Neuroscience

Absinthe-Minded

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Jay Novella writes about absinthe, and how this classic beverage is really just another kind of booze: the “special ingredient,” thujone, isn’t really a hallucinogen after all. This is doubtless the cause of much heartbreak and disappointment, but I have a solution:

LSD-spiked absinthe.

What could possibly go wrong? This is serious psychiatry we’re talking about, here. I mean, a bottle in front of me is still better than a prefrontal lobotomy, right?

About this Blag

A Meme for Year’s End

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Tyler DiPietro tagged me with a meme, in obedience to which I’m supposed to answer a series of questions about my personal behavior. I said I would do this if I could answer the questions in a way which wasn’t terminally dull; if you see this post, then I’ve succeeded, at least in my own estimation. If you don’t see this post, then I failed and I didn’t want you to know.
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Transparency

Commies Conquer Publishing Industry!

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Yesterday morning, an omnibus spending bill was signed into law, a bill among whose provisions lurked the mandate that the National Institutes of Health require Open Access for all research funded under its auspices. The language in question states,

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

And it ain’t just a good idea no more.

John Gordan has had the best rimshot so far:

I’d also like to thank the biomedical publishing industry. This could never have happened without the transformation of a cottage industry into short-sighted publicly traded corporations dedicated to maximizing near term revenue. Publishers pushed journal subscription and archive access prices to stratospheric levels, knowing their subscribers had no real options. It was a great short term strategy …

This is what happens when those slinky, no good Reds are “both elusive and in possession of a better message“.

Pseudoscience

Creationist Tax Policy

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One of my Christmas gifts this year was Peter Irons’ God on Trial (2007), a rollicking account of courtroom clashes about religious influence in the public sphere. Irons, you may recall, was a dry-humored champion of justice in the Stuart Pivar affair, and these days, he’s been doing a little gumshoe work to uncover cdesign proponentsist shenanigans with regard to copyright violations. This is a pretty tangled business, and it probably won’t escalate into the next Dover trial, but it does have its amusing aspects.

For example, known pseudoscientist William Dembski has been complaining to his lawyer that Irons just won’t shut up with the pesky honesty. To hear poor li’l Dembski tell it, he just can’t go a single day without some e-mail from Irons, pestering him about academic integrity and intellectual property. This part caught my eye:

Moreover, I’m not particularly happy that Irons sends them from the UCSD server, which my tax dollars are indirectly supporting.

Gee, I wonder if Dembski is going to stop paying his taxes, given that during the 2007 fiscal year, the National Science Foundation was appropriated $5.9 billion dollars, and all those half-a-trillion pennies went to support actual science instead of Intelligent Design. Now, this isn’t very much of his withholding tax, since the NSF’s slice came out of a $463.5-billion pie (called H.J.Res.20), but it’s still enough to make him yowl like a wet LOLcat: “Noooo! They be takin mah taxez! Do not want!”
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Software

X-Mas Update

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I now have a camera phone which won’t talk to Apple computers and an iPod Nano which won’t talk to anything at all. In addition, I have a GPS-based automobile navigation device — the kind with an insistent female voice which never says “please” or “thank you” — of a brand which I just heard my cousin saying doesn’t work in Boston, thanks to all the tall buildings (and, probably, the non-Euclidean geometry of the roads).

Season’s greetings from gadget-geekery land. . . .

"no matter how gifted, you alone cannot change the world"