What? You can just get a blog post published in a journal?

Especially a paper about scientific fraud that uses this clever figure? (It’s short and openly accessible, go ahead and read it.)

I’m envious. But then, it is a pretty good summary of the kinds of wickedness some scientists are up to. I’d have to put a few of the scientists in the ENCODE consortium in level II, and evolutionary psychology is definitely condemned to level III.

It’s titled the nine circles of scientific hell, so sorry, creationists don’t even register.

And the 2016 presidential campaign begins…NOW

The Republicans are always better organized than the Democrats, and they have already identified a clear front runner.

We will now spend four years moaning about the extra-special awfulness of the Republican candidate, pretending that a horrible half of the electorate doesn’t exist, and finally nominating someone notable mainly for their bureaucratic ability to blend in with the Washington beltway crowd. The Republican will still get a substantial percentage of the electorate and come close to winning (if not winning altogether), and then we’ll all wonder about those strange people who weren’t inspired by our lackluster candidate, and voted for the stupid party instead.

So “Gay Power” was meant literally?

You knew this was inevitable: Hurricane Sandy is blamed on New York’s gay marriage legislation by Rabbi Noson Leiter, and on the choice of two pro-homosexual candidates for the presidency by pastor John McTernan (oh, come on, does anyone really believe Romney will be good for gays? Maybe rich ones.)

Only Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has understood the implications. This is an amazing power that must be harnessed by America’s patriots.

The Big Stunt

I refrained from joining in the enthusiasm for Felix Baumgartner’s 128,000 foot parachute jump. It was a spectacular act of bravery, but it was also little more than a colossal stunt and a $10 million advertising gimmick for Red Bull. I just didn’t see the point — there was nothing learned from this event — and it seemed spectacularly crass, with a lot of truly stupid hype surrounding the story.

Now a historian puts the Stratos stunt in context. That makes it a little better, but it’s still a big commercial that put a man’s life at risk.

Hasn’t changed a bit in half a millennium

Archaeologists are digging up a Tuscan convent and have found some skeletons that might include the remains of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, also known as Mona Lisa. She’s still lovely after all this time.

One investigator has been going through the bones, trying to identify the dead woman, so they can apply forensic reconstruction to her skull.

Wait…why?

I mean, we already know what she looked like. I can understand general historical research on Renaissance remains, but pawing through the graveyard to find one famous person simply to reconstruct a face we’re already familiar with seems peculiarly ghoulish — nothing but a sensationalistic game. What question does this answer, what do we learn from this pointless exercise?

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who wonders about that.

But not all experts are convinced by the claims of Dr Vinceti and his team. Dr Kristina Killgrove, an anthropologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the US, said on her blog: "Although the excavation is being carried out in a professional manner, Vinceti’s quest to dig up the ‘real’ Mona Lisa is not grounded in scientific research methodology." She added: "The news media’s breathless coverage of it threatens to signal to the public that archaeologists are frivolous with their time, energy, and research money."

Maybe, once they identify the skull, they can send it off to the Louvre and mount it on the wall next to the painting. <sarcasm>That’ll be informative.</sarcasm>