Reflecting on my earlier post here, I decided to do some quick research on criticisms of the report that claimed that the “all in” or “dust to dust” energy cost of a Hummer was less than a Prius. Here’s some of what I found: 1. An interview with the President of the company that conducted the report said that the report assumed that trucks and SUVs would have much longer […]
An article today in the Independent quotes a report for the British Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, which suggests that raising food organically may have, in some instances, more adverse impacts on the environment than traditional methods. One example given was the production of organic milk: [T]he researchers singled out milk as a particular example of the environmental challenges presented by organic farming. Organic milk requires 80 per […]
A very interesting recent study evaluated the “lifetime energy usage” of various vehicles, by looking not only at their fuel economy, but all energy costs associated with the design, manufacture, delivery, and disposal of those vehicles. The surprise? Hybrids don’t fare especially well in this analysis. For example, the Honda Accord Hybrid has an Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while the conventional Honda Accord is $2.18. Put simply, over […]
This week’s Economist contains an interesting article on a study evaluating the accuracy of published medical research articles. The conclusion: When Dr Ioannidis ran the numbers through his model, he concluded that even a large, well-designed study with little researcher bias has only an 85% chance of being right. An underpowered, poorly performed drug trial with researcher bias has but a 17% chance of producing true conclusions. Overall, more than […]
I subscribe to a publication called New Scientist, a British science magazine. It’s a little pricey (because it’s a weekly, unlike Scientific American), and my friend the Grump sometimes gets annoyed by its unabashed leftist political slant, and it’s a bit uneven at times (for example, the current issue has a large “alternative history” section with some questionable speculations about what would have happened if (for example) Newton had not […]
It seems the SSSBlog has inspired the New York Times! A good opinion piece appears today making one of the points made earlier in this blog, that people can’t really comprehend the vast time scales necessary to make evolution work.
More follow up to the earlier post on intelligent design: The New York Times published this article today discussing the substantive arguments made by the proponents of intelligent design. Also, the fundamental idea isn’t new. Various forms of the so-called “anthropic principle” have been around for many years. The principle tries to answer the question of why so many fundamental physical constants in our universe are precisely what they have […]
Inspired, no doubt, but the Grumpy Moderate’s views on “intelligent design,” the New York Times published today this article about the funding origins of the movement. Kudos to the professor at my old school, the University of Iowa, quoted in the article, who while apparently believing in “intelligent design,” makes the same point as the Grumpy Moderate in his post yesterday: “They’re interested in the same things I’m interested in […]
I introduce my readers today to a new character: The Grumpy Moderate. The Grumpy Moderate is a guy (apologies to my female readers, but he’s a guy) who views the news through a pane of skepticism. He’s pretty bright, but thinks that intelligence is overrated. The Grumpy Moderate loves science, though. He likes to parse through the b.s., dislikes dogma and extremism, loathes pretense, likes pragmatism, and is highly suspicious […]
During lunch today my co-workers were making critical comments about one of my few remaining vices, Diet Pepsi. Other than the cost, I don’t see that Diet Pepsi can do much harm (even though some scary web sites, including the very subtilely named aspartamekills.com, talk about brain tumors, vision problems, birth defects, hairy palms [no, I just made that up], and the fact that “Michael J. Fox, who was spokesperson […]