America has seen a 30 percent rise in autism since the last estimate in 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control.That's a big jump, an epidemic even. Mainstream media is going to have a field day and everyone will be looking for ways to demonize their favorite societal targets.Before we start writing to Congress, we need to keep a few things in mind.(1) It's an estimate based on...
read moreUnless it's a child of Jenny McCarthy or the anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-science demographic that listens to her, kids of today who are reading classic fiction may not understand the world characters of the past lived in. Cholera? Scarlet Fever? Jungle Fever? A lot of great books written today simply lack a plot, unless the emotional anchors for The Velveteen Rabbit and Little Women could...
read moreLast week, the L.A. Times was able to post an article about an earthquake 3 minutes after it happened.No human could write that fast. And no human did. read...
read moreYou want to know what movies are about - and that is why spoilers related to the upcoming "Star Wars" movie and "Avengers 2" and whatever else are so popular.Hey, you knew how the RMS Titanic met its demise, and you still watched a movie about it, notes Rich Goldstein in The Daily Beast. I didn't, but most of you did. And Shakespeare knew you wanted to know, that is why you read The Tragedy...
read moreWho is to blame for the latest weekly decline in Cosmos ratings? The Walking Dead, NCAA basketball games, a mass exodus due to its opening effort to be culturally in-your-face? There is always going to be competition on TV, just like there will always be competition for a government R01 grant. No point in whining about that. And Cosmos still takes shots at religion, but it isn't devoting 25...
read more