Pharmaceutical companies love to complain about how expensive it is to bring a new drug to market often throwing the number $1.3 billion dollars around. It’s easy to understand why, it’s makes high drug prices easier to swallow. Those high prices get progressively harder to swallow when you learn that pharmaceutical companies routinely spend 3 [...]
I’m going to pretend that I’m posting this because of the impressive data visualization letting you see, not only all the scores from every dunk in the NBA Slam Dunk Contest since 1984, but by clicking on any score you can also see the video of the dunk. Loosely science related, strongly weekend related (as [...]
Take a perfectly straight line. Ask someone to copy it. Then ask another person to trace that second line and so on until you get 500 people down. What do you end up with? The furthest thing from a straight line. This is a simple way of demonstrating how evolution works, sometimes. It starts off [...]
Watch this one fullscreen in HD:
I’m not sure what to think about the cover story of the March issue of Wired. The cover states, in a way that apparently should make the conclusion clear: 1 million workers, 90 million iPhones, 17 suicides. First, a minor point: 17 suicides in how many years? If it’s in one year that seems kind [...]
Like this: I know I came from you and mommy, and that you came from your mommy and daddy, and that grandma and grandpa came from their mommies and daddies, but where did the first kids come from? That was the four-year-old daughter of the creator of Calamities of Nature, a webcomic with a strong [...]
“What we really yearn for as human beings in to be visible to each other.”
An interesting article from The Smart Set describing two very different ideas of what makes a genius (via: 3quarksdaily): On the neoclassical side of the ring, we’ve got Voltaire and Kant, who defined genius as “only judicious imitation” (that was Voltaire). This means that genius is deliberate and that ideas come from somewhere, rather than [...]
Enough talk about global health, education reform and Carl Sagan. Here’s some actual practical advice about how to treat a cold from Science-Based Medicine (SBM). I like SBM because–here come’s a hockey analogy–they’re the Spector’s Rumors of the health world. Specter’s Rumors, for those of you who don’t think about hockey trades 11 times a [...]
This story is from last year but it fits too well with the Bill O’Reilly video from yesterday. From an article written by Joe Keohane in the Boston Globe: Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts [...]
