Dr. Paul Offit is the Hillary Clinton of the autism world. Or is he? It seems really unfair that a well-respected pediatrician and infectious disease expert who has devoted his career to saving lives is the recipient of the vitriol that places like Age of Autism and people like its editors and followers heap on him, all because he has the courage to stand up to their intimidating tactics and speak out honestly about vaccines. He's one of the first to admit that vaccines have caused damage; he writes openly and honestly about the live polio vaccine causing polio, about Cutter laboratories. 

I enjoyed a drink one time with a fellow who was, even for science blogging, left of left.    I won't name names because it doesn't matter, he is a talented writer and a good guy but I always feel like he loves politics more than science and his persistent belief that Republicans/conservatives/right wing neo-cons/Nazis/(insert your favorite term here) are anti-science and progressives are not seemed rather odd.   But I have written about the Democratic War On Science many times.

The comments thread for an article that I wrote a couple of weeks ago has suddenly been swamped by the replies of a young-earth creationist. Perhaps I should have expected it, with an article about hoaxed fossils. He presents an orgy of anecdotes that he claims (I assume it's a he) debunks my evolutionist agenda.

A week ago a meeting was held in Chamonix to discuss in detail the schedule for the near future of the Large Hadron Collider, and to take a decision on the schedule, in particular for 2012.

Yesterday morning I peeked., just a small peek, at Age of Autism, and saw this: 

"Call it entropy [..] nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.” -- Von Neumann to Shannon.

Have a look at below picture. You see a binary pattern. This pattern is formed by a hexagonal pattern of empty (yellow) spots and blue disks. The pattern repeats. If you carefully inspection the figure, you will discover that the repeating unit consists of 31 spots (with 15 of these empty, and 16 occupied). Let's consider a simple question: How many bits do you need to fully specify the image displayed?

Cognitive enhancement is not about future generations playing video games via neural implants and thought interfaces. Presently, it is about a large fraction of the worlds scientist shortening their lives (speak about lifespan enhancement) via caffeine, nicotine, and sugar intake that leads to diabetes and cardio vascular illnesses via hypertension with high blood pressure and heart troubles, teeth grinding, frequent urination, and so on. Coffee is a must at all conferences. No brew, no chance of surviving afternoon talks in a fully conscious state.

Fantasy baseball as fans understand it today began in the 1980s but actual fantasy baseball, beyond kids trading baseball cards, began 50 years ago.   Hal Rickman, an accountant in New York City, started finalizing  work on something he had begun when he was much younger.   It was Strat-O-Matic Baseball.

Rickman told USA Today's Mike James that as a young boy he rolled dice 5,000 times to make a table of probabilities and looked at baseball statistics in the newspaper to match probability to performance and see what would happen.   In 1961 he started producing the game and later the year Roger Maris would eclipse the ghost of Babe Ruth for the single season home run record.

In the 'gay sex is bad unless it's women' cultural milieu, a survey by a University of Texas at Austin psychologist determined that men are more than twice as likely to continue dating a girlfriend who has cheated on them with another woman than if she cheated with another man.

The survey used 700 college students so calibrate accordingly - men may not like their girlfriends sleeping with another guy but a girlfriend sleeping with another girl is a porn movie.