My ranking of the top 20 prospects for 2015 impact went up on Tuesday for Insiders. I also wrote some words about Boston signing Yoan Moncada.
Over at Paste, I recapped what I learned about recent and upcoming boardgame releases from my visit to Toyfair.
And now this week’s links, heavy on the anti-science as it was a good week to be stupid…
- Jimmy Kimmel and a bunch of actual medical doctors have something to say to vaccine deniers. Meanwhile, look at these idiots in Arizona who exposed a whole town to measles after all three of their unvaccinated kids caught it at Disneyland … and the mom still can’t take full responsibility for her actions. How is denying your children essential medical care like vaccinations anything but child neglect?
- Meanwhile, there’s a vaccine out there that can largely prevent several forms of cancer, and lots of parents aren’t getting it for their children. It’s Gardasil, which provides immunity to most strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV), which is transmitted through sexual contact and can cause cervical, anal, vulvar, oral, and oropharyngeal cancers. Gardasil also protects against strains of HPV that cause genital warts. Yet we have vaccine deniers claiming it’s unsafe (it’s quite safe, thank you science), and I think we have a lot of parents refusing to acknowledge that their daughters are sexually active.
- Senator Sheldon Whitehouse puts the smack down on the Senate’s most anti-science member, Jim Inhofe, over the latter’s climate change denial (and ignorance, really). This is on the heels of the Idaho lawmaker who thought the vagina was connected to the digestive system and the Nevada lawmaker who said cancer is caused by a fungus and can be cured with baking soda. Science literacy matters, folks, especially among people who might be making laws and such.
- A rather harrowing blog post from writer Desi Jedeikin about a childhood memory of seeing her father nearly kill her mother. It’s a repost from xojane in 2012, but she put it on her tumblr this past week, which is where I first saw it. She’s also one of the only comedians/comedy writers I’ve ever encountered who can do very crude humor well.
- Also from the Harrowing Links Dept., a long read from the Wichita Eagle on the struggles of the daughter of Dennis Rader. You might remember Rader as BTK, the serial killer who terrorized Wichita over the course of about two decades and ten confirmed murders. The piece does contain some disturbing details of the murders.
- A new study says that babies who eat peanut-containing foods are 80% less likely to develop peanut allergies. Another study, this one in Sweden, found that children in households where people hand-washed dishes are about 40% less likely to develop allergies, a little more evidence in favor of the “hygiene hypothesis,” the idea that we have more allergies today because everything is too clean and our immune systems aren’t challenged by enough germs when we’re little.
- I’m not going to link to her page, since she’s an anti-science fraud, but the self-styled “food babe” is now targeting the food additive cellulose (and various derivatives of it), which is generally made from wood pulp. Although that sounds weird – and that’s just the fallacy TFB is exploiting here, the argument from personal incredulity – there are two significant problems with her “argument.” One is that cellulose is among the most common chemical compounds in the plant world. If you eat celery, you eat cellulose. The fact that the food additive version comes from wood shouldn’t matter any more than you should care that cochineal and carmine come from bugs. The FraudBabe’s second problem is that we all eat wood already: Cinnamon and its knockoff cassia come from the barks of two trees found mostly in south and southeast Asia, and that wood isn’t processed to be un-wood to anywhere near the extent that industrial cellulose is.
- Finally, also in the science-fraud department, the guy behind the junk-science juggernaut NaturalNews posted this gem late last week:
Boy recovering from #leukemia, who says everyone needs to be #vaccinated, has friends with ties to #vaccine industry.http://t.co/28Uc5L97SM
— HealthRanger (@HealthRanger) February 21, 2015
That’s right: A seven-year-old leukemia survivor is just a shill for Big Pharma. Welcome to the fantasyland of science deniers.
I asked my better half if she had ever heard of the Food Babe, either by moniker or by real name. She said she hadn’t. So she may be bigger in the food additive industry than the more general food blogging industry.
Regarding the HealthRanger, couldn’t it just as easily be said that he has friends in the anti-vox industry?
She has nearly a million likes on Facebook, so she has some perceived power, at least. She’s claimed – without clear evidence, of course – to have forced the removals of additives like azodicarbonamide from commercial products.
Will you do a write up of your meal at Qui?