Methodological Stuff:

1. 1. Introduction
2. 2: Patterns
3. 3: Patterns, Objectivity and Truth
4. 4: Patterns and Processes

The Pattern Library:

Having examined PBS's Autism Now in an earlier posting and noting its overall negativity, I'd like to turn to a documentary on autism that I can recommend: Todd Drezner's Loving Lampposts.

The PBS series on autism, Autism Now, has aired all of its segments now. The extended transcripts of interviews are available online, as well.

You might think that those who are skeptical (or downright intransigent) on a CO2 basis for global warming are bigger wasters of energy or greater polluters than those who accept climate science.

Not so.   Skeptics are just as green.   Their reasons may simply be different.

If you Google calculating the date of Easter, you are likely to get any number of top responses from SEO-friendly content farms that go something like "Easter is the first Sunday after the first full Moon following the vernal equinox", which is great for trivia but the how of that is great Easter science.

ADVANCELL has initiated a phase IIb clinical study of the Company's ATH008, for the treatment of the palmar-plantar erythrodysesthesia syndrome, also known as hand-foot syndrome, a painful side-effect of certain chemotherapies such as capecitabine and fluoropyrimidines. No treatment currently exists for this condition. ADVANCELL expects to launch the product on the market by the end of 2015 or beginning of 2016. 

Based on last week's indictment of vaccine-autism researcher Dr. Poul Thorsen for money laundering and mail fraud, the Coalition for Mercury-free Drugs (CoMeD), a Maryland-based non-profit organization, is calling for further investigation. 

Dear earnest wingnut,

Thank you for sending me a copy of your 20-page monograph containing your brilliant new paradigm which The Physics Establishment are seeking to squelch,  Having been squashed at times by the T.P.E., I can heartily sympathize.

I am writing back to you because you don't seem as crazy or scary as most.  Also, your paper had good spelling and grammer.  Your elementary English teacher told the truth-- spelling matters.  So I read the thing.  And by 'read' I mean I fully read the first page and the conclusion, but sort of skimmed the middle.  It'll have to do.

Note: updated list of links at the bottom.

(Older Note: Bet on this signal! See at the bottom of the article! Odds are two to one in your favour now!)

(Older note: Update at the bottom.)

It seems I am late on this one -an internal note by the Atlas collaboration seems to contain the discovery of a bump in the diphoton mass distribution from data collected in 2010 and 2011. They find a signal that seems consistent, in mass and resolution, with what one would expect from a Higgs decay, if the Higgs were sitting at 115 GeV, the value at which LEP II found some hint (a 1.7 standard deviation signal) before being shut down in 2001.

Amira Pharmaceuticals, Inc. announced today that AM152, the company's lead LPA1 antagonist, has been granted an orphan drug designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Commonly referred to as IPF,  
idiopathic pulmonary fibrosisis scarring or thickening of the lungs without a known cause.   This fibrotic disease affects the lungs of patients and their ability to breathe. 

No one knows what causes pulmonary fibrosis or why some people get it but the condition is believed to result from an inflammatory response to an unknown substance. "Idiopathic" means no cause can be found.