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The Politics Of Denormalization: Public Smoking Bans Aren't Evidence-Based

The Politics Of Denormalization: Public Smoking Bans Aren't Evidence-Based

Jul 27 2013 | comment(s)

Over the last few years, you may have noticed more "no smoking" signs have cropped up on parks and beaches. They're part of a larger trend banning smoking at outside, public areas. In fact, smoking has been banned in 843 parks and more than 150 beaches in the last two decades.

In California, where a law was passed banning smoking in bars and restaurants without a vote, they are now trying to can smoking on outdoor patios of bars and restaurants. And in cars. And in private homes.

Public health officials have long argued the bans are meant to eliminate dangers from secondhand, or "sidestream smoke," reduce the environmental impact of cigarette butts and to keep young, impressionable children from picking up on bad habits. Makes sense, right?
Do Incentives Lead To Loss Of Trust?

Do Incentives Lead To Loss Of Trust?

Jul 27 2013 | comment(s)

80 percent of Americans don't trust big banks and almost two-thirds think that corporate corruption is widespread. 

This loss of trust is costly. Though it is said that market competition is an efficient substitute for trustworthiness and integrity, economists have claimed for years that it is expensive and wasteful to monitor and regulate a system when trust is lost. 
Chipotle Fake Tweet-Hacking Itself Is The Next Big Thing In Marketing

Chipotle Fake Tweet-Hacking Itself Is The Next Big Thing In Marketing

Jul 27 2013 | comment(s)

The American media loves hackers - well, sometimes. Julian Assange releasing dirt on the Bush administration - yayyyyyy - but then Edward Snowden releasing dirt on the Obama administration was a big no-no. The media were suddenly to the right of Richard Nixon when it came to national security when President Obama looked bad.
Authentic Origins - All The Glamour And None Of The Deception Of Organic

Authentic Origins - All The Glamour And None Of The Deception Of Organic

Jul 26 2013 | comment(s)

Are you a lemon cowboy?  

You might soon be. While savvy consumers are spending less on food with organic labels (though the market is growing, due to un-savvy  consumers) and no one believes in 'natural' claims any more, "authentic origins" is just vague and healthy-sounding enough to resonate in marketing campaigns. It will surely be the cliché of 2013 in food circles.

Wyoming-based Dust Cutter Beverage Co. sells all-natural, Western-style lemonades - I don't know what western style is and it doesn't matter because it has "authentic origins". The company's founder, Eric Green, saw his grandparents, who owned the Warm Springs Ranch in Jackson Hole, give lemonade-and-whiskey "Dust Cutters" to guests coming off the trails of the dude ranch.
How Many Crickets Do You Want In That Energy Bar?

How Many Crickets Do You Want In That Energy Bar?

Jul 24 2013 | comment(s)

We've talked about it a lot here: bugs are a great protein source, usually for someone else. Starbucks customers, for example, cheered when the company announced it was removing an artificial coloring in its Frappuccino - until they learned that the organic coloring alternative, long used throughout history, was ground up cochineal bugs.
Despite What You Read, Not Every Scientist Is Evil - But Some Are Lucky Idiots

Despite What You Read, Not Every Scientist Is Evil - But Some Are Lucky Idiots

Jul 17 2013 | comment(s)

This might come as a surprise, given everything Cracked has written about them, but they acknowledge that not every scientist is evil. Instead, they say, most are just lucky idiots. 

Imagine that you're a scientist, and you just thought of something really crazy, like an experiment that will only work if you irradiate half the planet. You obviously can't do that, or at least you can't get caught doing that. Your only option then is to look around to see if someone's already done the crazy part for you, to find some serendipitous accident of man or nature that left a perfectly designed experiment in its wake. Something like ...
Organic Food Labels – How Truthful Are They?

Organic Food Labels – How Truthful Are They?

Jul 16 2013 | comment(s)

As we have discussed here numerous times, 'organic' mostly means what you want it to mean. The list of synthetic ingredients that the organic lobby has gotten the FDA to add is truly dizzying, with exceptions as simple as 'there is no non-synthetic alternative'.
Institute for Justice versus government-controlled psychology

Institute for Justice versus government-controlled psychology

Jul 16 2013 | comment(s)

John Rosemond has a master's degree in psychology and is a licensed psychologist. He is also a syndicated advice columnist who has been doing it since 1976, one of the longest-running syndicated columns in the U.S.

But the Kentucky Board of Examiners of Psychology wants him gone. He does not pay them a fee yet calls himself a psychologist due to having a degree in psychology and being a licensed psychologist.  But that does not count in Kentucky, they have suddenly determined, so they say his newspaper column is practicing psychology illegally.  Rosemond is the author of 11 parenting books and is a licensed psychologist in his home state of North Carolina and his work appears regularly in 200 newspapers nationwide.
Subsidy Stupidity - Smuggling Rice Into Thailand

Subsidy Stupidity - Smuggling Rice Into Thailand

Jul 16 2013 | comment(s)

How do you know subsidies are a dopey public policy? When it pays to smuggle rice into Thailand, even though Thailand already has enough rice to meet half the world's annual trade in the food staple.

The reason is that the Thai government is subsidizing production so heavily as part of a campaign platform that it is paying its farmers almost double the prevailing prices in Cambodia and Myanmar. Farmers in those neighboring countries are sending their grain across the border to be sold.

The equivalent of 750,000 tons of milled rice is being smuggled into Thailand a year, according to estimates of analysts and traders who have studied the illicit shipments.
Robot Farmers Would Solve A Lot Of Problems

Robot Farmers Would Solve A Lot Of Problems

Jul 16 2013 | comment(s)

Proponents of illegal immigration contend that they are doing jobs no one wants to do. Farmers worry about the cost of labor.

Both immigration and wage problems are solved by just using robots.  The Lettuce Bot, for example, can "thin" a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand.

 A new generation of machines targets the last frontier of agricultural mechanization; fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they're sensitive to bruising.

And it would solve policy and labor issues too. Bring on the bots!
Doomsday Prophets Love To Believe Culling The Human Herd Is The Only Way

Doomsday Prophets Love To Believe Culling The Human Herd Is The Only Way

Jul 14 2013 | comment(s)

If environmental doomsday prophets had been around 10,000 years ago you would not exist.

Way back then, as a large tribe of people had begun to run out of food to hunt and berries to forage, some smart scientific person came up with the greatest idea anyone ever had - why don't we grow our own animals and vegetables?

A doomsday prophet in charge would have been talking about who they could kill off. They would have rationed and mitigated and legislated and agonized about who they could kill, preferably a bunch of people they did not like. Reason won out. Like the idea of a 1,500 calorie Big Kahuna Donut Burger? Thank science.
Chemist Takes Her Work Home - And Poisons Her Husband With It

Chemist Takes Her Work Home - And Poisons Her Husband With It

Jul 09 2013 | comment(s)

Who says the hard sciences lack female representation?

When it comes to murder using the awesome power of science, there is no gender disparity. 

Tianle Li, 44, a Bristol-Myers Squibb chemist for 10 years, has been found guilty of fatally poisoning her estranged husband, Xiaoye Wang, with thallium she got at work. She faces life in prison when she's sentenced Sept. 30th.

She was convicted of poisoning Wang with the highly toxic thallium while they were in the process of divorcing. He died early in 2011.
Throat Cancer Kills Former Fukushima Nuclear Plant Boss

Throat Cancer Kills Former Fukushima Nuclear Plant Boss

Jul 09 2013 | comment(s)

Masao Yoshida, 58, former boss of the Fukushima nuclear plant, "died of oesophagal cancer at 11:32am today at a Tokyo hospital," said a spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), the group that owns the Fukushima plant which had meltdown concerns after towering waves from an earthquake and tsunami swamped cooling systems.

Despite panic stories and concern among the public and the media, Yoshida was a classical stoic Japanese and stayed at his post.  8 months later he was admitted to the hospital and was diagnosed with throat cancer. After surgery for that, he had a brain hemorrhage and surgery again.
Active Denial 2013 - The Military's Modern Microwave Pain Ray

Active Denial 2013 - The Military's Modern Microwave Pain Ray

Jun 27 2013 | comment(s)

In the 1980s, basic science super-advocate President Ronald Reagan got a pitch about creating a futuristic non-lethal way to subdue people without injuring them. He loved the idea and by the end of the decade it was being developed.

Most everyone has a microwave oven in their house. Its 2.45 GHz frequency gives it a long wavelength so it can cook your food by penetrating deeply. Obviously, cooking people is a bad idea so the microwave weapon they proposed had a much higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength. It would only only penetrate a little, where our layer of skin would absorb the microwaves and turn them into heat.
One True Pairing - A Paleontology Comic

One True Pairing - A Paleontology Comic

Jun 26 2013 | comment(s)

OTP is slang for One True Pairing, meaning your favorite combination of characters in a fandom.

Sci-ence.org does cool art about science and under the OTP heading they used a neat story about a mammal forerunner and an amphibian that lived (and died) together in an African burrow 250 million years ago. 
Is The Voynich Manuscript Not Gibberish?

Is The Voynich Manuscript Not Gibberish?

Jun 25 2013 | comment(s)

The Voynich manuscript has delighted conspiracy theorists and researchers since book dealer Wilfred Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. Its illustrations of naked nymphs, unidentifiable plants, astrological diagrams and pages and pages of text in an unidentified alphabet is considered gibberish, part of a Renaissance hoax to bilk rich, dumb people out of some money, by most, but an elaborate code by a persistent minority, mostly people who believe in "Chariots of the Gods" and Loch Ness Monster stuff.
Eco-Terrorists Destroy Beet Farm In Oregon

Eco-Terrorists Destroy Beet Farm In Oregon

Jun 25 2013 | comment(s)

 In what the FBI called “economic sabotage”, genetically modified 6,000 sugar beets from two fields in Southern Oregon’s Jackson County were destroyed this month.

Such modern hysteria makes the quaint clueless charm of the hipsters portrayed in "Portlandia" seem like a hundred years ago. At least in some counties these people are militant now.  The FBI isn't disclosing how the fields were destroyed - they know environmentalists lack imagination but love to copycat each other.

Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science

Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science

Jun 25 2013 | comment(s)

Modern science may seem slow and incremental but, as has always happened, small steps lead to awkward leaps and bounds - and revolutions. 

It's why we make goat noises at people who claim their bachelor's degree in engineering has led them to come up with a Theory of Everything.  You have to know a lot before you can even know what is missing, much less how to fill the gaps.
Don't Drink The Ancient Mine Water

Don't Drink The Ancient Mine Water

Jun 24 2013 | comment(s)

If you discovered water that could be millions or billions of years old, what would you do with it?

Drink it, of course.

A researcher who analyzed water found in a Canadian mine in Timmins, Ontario, did just that. The water is between 1.5 and 2.6 billion years old, meaning it has been totally isolated for that long.

Dr. Barbara Sherwood Lollar, geologist at the University of Toronto, dipped the tip of her finger in this water and tested it with her tongue. She found the ancient sample "very salty and bitter -- much saltier than seawater." No worries there.
The Junk Science Methods Of Wine Tasting

The Junk Science Methods Of Wine Tasting

Jun 24 2013 | comment(s)

While there's no question there is biology in taste buds, actual wine testing has proven to be in the astrology and psychological assessment range of accuracy.

Most people are not able to discern expensive wine from cheap and neither can wine sommeliers.  That's why various wine festivals rarely agree on wines - a gold medal at one can yield nothing at another.  It isn't just subjective, argues a small winery owner, it is almost random.