Today’s Science Lesson
Today’s science lesson is sponsored by XKCD comics.
You can find more at http://xkcd.com/, in case you haven’t checked it out before.
Today’s science lesson is sponsored by XKCD comics.
You can find more at http://xkcd.com/, in case you haven’t checked it out before.
My father is 92 years old, and I am beginning to wonder whether the best thing for his health would be to stay away from doctors. That’s because well intentioned physicians often expose their elderly patients to harmful and unnecessary services out of habit. That’s certainly the message I absorbed after reading a recent issue…
The world is complicated. It’s hard to know what the federal government should do about a whole range of problems. That’s why most people take a shortcut, and judge policies based on their opinion of the people who support or oppose those policies. If you like someone, and he supports a policy, then you are…
Platforms and popularity ratings; policies and debate performances; PAC funding and get-out-the-vote efforts – so many factors can make the difference in a close election. But uncontrollable world events can tip elections too. In fact, Donald Trump’s election chances may depend on something as seemingly random as a global epidemic. Epidemics of contagious disease are…
This picture shows changes in the cost of treating colon cancer, from 1993-2005. It shows unsustainable growth in these expenditures: By unsustainable, however, I do not mean unjustifiable. Patients with colon cancer have much better prognoses in 2005 than 1993, in large part due to advances in chemotherapy. Instead what I mean by unsustainable is…
Often great science depends on keen observation. Darwin built his theory of evolution on detailed observations of everything from birds to beetles. Jane Goodall revolutionized our understanding of primate behavior by staring at chimpanzees for hours and days. But not just staring at them, noticing them. She saw things most observers would not have picked…
In a clever study, secret shoppers called primary care offices in an attempt to make a new patient appointment. People with Obamacare insurance, or “marketplace plans” in the below figure, had a hard time finding appointments. But so did people with traditional insurance. But there’s a bigger takeaway, one slightly obscured by the misleading y-axis,…