Science 2.0

Senator Tom Coburn used to do an annual report of the most ridiculous abuses of taxpayer money and it always got attention because his Wastebook didn't care if the party behind it was Republican or Democrat, he was a towering figure in fiscal conservatism.

You work hard for your money and he wanted you to know when government squandered it. A Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska or a 'study' of how college students use cellphones, none of it should have been using taxpayer funding, but those and many others were.

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Climate has always shifted but concerns about faster changes brought on by the modern world have led the authors of a new paper to worry that current high-volume sources of apples could lose their apex status to other areas.

The paper in the pay-to-publish journal Environmental Research Letters analyzed over 40 years of climate conditions they correlate to the growth cycle, bud break to fruit, of apple trees. They sound the alarm that the largest apple-producing counties in the US (Yakima in Washington, Kent in Michigan and Wayne in New York) have already been impacted.

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Blood samples of pregnant women have detectable levels of chemicals and that 'chemical cocktail' may pose "neurotoxic risk", according to a paper published in Science whose senior author is strangely on the board of reviewing editors at Science.

This "chemical cocktail" nomenclature has been popular among activists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other environmental lawyers for decades, because it needs no science, it instead means science 'needs more testing', and there will never be enough testing.

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The Biden administration issued a report showing alcohol's causal link to cancer. Not just statistical woo, like epidemiologists "correlating" virtual pollution ({PM2.5) to things like insomnia and lower scores in first grade, or weedkillers to anything an environmental lawyer can dream up, serious evidence.

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During Christmas holidays I tend to indulge in online chess playing a bit too much, wasting several hours a day that could be used to get back on track with the gazillion research projects I am currently trying to keep pushing. But at times it gives me pleasure, when I conceive some good tactical sequence. 
Take the position below, from a 5' game on chess.com today. White has obtained a winning position, but can you win it with the clock ticking? (I have less than two minutes left for the rest of the game...)

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Cigarette smoking is in steady decline because the evidence became overwhelming that cigarette smoke causes cancer. It is not dumb epidemiology, like that 'organic food is linked to better grades in children' or 'virtual pollution may be why your income isn't higher' and whatever else the International Agency for Research on Cancer or National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is trying to scare the public about this month.

Smoking, be it cigarettes or marijuana, is very bad.(1) Yet while while the federal government rightly joined us in criticizing cigarettes, they gave alcohol a free pass. 

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A recent paper claims that even at low doses pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are changing the behavior of insects.

Though they are not able to show how it is happening, the authors use 'needs more testing' rhetoric to call on governments to ban chemicals until it is certain there is no unintended long-term ecological harm. If that sounds very Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., that's because he and other anti-science progressives have been saying it for decades.

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As part of my self-celebrations for XX years of blogging activities, I am reposting here (very) old articles I wrote over the years on topics ranging from Physics to Chess to anything in between. The post I am recycling today is one that describes for laymen a reason why it is interesting to continue going after the top quark, many years (10, at the time the article was written) after the discovery of that particle. The piece appeared in July 10, 2005 in my column at the Quantum Diaries blog (https://qd.typepad.com/6/2005/07/ok_so_i_promise.html).

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A whole lot of classic liberals have discovered how goofy their progressive cousins have been for 25 years. All it took for this sudden embrace of critical thinking was for a Republican to say 'maybe he is right on food and medicine' about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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Most of the country laughed when an expensive Los Angeles Times 'Foodie' event gave elites who paid up to $800 per ticket norovirus. 

Norovirus is gastroentitis, a 'stomach flu', sometimes called food poisoning, except related to bad hygiene rather than spoiled products. You see it a lot on cruise ships because so many people are in such a small area and it can be hard to kill using hand sanitizer. It can easily be prevented, though.

Wash your hands, obviously after using the bathroom or before preparing food.

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A recent epidemiology paper links common weedkillers to prostate cancer and further claims four of them cause death. 

Obviously they can't show that, there is no plausible biological mechanism, no increase in prostate cancers, and no evidence any of the people who got prostate cancer had contact with the pesticides at all.

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In the fall of 2020, the contentious election saw progressives claiming the COVID-19 vaccine was rushed and that the Republican president was risking lives to help his Big Pharma buddies.

They won the election and now blame Trump for everyone who died, they turned on epidemiology after a peer-reviewed paper claimed a well-known 'miracle drug' could work off-label for COVID-19 as well, and because the vaccines were rolled out when a Democrat was president, they took credit for it.

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The US Defense Intelligence Agency National Center for Medical Intelligence, America's first line of defense against medical threats, expressed concern about gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab.

The Biden administration buried it. They were even prohibited from presenting the evidence in meetings, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

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As part of my self-celebrations for having survived 20 years of blogging (the anniversary was a few days ago, see my previous post), I am re-posting a few representative, old articles I wrote in my column over the years. The selection will not be representative of the material I covered over all this time - that would be too tall an order. Rather, I will hand-pick a few pieces just to make a point or two about their content. 

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GMOs had quietly been in use for decades when they became controversial - for saving a fruit in Hawaii that legacy techniques like breeding and chemicals had not.

The Rainbow Papaya became a home run for genetic engineering, the first genetically rescued organism, and that made it a target for environmental groups who had ignored it when it was saving diabetics by creating insulin.

Lawyers have not stopped campaigning against GMOs since, and are calling on all media allies to criticize Mexico for refusing to ban GMO corn, but while they fight the past, biotech may be winning another fight for the future; against malaria.

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Anti-science activists are outraged that Mexican experts ruled against their government's publicity stunt claiming they would ban "GMOs" and the most popular weedkiller used by Mexican farmers.

Some of it was just populism - Mexico buys $3 billion worth of GMO corn per year from the US and the way to encourage more domestic corn sales is to ban it in the use of things people want, like tortillas.

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Once upon a time, environmentalists embraced biotechnology as key way to reduce pesticide use. Rachel Carson, author of "Silent Spring", was a fan of genetic engineering. That was before we all learned that environmental groups are only 'for' something if it means they can raise money being against something. Biotech was great - until it was real. Then they hated it. Along with hydroelectric power and natural gas, and how they will want to tear down solar energy, once it stops being a government gimmick.

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If you want to virtue signal your eating habits to others, Los Angeles is a great place to be. Everyone touts organic, holistic, free-range, wild-caught, artisanal, non-GMO, you name it and if the price can be expensive, someone will sell it.

Los Angeles media influencers love to sell readers what they want to buy and an event at the Hollywood Palladium costing $300-800 per ticket to promote the Los Angeles Times' list of the '101 best restaurants' was sure to make big money - even if you give 80 attendees food poisoning.

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Twenty years ago I got access for the first time to the interface that allowed me to publish blog posts for the Quantum Diaries web site, a science outreach endeavor that involved some 12 (then 15, then 25 or so IIRC) researchers around the world. A week before I had been contacted by the Fermilab outreach team, who were setting the thing up, and at that time I did not even know what a blog was!

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In ancient civilizations, rulers and nobles exchanged gifts as acts of prestige. Only when Assyria came into existence, and it had a need for manpower and resources to feed its conquering empire, did gifts turn into taxes and government become overlord of its people, who were moved from place to place and told what to do by elites.

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