Should we be complete morons and force our 6 year old children, by state law, to become gun nuts?

Here’s one view:

Here’s another view (trigger warning):

Ben Goldacre, the Bad Science column writer and at present, Wellcome research fellow in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has a book coming out soon (Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients). I’ve not seen it yet, but when I do I’ll get you a review as soon as I can. Mean time, he’s written a nice piece for the New York Times.

Bottom line: All that icky stuff you hear, think, assume, guess, wonder about regarding the medical industry, especially Big Pharma? Well, a lot of it is true. The NYT piece is especially focused on the file drawer effect. The is where studies that show result B are put quietly in the file drawer, while studies that show the result A (the one you were hoping for) are published and publicized. In some areas of science there are actually rules that stop this from happening (or slow it down, anyway) but in pharmaceutical research (and psychology, I’ve heard) it probably happens a lot

If I toss a coin, but hide the result every time it comes up tails, it looks as if I always throw heads. You wouldn’t tolerate that if we were choosing who should go first in a game of pocket billiards, but in medicine, it’s accepted as the norm. In the worst case, we can be misled into believing that ineffective treatments are worth using; more commonly we are misled about the relative merits of competing treatments, exposing patients to inferior ones.

Ben will probably be around quite a bit promoting his book so expect podcasts and stuff.

Birdchasers: An educational documentary ideal for the Discoverie Channel.

Two teams of birdwatchers spend the entire birding season (from June 1st through June 22nd) in sometimes friendly, sometimes not so friendly competition in a desperate and dangerous search for dangerous and disparate birds. Team A is from Cornell University Bird Research Center, and their main objective is to collect good scientific data and a few nice pictures. Team B consists of Corey Finger and Mike Bergin, from the Internet Blog 10,000 Birds. The bloggers, with the nickname “The Dominators,” are mainly after the photographs, but also intend to collect some scientific data.

Team A, led by Dr. John W. Fitzpatrick, has a bird radar search vehicle, an Imax Movie Van, and several binocular-wielding bird counting graduate students. Mike and Corey have a 1998 Subaru Forester, some old binoculars, and one really good lens for their Pentax K-1000 camera. Throughout the season, Mike and Corey consistently “get the shot” despite all odds against them, while the well funded and elaborately equipped Cornell team, less mobile and more cumbersome, is often left lagging behind. Yet, when push comes to shove the two teams need to rely on each other, and have more than a few opportunities to save each other’s beaks. At the end of the season, it turns out that all they really want is a big group hug.

Here’s a clip of the renegade Dominators of Storm Chasers to provide a sense of how the 10,000 Birds Blogger team would approach their birding:

And here is a clip of the academic meteorology team of Storm Chasers to provide a sense of how the Cornell Ornithology team would approach their birding:

So, what do you think, should we crowdfund this? Or won’t it fly? As it were….

TRIGGER WARNING: Rape, molestation, physical attack, misogyny, abuse. Followed by one billion angry women kicking the patriarchy in the ass. You have been warned.
Continue reading One Billion Rising →

Glaciologist Jason Box describes a post-warming world that you won’t even be able to recognize.