yet never makes accurate predictions. The outlook, according to economists, is always rather bleak.But given the current state of the economy, economists are downright ecstatic, because they can be relevant again. And, in this case, it turns out they are a lot more optimistic than unemployed people are about the future.You know when economists are cheery things must be pretty bad.
If you're in the prejudice business the worst thing that can happen is to have a woman and an African-American fighting it out to be President. A white guy has a tough time out there these days and that's a good thing for society because it means that America continues to be the least racist country in the world. But if you're in the prejudice business the death of institutional racism and the demise of cultural racism means you'll need to look deeper; namely to find people being prejudiced against themselves. Then you can say it's the legacy of old prejudice and the cycle continues.
Okay, you're thinking a guy who started a site where scientists write feature articles directly to the audience must be insane to endorse big media science journalism, right? Not at all. Science journalism is a different beast than what we do here but it still has more commonality than it lacks and that's why I was intrigued by a recent back and forth between Professor Larry Moran of the University of Toronto and Chris Mooney of Seed Media's Scienceblogs.com.Moran is never one to pull punches - that's why I have him on my blogroll - but that doesn't mean I always agree with him, I just like his style.
Show Me The Science Month Day 19Merriam-Webster's dictionary says the word 'evolution' originated in 1622 and derives from the Latin evolutio, "unrolling, from", as in a parchment, and this is actually the perfect way to think of both Darwin and Evolution in their context.
