Skeptically Speaking’s 200th show is coming up soon! But first, there is show #199. But before I mention show #199, I want to remind you of show #198, because I was in it:

#198 Nature’s Compass and New Caledonian Crows

This week, we’re looking at some of the amazing abilities exhibited by our animal cousins. We’ll speak to James Gould, co-author of Nature’s Compass: The Mystery of Animal Navigation, about the varying strategies animals use to find their way across all kinds of distances. And biological anthropologist Greg Laden discusses new research on the surprising reasoning abilities of some extremely intelligent crows.

I reviewed Nature’s Compass here, by the way.

Listen or Download Here

#199 Fate of The Species

This week, we’re looking at the ways that people are changing the planet, and the consequences for all of us if we don’t start doing it responsibly. We’re joined by Fred Guterl, Executive Editor at Scientific American, to discuss his book The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It. From climate change to superbugs, we’ll talk about the ways humanity could take itself out, and how (or if) we can stop it before it’s too late. And we’ll talk to John Cook, creator of Skeptical Science, about the political arguments over climate change.

Listen or download here

I wasn’t living in Boston yet; Albany, instead. But at the time I was actually travelling by car out to California, and was in Texas when this particular storm caught up with me. Texas got iced over, the Rio Grande froze, the citrus crop was destroyed and I spent two nights in Big Spring. Two months later there were still semi’s littering the roadside on Route 40 and elsewhere. This storm was the end of coastal residential development in New England. Between this storm and a few bad coastal storms that came over the next few years, thousands of homes were destroyed without being rebuilt, because the coast had already been rebuilt.

Now, I have a warning for your climate science denialists: Don’t tell me that “global warming isn’t real because 1978!!!” I’m not even going to explain why that is stupid. Just #STFU.

Anyway, here’s a blast from the past for you:

Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute joins Scienceblogs.com, and here is his introductory post!

Welcome to the first post in my new National Geographic ScienceBlogs column “Significant Figures.” I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you on a wide range of environmental science-related issues, data, and people, and to a productive and constructive interaction….

If you’ve hear me mention something about “something cool about to happen on the blogs” lately, this is it. Welcome Peter!

As you know, the permafrost is melting due to global warming, and this is releasing greenhouse gasses which cause global warming. What you may not know is that we could not have had this conversation even a century ago because science has only recently recognized permafrost (it was not clearly defined and known of in the early 20th century). John McKay, an expert on hairy elephants and related things, has written up a description of what may be the first scientific description of permafrost, from a century or more prior to it’s incorporation into the scientific conversation as a reasonably well understood concept, by a botanist working a bit out of his field of expertise in 1806. Check out: An Early Description of Permafrost at Mammoth Tales.

In a recent Minnesota Atheists newsletter, oft-times president and general all round Atheist Leader August Berkshire wrote about the idea of Humanists of Minnesota and Minnesota Atheists combining. He notes that this may have been impossible in the pas when the philosophies of the two groups may have been quite different, but that now the philosophies are pretty much the same.

I have to say that I agree that as far as I can tell, Minnesota Atheists members and Humanists of Minnesota don’t seem to be at odds. I’ve seen members of the two groups in the same place many times and fights, or even mild arguments, never break out. Of course, this is Minnesota, so I may be missing something. Perhaps there are withering stern looks that I’m mising. but I don’t think so.

I also agree, and this is almost an aside with this observation by August:

“In my almost 30 years of atheist activism, it seems to me that virtually every schism, split, or separation in the freethought movement was based on personalities, ego, desire for power, or quibbles about a name – not on atheist/humanist philosophy. Can we rise above our differences for the greater good of coming together under the banner of a unified atheist and secular humanist organization? Should we? Or are there rational obstacles that are just too great to overcome?”

There seems to be nothing to stop Minnesota Atheists and Humanists of Minnesota from melding. They can call themselves MASH. Minnesota Atheists and Humanists of Minnesota.

But there is a down side that I want to point out because I think it is important. Numbers. Right now there are these two major groups and one or to other Minnesota based secular groups other than CASH. That is not very many different groups.

This problem occurred to me a few years ago when I was strolling among the UMN student group tables during “put your student groups out on tables” day on the Saint Paul campus. There as a table for each of at least 15 different clearly religious groups and probably a half dozen or more groups that were not explicitly religious but that were in fact religious just under the surface. And the tables out that day represented about a third, or less, of the actual groups out there. And then there was CASH, the one, single, lonely secular student group on campus. CASH has a couple of dozen members. If those members were distributed among six explicitly secular groups, they would have had six tables at that event.

More recently I attended the Anoka county Youth Gay Pride day fest, held on the banks of the Mississippi a few blocks down the street from my house. There were about 10 groups represented there that had to do with gay youth, and at least half of them were explicitly religious (i.e, they were churches). Had there been a table for Minnesota Atheists that would have been just one explicitly secular group. If there were five or six explicitly secular organization involved in human rights and social justice in Minnesota, there could have been a few of them at that event, giving the churches a run for the money.

Ditto for the May Day parade. Ditto for Pride Fest. Ditto for whatever-whatever. You get the point.

Perhaps instead of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists of Minnesota, merging, maybe they should each undergo mitosis!

OK, no one is going to go for that, but there are ways we can both combine and make ourselves larger. The two organizations can form the Minnesota Secular Coalition and also the Committee for Secular Approaches for Social Justice (CSASJ) and contribute a few people to each one to help run them. These organizations would provide a vehicle for outreach to communities that we are currently not reaching but that are reachable. Then, once or twice or even three times a years, at the right moments, we can put out a bit of extra effort and all of us can staff tables at some event or another.

And, then, instead of having a dozen churches and poor little us at one table, we can have a dozen churches and a half dozen us. Give them a run for the money I say!

In the mean time, we could perhaps consider a combined membership deal. For a bit extra, you can expand you membership in one group to include the other group(s) at the same time.

We can take a page out of the books of nature. A whole chapter, perhaps. The chapter on “looking bigger.” And sometimes, a little scary might be good too.

Updated with some corrections.

Assuming you are an IT animal.

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….