Random Thoughts

Progressives love to get celebrity endorsements for their beliefs, and for good reason; while the right is stuck with Clint Eastwood wandering around unintelligibly - and he disagrees with about half their platform - the other side's famous true believers are all thin and pretty and stay on message. No independent thinking like Dirty Harry and if you have a crackpot, anti-science belief, some left-wing celebrity does too. Courtesy of Katie Couric, we get Sheryl Crow doing for cell phones what Jenny McCarthy did for autism; namely, working people dumb enough to watch Katie Couric into a frenzy…

I am a lot more skeptical than most people who call themselves Skeptics; I am skeptical about more than Bigfoot and religion, I am even skeptical that (a) all Democratic politicians are pro-science while Republicans are not and (b) either of their voters are genetically super smart just by filling out a voter registration form. Skeptics can't violate those pet positions or a few others - James Randi learned that when he dared to ask if numerical models about global warming were accurate. There's skepticism, and then there is people not buying tickets to your conference if you ask the wrong…

There are few things as irritating as scientists taking complex topics and reducing them to sound bites that are invariably wrong.  They pick up the wrong data, manipulate it with a bit of correlation and suddenly they're off and running on a new study which promises to be as ridiculous as the last. Currently there is one entitled "The role of Genes in Political Behavior", that would have people rolling in the aisles if it weren't so pathetic. How do things get so goofy?  Apparently it's that the people practicing "social science" can't be bothered to do the hard work necessary to…

On-Cor Frozen Foods of Geneva, Illinois has the funniest product recall you will read today. Now, product recalls are not generally humorous. As Ian Froeb at Riverfront Times rightly notes, they are usually about serious stuff like listeria, E. coli, salmonella - and that is just in the organic food section.  On-cor instead is, the USDA states,  recalling 605 pounds of frozen boneless rib-shaped patties with barbecue sauce because they may have been mispackaged and labeled as Salisbury steak. Link and credit: USDA Food Safety Inspection Service That's food identity theft…

Physician John Smallberries said to me, “Twenty years ago, I didn’t even know what the word autism meant. It was rare.” But since then something has shifted.  Whether it was music, vaccines, GMOs, or some combination of those, an astounding 1 in 110 children are now diagnosed as being 'on the spectrum', with boys 4 to 5 times likely to be diagnosed.   What could be damaging the health and well-being of so many of our children?  Dan Hoover, PhD, professor emeritus from Folsom University, has an idea. In March, 2012, Hoover gave a talk in Holland about the physiological,…

Do plants have muscles?  Strictly speaking, no, but time-lapse photography shows that they can be quite thuggish in behaviour. Following last year’s BBC TV series on Blooming Botany and writing five articles about it, (1A) (1B) (2) (3A) and (3B), yesterday (21st August 2012) I at last got round to visiting the Oxford Botanic Garden, armed with camera. Some of the beds there are arranged according to their botanical families, others are (it seems) mainly for beauty, but in all of them each plant is put in with an informative label.  However, the plants have ideas of their own, and…

This paper seeks to address hypermasculinity and the settled heteronormative value system embodied in public-policy actors, primarily the White-centered hegemonic masculinity that has created negative performative aspects of cultural identity constructions in this multicultural and globalized era. Basically I want to address the video game Mass Effect 3 and its scripting of heteronormativity, including heteronormative biases and hermeneutic phenomenology and I will use Butler's performativity and Foucault's concept of power/discourse to show how hegemonically masculine…

The Olympics are coming to a close and now the British get to reflect on what, if anything, has changed in the world due to a gaming event designed to make the world a smaller and better place. The games opened with some things that are quintessentially British; a weird homage to the National Health Service (and why not?  After all, what have Oxford or Cambridge ever did for the world?) was just one of the jumbled, confusing things "Trainspotting" creative director Danny Boyle gave us. What to make of it?  Journalists were desperate to provide some new, deeper context. The show was…

Kimberly Gerry-Tucker's memoir is not just another Asperger's autobiography; it is much more than that. From rich recollections of a childhood where things were often more real than people, where words often failed to come out, where one call almost feel the textures Kim paints with her words to the story of a how a family copes with the diagnosis, illness, and subsequent death of the husband and father from ALS, Under the Banana Moon is a window into Kim's world and her unique way of seeing and experiencing it. Diagnosed as an adult with Asperger's at the same time her son received…

As the mother to three wonderful kids on the spectrum, I am given a unique opportunity to watch how each handles his and her challenges differently, and even better, how they come together as a triad to work out how the world works and ways to navigate an increasingly more complex world where social skills are vital to getting ahead and where deficits in language can cause huge misunderstandings. Listening to my girls chat with each other is often a delight--the things I learn about how they process information really is priceless. Lily works hard to decode speech and the subtext, and will…