Random Thoughts

Wakefield and the vaccine wars suck up the air. So much attention on one man. On hammering away at each other over whether Wakefield's the saint or Deer. Or who's the greatest sinner. There can be little doubt regarding Wakefield; the GMC ruling and revocation of his medical license last year clearly indicates that Wakefield acted dishonestly and unethically. I know, if you're a Waker's fan you believe it's all a governmental/industrial plot to silence the maverick doctor willing to stand up to vaccine companies, except you keep backtracking and insisting now it wasn't about autism and it…

A question occurred to me the other day, which was to consider how science might have developed differently had humans possessed different senses.  As an example, humans are significantly visual, but it is interesting to consider how things might be if we lacked vision. While it would have obviously affected our lifestyles and evolutionary path, it is interesting to speculate on how our progress through scientific discovery might have also been affected.  In the first place, we might consider the role vision (or any other sense) played in our intellectual development.  If we…

On Tuesday, September 11th, 2012, I will make the attacks of 2001 a political issue.  For almost 10 years, these attacks have been used by Republicans as a political issue, justifying everything from conspicuous consumption to the Two War Economy of stopping (inflaming) Global Terrorism.  Off the top of my head, I can think of politicians such as Sarah Palin, George Bush, Rudy Giulliani, talk show hosts such as Glen Beck, and more recently a moral spate between local "Progressive" Democrats, "Independent" Democrats, and some of the handful of local NY Republicans over the Park West…

Seems to be a time for retrospectives! I couldn't resist the chance to muse on the history of Squid A Day . . . I started posting sixteen months ago, on September 1st, 2009, having been brought to the site by a writing contest for graduate students. I didn't win the grand prize, but I did get a nifty little flip video camera . . .. . . which I used a year later to make a video for an application to a musuem gig which I also didn't win. However, I am told the movie is quite entertaining. Despite spending my time on silly videos when I should have been writing my thesis, I somehow managed to…

The sudden switch from one to another provider of visit statistics last September prevents an accurate assessment of how this blog fared in 2010. However I can collect some information from some in-site tools. The pages of this blog have received a total of 716,886 hits in 2010, or an average of 1964 daily hits. The best month was July, which scored by itself about 140,000 hits, largely although not exclusively thanks to a highly linked, controversial post. I wrote a total of 207 posts last year, or four per week, or one every 1.76 days. This is a lower average rate than that of 2009 (one…

I am 21% of awesome.  But the rest, well, as with last year, I thought I'd let everyone know what you hated. My two worst columns from last year, the only ones to get under 400 visitors, were: 1) AGU Meetup? (San Fran, Dec 13-17), at 154 visits.2) Dating Advice or disaster in the making?, an anemic 257 visits. Yeah, I can see it. Neither calls to me. The first is just reaching to regular readers who might be in San Francisco, the second is a reblog of someone else's bad dating advice. Most notably, both were blog posts rather than articles. Blogs here always get less traffic. It is…

The Political and Financial Leaders of today have ransomed our future.  No one is innocent.  People of the earth you have all been poisoned.  The only antidote is a drastic program of retraining, retooling, and reform.  Short of this, a Jeffersonian call to revolution is the only alternative, and one which I do not relish.  Our debt per capita is more than most people's retirement accounts.  A quick reading of history will show that the French had the same problem before their problems started a few hundred years ago.  As they say, "the only war the french…

Apparently, the New Zealand Air Force just released a bunch of documents pertaining to UFO investigations over the past 50  years. They include a well-known sighting from 1978 in which a cargo plane said it was being followed by strange lights - and was backed up by radar images from air traffic controllers. However, an Air Force report at the time explained it away as lights from Japanese squid boats reflecting off clouds. If you ask kiwi UFO aficionado Jeff Stone, this explanation is completely bogus. "A squid boat doing 700 miles an hour and turned up on radar?" But if you ask kiwi…

I was a soldering fiend.  Rosin and tin melted under the heat of my mighty, err, tip.  Yes, I finally got the chance to start soldering some of the Calliope boards-- plus fix the broken down strum switch on my Guitar Hero guitar, edit two podcasts, and finally watch "How to Train Your Dragon". The reason for this burst of useful activity?  My internet connection was down for two days.  Because of those two days, I think I surged two weeks ahead in my Calliope build schedule. So, the Internet: great place, but sometimes even more awesome when it's turned off.AlexLaunching…

What do you get when you cross Science 2.0, the cultural buzzterm that really took off in 2010 (and brought with it a whole host of colloquial meanings veering into 'web 2.0-ish, it means whatever you want it to mean' jargon) with a western world Christmas season? You get an excuse to do a compilation of science articles, that's what. So once again this year I have compiled topical articles from this year and seasons past. First, you need to think about gifts because, as we learned in that important holiday work "A Johnny Bravo Christmas", Christmas is about free stuff.    If you're…