Your humble editor is taking next week off, but before I do so, I must quickly note a few milestones:
--HealthFactsAndFears.com is (currently) the third-highest Google hit for the search term "fears" -- right behind the New Wave band Tears for Fears at #1 and the techno-thriller Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy at #2, which is approximately where I've always wanted to be, and I do not begrudge New Wave its well-deserved triumph. I may start referring to this site simply as Fears for short, though, to give us a bit of a nudge upward, search-term-wise ("Oh, yeah, I've read Fears...What does Fears have to say about the latest scare?...Have you seen that site Fears?...Search for fears, you'll find it," etc.)
--One writer who has done a great deal over 25/26ths of ACSH's twenty-six-year existence to help make us so prominent is Kathleen Meister. In fact, ACSH just presented her with an award for her two and a half decades of solid work, helping craft consumer-friendly versions of our reports on such topics as chemoprevention of breast cancer, chemoprevention of coronary heart disease, risk factors for prostate cancer, nutrition accuracy in popular magazine's, and America's War on "Carcinogens".
--Speaking of science and media, if you're near DC on February 26, you should attend a panel discussion on "The State of Science and Journalism" moderated by Nick Gillespie (editor of Reason magazine and the book Choice) and featuring science writers Ron Bailey, Sally Satel, and Chris Mooney (RSVP to pcoryell[at]gmu.edu).
--Other friends of ACSH, the Atlantic Legal Foundation, scored an important victory for science in recent weeks when the California Court of Appeal ruled, as urged by Atlantic Legal Foundation and others, to dismiss dubious claims that Lockheed workers involved in building stealth bombers had suffered a variety of chemically-induced ailments. The message is starting to sink in across the land that a lot of courtroom science is really superstition in the service of plaintiff lawyers.
--Meanwhile, a different sort of defeat was dealt to trespassers/vandals/protesters from Greenpeace who disrupted highly valuable oil trading in London this week (to protest oil's supposed role in accelerating global warming) -- and were surprised and saddened to find themselves getting pummeled by the traders. They sort of had it coming, environmental writer Robert Bidinotto succinctly suggests.
--Greenpeace being troublemakers is no surprise to one of the group's co-founders, Patrick Moore, who says the environmental movement has "abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism."
And if all the fighters against junk science noted above aren't enough to stop the nonsense, the Onion seems to have a surprisingly good handle on the problem of scaremongers, too, judging by pieces such as "Nation's Leading Alarmists Excited About Bird Flu."
Fears editor Todd Seavey begins hosting the monthly http://JinxMagazine.com debates at the bar Lolita in Manhattan on March 2 at 8pm, with the first topic being whether traditional gender roles are natural.
