This post appeared here originally on 31 October 2007

---

Have you ever wondered, perhaps on 31 October, why witches are depicted as riding brooms?

The answer is alluded to by Karmen Franklin at Chaotic Utopia in her post as to why witches need to know their plant biology.

The excerpts I'm about to give you come from a superb and accessible pharmacology text entitled, "Murder, Magic, and Medicine," by John Mann, host of the BBC Radio 4 series by the same name.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

I'm posting this from a Helsinki basement café after a day's excursion by bus and boat in the countryside west of town. We mainly looked at cairns of various form, date and function, including a group of very fine large mountaintop ones of the typical Bronze Age variety.

Toward the end of the day we saw a preserved little bit of an excavated cemetery to which had been added a memorial stone in the 1930s. On the plaque the site is dated to about AD 100 and proclaimed as burial place of the first Finns! The reasoning went like this.

"We have a gap in the archaeological record during the Last Millennium BC. And the linguists believe that the Finnish language arrived here from Estonia about AD 1. And the grave type here has its closest parallels in Estonia. So this must be the grave of early Finnish-speaking colonists who arrived in the country when it was empty about AD 1!"

In the decades since, we have learned that there is no gap in the Finnish settlement record in the Last Millennium, and the grave type has been shown to be native to the coasts all around the south-eastern Baltic Sea. And the linguists have changed their mind about the date of the arrival of the Finnish language. So all that remains of the ideas celebrated on that stone is that yes, we still date the grave goods to about AD 100.

But as I told my colleagues, this is not by far the silliest memorial stone erected on an archaeological site. A strong candidate is found at Vendel church in Uppland where rich boat-burials have been excavated. It reads,

VENDEL PERIOD
PERIOD OF STATE-BUILDING
PERIOD OF MEN

Read the comments on this post...

Inside Higher Ed just reported that an adjunct instructor at the University of Akron quit when he was told that he had to submit to DNA testing. "It's not enough that the university doesn't pay us a living wage, or provide us with health insurance," the instructor said, "but now they want to sacrifice the sanctity of our bodies. No." He was right to question their policy: The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 specifically states:

It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any employee, or otherwise to discriminate against any employee with respect to the compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment of the employee, because of genetic information with respect to the employee

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

I spent about 45 minutes yesterday in the local HMO clinic. They had turned the main waiting room into a Pandemic Novel A/H1N1 Swine (nee Mexican) Influenza quarantine area, and I could feel the flu viruses poking at my skin looking for a way in the whole time I was there.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Apparently, offering high school English students the chance to read an article on the Seed Magazine website is ground for suspension - at least if you're an English teacher in Piasa, Illinois.

According to several media reports, teacher Dan DeLong has been suspended with pay pending a Monday evening board meeting. The suspension came about when a parent complained about the content of an optional, extra-credit assignment that DeLong had offered students in one of his 10th grade honors classes. The assignment? Read an online version of an article by ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer that appeared in a 2006 issue of Seed Magazine. The article in question deals with homosexuality. In animals.

That's right. Apparently, Teh Gay is so offensive that students need to be protected from being permitted to read about it in any form whatsoever, even in animals.

The Superintendent of DeLong's school district is Larry Elesa. His email address is lelsea@piasabirds.net

HT: Jonathan Turley

Read the comments on this post...

Statins for influenza are in the news again, this time because of a paper given at the Annual Meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA). We'll get to it in a moment, but first a little background.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

We barely have time to react in this world, let alone rehearse.

- Ani Difranco

Read the comments on this post...

Scientia Pro Publica #14 is up on Genetic Inference

Friday Ark #267 is up on Modulator

Read the comments on this post...

Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time (all my tweets are also imported into FriendFeed where they are much more easy to search and comment on, as well as into my Facebook wall where they are seen by quite a different set of people):

On science writing and journalism: Scientists can't write? and Science journalism--critical analysis, not debate and Three kinds of knowledge about science and journalism. Recommended.

A new treatment for chronic wounds

Open Source Science? Or Distributed Science?

Pretty Greeting Cards Warble, Tweet to Readers

Big-headed tiger snakes support long-neglected theory of genetic assimilation

UNC-CH, NCSU professor, entrepreneur Joseph DeSimone to receive top N.C. award

Seed article about animal homosexuality got an IL teacher suspended. Former students of the suspended teacher have set up a Facebook group in support.

The Data Explosion and the Scientific Method

China outperforms US on green issues

The recession is turning more people into paid clinical trial volunteers

Bio crude, a potentially lethal brain infection and asthma...

Don't Get Cocky, Twitter - on Twitter lists and why they are not "ready" yet.

As journalists, are we our own brands?

Five reasons corporations are failing at social media

New Science Journalism Project - collaborative science news by journalism students worldwide.

Journalist Amy Wallace Welcomes 'Conversation' She's Started About Vaccines

Sex and hand differences in circadian wrist activity are independent from sex and hand differences in 2D:4D

Study Surprise Yields New Target for Assessing Genes Linked to Autism

Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues

Extreme Pumpkins - the ultimate guide to carving pumpkins - I wish I saw this site earlier!

Big Breasts: An Indicator of Dangerous Fat Deposition?

Malaria Vaccines: Where Next?

Make nominations for NC Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education Center Awards.

No news to report? Are you sure about that?

Russ Campbell starts a series of interviews with participants of #sciwri09 with the interview with Deborah Blum: People I met at the World Conference of Science Journalists

Casual Fridays: Is political wishy-washiness a general phenomenon?

PLoS at ASTMH 2009 - Booth 501

Nurse Ratched:Your Byline Has Blogger Envy - "There was a time when only journalists wrote the news...."

Social networks - are they useful or pointless? For scientists, you cannot collect people. You collect data and people will collect themselves, attracted to the data.

The Incredible Macro Bug Portraiture of Thomas Shahan

Basic concepts: Truth. (this one's for bookmarking)

Jonah Lehrer: Outsider Intelligence - got hard problems? Don't turn them over to experts - ask outsiders.

Do scientists encourage misleading media coverage? PR officers, not scientists.

Read the comments on this post...

It's been an unusually busy week, so I apologize for the lack of original posts, but I just came upon Christopher Hitchens' latest piece in Slate reflecting on the many debates he's had with religious proponents in the last few years. His new film, Collision, looks fascinating and I look forward to reviewing it.

What struck me in Hitchens' article, and what I've found when discussing religion with theists as well, is how few of them hold literally to the doctrine that they espouse. It is one of the curious aspects of religion today that people will join movements insisting that religion be taught in science classes, but won't agree on which parts of that religion they even believe in.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...