It's amazing what you can find if you have a bit of imagination, and access to somebody's personal e-mail account. Careful scrutiny of my mails, for example, could reveal many interesting things; that I cycle to work every day, that I am Belle de Jour, and that my Grandfather made up Antarctica for a bet. Much like, say, the Bible, or a tabloid headline ending in a question-mark, given a suitably ambiguous piece of text you can read from it pretty much whatever you like.

This is a guest post by British doctor DeeTee. See more by DeeTee here.

The Myspace picture albums seem to capture a wonderful moment in time. The scene is idyllic. Sun-kissed palm trees are set against an azure Caribbean sky, and a happy couple delight in their holiday trip to the Florida Keys. Elsewhere, we can see photos of them with their children, a wholesome, all-American family enjoying everything life has to offer and dreaming of good times yet to come. But despite the glowing vitality that is projected in the photos, things are not what they seem. The woman you see is Karri Stokely, a 43 year old who was diagnosed with HIV infection when she was 29 years old. She is keen to share her story, and does so on several other websites and blogs. It should be a story of courage and hope, but I fear it will not turn out that way. For Karri has decided to completely ignore medical advice and forgo her HIV medication.

I want to take you on a journey through time and space. Specifically, I want to take you along the long and convoluted trail of citations that leads from David Bellamy's surprising 2005 assertion, in a letter to New Scientist, that the vast majority of glaciers under observation were in fact increasing in size; and the 1988 paper from which this "fact" was ultimately taken. It's a fascinating story, that I think acts as a kind of exemplar for everything that can go wrong in using sources on the internet (HT: Deltoid).

Recently, I've heard the same, odd message from a number of different, seemingly unrelated people. Essentially it goes like this "America is being held to ransom by crazy foreigners over oil. In order to solve the problem, we should drill into our own huge reserves, and become self-sufficient so we don't have to import any from those capitalist pigs at OPEC. Naturally then oil prices would tumble, fuel would be cheap. We wouldn't be dependent on those evil foreign-types." There's even a petition up about it at
http://www.americansolutions.com/. So I thought I'd take a look at this meme.