Wolfram Alpha looks like a really useful tool. Danny Sullivan’s overview is the best I’ve read. Here’s a 10-minute sampling of some of the functionality:

From the Huffington Post, What Most Doctors Won’t Tell You About Preparing for the Swine Flu:

The next immune booster is part of the facial reflexology – the point between the upper lip and the nose needs to be pressed firmly for 5 – 10 seconds; do the same for the hollow point slightly above the chin, and the two points at the base of the inside of the eye-brows.

The next significant immune shot is massaging the ears, starting from the inner base up and then from the upper point down, then pulling the soft part of the ear in all directions to increase blood supply.

They never mention why most doctors won’t tell you these things.

via 1gm

“Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don’t have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time. They’ve obviously been deeply hidden, and it will require that we get the information from people who know where they are.”

- Charles Krauthammer, April 22, 2003

Writers and thinkers who aren’t self-critical are always the least interesting.

Relevant part is around 1:15:

Excerpt:

“The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know when they do what they do you’ve got more carbon dioxide.”

First of all, cows emit methane, not carbon dioxide. Methane is orders of magnitudes more potent than carbon dioxide, but neither of them are carcinogens. To be clear: nobody claimed that CO₂ is a carcinogen, which makes you wonder/know how well John Boehner has studied this subject. In fact, cow emissions cause a greater greenhouse effect than cars. This seems surprising at first, until you think about the numbers: there are about 1.5 billion cows in the world and around 650 million cars. With methane being so much more potent, it isn’t hard to comprehend how this could be possible.

It’s a mistake to consider the effects of cows as a naturally-occurring event. In 1950, there were less than half as many cows as there are today: this is a number that tracks roughly with human population growth. Much like many emissions come from coal-burning energy factories, some come from our food factories: cattle.

The fact that a substance is naturally occurring does not mean that generating a greatly increased amount of it will have no effect on the world. You’d think that this was obvious, but apparently it isn’t.

I’m a big fan of skepticism, and I think that it’s especially appropriate in a field such as climatology, but there’s a difference between skepticism and denial. In the former, you question, prod, and refine the theories, in the latter, you just look for things to refute the theories. Boehner is not a skeptic, he’s a denier.

UCB’s video is pretty funny (language warning):

FactCheck says no.
(or at least, it’s highly unlikely)

Both sides of that debate have abused statistics with little restraint (previously).

I’d heard this a lot, from a lot of news outlets, but FactCheck.org provides some clarification:

At a Nov. 19 House Financial Services Committee hearing on a possible bailout for the auto industry, Alabama Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus said, “Even with recent changes, the average hourly wage at General Motors is still $75 an hour. …” Two of his GOP colleagues on the panel made similar statements. And in a Nov. 18 column in the New York Times, business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote, “At GM, as of 2007, the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs.”

The problem is, that’s just not true. The automakers say that the average wage earned by its unionized workers is about $29 per hour. So how does that climb to more than $70? Add in benefits: life insurance, health care, pension and so on. But not just the benefits that the current workers actually receive – after all, it’s pretty rare for the value of a benefits package to add up to more than wages paid, even with a really, really good health plan in place. What’s causing the number to balloon is the cost of providing benefits to tens of thousands of retired auto workers and their surviving spouses.

The automakers arrived at the $70+ figure by adding up all the costs associated with providing wages and benefits to current and retired workers and dividing the total by the number of hours worked by current employees.

I’m not making a claim about bailouts or the auto industry one way or the other, but I’d seen that $70 number so often that I thought it was true.

A little while ago, in the spirit of challenging my own views, I sat down and watched the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Intelligence being a reference to Intelligent Design (irony not intentional). In this review, I won’t really delve into the core issue of evolution itself, but instead will judge how well it stands up as a documentary and discuss some of the arguments made. If you’re interested in the scientific aspects, Scientific American has a thorough analysis.

I watch a lot of documentaries, and ignoring the intellectual merits for a moment, this was a terrible documentary. Famously-boring former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein is the narrator and protagonist, which is annoying to begin with, but it only got worse. The film is stuffed full of random stock footage of old TV shows, Nazis, and lots of other irrelevant things. It has so much of this that it quickly becomes distracting and hard to watch. I watched the whole thing, but after 30 minutes I was already checking if it was almost over.

The film mixes some of its more serious arguments (a generous statement on my part) with some blatantly intellectually bankrupt ideas. I call this the Michael Moore effect, as the few parts where they go far beyond what is reasonable cheapens the whole thing.

First, Nazis! Stein says:

What other societies have used Darwinism to trump all other authorities, including religion? As a Jew, my mind left to one regime in particular.

Stein claims that acceptance of evolution leads to social darwinism which leads to genocide. There are two reasons why this is a terrible argument. First, social darwinism and the rationales for genocide provided by Nazis do not require acceptance of an evolutionary origin of species. Even creationists will admit that natural selection and some biological variation occur, in addition to many traits being hereditary. Admitting this isn’t the same as saying that all species have a common ancestor, but these are the only parts needed if someone wanted to abuse science to justify genocide. Second, even if acceptance of evolution helped create a foundation for Nazi beliefs, how does that make evolution less plausible? It seems completely orthogonal to me.

Similarly, Stein makes an argument that acceptance of evolution leads to atheism. Regardless of whether or not this is true, this has no effect on whether or not evolutionary theory can explain the origin of species. Our desires for things to be true have no effect on how true they are. Stein said in an interview:

“When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you. [...] Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.”

Yeah…

The creationism v. evolution question is deserving of its own post.. I’ll try to get that later.

A little while ago, Discover Magazine had an interesting article Ten Things You Don’t Know About the Earth. Granted, you probably do know some of the things on that list, but it’s definitely an interesting read. Some things I found interesting:

• If you were to build a frictionless tube between any to places on the surface of the earth, it’d always take the same amount of time to fall from one side to the other and back (~42 minutes each way).
• It would take the same amount of time to orbit the earth at sea level (if that were possible).

All this talk is making me think of the Earth Sandwich…
Original challenge video (with a song!):
Winner (Spain/New Zealand):

After dropping the lines from her speeches while in Alaska, Palin has brought back her lines about the bridge to nowhere (“thanks, but no thanks”) and selling the jet on ebay, according to Fox News. I’m honestly amazed by this. Both lines have been shown to be untrue for a while now, but she’s still going with it. She’s starting to remind me of GWB a lot, especially when saying “you can’t blink” to Charlie Gibson.

To be clear, Palin did sell the jet, but it was not on ebay. This is not a major point, but the fact that she would continually repeat something that is patently false is disconcerting. Plus, I don’t think the line becomes less meaningful if she were to remove “on ebay”, which is why I’m so amazed it hasn’t been removed.