My activity as a chessplayer has seen a steady decline in the past three years, due to overwhelming work obligations. To play in chess tournaments at a decent level, you not only need to be physically fit and well trained for the occasion, but also have your mind free from other thoughts. Alas, I have been failing miserably in the second and third of the above requirements. So I have essentially retired from competitive chess, and my only connection to the chess world is through the occasional 5-minute blitz game over the internet.

The activist army in the war on common pesticides like glyphosate (and adjacently GMOs, they don't know enough science to know they are different) is having a Gettysburg moment.(1) They are out of options so they are making a desperate charge but they are in an open field a long way off and opposing them on the other side is every legitimate science and regulatory body in the world.

If scientists and journalists want the politicization of science to stop, they have to be part of the solution, even if a guy they didn't vote for is in power. But now that he is, all the talk about "depoliticizing science" has been exposed as the farce that we always knew it was.

Thor: Ragnarok is the latest Marvel movie (out in Australia today) that sees Australian Chris Hemsworth back as Thor, but he’s not on friendly home turf.

Instead he finds himself imprisoned on the opposite side of the universe from his beloved Asgard, and out of his depth in a gladiatorial contest with the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

But Hulk isn’t his only problem. Ragnarok (the end of his homeland of Asgard) is looming and Thor has new villains to deal with, including the warlike Hela, played by Australian Cate Blanchett.

There is a different kind of 1 percent, and it isn't people who can afford to buy organic food. It's Americans who carry a handgun on a daily basis. 

It's not a surprise, given American history and horrific events like a psychopath in Las Vegas wounding or killing 500 people while police waited 70 minutes to attack him. A nearby hotel guest with a gun could have ended that more quickly. 

Short summary: A scrap book of nonsense. Theologically, morally, astronomically and politically abysmal. The author would not be accepted for admission to a course on astronomy at a university, never mind actually pass such a course. And it’s a similar position for theology. Most of the book, 75%, is not even written by him but just copy / pasted from the internet. It is appalling to think that this book reached the #1 position for astronomy books in Kindle on Amazon, and #5 for paperback. I’ve asked them to take it down for breach of copyright.

Yesterday, October 20, was the international day of Statistics. I took inspiration from it to select a clip from chapter 7 of my book "Anomaly! Collider physics and the quest for new phenomena at Fermilab" which attempts to explain how physicists use the concept of statistical significance to give a quantitative meaning to their measurements of new effects. I hope you will enjoy it....

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In 2017 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) published a report that it developed for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to evaluate the evidence that chemicals are capable of causing health effects at low-doses. 

There are reasons to get an HPV vaccine - it literally prevents cancer - but consumer marketing is misstating absolute and relative risk when it comes to throat cancer. A preventive vaccine against HPV types, 6, 11, 16, and 18 has been in widespread use for a decade, and a version that also protects against five other HPV types was FDA-approved in 2014. Those vaccines won't clear existing HPV infections.

Christopher Portier, Ph.D., recently gave a deposition in liability litigation hearings related to cases filed by environmental lawyers against Monsanto’s Roundup. If you are not aware, Dr. Portier is external special adviser to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) working group that prepared the Group 2A classification (“Probably carcinogenic to humans”) for glyphosate, the key component of Roundup.