I have this one little saying. When things get too heavy just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man. -Jimi Hendrix Hendrix is almost right: helium is the second lightest gas known to man, behind hydrogen. But there are many applications for helium -- both scientific and non-scientific -- that make it incredibly useful and practical. Helium is far lighter than air and is inert, which means it won't combust when you combine it with air and energy, like Hydrogen does (below). (Too bad for the kids who want hydrogen balloons for their birthday parties!) In addition to being lighter than air, Helium is incredibly useful, scientifically, in its liquid form! With a boiling point of only 4 Kelvin, liquid helium is used to cool some of the most powerful electromagnets on Earth, including those at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider. It's the first known superfluid, a fluid that has many interesting properties, including absolutely no viscosity, and it will never come to rest or lose energy once you start it in motion! But -- as Lee Billings wrote earlier this week -- Helium is pretty rare on Earth, and we're running out of it. Although Helium is the second most common element in the Universe (behind Hydrogen), it's incredibly rare on Earth. There are only two places to find Helium. The first is the Earth's atmosphere. The exosphere -- the uppermost layer of the atmosphere -- contains small amounts of Helium. Compared to the rest of the atmosphere, five parts per million are Helium, which means that extracting Helium from the atmosphere is incredibly inefficient and expensive, so much so that we don't do it. Where do we get our Helium from, then? Believe it or not, we mine it from underground! This above image is the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Crude Helium Enrichment Facility in Texas. It supplies about 40% of the Helium produced in my country, and it all comes from pockets of Helium that live underground. Want to know how it got there? That's right; radioactivity! You see, when our Earth was formed, it was loaded up with a whole slew of unstable elements, including everything on the periodic table that's heavier than Lead, such as Uranium, Thorium, Radium, and Radon. Since these elements are unstable, they radioactively decay. Even though some of these elements take billions of years to decay (on average), the Earth has been around for billions of years! Not only that, but there are three ways that particles can decay. The first type discovered -- alpha decay -- is when a radioactive particle emits a Helium nucleus! Find a couple of electrons, and what have you got? Helium! So if you get an ore of the right type of radioactive element, and you wait millions and millions (or even billions) of years, you make a giant underground store of helium! So the good news is that these underground stores exist, so we have a supply of Helium for all of our scientific (and non-scientific) purposes. But the bad news? When we use it up, we'll have to wait million of years for it to build back up, or figure out some non-prohibitively expensive way to recover it from the atmosphere. (It's so expensive that many are thinking of mining the Moon when we're out of it on Earth!) I'm all for environmentalism and conservation, but even if you aren't, running out of Helium poses a serious problem for the continuing advancement of science and technology. Helium on Earth is scarce. It took millions of years to make the stores we have now, and once they're gone, they'll be gone for thousands of generations. So be careful with the precious things you have, and treat them like the precious things they are, even if others don't. Because some of them -- like Helium -- are truly irreplaceable. Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

The comment that has stirred up the most condemnation from the press is Richard Dawkins' mention of "Pope…Nazi," which everyone assumes was about the current Pope. Wrong. Everyone knows the current Pope is most properly addressed as "Pope Palpatine". No, Pope Palpatine is not currently up for canonization (at least, I hope not), but there is another pope who is, and this thorough discussion explains who Dawkins was actually talking about. Blatantly evident in this clip, Richard Dawkins uses "Pope Nazi" as a shorthand descriptive phrase for "that Pope whose name I've forgotten (Pope Pius XII)?—?who's also up for canonisation and was aiding and abetting the Nazis during the war". And here's the clip. Richard Dawkins from Young Australian Skeptics on Vimeo. Oh, and Pope Pius XII really was a sniveling rat bastard who should have been held accountable for contributing to the evil perpetrated against the Jews. Read the comments on this post...

Kent Hovind's infamous alma mater has put together a collection of responses because they are "under attack!" Only they aren't—they're being laughed at. And whoa, these pages are even more hilarious. (Warning: all of the links below go to pages that fire up some tedious piano music on autoplay…that you can't turn off.) The first one is offended at the falsehoods their critics promulgate. For instance, people have passed around this photo, claiming it is a picture of the Patriot University facilities: It is a filthy lie! That is the minister's house. To show how wrong this portrayal is, the staff at Patriot Bible University have released an official photograph of the wonderfully elegant, high-tech but traditional campus: Well. I guess we can't make fun of that anymore. The second page can be summarized as "Don't trust the internet, trust us!" They explain what is wrong with the internet: Should you trust someone's 'factual' information about morals when they post pornography, promote homosexuality, post curse words, and claim evolution as fact? Whoa, somebody pass that along to the Intersection! I'm sure it will fit with their sentiment perfectly. Patriot University also has a simple test for evaluating the worth of a web page. Would Jesus agree with the values and the message of the source of advice? For some reason, this instantly stirred up an image of introducing Jesus to Dan Savage. My vision of Jesus is of an unkempt Jewish zealot with a madman's fire in his eye and a dedication to those old testament laws, and no, I don't think he'd get along with Dan at all — there'd probably be an impromptu stoning on the spot. But Christians always tell me that their version of Jesus is gentle, loving, understanding, and thoughtful — that Jesus would probably give Dan a big hug and thank him for his work. Which Jesus are we supposed to use in this exercise from PU? And isn't this an admission that you're just supposed to go along with stuff you like, assisted by the crutch of an imaginary cheerleader? They also list the virtues of PU. I. Patriot bases all teachings on the Bible and God's absolute truth.
II. Patriot has been teaching God's absolute truth for nearly 30 years.
III. Jesus said "He is the way, the truth, and the life" (Jn 14:6). Patriot believes this and follows Jesus, only. Oh, yeah. I'm reassured. Finally, they get around to discussing Kent Hovind. Patriot does not retain ownership to student thesis' or dissertations, as is commonly practiced by many schools. Instead, Patriot grants each student full control over the circulation of his/her work. Therefore, Patriot cannot release student work to the public. Patriot issues Bible degrees for the purpose of equipping students for ministry; Patriot is not a research institution. Hovind's dissertation was part of a graduate "project". Thus, the paper being posted online was only a portion of Hovind's initial research notes for his dissertation requirements. It is obviously not a finished product. Hovind has been a prolific publisher of videos and books on topics involving Biblical Creation. He has participated in numerous video-taped debates. His work since 1991 has been widely distributed and stands on it's own and supercedes an earlier written dissertation. There is no need to attack it and ignore what he has produced since then. So that thesis that was posted on Wikileaks wasn't actually Kent Hovind's thesis. PU does not keep copies of theses, they are not submitted to any official archive, so basically, it doesn't exist. Huh. Well, that certainly sounds professional. That ragbag collection of noise that begins, "Hi, my name is Kent Hovind" was part of a "project". What project could benefit from such haphazard trash, I don't know. It clearly wasn't a finished product. Where is the finished product? Don't ask the degree-granting institution! Yeah, Kent Hovind's work since 1991 does stand on its own as rank raving idiocy. We laugh at that, too. Strangely, this defense of Kent Hovind doesn't mention his current residency in a penitentiary, convicted of tax evasion. Read the comments on this post...

A couple of unrelated technology things. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

It was announced today that the pie entered for pi day from the USA Science and Engineering Blog,
Joanna Pool's Irrationally Good Chocolate Basil pie, made it to the top 10! But we need your votes!! How to vote:
1) Go to seriouseats.com
2) Register on the site
3) Vote! Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

Kent Heckenlively shows us why AoA is "not anti-vaccine": Bruesewitz v. Wyeth has the potential to move all that in a new direction. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act simply states, "No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable . . . if the injury or death resulted from side-effect that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings." What does that mean in plain English? The example I've always heard used in reference to such a standard is dynamite. Now we all know what dynamite does. It blows up. So, if you light a stick of dynamite, wait over it, and it blows up, you're out of luck. By its very nature dynamite is an inherently unsafe product. But if you have a six-foot fuse, light it, and as you try to run away the fuse burns so quickly that you can't escape, well, you're entitled to recovery. Or, if they use substandard chemicals and the dynamite simply blows up while sitting in a box, then you're entitled to recovery. You can still sell dynamite. As the manufacturer you just need to sell the safest dynamite you can produce. To Kent Heckenlively, vaccines are like dynamite; their purpose is to explode and thereby destroy. I find it quite telling that Heckenlively couldn't think of another example to illustrate his point. I'm surprised he restrained himself not to use another similar example, such as firearms. In any case, note how he chose the example of a product designed to destroy in the context of crowing over a Supreme Court case that, in the unlikely event the plaintiffs prevail, could severely limit the power and scope of the Vaccine Court. Read the comments on this post...

Stacy Jannis, who has been working tirelessly for the Festival to get the Kavli Science Video Contest up and running, was recently honored by AAAS and the National Science Foundation 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge for her video "Inside the Brain: Unraveling the Mystery of Alzheimer's Disease", which she produced for the National Institute on Aging. See her video here. Learn more about the annual challenge here. Congratulations to Stacy! Check out more of her amazing work .

~~written by Ruth Kiefer Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

Mark Goetz makes me LOL: Via lots of places, most recently Pollster. Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

For most men, the thought of taking on the burden of pregnancy from their partners would seem like a nightmare, but it's all part and parcel of seahorse life. After mating, female seahorses and pipefish lay their eggs into a special pouch in the male's belly and he carries the developing babies to term. They may seem like a shoe-in for a Dad-of-the-year award but this apparent display of paternal perfection has several macabre twists. A recent study showed that pregnant pipefishes can also become vampiric cannibals, absorbing some of their brood for nutrition if their own food supplies are running low. Now, Kimberley Paczolt and Adam Jones from Texas A&M University have found that male pipefishes are also selective abortionists. They'll kill off some of the youngsters in their pouches if they've mated with an unattractive female, or if they've already raised a large group of young in an earlier pregnancy. The pouch isn't just an incubator for the next generation. It's a battleground where male and female pipefish fight a war of the sexes, and where foetal pipefish pay for this conflict with their lives. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

There's almost no on answering the Collective Imagination Question today, so this is your chance! Click here. And while you are over there, have a look at my latest post on Japanese Ring Tone Therapy. Read the comments on this post...

Are human beings rational? No. In fact, Stuart Sutherland managed to write an entire book on the Irrationality of people. Here is a review of Stuart Sutherland’s Irrationality. I think this quote is worth reproducing here: “First published in 1992, Irrationality proposes, and to any reasonable mind proves, that we are for the most part credulous [...]

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As I've mentioned before, I've been spending a lot of time working on a book. Initially, I was working on a book made up of a collection of material from blog posts; along the way, I got diverted, and ended up writing a book about cloud computing using Google's AppEngine tools. The book isn't finished, but my publisher, the Pragmatic Programmers, have a program that they call beta books. Once a book is roughly 60% done, you can buy it at a discount, and download drafts electronically immediately. As more sections get done, you can download each new version. And when the book is finally finished, you get a final copy. We released the first beta version of the book today. You can look at excerpts, or buy a copy, by going to the books page at Pragmatic's website. If you're interested in what cloud computing is, and how to build cloud applications - or if you just feel like doing something to support you friendly local math-blogger - please take a look, and consider getting a copy. I'm not going to harp about the book a lot on the blog; you're not going to see a ton of posts that are thinly veiled advertisements, or updates tracking sales, or anything like that. If there's something that I would have written about anyway, and it's appropriate to mention the book, then I'll feel free to mention it, but I won't waste your time hyping it. In other news, here's the main reason that things have been dead on this blog since the weekend: That's the view from my driveway as of monday morning. Over the weekend, we had one of the worst windstorms to hit New York in about thirty years. That mess is two oak trees, each close to 2 meters in diameter, which came down on our street on saturday. (If you look closely towards the right hand side, you can see the remains of my neighbors car.) The telephone pole in the picture was snapped not by getting hit by a tree, but simply by the wind. Since that pole had our electrical transformer, and those trees took out the wiring that fed that transformer, we are (obviously) without electricity, internet, or (most importantly) heat. Con-ed is promising to restore our electricity by friday. I'm not holding my breath. Anyway, back to the happy stuff. The book exists in electronic form! Buy a copy for yourself, your friends, your neighbors, and your dog! We've got lots of wonderful new expenses to deal with recovering from that storm! :-) Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

  Image by Duchamp.
In most developed nations, kids get far less physical activity than they did just a few generations ago.  Given the strong links between physical inactivity and health risk (and given that we're now seeing "adult" diseases like heart disease and type 2 diabetes in children and teenagers), this has become a very real public health concern.  Unfortunately, when it comes to increasing childhood physical activity levels, people often want to reinvent the wheel.  For example, many people are enthralled with the Nintendo Wii as a means of increasing childhood physical activity - even though it is expensive, and the evidence supporting it is weak at best.  At the same time, evidence continues to accumulate in support of simple, inexpensive interventions for increasing childhood physical activity.  Today I'd like to briefly look at one of the simplest possible ways of increasing childhood physical activity levels - painting lines on a schoolyard playground. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

Last November, in Florida, I had the opportunity to see my first Space Shuttle launch. For the hundreds of millions of people who don't pay more than a passing notice to the fact that human beings still go into space on a regular basis, this is a fairly banal thing. But to those who camp out all day, plan trips around Cape Canaveral launch windows, and scrupulously follow the ins and outs of NASA politics, this is the bread and butter. Unless you score tickets to the Kennedy Space Center, which has the official ambiance and a giant countdown clock, the best place to watch a NASA Shuttle launch is from the nearby burg of Titusville, Florida. Titusville is a small town dubbed "Space City, USA," by its largely aerospace-employed locals; it boasts both an Astronaut High School and a Spaceview Park, the latter of which is overrun by hardcore space-heads on a launch day. It takes the wild rumbling sound of the shuttle's 1,300,000 pound solid rocket boosters several seconds to reach Titusville, twelve miles away across the Indian River -- but it's still loud as hell. And powerful, too, in a way I didn't entirely expect. There was the Shuttle, which looked so small from a distance, one of six in a fleet so often criticized as "penguins" (y'know, flightless black and white birds) holding six people, worth untold billions (approximately 1.5 billion just to launch one), and stocked with 534,900 gallons of fuel. The real surprise was how fast it happened; within seconds of liftoff, STS Atlantis was just a blip going 15,000 miles an hour and the sky was torn in half by a ragged cloud of exhaust that later diffused in a lovely, thoughtful way. Check out a video of the launch here. In any case, the experience revived my interest in the goals and operations of our bloated ol' space agency. It's been a few years since Universe took on the beast in a comprehensive way, and as we're on the cusp of a new era for space -- what with the now imminent retirement of the Shuttles, NASA's success with unmanned missions, the much-debated "bombing of the moon," and, most importantly, the Obama administration's recent nix of Bush-era manned moon mission plans -- it seems a fitting moment to revisit. Where are we, after all? Should we be laughing or crying? Should we cheer or lament the end of the Shuttle era?
Is NASA in the dumps? Well, the answer is: it depends. Yes, this is the brink of a new era for space exploration, but it won't be the anything like the "New Vision" envisioned by the Bush Administration six years ago. Gone may be plans of a return to the moon in the next two decades. Gone, too, may be the Ares rockets, the ostensible replacement for the dying Shuttle program. If Obama's exclusion of Project Constellation from the 2011 United States federal budget goes uncontested by congress, gone will be all of NASA's seemingly arbitrary, high-profile manned space mission plans. What does this mean? Well, in my opinion, it's good news. Project Constellation seemed crazy to me from the beginning; even former NASA administrator Mike Griffin once called "Apollo on steroids." While other space agencies and the booming commercial space sector busied themselves with innovative new rockets, single-stage to orbit vehicles, and space planes, NASA planned on stepping back to the kinds of rockets it had been successful with in the 1960s. Ever since being announced by the Bush Administration, the project has been perpetually underfunded and generally unpopular with scientists, who see the recent successes of NASA's many unmanned missions as proof that sending people into space is risky and totally not cost-effective. Says Obama of the new, stripped-down NASA budget: it's a "bold new approach to human space flight that embraces commercial industry, forges international partnerships, and invests in the building blocks of a more capable approach to space exploration." This means, simply, that the Obama administration believes encouraging the burgeoning private sector to pick up the space administration's flack will lead to new industry as well faster, smarter, and cheaper rockets. It's no secret that the commercial space industry has been flourishing in recent years -- companies like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, Scaled Composites, Blue Origin, and SpaceX are making huge strides in research, development, and design of rockets, all on tighter budgets and way less administrative overhead than NASA could dream of having. Commercial rocket systems will almost certainly be a lot cheaper, and could potentially have us back riding rockets to the Space Station by 2015 rather than by the Ares 1 rocket's proposed completion date of 2018 (which leaves us rocketless and dependent on the Russians for less time). They will also, hopefully, be safer than the Shuttle, whose track record inspires little confidence. By axing NASA's budget for manned space missions, the government is implicitly endorsing a more flexible path, one which puts the pressure on small entrepreneurial firms to build rockets for human spaceflight. Let's be clear on one thing, however. NASA's never built their own rockets; they've always depended on commercial aerospace contractors like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Now that the government is openly talking about moving space travel into the commercial realm, what they really mean is that they're handing the baton over to the underdogs -- companies like the aforementioned SpaceX, Blue Origin, or Scaled Composites -- who are flexible, innovative, and able to manufacture rockets without operating on a cost plus basis. This is a major shift from how the agency's been running things for decades: NASA now intends to put its money back into R&D for long-term projects and research, allowing the private sector, for now, to take on the brass-tacks operations of low-Earth orbit and Space Station missions.
How do people feel about this? Well, there's bound to be some congressional opposition, especially with politicians who represent districts with traditionally massive aerospace industry dependence. In these economic times, however, cutting millions out of government spending is more than likely to pass through uncontested. And even NASA, as a whole, supports this sea change. In an interview with the excellent video series, This Week In Space (see above), NASA's deputy administrator Lori Beth Garver points out that, "NASA's been trying to relive Appolo for the last 40 years. We do not have, nor do we hope to, the same kind of political situation that we did at that time that would cause something like a [space] race. Without that, just choosing an arbitrary destination and time doesn't really make sense." Garver is right. NASA's been trying to rally passionate public engagement in recent years the only way it knows how, the only way it's worked in the past: with manned space missions. However, this is a different age. There's definitely still a space race going on, but it's far more diffuse; as China, India, Europe, and the many commercial space enterprises get into the game, we no longer have one common competitor, but dozens. And I don't think it's helpful to think of any of these as "competitors," too; this isn't the Cold War. This is an era of lateral, collective space development, collaboration, an inevitable zeitgeist. It's surprisingly reasonable for NASA to be aware of the milieu of space in 2010, adapt to it, and allow those people into the process that would undoubtedly have beaten them to the punch anyways. We will still go to space. But the way we go will doubtlessly surprise us. Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

One of my many distractions lately is travel planning. After spending several months living in the wilds of Lower Alabama, I'm getting to take a bit of a vacation. Right now, face a 60-minute round-trip commute to get to the nearest bookstore (a marginally acceptable Barnes and Noble). If I'm going to make a longer trip to restock the larder, I might as well go the full Monty and hit the Waterstone's on Piccadilly Circus. So I'm off to Europe for a few weeks at the beginning of April. I've got the rough outline sketched in, and I'm hoping that some of you can help me fill in some of the details before I go. Here's what I'm looking at so far: Fixed Dates:
On the morning of 5 April, I arrive in London. I have a hotel booked in Central London for the following week. I also have a BritRail England pass, which gives me unlimited rail travel through England for that week. On the morning of 12 April, I depart for Frankfurt. I'll be staying with friends there for two nights, and heading on to Paris on the 14th. On the 15th, my wife and children will be arriving in Paris. We're planning to head to Normandy for a couple of days, then meet up with my parents back in Paris, head down to see some of my wife's family in Auvergne, and then get back to Paris on the 20th or 21st. On the 24th, I'm taking the train back to London, and I'll be flying home early on the 25th. The gaps:
Right now, I've only got some tentative plans for the week that I'll be basing out of London. I'd like to make sure I get my money's worth out of the rail pass, and I'm very much open to advice on ways to do that. The last time I was in the UK, I got out to Oxford, Cambridge, Stonehenge, and Down House. Here's what I'm thinking about for this trip, in order of priority: Nottingham. This one's actually a bit of a priority for me. I'm a long-time Warhammer and 40K geek, and I'd like to get to Warhammer World, if only for a few hours. I'm probably going to do this on the 7th, and only for part of the day. York. I'd like to see at least York Minster, the walls, and the Railway Museum. (Yes, I'm also a transport geek. In fact, I have lots of hobbies, and all of them are geeky in one way or another. At the moment, this is a very good thing, because it helps me compensate for the fact that I seem to have somehow wound up making a living in sports and aquatics.) I'm not sure if I'm going to go to Jorvik or not - if anyone's been there, and has a review, please let me know. I'm strongly considering DIG, or at least the Hungate tour. (Again, opinions from those who've done any of those are very welcome.) At the moment, I've tentatively decided to head to York on the 6th. Dover. Dover Castle, in particular, has a lot of appeal, and I'd like to take an hour or two to walk along some of the paths that head toward the White Cliffs. Canterbury. I've wanted to see the place since I read Canterbury Tales in high school, but somehow didn't get around to it last trip. I might stop there the same day I go to Dover. Those are the places I've got the strongest feelings about, at least for the moment. I'm considering a number of others - Bath, Salisbury, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Colchester - but haven't settled on any of them, or even tried to sort out which I want to get to most yet. I also wouldn't mind getting back to Oxford or Down House, but I don't know that I want to sacrifice going someplace new to get back to either of those. London. This will be my third time in London. Last time, Matt Brown (who was then working at Nature Network, and is now at the Londonist) took us on a couple of fantastic walking tours that covered a good bit of the scientific heritage of the city. But, London being London, there are still a lot of places I haven't seen yet, and quite a few that I have, but want to see again. Suggestions here would be good - I've been to most of the major sights already at least once, but I'm open to any sort of suggestions here. About the only thing on my "I'm definitely not skipping out on again" list is Kew Gardens. Everything else is open. Germany. I really haven't done much planning on this one. One of my local hosts was going to ask for advice on another blog. I'll link that when it goes up. France. My family is doing most of the planning for this part of the trip. Since they're being nice enough to let me go off and explore on my own for 10 days, I'm not going to argue with them much. Still, suggestions, particularly for Paris, would be appreciated. Read the comments on this post...

While I was on blogcation, I got an email from the watchdog group Stinky Journalism, complaining that prominent science author and professor Jared Diamond (Collapse, Guns, Germs and Steel) was in the hot seat again. (You may remember that Stinky Journalism broke the story about the lawsuit against Diamond arising from his New Yorker piece on tribal violence in New Guinea; I blogged about the fallout of the controversy here and here.) Really? I thought; what has Diamond supposedly done this time? Here's the scoop from Stinky Journalism: [In] the February 18 issue of the journal Nature . . . Pulitzer-winning scientist Jared Diamond reviews a book of essays called Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. The review, "Two views of collapse," is largely negative. What Diamond doesn't disclose to the readers of the review, however, is that Questioning Collapse is not just a book about "collapse"... It's a book about his bestselling book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Even more, it is a book of essays directly criticizing and critiquing Diamond's own work and writings. . . . This may not be the only time the subject of a critical work has reviewed the book that critiques them. But, by failing to disclose that Questioning Collapse is a critique of his own research, Diamond misleads readers into viewing his book review as something it is not--the dispassionate opinion of an outside observer. Wait. . . that's the big scoop? Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

It's rare that I encounter a bit of nonsense that allows me to deploy two of my favorite rhetorical devices. First, it lets me pull out one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, in which the immortal line, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" was first uttered. Second, it lets me repeat once again yet another variation of Inigo Montoya's immortal words. It's a two-fer! Not surprisingly, it's courtesy of the anti-vaccine crank blog we've all come to know and love (well, I love it because it has provided me such a target-rich environment for taking on quackery and woo, although I hate it because, well, it promotes anti-vaccine quackery and woo). Yes, we're talkin' Age of Autism, and this time it's Katie Wright crying repression and censorship in a little screed she called Sebelius Asks Media to Censor Autism Debate. "Censor." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. I'll show you why. First, let's look at what provoked Wright's little bit of willful misinterpretation: There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for a variety of problems, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. We (the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services) have reached out to media outlets to try to get them not to give the views of these people equal weight in their reporting. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

It's rare that I encounter a bit of nonsense that allows me to deploy two of my favorite rhetorical devices. First, it lets me pull out one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, in which the immortal line, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" was first uttered. Second, it lets me repeat once again yet another variation of Inigo Montoya's immortal words. It's a two-fer! Not surprisingly, it's courtesy of the anti-vaccine crank blog we've all come to know and love (well, I love it because it has provided me such a target-rich environment for taking on quackery and woo, although I hate it because, well, it promotes anti-vaccine quackery and woo). Yes, we're talkin' Age of Autism, and this time it's Katie Wright crying repression and censorship in a little screed she called Sebelius Asks Media to Censor Autism Debate. "Censor." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. I'll show you why. First, let's look at what provoked Wright's little bit of willful misinterpretation: There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for a variety of problems, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. We (the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services) have reached out to media outlets to try to get them not to give the views of these people equal weight in their reporting. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination

How long ago was the time of Emperor Augustus? Most educated people, including professional historians and archaeologists, will reply "about 2000 years" if you ask them. But a considerable number of amateur dendrochronologists say "about 1800 years". And because of an unfortunate peculiarity in how professional dendrochronologists work, it is very hard to convince these dissident amateurs that they are wrong. Because they're actually thinking straight given the data available to them. If you look at published dendro curves for the transalpine provinces of the Empire, you find that they contain two main blocks of information covering the past 2500 years or so. There's one that extends solidly from today and back to about AD 400, consisting of many tightly interlinked samples. And then there's a Roman-era block that is also quite solid internally. But between the two blocks is a period of about 200 years when there are very few samples. It appears to be hard to find preserved timber that grew in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD. There are enough samples to satisfy professionals that they actually have the whole 2000 years covered, but the sample overlaps for the gap between the blocks are few and rather weak. Professional dendrochronologists explain this lack of finds by reference to the cessation of Roman building projects and to deforestation during the Imperial centuries. According to the accepted model, the reason that there are so few samples covering the gap between the blocks is that few trees were of a suitable age for construction timber during that time and even fewer were used to build anything that has been preserved. Trees that fell into bogs and rivers at the time would have too few rings to be of much use to dendrochronology. Dissident amateurs instead think that the Roman block and the recent block have been joined incorrectly, and that there shouldn't be any gap at all between them in the diagrams. According to them, the professionals have been fooled by the early historians Dionysius Exiguus and Beda Venerabilis into thinking that the Western Empire fell 1600 years ago, using this as an axiom in their work with the dendro curves, when in fact it happened only 1400 years ago. A common idea about why this should be so is that the Church of Rome added a couple of centuries to its age to gain legitimacy: in other words, a conspiracy of early historians. I mentioned published dendro curves. The rub here is that most dendro data are never published. They are kept as in-house secrets in dendro labs in order for these to be able to sell their services to archaeologists. So when the amateurs challenge the professionals' opinion, all the latter can reply is "We know we're right but we can't show you how we know". And that is of course an unscientific approach to the issue. The amateurs rarely get access to 1st Millennium wood samples, and basically have to work with the past 1000 years in their own studies. And so they cultivate a dissident opinion that could swiftly be laid to rest -- or be accepted as fact -- if wood samples and measurement databases were only made public. My guess, though, is that any Roman archaeologist could solve the controversy quite easily, perhaps even using published radiocarbon dates. All you need are a couple of well-sourced dates for contexts known to be from about the time of the first emperors, such as Pompeii. (But if you know that a context is from that time, then you have very little reason to pay for radiocarbon dating.) Because although the calibration curve for radiocarbon depends on dendrochronology, several of the available datasets are not from European wood samples. And there is of course no inherent bias about where on the diagram the fall of Rome should be in North American dendrochronology, for instance. [More blog entries about dendrochronology, archaeology, history, roman; dendrokronologi, historia, arkeologi, romersk.] Read the comments on this post... Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week: Collective Imagination