UPDATE: I have a new blog home! The Questionable Authority can now be found at Scientopia. When Pepsigate first erupted, I was extremely unhappy both with that situation and with how Seed had been treating its bloggers. I did not join the large (and still growing) group of departing ScienceBloggers at that time. I've invested a great deal of time and effort here, and felt that - despite the credibility that we all lost as a result of Seed's amazingly idiotic decision to sell Pepsi a blog - there was still a lot of potential for ScienceBlogs to be a force for positive change. You might…

...before someone used Pepsigate as the inspiration for some painfully good satire. Well done, Bob.

Since I've obviously started blogging again (at least for the moment) I thought this might be a good time to bring you up to date on the latest excuses reasons I haven't been blogging much over the last few months. I've been working a real, live jobby job. It's one that has extremely limited internet access, and has been exhausting enough that I haven't really had the energy to write much after work - I'm now an Assistant Aquatics Manager on an Army base. (Think Hasselhoff with a big goatee and bigger gut.) I'll probably have more to write about that later. For now, I'm still working on…

This is not the post I though I'd be putting up today. This morning, I fully expected to come home from work, post my already-written "I quit" post, and point you all to a WordPress blog I set up yesterday. As of this moment, I'm not leaving Sb. As of this time next week, who knows? As some of you have gathered, a lot of the bloggers here have frustrations with Seed that extend well beyond the Pepsipocalypse, pressures that, in some cases, have already led bloggers to quit. I'm certainly in the frustrated group, and to be honest I was strongly considering moving on well before the latest…

A few of you might have noticed that there's a new blog here at ScienceBlogs - one that does not exactly seem to be receiving a warm welcome. Pepsico - the makers of much of the sugary caffeinated goodness that gets me through the day - seems to have managed to purchase a blog here. (Contrary to popular belief, that's not actually the strategy I employed to get my slot. I don't have corporate pockets, so I went with "beg and grovel" instead.) For obvious reasons, having a corporation blogging about their products at Sb raises some concerns about things like conflicts of interest, the…

It's been a while since I've posted, because I've been busy goofing off and having fun - I took a long European vacation (pictures and posts to follow). I'm back, mostly recovered, and almost back to my normal routine.

As of this morning, at least 20% of your genes were patented by someone other than you. The holders of the patents could quite literally forbid you to investigate large portions of your own personal genome. This afternoon, a federal judge in New York handed down a broad ruling that calls into question - thankfully - the entire idea that naturally occurring genes are patentable. The ruling in question most directly affects the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which have been implicated in hereditary breast cancer. Myriad Genetics patented those two genes, and has been jealously guarding those patents…

Next week, I'm going to be in the UK. My plans for the trip are centered on two things: the room I've booked in London for the week, and the 8-day rail pass I purchased a couple of months ago. This morning I hit the National Rail website to start figuring out exactly which trains I need to take to get to the destinations I've been planning to hit. After the third or fourth inquiry I ran, I began to notice a disturbing pattern: every train I might want to take had a little yellow exclamation point icon under "status". Clicking through to details brought up a notice that, "industrial action…

If it takes a village to raise a child, I was particularly lucky to grow up in the middle of a wonderful little village in the middle of the Bronx. All things considered, the village did a pretty good job with a whole bunch of kids, who have since spread out all over the place. Some have gone on to really cool editing gigs, occasional appearances with Keith Olbermann, and our own Wikipedia pages. Others have wound up working as lifeguards in Lower Alabama. But pretty much all of us came away from the village we were raised in with at least three things: a strong understanding of the…

One of my many distractions lately is travel planning. After spending several months living in the wilds of Lower Alabama, I'm getting to take a bit of a vacation. Right now, face a 60-minute round-trip commute to get to the nearest bookstore (a marginally acceptable Barnes and Noble). If I'm going to make a longer trip to restock the larder, I might as well go the full Monty and hit the Waterstone's on Piccadilly Circus. So I'm off to Europe for a few weeks at the beginning of April. I've got the rough outline sketched in, and I'm hoping that some of you can help me fill in some of the…

Via GeekDad, I just discovered the blog of the Illinois Poison Control Center. More specifically, I discovered the "Day in the Life of a Poison Center" feature they did last month. As medical blogging goes, this was brilliant. They posted very brief descriptions of each of the calls that came into their center in a 24 hour period. The Tweetable little descriptions capture the stress, fear, and humor that is an integral part of providing emergency health care. Some of the calls were scary to read, even in two-sentence bursts. These were ones that contained the phrase "child got into" - or…

In what seems to be a bit of a continuation on his earlier post (which I talked about yesterday), Larry Moran has another post up on the whole "is science ever compatible with religion" thing. At the end of the post, he asks a very good question - one that gets right at something that's very important: So, what exactly are the limitations of science that we are supposed to adhere to? Earlier I criticized the concept of methodological naturalism because it seemed to rule out investigations of the paranormal as well as investigations of miracles. Robert Pennock, another philosopher, was…

As you might have noticed, ScienceBlogs picked up a couple of new bloggers recently. Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders moved their blog, Obesity Panacea, over to these parts last week. Their move gives me an opportunity that's way too good to pass up - an excuse to present my latest excuse for a prolonged gap in blogging. I've been too busy getting thin to post much. OK, maybe "getting thin" isn't the most accurate description. But it sounds so much nicer than reality - which is more like "becoming merely overweight instead of downright obese". (For starters, it's a much pithier…

While reading Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography, I came across something I hadn't heard of before - the "city hermits" that lived in medieval London. The concept struck me as odd - hermits (at least the non-crab variety) were something that I had always thought of as a purely wilderness phenomenon. A life of solitude? In a city? Really? As I read on, I became less confused: The figure of the hermit has another significance also; the stories of the city throughout the centuries have been filled with lonely and isolated people who feel their solitude more intensely within the busy life…

The Sandwalk Down House, Kent, England 31 August 2008 1/45 sec @ f/4; 18mm focal length Technorati Tags: blogpix, darwin, Raw, sandwalk

The title on this one pretty much says it all - after less than an hour of deliberation, the jury in the trial of Anne Mitchell came back with a not guilty verdict. The civil suit against the doctor, hospital, sheriff, district attorney, and county will presumably now come out of the holding pattern it's been in while the criminal case was pending.

The more I look at the circumstances that lead up to the criminal prosecution of a nurse in Texas for informing the State Medical Board of her concerns with a local physician, the more I wind up wondering just how things wound up where they are. It's easy - and far from inaccurate - to view this as a case of the good ol' boy network gone bad, or as an example of a quack doctor twisting the system to turn the accusers into the accused. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm starting to think that we've really been looking at part of the picture. We've been missing something that's…

Remains of street sign embedded in pahoehoe lava flow. Chain of Craters Road, Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii 4 November 2006 1/60 sec @ f/5.6; 55mm focal length Technorati Tags: blogpix, lava, volcanoes national park

As some of you might know, there is a very scary criminal case currently underway out in West Texas. A registered nurse named Anne Mitchell is currently standing trial. She's been charged with misuse of official information, which is a felony carrying a 10-year maximum sentence. She allegedly committed this crime by sending a complaint to the State Medical Board, because she was concerned about what she believed to be a pattern of sub-standard care and ethics on the part of Dr. Rolando Arafiles, a physician at the hospital where she worked. Dr. Arafiles, according to the complaint filed by…

View of St. Thibaud de Brageac - a 12th century village church in France Brageac, Auvergne, France 2 January 2007 1/30 sec @ f/8; 55mm focal length Technorati Tags: blogpix, brageac, France, Raw