Whoa…ScienceOnline has gone and died

They announced their decision to shut down the organization and cancel future conferences yesterday. This is sad news — it has always been an innovative, interesting event, but they faced a terrible hit when one of their founders, Bora Zivkovic, was slammed with charges of harassing women, and they’ve been struggling to get donations to support the organization. I suspect they may also have gotten a bit over-extended, too, since they’d been creating satellite conferences on narrower topics at different locations (which was an excellent idea, by the way, but may not have been wise if their core operations were overtaxed).

The full announcement is below the fold.

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xkcd hits another one out of the park

There is a place for academic arguments — but in the real world, we have an obligation to take arguments that harm people seriously, and advocate honestly for what we really believe. If you’re talking about torture, for instance, you do no one any favor by inventing improbable-to-impossible scenarios and then making justifications that will be used in far less justifiable situations.

Cancers aren’t atavisms!

I’ve been so disappointed in the journal BioEssays lately. It hasn’t gotten bad, exactly, it’s just changed, moving away from my interests. It used to have lots of papers on developmental biology, and now it rarely does; I think it’s since Adam Wilkins left the journal staff.

But every once in a while I still check in. I may have to change my mind about the quality. They’ve published an article on cancer by Lineweaver, Davies, and Vincent, on their absurd “atavistic theory of cancer”. It’s embarrassingly bad — I’ve written about it before, and Davies openly admits that it’s based on … Haeckelian recapitulation.

You should be dumbfounded by this revelation.

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I read the Morris North Star, so you don’t have to

Last year, there was a rather ridiculous tempest in a tea cup in which our local conservative “alternative” student newspaper, the Morris North Star, published some sick racist crap, and I suggested that the campus ought to throw the paper out, and then they threatened to sue me. Nothing happened, except that the North Star stopped publishing for the rest of the semester — I think they probably ran out of money.

This year, I thought we might be rid of them. Their lawyers had gone silent, and no more crappy editions appeared. Unfortunately, our luck has run out, and new slimy stuff has appeared.

I thought I’d do them a favor. Since they’re so touchy about people taking their paper — they now say on the cover, First Copy: FREE. All subsequent copies are $5 — I thought I’d encourage you all to take zero copies. But if you’re really curious, I thought I’d be nice and summarize the content for you.

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Painting something pink doesn’t make it good

A company that makes drill bits for fracking is painting them Susan G. Komen Pink — that specific intense shade that has become fixed in the public eye as the color of breast cancer research. Note, though, that this is entirely an initiative by the drill bit company, and there doesn’t seem to be a specific partnership, and the company doesn’t seem to be donating any money to breast cancer research, but are just painting all their bits a different color than usual, and tossing in a breast cancer pamphlet.

pinkdrill
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How not to give an interview

You know, that moment in an interview where suddenly the subject goes wandering off script, and becomes fervent — obsessed even — on a subject that makes your eyebrows rise up and reach for your hairline, and you’re beginning to wonder whether someone will kick the person under the table or make that throat-cutting motion with their hand or something, anything, to get them to shut up because you can’t believe that they’re saying such hateful, stupid stuff? Yeah, that happened.

Mathew Klickstein has a niche: he’s fanatical about old kid shows on Nickelodeon. It’s a weirdly twee sort of thing to care so much about, but I can sort of see it — my kids were big fans of shows like Rugrats and The Adventures of Pete & Pete (that one had Iggy Pop on it, which I thought was awesome) and Clarissa. So he’s doing a show in New York about these old cartoons, he’s written a book about them, and he’s getting interviewed, and yes, he really, really knows a lot of minutiae about Nickelodeon cartoons.

Then they ask him about diversity.

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