Who Goes Nazi? – The Anchoress, via Assistant Village Idiot. Suggested further reading: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.

Masterminds or Muddlers? - the glittering eye.

The prototype for a mastermind would be Napoleon, someone who with a combination of brilliance, insight, savvy, guile, and the urge to power was able to bring complicated plans with many moving parts to fruition.

Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life? — The New Yorker, by Atul Gawande. And… as I see it, a complete misunderstanding of that article by Megan McArdle and most of her commentariat. That misunderstanding is further displayed in this McArdle post:  Does Medicaid Kill? Though not easy to identify, there are multiple points where medicine becomes harmful rather than helpful. Part of this has to do with the way we evaluate drugs — by choosing an endpoint (ie, blood pressure reduction) without evaluating whether that leads to longer life, much less the quality of that life.

That’s enough deep thought for a while. I will now return to my regularly scheduled whining, ranting, silliness, and non-blogging.

The big ScienceBlogs brouhaha over selling a blog to Pepsico was fun — in the sense that watching a trainwreck can be called fun. The best roundup of links and a decent explanation of what upset many of the bloggers over at SB is Oh, Pepsi, What Has Thou Wrought? by Carl Zimmer at Discover.

At first… now other bloggers are leaving SB too. Or going on strike. This is going to expand my science blogroll, because now I can’t just use the SB blogroll to easily get to them.

I’m going to miss ScienceBlogs. It was great while it lasted.

I thought the following was seriously stupid, considering the age of the earth:

One scientist, however, says that relative to the time period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been more active over the past 15 years or so. 

Even if that “one scientist” is a YEC, that’s some extrapolation extraordinaire.

Even though I’m not a geologist, my BS detector pegged on that one. At least one geologist, Erik Klemetti, apparently agrees – calling this type of headline “irresponsible, reprehensible “journalism” that the worst hacks should be ashamed to print.”

And I certainly agree with Mr. Klemetti’s final point:

The point here is that the Earth is an active place – and we have very short experience with seeing events on a global scale. Reckless speculation the likes of which MSNBC (and LiveScience) partook in should be a warning of how the media still has a long way to come when it comes to reporting the facts rather than the hysteria of the natural world.

It’s just a darned good story and it pushes all my “I want to read that” buttons – lively characters, science, mystery, public policy and politics, genealogy, plus a few I’ve probably not yet identified.

When you finish a book with a feeling you know some of the characters, and wishing you could visit further with them, you know it’s been worth your time. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s just that good.

This is good news, but in the general atmosphere of woo-acceptance, I’m afraid it’s too late. By about 12 years.

There is no evidence that vaccines cause autism in otherwise healthy children. None. Zero.

Orac, author of Respectful Insolence, has been faithfully battling autism and anti-vaccine quackery and other forms of unscientific, frankly silly, woo for several years now.

Tonight I battled woo on a personal level. I love my husband, but he’s so susceptible to believing “medical” advice… EXCEPT what his doctors tell him.  

If I stop eating tomatoes and potatoes, my arthritis won’t go away. If my husband starts taking alpha lipoic acid, his type II diabetes won’t be cured. Homeopathic remedies and the people who sell them are worthless.

If it were just my husband, I wouldn’t worry much. But it’s not. It’s seemingly everywhere I turn recently. And so much of the misinformation calls itself science, that one really has to be careful not to be misled.

arrggghh… I know this post doesn’t entirely make sense, but I’m not entirely free to explain all the run-ins I’ve had over the past several months with fads of woo.

*I hate the scrolling twitter widget. I hate anything on a website that moves unless I tell it to.

*History’s First Redneck Mummy (lower left panel)

*I love my battery backup, because I hate power outages.

*Am I the only person who cannot manage to order a Pizza Hut pizza online? I’m beginning to think they want to be able to say they offer online ordering, but are actively discouraging anyone from ever using it.

* New study reveals most children are unrepentant sociopaths (via Retriever). And then they grow up and design scrolling, flashing widgets for websites or tests for “security” that can’t be passed. For a more scientific view, see The Science of Success.

*Speaking of pizza — a quick perusal of our buying habits over the past year says that this family orders pizza on average of once a month, and that approximately 25% of these orders coincide with having company. Yeah, I am just that lazy.

*Is it the least we can do? Buy Local, Act Evil. Just a thought here… but, if I buy the best that I can for the least amount of money, is that not also ecologically sound? (Note: I’m not saying I do this — see cheap cheese.)

*Tundra. Just go, click, and scroll. That’s what I plan on doing for the next hour or so.

My husband is known for many things, but not for his new-fangled electronic gadget knowledge. A little over a week ago he brought his cell-phone to me and impatiently and petulantly asked why it wouldn’t turn on.

My first response was “duh, the battery is dead” so I plugged it in to his charger, but didn’t hear the cutely annoying ditty his phone always played when plugged in. And, there was no “charging” indicator.

Hmmm… I said to myself. (I say this a lot, but that’s not important right now.)

Drawing on my years of electronic gadget knowledge, I decided that we should try the time-honored “trick” of pulling the battery out and putting it back in again. But, being a physically mechanically challenged individual, I couldn’t get the cover off the battery.

Where brute force is required to remove something, no one tops my husband (once a Marine always a Marine) and he said, “Give that to me.” So, I did and he got the cover off. I watched him do it.

And then he said, “There’s no battery in here.” Of course, I thought he simply didn’t recognize the shape and form of modern day batteries, expecting to find a 9-volt in there.

But, when he held the phone up where I could see it better, I discovered to my amazement that he was right! There was no battery in the phone!

With the power of a flash of lightning, I immediately knew that the lack of a battery was why the phone was NOT working. I’m amazing that way.

So, I ask dearest hubby why he took the battery out. He assures me he did not remove the battery. Then… because we are both old and doddering fools with less than perfect eyesight and reflexes… we figure the battery must have popped out when he took the cover off.

We were sitting in my office (otherwise known as the cave with the internet connection) when this took place and I’m a bit embarrassed to note that said battery could have popped off and been hidden anywhere.

Yep, my “office” defines clutter, trash, disarray, chaos, confusion, disorder, mess, litter, hodgepodge, and general mess. Being rational people, we figured that any place with more than an inch of undisturbed dust was not a likely spot for the battery to have landed. Thus our search area was somewhat defined.

We looked behind and underneath furniture, inside crates, laundry baskets, and other containers of “stuff” and we didn’t find the battery. We did find a discarded phone with a battery of the same size fitting the same charger and got the phone working again.

Yet, we remained puzzled. We ruminated over the time lapsed since the last call from or to that phone and who might have had access to it during that time. We called the one person we thought might know of a new trend of stealing batteries from phones… and endured the derision of the common sense thinking that suggested they would simply steal the entire phone.

And, we carefully examined the list of pranksters we know. Oh, yes… there are people we know who would delight in seeing us puzzled, bemused, confused, bewildered, baffled, rattled, and addled.

The worst part of this was that my dear loving untrusting husband considered me the prime suspect in this case. Maybe it was not quite so often, but it seemed to me that he asked at least seven times a day if I was yet ready to tell him where the battery was.

I swore, upon pain of everlasting blisters on my left little toe, that I had nothing to do with the disappearance of his cell phone battery. Finally, I think he came to believe me.

The most logical explanation he could come up with otherwise was that one of us was sleep-walking and had, um… perhaps, accidentally removed the battery. Except that he obviously thought that since I like sleeping so much, it must have been me doing the sleep-walking.

Not a chance, I countered. If I really wanted to mess with him I’d have hidden his keys and glasses. He countered that was silly because he couldn’t find those anyway. I had to concede he had a good point.

So… we come to yesterday. Saturday mornings my hubby and his biker friends regularly gather for breakfast, gossip, and tall tales. I regularly skip this meeting preferring sleep.

On the way home from this meeting… Mr. Coordinated (aka dear hubby) drops his cell phone in a public restroom. Now, he swears he saw it fall… and that that back did not fall off. He states, for the record, that when he was through with his business he put the cell phone back in it’s holder and that the battery cover was not loose.

A very few minutes later while on the interstate, he tries to make a call. Nothing happens. The phone is deader than a door nail. Knowing himself not to be a virtuous battery charger, he plugs the phone into the car charger.

Uh Oh. No melodious response, no lights, no cute graphic of a battery charging. Being a cautious man, he pulls over before he takes the cover off to discover there is — again – no battery in his phone.

Obviously this is not a fluke, as there is no sign of good luck to be found in this mystery.

Upon finding that a replacement battery cost $48 (since we’d run out of superflous phone batteries), my darling decided to purchase a new phone complete with battery for $29.95.    

If the battery in this new phone stays where it’s supposed to be, I supposed we’ll have to conclude that the other (refurbished, mind you) phone was haunted in some way.

UPDATE: One of the batteries has appeared in the comments. This is truly amazing, folks.

Now,  new theory explains why that is not necessarily true – Socks are Fermions:

I have come to the conclusion that socks are fermions, and that this explains much of the behavior of disappearing socks. (There may be other factors at play, of course) Clearly they are not bosons; you cannot make two socks occupy the same space: Put two socks on the same foot and they wll be layered, and there is a finite number you can fit into a washing machine or a dryer. Socks worn in the normal fashion are distinguishable by being on the left or right foot (or hand, in the case of the sock puppet effect; I won’t be discussing the very interesting Lamb-Chop-shift one can observe). The individual socks in a pair, however, are indistinguishable and they must have an antisymmetric wave function and thus obey Fermi-Dirac statistics and follow the Pauli exclusion principle.

Physics may well be on the way to solving this age-old mystery.

1902: With human comfort the last thing on his mind, a young mechanical engineer completes the schematic drawings for what will be the first successful air-conditioning system.

It was the effects of humidity on paper that he was trying to stabilize and I can assure that paper has been curling in my home the last few days. So has my hair.

Our new unit is on the way and hopefully installation will be completed by Monday evening. We’re not just getting the old one (aged 24) repaired, but installing an entirely new unit, including heat.

The heater part hasn’t worked right in 5 years or so, but that’s seldom a huge problem here.

About this same time, a co-worker gave me a book on homeopathy and well… you know at the time, parts of it almost made sense? A good background in English helped me out there as much as any knowledge of science. Bad writing often equals bad logic.

I was also influenced by my family doctor – John Ellis. Whether his research on B6 is worthy, I honestly don’t know, but he was a good GP. He didn’t prescribe B6 for anything I ever went to him for. He was basically a country doctor in a small town, who people called on for advice about their cattle as quickly as they did their children.

I wanted to believe that everyone promoting a vitamin or herbal remedy was the same kind of person — well-intentioned at the very least. That is simply not a workable everyday ideal. Some people are out to make a buck by selling you worthless concoctions or contraptions. Unfortunately some may even be harmful.

I have a nephew with severe autism and developmental disorders. He’s a beautiful boy and I was well aware of the anguish my brother-in-law and his wife were going through trying to help their daughter raise him. After seeing Jenny McCarthy on TV, I emailed them about her book. I didn’t research it, I was grasping at straws for them. While they may have read the book, they stuck with their doctors and never mentioned it to me. For that reprieve, I’m grateful.

Do you see how even a not really quite completely stupid person can be so easily taken in? I swear I’ve learned my lesson! I question everything now and try to apply what little learnin’ I’ve got. I thank Orac and PalMD (and others) for the lessons. In my defense, the episode about Jenny McCarthy I saw concerned restricting gluten, not blaming vaccines.

I remember waiting in line in the 50s for my polio vaccine. I remember older relatives who got the disease instead of the vaccine. No one has to convince me that vaccines are worthwhile. But gluten restriction? To a layman, that sounds like something sort of reasonable.

What do you do about people like me? I’m not an enemy of evidence-based medicine (though I am leery of government bureaucrats deciding what evidence is worthy) and I’m certainly not a believer in something as silly as crystals and pyramids. How do you get the word out to people who are basically like me, but not necessarily science junkies? Look how long, how much it took, for me to really learn to discern. (I must add that it’s anthropology that really grabs my interest.)

Most of the stuff on HuffPo that Orac and PalMd post about would not fool me. My goodness, these people are not only scientifically illiterate, but also logically illiterate to the point that anyone with a minimal understanding of the logic of language should be able to see through their non-valid arguments.

I should also point out that I don’t necessarily agree with scientists about everything. I often wonder how their superior abilities at logic lead them to lean strongly toward the left politically. This doesn’t mean I’m right wing (because their logic is also less than superior, IMHO). Basically, I can’t find a political ideology that fits my ideas. Perhaps I’m a centrist, if that can mean I find both “sides” equally unappealing.

This post is probably no help at all in the quest to find a way to present evidence-based science to the general public, but I hope that it will give the scientists some idea of how at least one small part of the public reasons.