(Via Tom Nixon)

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Tom Jefferson, an epidemiologist with the distinguished Cochrane Collaboration in the Britain, explains that we don’t really know what protection flu vaccines offer. Fascinating interview.

But, getting to the key question: What should people do to prevent the flu?

If they want to base it on good evidence, they should wash their hands.

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Salon's Andrew Leonard:

It's amazing the effect Wal-Mart can have on entire industries.  And headlines like this one, among many others, are why I will only eat fresh caught/wild salmon.  I won't touch the farmed stuff.

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Much easier than Punnett squares.

(via kottke)

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Base rate fallacy – ignoring available statistical data in favor of particulars.

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In what Bizzaro World can you group Al Gore - alleged enviro-lunatic, evil hoax-foister, raging liberal - and Bill Gates - capitalist, American business icon, technologist - together?

In this one.

Alex Steffen over at Worldchanging reports on Bill Gates's (yes, that Bill Gates) TED speech in which Gates describes his plan to get everyone - the entire world - to zero climate emissions.   This isn't about reduction, making slight changes to your lifestyle, being less of a carbon polluter: Gates is talking about zero.  Strangely, everyone who pshawed Al Gore is suddenly listening to Bill Gates.  If Gates's weight comes to bear on the climate issue, it will vindicate what I've been saying all along: that the issue was a political one (as everything is these days), not scientific, and that Al Gore was entirely the wrong guy to breach the topic with the American public.

Some highlights from Gates's talk, as reported by Steffen:

He reckons that because population is going to continue to grow for at least four decades, because billions of poor people want more equitable prosperity, and because (as he sees it) improvements in energy efficiency are limited, we have to focus on the last element of the equation, the carbon intensity of energy. Simply, we need climate-neutral energy. We need to use nothing but climate-neutral energy.

and

For most people, a ten percent or twenty percent improvement sounds like a big deal -- in large part because the improvements they're most familiar with involve giving things up. When they do encounter it, the idea of "zero" looms like a giant wall of deprivation in front of them. The idea that zero might not be the end of the good life, but in fact the beginning of a much better way of life, is simply inconceivable to the vast, vast majority of them. When we talk zero, we sound crazy.

But when Bill Gates talks zero, he sounds visionary. Gates, whatever else he did Friday, just made the most important idea on the planet mainstream credible. That's a big, big deal.

and

The idea that contemporary suburban American lifestyles (the kind of prosperity most people around the world aspire to, thanks to Hollywood and advertising), the idea that McMansions, SUVs and fast food chicken wraps somehow represent the best form of prosperity we could possibly invent is, of course, obviously ludicrous.

We can reinvent what prosperity means and how it works, and, in the process both reduce the ecological demands of that prosperity and improve the quality of our lives. In most cases, this is a smarter approach than simply improving efficiency.

The obvious prediction, of course, is this, and I'll stake it here: deniers will immediately blackball Gates, a once-great man succumbing to age and a slackened mind, a once-strong American capitalist having his ideology shaken due to his philanthropic work and his waning willpower to defind that which made him wealthy.  He has his, they'll say, so he can afford this fantasy.  The rest of us who have to foot the bill for this hoax can't.

And, with the swift pens of our national media news-based entertainment industry, in the blink of an eye, Gates could be politicized and marginalized in the climate debate.  Zero emissions?  Smarter cities?  A new definition of prosperity? Nuclear power? What?

It's the very risk of all that Gates could lose that makes his move incredibly important.  I've never been one to applaud Microsoft or its products, but I am staggered, in the best way possible, at what Gates has done here.

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Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behaviour.

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I’ve always been fascinated by the Marianas Trench, the deepest recorded part of the ocean just off the coast of Japan. I think of this 36,000 ft. deep trench as a sort of inverted, underwater Mount Everest, and I remember watching a PBS special when I was a kid in which a giant white ’sea spider’, ensconced in gnarled exoskeleton,  was found in the trench, and it was 8′ tall and ghostly and grotesque and otherworldly. The potential for horrifying sea monsters and undiscovered species aside, the vast, crushing depth of it is actually mind boggling. How mind boggling? This much. Note the infinitesimal dot sitting atop the water. That’d be you.

(Via DF)

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The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

For more information visit http://www.amnh.org

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