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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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It's two weeks until Christmas and if you are a Science 2.0 reader, that means it is at least time to think about shopping for a Christmas gift.  Demographically, not a lot of you were lining up to gratefully overpay for Apple's latest offering or whatever else obedient Oprah viewers are expected to buy on Black Friday.

Here are three nifty ideas that are science related for your consideration, in three age ranges.  If you just like gadgets you can check out the Top Gadgets of 2011 instead.

For The Young 
If a crime occurs, asking the criminal what happened is unlikely to give you the most accurate picture of events.  This is why police interview the victim first.    So an evolutionary psychologist outlining how great evolutionary psychology is has to be taken with a grain of salt; no one becomes a professor in a field and then decides it is a lot of woo.
You know you are culturally hip when magazines want to do their photo shoots with you in them - the poor Tea Party folks clearly have to get some representation in midtown Manhattan if they want to get haute couture coverage.

Until then, Occupy Wall Street is the cool place to be solely for well-heeled fashionistas.  Kanye West looked silly showing up in a $300 shirt and gold chains to show he was not part of the 1%, even though his net worth is $400 million dollars.   His problem was he was too humble - if you want to go full on into progressive acceptance you have to shamelessly plop your highly paid models in their $3,000 suits in front of the protesting masses and pretend they belong.  Confidence sells.
Bad news for bloggers; the courts love to protect journalists, even those shysters who use 'anonymous' sources that have directly led to the rash of modern journalists inventing even Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that were made from whole cloth - but bloggers are not under that umbrella.

Uber-progressive Oregon is, no surprise, not on the side of the little guy here and instead went with the most expensive attorney. U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez declared last week that a blogger does not get the same protection as a journalist and so can be sued for defamation.

BeautifulPeople.com, the dating community exclusively for good-looking people, is offering the chance to win a date with Joseph and the Virgin Mary - namely by spending a lot of money.  Well, not really the Virgin Mary, they don't want frogs raining on you or locusts infesting your kitchen this Christmas season. 

Instead, they are shamelessly whoring themselves, and willing attention-whore members, out in a vaguely disconcerting publicity stunt.  They convinced their members Heather and Dorion, who also appear as the parents of Jesus in their website's Nativity scene, to take one for the team and go on a date with whoever wins the auction, including *gasp*, an ugly person, should they be rich. 

A problem began to come into existence a few decades ago and in the polarized climate enabled by instant access to partisan spin, it's only going to get worse.

The problem isn't always that people are anti-science, though documenting the numerous instances of global warming deniers on one side and anti-science hippies on the other is always fun, it may be that people accept science too much - and there is a backlash on the way because people don't always understand that accepting science isn't always going to mean things don't change when new information comes to light.