Science 2.0

In a world where food is affordable and choice is high, some people will not have impulse control. Forget conspiracy mumbo-jumbo about corporations and ultraprocessed foods and addiction, some human somewhere will have fetishized everything so such an "addiction" means nothing, what is true is that foods are more delicious than ever and some people will eat too much.

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Despite nearly two decades of marketing campaigns insisting bees are in decline and science is to blame, the data show otherwise. Bees are not entirely irrelevant in the food supply, and do valuable pollination work in nature, but there are 25,000 other species of bees that are important also, it is only in boutique agriculture that honeybees are meaningful to our food supply.

For crops like almonds, bees are rented. They are flown on planes or shipped on trucks and do their work and then go somewhere else. California only has 1.3 million acres of almond trees, which means about 2.6 million honey bee hives are needed every year. That is why 90% of rented bee colonies are in California. It's a lucrative market and they can ship bees elsewhere as needed.

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The tide of culture has shifted away from more centralized government control and the social authoritarianism it brings. While those who ideologically profited from the 'old Twitter' and have all scampered to Bluesky to only talk to each other, the rest of the world is now trying to be mainstream again.

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I'm a Steelers guy now but I was a late fan. Where I was young in Pennsylvania, three teams in New York and two in Pennsylvania were the same distance to drive - and we did not drive to any of them. 

So I remained a Cowboys fan.(1) My brother, though, was an Eagles fan of early on. And he's never wavered.

Ants think that's the proper way to be. Eagle fans hold grudges and ants respect that, but there is no comparison between the level of grudge Philadelphia has against Michael Strahan or Terrell Owens or Kevin Allen or Jerome McDougle and what ants have against their enemies.

If they could write, it would be the stuff of legends.

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In early 2015, a small group of scientists and doctors noted that Dr. Mehmet Oz, famed TV physician and real-life surgeon at Columbia, was promoting so much quackery that the university should remove him from their ranks.

The knives immediately came out among progressive journalists in corporate media. The doctors and scientists criticizing Oz were "corporate shills" and the nonprofits they were affiliated with were suspect and probably front groups for Big Tobacco and Monsanto and probably racist against Muslims.

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If you want to know where someone is most likely to steal your package, the short answer if you want to stop reading is Washington, DC. The nation's capitol. Infer from that what you will. The cost may be up to $12 billion each year.

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No one wants to diet, everyone wants a miracle pill, and that is why supplements are a $35 billion industry in America, despite being mostly placebos. Weight loss therapies, even those with side effects, are all the rage with thin culture - because they work.

Still, who wouldn't want to stay thin without a shot in the butt?

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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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