Fake Banner
Ozempic Is A Kickstart, Not Magic - Here Is How To Make Weight Loss Stick

Publicly doctors say all of the things you'd expect a group with heavy state and federal scrutiny...

Spring Forward Fall Back: We Hate Changing Clocks But Hate One Change Most

In 1918, with Gen Black Jack Pershing off to France to stop the Germans in World War I, the United...

Canadian Epidemiologists Claim Processed Foods Cause Bad Kids

A cohort analysis of preschoolers in Canada has led the authors of the paper to call for bans...

What AI Can't Do: Humanity’s Last Exam

By this time 26 years ago, the "Dot-Com Bubble" was ready to burst. People who wanted to raise...

User picture.
picture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Hontas Farmerpicture for picture for Fred Phillipspicture for Atreyee Bhattacharyapicture for Patrick Lockerby
Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Blogroll
BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, is an experiment that used almost 100 detectors to scan the sky at microwave frequencies ( 100 GHz and 150 GHz, angular resolutions of 1.0° and 0.7°) in order to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
I play guitar but I don't play out for money. Aside from a high level of stage fright about playing guitar in public I think doing it for money would take away a lot of the relaxation.

That doesn't apply to all things. I write every day and always enjoy that. So at first blush I might be inclined to think a job tasting beer would be a bad thing, but perhaps it is just like writing and if you would do it for free anyway, you might as well get paid for it.
In The Federalist Today, I have a piece titled Five Things Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Cosmos” Gets Wrong

Robin Thicke may have sung "Blurred Lines" and appeared in a teenage fantasy video with a lot of naked women, but when a photo was revealed of him in a suggestive situation with another woman, he found that the line was actually not all that blurry to his wife.(1)

What changed? She had been fine with his canoodling before. He has no idea and men meeting women across the nation are just as confused about where their blurred lines are. 

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality - Carl Sagan

I missed the big Carl Sagan thing when it happened. I was in high school when Cosmos came out, we lived in the country and if you wanted to watch a different television network, you had to go up into the attic and turn a giant antenna with a pipe wrench. Sports and girls and D&D were more of a priority than television.

Yet even though I didn't watch it when it came out, shortly afterward I could still tell you who said "billions and billions" with that special emphasis.  That and riffs on "Who Shot J.R.?" were big that year.
Statisticians have a rule of thumb for calibrating claims made in humanities and science papers alike. Andrew Gelman, for example, talks about statistical significance filter - "If an estimate is statistically significant, it’s probably an overestimate."

A good thing to remember when you read weak observational studies, psychology surveys and, in modern times, a shocking number of epidemiology papers.

For health, you can use a different rule of thumb: Does Joe Mercola sell it?

If he does, it is probably suspect.