Mr Hensley tried to swim to shore but eyewitnesses told the sheriff’s investigators the swan appeared to have actively blocked him.

By Crom, they're after the children!

“I find myself still scratching my head,” says Sheriff Dart. “This truly is one of the ones that keeps you from saying ‘I’ve seen everything now.’”

I’ve seen the Canadian geese go after passersby, especially when their young are around, and I’ve seen a swan chasing people, but never thought they’d consider murder. (Canadian geese, however, are renown for their anti-human suicide attacks, showing no concern for military or civilian targets.)

This Star-Ledger fluff piece on local urban legends actually has done me a favor:

Sussex sea serpent

Lake Hopatcong boaters, swimmers and anglers share the water with a sea monster nicknamed Hoppie. Although the creature is regarded as a friendly inhabitant, there was a panic in 1894, when fishermen first noticed something lurking in the lake. The monster was described as 40 feet long, with the head of a canine and the body of a snake, “as thick as a man’s leg.” The archived news story includes quotes from doubters who suggested that the behemoth was probably a floating beer keg.

I have little fear of monsters and even less fear of beer kegs, so I think I’m alright here.

To those with an open mind, of course, the transistor could be considered a breakthrough of both science and engineering–in effect both a discovery and an invention. What seemed fair to say, though, wast that the transition was not yet an innovation.

The term “innovation” dated back to sixteenth-century England. Originally it described the introduction into society of a novelty or new idea, usually relating to philosophy or religion. By the middle of the twentieth century, the words “innovate” and “innovation” were just beginning to be applied to technology and industry. And they began to fill a descriptive gap. If an idea begat a discovery, and if a discovery begat an invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use. Almost by definition, a single person, or even a single group, could not alone create an innovation. The task was too variegated and involved.

Right now, I know folks struggling with the concept of “translation,” as in translational medicine, the process of taking a scientific biomedical concept and turning it into a practical drug or therapy.

Everyone, from researchers to academic administration to pharma to the National Institutes of Health, are calling for translation. What they mean is innovation, I think.

Still, look at the crazy man and his magic underwater pressure cooker.

Anyway, I realized that I can’t just pick up and run once the zombies rise. With small kids in tow, the options are fewer.

Here’s the outline I sketched in my head, but I don’t know if I should put the serious stuff first or the fun stuff first.

Introduction: Dawn of the Dread, The Paranoid Style in Parenting
Chapter 1: Hey, its happened before
Chapter 2: So, You Think You’ll Live through This.
Chapter 3: Preparing for the Highly Unlikely without Looking Like A Total Kook or Freaking out Your Kids and Partner.
Chapter 4: Nowhere Left to Run, How to Hunker Down or Find New Shelter
Chapter 5: Scruffles Isn’t Coming Back, Helping Children Cope with Deaths in the Family And/Or Civilization
Chapter 6: Running Bartertown: Skills for the Post-Apocalypse
Chapter 7: Oh The Many Ways We’ll Die <--Here is where the fun starts; Include a chart on whether a particular apocalypse is worth doing anything about
Chapter 8: They Came from Outer Space, Part I: Nature Wants Us Dead
Chapter 9: They Came from Outer Space, Part II: Invasion: Earth
Chapter 10: Zombie A-Go-Go
Chapter 11: Financial Apocalypse (Duh)
Chapter 12: They Suck: What To Do When The Vampires Take Over
Chapter 13: Robot Riot
Chapter 14: When the Stars Are Right: Surviving Mind-shattering Reveals
Chapter 15: Everyone Look Busy: Religious Apocalypses
Chapter 16: Pascal's Powerball: A Review Of Non-Western Religious Apocalypses
Chapter 17: Kaijuageddon: Life Under Foot
Chapter 18: Monster Mash-up.

Good deal, eh? Now I just need a publisher and an illustrator. And to write it.

UPDATE: I added a new first chapter.

Arnica, for example. There’s a big difference between homeopathic arnica preparations (which don’t got no arnica in it) vs. arnica gel (which is often labeled homeopathic even though it has an active amount of ingredient). Arnica gel can actually do something. Anyway, PZ Myers schooled the Jezebel site on the topic, which is worth a read.

I know some folks who have fallen for applied kinesiology…not scams, per se, but some hokum motivational speaker. Here’s a good an interesting look at the phenomena and how its used on Science-Based Medicine, written by the awesome Harriet Hall whose wrath I unfortunately incurred by attributing an article of her’s to Steven Novella, likely because SBM at the time looked identical to NeuroLogica.

Also: Heh, wallet biopsy.

Are blue whales the biggest animals ever? Maybe.

I mean, its one of those factoids that comes up repeatedly in books about either whales or dinosaurs, both of which we have in great heaps at Stinkbug Manor. (Definitely need a new bookcase in Julia’s room.) At 98 ft (30m) long and weighing almost 200 tons (180mt), it is certainly big. Dino-writer extraordinaire, Brian Switek, reexamines the claim with a look at some of the biggest sauropods that may (or may not) have ever existed. Spoiler: some dinos were longer, but none were likely more massive than a big blue.

Argentinosaurs, shamefully hot-linked

Speaking of Switek and sauropods, he mentioned on Twitter the other week about a dinosaur app for the iPad that I felt necessary to buy. It hasn’t been as popular with the kids as Dinosaur Zoo, due to the lack of defecating sauropods, but it is a little more stylish, a lot more expensive, and contains 100 percent more Stephen Fry, which is worth the $15. It is called Inside the World of Dinosaurs, and each morning, as I make coffee, Mr. Fry tells me about a dinosaur. This morning it was Argentinosaurus. Of course, I’d buy a copy of the phone book if Fry were to narrate it. Interestingly, he pronounces Giganotosaurus (which played into the story of Argentinosaurus) differently than they do on Dinosaur Train, favoring Ji-GANT-osaurus over Ji-gah-NOH-ta-saurus (forgive my phonetic approximations).

Today Brian wrote a lovely article on icthyosaur falls, which are like whale falls but, you know, they happened a long time ago to, you know, icthyosaurs.

The point being that ichthyosaur carcasses, like whale carcasses today, could serve to feed an entire ecosystem of bottom-dwelling, presumably nasty, critters. Sayeth Switek:

How different organisms utilized marine reptiles depended on the state of the carcass. When the dead marine reptiles were still covered in flesh, sharks and cephalopods probably picked at the body. Once denuded of soft parts, though, the reptile’s skeleton could have been a refuge for various encrusting and burrowing organisms (although, as far as I am aware, no one has yet found evidence of bone-burrowing snotworms among Mesozoic marine reptile skeletons). Fine-scale field investigations are required to further investigate this hypothesis, but Hogler made a reasonable case that marine reptile deadfalls may have been ecologic precursors to modern whalefalls. Perhaps some of the organisms which congregate to dismantle whales today are the descendants and relatives of creatures which used to greet the carcasses of mosasaurs, ichthyosaurs, and other Mesozoic sea dragons.

So thusly we are reminded of a past, reason not to go into the water: bone-eating dominatrix tube worms with a dwarf fetish.

Ah, love. In all its filthy disgusting forms.

The Wonderful Effects of the New Innoculation (thanks Wikipedia!)

At the risk of not sounding terribly polite, I’ve been researching (i.e., Googling) some of the stupidest questions being asked in our society: those of the antivax movement. Its not that it is stupid to question vaccinations, or for parents to ask sincere questions before having their children repeatedly jab. That’s common sense. No, the stupid comes in where we see antivaccine talking points repeated endlessly, unthinkingly by the antivaccine faithful. (And before you say it, “open minds” should go both ways.) You can’t help but find the same rhetoric being repeated endlessly on discussion boards, partisan websites and in interviews.

Anyway, I’m collecting some of my favorite Snappy Answers to Stupid Vaccine Questions here. While I am no expert, I’ll try to link to answers with good references. I’m also trying to avoid the vanilla PR answers you’ll get from health system websites.

Al Jaffee, by the way, is still alive, possibly in Guantanamo through either a tragic misunderstanding or an accurate Snappy Answer.

From A Photon in the Darkness comes Three Popular Anti-vaccine Myths Deconstructed. Spoilers: The myths are
1) “You claim that vaccines are 100% safe and effective!” Which technically is actually kind of a straw man of a straw man. A meta scarecrow, if you will. But only technically. As Photon explains, nobody of any real knowledge of the matter would claim that vaccines are either 100% safe or effective.
2) ”Vaccine-preventable diseases were in decline before the vaccines were introduced”
3) “The chickenpox vaccine causes shingles!”

From Losing in the Lucky Country comes a discussion on the mysterious phenomena of Vaccine Shedding, which follows in great part with myth #3 above. I’ve seen this sort of thing pop up in a number of discussion boards, where the real phenomena of viral shedding, a part of viral reproduction, has somehow been conflated with vaccines to create the myth of Vaccine Shedding.

The colloquial use of this nonsensical term seeks to convey that an individual who has been vaccinated can readily shed part of the vaccine and cause infection in the unvaccinated. Which by definition demands them to have shed not a vaccine but an infectious agent. Indeed a virus. Which by extension demands the vaccine to be a live virus vaccine. This then opens the door to viral shedding the vast complexities of vaccine induced immunity and viable modes of excretion – aka shedding. That won’t stop your garden variety anti-vaxxer claiming any vaccine can lead to infection of the unvaccinated via this ghastly “vaccine shedding”.

Its complex, and worth a read. To oversimplify, yes, live attenuated vaccines can pose a risk to immunocompromised people (and often infants and pregnant women) and a healthy child or adult cannot get sick from being near a vaccinated person.

I’ll try to keep updating this as whim takes me.

UPDATE 1: How Antivaxxers Debate

Here’s a nice primer on common antivaccine “Tropes and Tactics”, which is summarized and added-upon by Orac here for those who can’t access the article.

UPDATE 2: Brain Studies Demonstrate Autism at 6 Months

Interesting news for the antivaccine proponents who still cling to the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism: you can detect patterns of autism in children as young as six months. Of course, MMR isn’t given to children younger than one year old, which leftbrainrightbrain blog suggests time travel may be the last refuge for the vaccine denialists. They also take a nifty look at the causation/correlation fallacy commonly necessarily employed by people who still insist vaccines cause autism.

UPDATE 3: The Amish

Apparently, one anti-vax talking point is that the Amish don’t get vaccines, therefore they don’t get autism. Double wrong. Turns out that the Amish do get vaccinated (there’s no specific religious prescription against vaccines…or modern medicine, in general) and they do get autism (but, no those two aren’t linked here, either) and here’s the study that shows it.

The Amish, as a hole, tend to see fewer cases of autism. Their rate, according to the study just mentioned, is about 1 in 270 versus 1 in 91 among the rest of the population, as whole. That, to me, says something about a genetic component to autism. Genetic studies among the Amish are very well documented, as they tend to suffer a disproportionate number of genetic diseases. Given the, you know, limited gene pool.

Panda poses with poise

With the full moon, it was tough to point out Orion’s belt and Betelgeuse (“hey honey, its going to blow up some day”"No“”Yes”"Really?”"Uh-huh”"Cool“), but we managed. The laser also gave off a cool green disco effect on her shoes.

On a whim, I carried with me Julia’s digital camera, which was left on the hutch for some infraction and forgotten about months ago.

Then we decided to do something we haven’t done in nearly two years, when nightly walks were far more common, continue cataloging the puppies of Jenkintown. We meandered up to the town square, looked through the toy shop windows and talked about how the new owner of the bakery next door is much nicer (the old one wouldn’t let her use the bathroom once). I forgot how much I missed this stuff. We got out of the habit when Benny became of walking age. He’s less of a stroller than Julia.

When we found our only victim of the night, Julia and I both felt out of practice. She got nervous in asking the owner for permission, and then forgot how to use the flash setting. For my part, I forgot where the review button was as well as my notebook for recording the deets on the dog, Panda. In any case, I felt bad about holding the dog’s owner in the cold to indulge my kid, so I wasn’t going to quiz him.

Merry and bright

Panda, like most dogs around here, it seems, is a mixed breed adopted from a rescue. She had a beagle meets bull terrier vibe and was very sweet. Julia, of course, reminded me that we need a dog. I, of course, reminded her that we can’t rely on her to pick up her toys, how would she manage with a puppy? She just would, is all.

On the way back we stopped off to take some shots of the neighborhood lights. They came out blurry, but Julia liked the effect.

One of those solar-powered LED ornaments. Maybe a hummingbird, which would explain the blur.

She’s thinking of taking pictures of all the stuff in people’s yards. Pink flamingos and decorations and the like.

We’ll call it the Gnomenclature of Jenkintown, I thought, but I didn’t dare tell her. We had done enough for the evening, and I didn’t like the idea of poorly explaining one more thing that night.