There’s been a lot of chatter in anti-quakery circles lately. A lot of it has been backlash against the Huffington Post for recent posts by anti-vaccination folks and general alt-med mongers. And more recently, against Oprah Winfrey for signing a deal with Jenny McCarthy. Most of this has been in the sub-culture of skeptic bloggers. The Huffington Post did notably run an article in opposition to (it’s own) anti-science posts of late. And now Salon has poked it’s head in with an article about Oprah’s general affinity for alternative medicine weirdness.

This morass prompts me to make a few observations about the alt-med culture in general and anti-vaccination in particular. Firstly, as I’ve mentioned, alternative medicine and anti-vaccination seem to be phenomena of the political left. That’s one reason it fascinates me. It pains me to see my side succumb to a lack of reason (our general affinity for reason is what I like about my side).

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I’m still not done with this claim. I gave up after a couple of hours. I imagine I’ll be spending a good chunk of my weekend on this.I am currently trying to submit a claim for out-of-network services to my health insurance. I’ve done this before with my old insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and I thought that process was abstruse, but it wasn’t too odious and it got done to my satisfaction. Well, my company recently changed insurers and I now realize how spoiled I was. I would just like to take a moment to talk about the claim form I am faced with and what it demonstrates about the unfathomable levels of stupidity that humans are capable of.

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I have been a follower of the creationism/evolution thing for some time now. The loose community of skeptics on the nets that fight those battles share time with fights against other forms of nuttery as well. HIV/AIDS denialism, vaccine/autism quackery, UFOlogy, paranormal nonsense, and others.

I have managed to remain relatively unaware of the details of these. I mean, who has time to devote to learning about more than one completely head-whacking morass of ignorance? Well, I can no longer resist the pull of whackjob trainwrecks.

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There are some things about President Obama’s track record so far (vast as it is) that concern me: legal stances on state secrets and habeus corpus, questionable handling of the economic situation, and possibly accountability for torture (I haven’t made up my mind on that one yet).

But one man can’t be all things to all people, and there is one area where Obama has been reminding me of why I was so excited about him in the first place: science.

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Ben Goldacre has released a chapter that was originally missing from his book Bad Science. It’s about Matthias Rath, AIDS “dissident”. It’s well worth a read. I have not read Dr. Goldacre’s book (I hope to at some point), but I do read his blog regularly and it is always worth a read, as well. A brief taste:

The United Nations has condemned Rath’s adverts as “wrong and misleading”. “This guy is killing people by luring them with unrecognised treatment without any scientific evidence,” said Eric Goemaere, head of Médecins sans Frontières SA, a man who pioneered anti-retroviral therapy in South Africa. Rath sued him.

The whole thing is below the fold.

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I’ve been spazzing lately on trying to understand a little bit about the econoclysm. As I mentioned, I like Krugman’s blog. Howard pointed me to Baseline Scenario, which is nice. I do enjoy the Planet Money podcast and, of course, the periodic This American Life segments by the Planet Money crew. I even tried some papers at the Heritage Foundation to understand the right side of things (didn’t help a lot). I think I have more questions than when I started. Here’s some:

• If we nationalize the really big banks, then who’s left to sell them to when we’re done with them?
• If we nationalize the big banks, how does that get done operationally and is it even possible from a manpower/management perspective?
• How are tax cuts supposed to help stimulate the economy when a) everyone (including corporations) will probably just save the money and not spend it and b) the problem is one of low demand, not low supply?
• How is “mark to market” even an issue? Sure, I’d love to pretend my house was worth a lot more than it is, but it just doesn’t work that way.
• How is restraining spending supposed to help? Doesn’t that just fuel the demand problem?
• Some say we shouldn’t boost demand, we need to lower supply, but doesn’t that just mean lots of companies go under and we have huge unemployment for a long, long time?

I’m sure I’ll have more later.

A recent paper on miRNA got me thinking about when I started to get interested in the micro mechanisms of biology. Specifically, it reminded me of a fundamental misunderstanding that I had about biology that, when corrected, suddenly allowed things to make a lot more sense. It’s one of the cooler (and maddeningly illogical) aspects of molecular biology. I think that understanding it will help clear up a lot of people’s confusion about how genes and evolution work.

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Salon has an interesting piece today on PBS and crackpot science. I’ve always seen my PBS station as the best television resource for science (by far). Programs have their ups and downs (see this post about Nova) but some stations are apparently far more wackadoo.

Mark Hyman “UltraMind Solution” | Salon.

My resource of choice for running narrative on the econocalypse has become Paul Krugman’s blog at NYtimes. I appreciate his columns, too but the blog is where it’s at.

I understand maybe half of what I read there, but I’m fascinated by the blog as an exemplar of cultural movement. The man writes like a snarky thirty-year-old, but one who happens to have a Nobel in economics. He can combine impenetrable wonkishness (by his own explicit declaration) with delightful, slightly stale nerditry. A wonderful encapsulation of this is his recent post titled “All Your Downside Are Belong To Us“.

I find the blog helpful as a digest of the technical details of economic issues from day to day. And I find it absorbing as a reflection of this moment in cultural evolution - a cataclysm refracted through a delicious soup of Internet themes.

I know I’m not exactly early to the Paul Krugman party (and I do hope the members of the administration were, as is suggested, a lot earlier than I) but I still think he deserves another whoop.

As I have mentioned, I’m an information architect. That sounds fancier than it is. Mostly I draw boxes. Some of the boxes that I draw are grouped into site maps.

Site maps are a visual representation of the organization of a website. Typically, that means the pages of a site, buy they can be used for content or UI features or other things. I am concerned here with the traditional page-based site map as often produced by web IAs.

And I am talking about them because they suck. They are not as valuable as people think. Why? Read on.

A warning: this is going to be very long and boring for anyone who doesn’t spend his entire day worrying about categorizing content.

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