Here are a few items from the past week or two that I'm not going to get to, but that I couldn't entirely let go:
- Why do people who convulse over the bogus science at Kentucky's Creation Museum tolerate the pseudoscience marketing at Whole Foods? "From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort (more on that later), Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares," writes Michael Schulson in The Daily Beast. Jerry A. Coyne comments on Schulson's article at The New Republic. I suspect the difference between promoting probiotics and promoting creationism is that creationists too often try to impose their views on others. Whole Foods does so only through advertising and promotion, which we are trained to at least partially ignore. And Whole Foods doesn't care what you believe; it just wants to sell the products. Creationists want you to believe.
- The investigative powerhouse ProPublica has opened The ProPublica Data Store. There you can find, for example, datasets on pharma payments to doctors, prescribing information, CDC mortality data, nursing-home data, and much more. Some datasets are free, and others, which were cleaned up or massaged by ProPublica, are for sale to journalists for prices between $200 and $1,000 (with higher price tags for academics). Seems like a very good idea.
- "Your cable company is screwing you," writes Cassandra Willyard at The Last Word On Nothing. Not terribly, shocking, that. But it's worse than you think–and the problem is in the cable box. Willyard writes that fancy boxes with DVRs consume more energy than an Energy Star refrigerator. The cable companies recently signed a voluntary agreement to improve efficiency by 10 to 45 percent by 2017. But it should be possible to cut the energy costs far more than that. Willyard asks: "Why are we letting industries set their own energy efficiency standards?" Yeah. Why?
- Astronomers crunching data from the Kepler spacer telescope have confirmed the existence of 715 new planets orbiting 305 stars, writes Christopher Crockett at Science News, as do many others.
- Newsweek has come back to print, but with an annual subscription rate of $149 for print and digital, compared to $34.99 for digital only. It also claims to have uncovered the "mystery man" behind Bitcoin–but others say not so fast. Ken Doctor of Newsonomics analyzes the print relaunch and thinks it might work. "Kudos to the newest Newsweek owners for testing it," he writes at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
- "Climate change brings more crime," was the headline on a story by Louis Sahagun at the Los Angeles Times. Says who? Matthew Ranson of Abt Associates, that's who. And what do other authorities think about this extraordinary claim? You won't find out from Sahagun, because he didn't quote anyone else in his story. But he should have; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as Carl Sagan said.
- Adam Cole tracks the history of popcorn from the Aztecs to the movies in a story for NPR. In the Aztec language, the sound of kernels popping is called totopoca.
- Michael Balter writes at Science (paywall) that Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, misrepresented a Ugandan scientific committee's report on homosexuality, mistakenly saying that it supported his contention that "homosexuality, contrary to my earlier thinking, was behavioural and not genetic," as he wrote to President Obama in February. Alan Cowell, writing in The New York Times, said the report "found no genetic basis for homosexuality." Not so; the report did not say homosexuality was not genetic, reports Balter.
Have a good weekend.
-Paul Raeburn
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