There were two things in my young life that got me thoroughly engaged and excited about science and astronomy.  One, Carl Sagan, has been recently celebrated and written up all over the blogosphere by others greater than I – all I can manage is to point there way and say, “Yup…  What they said.”

But in thinking back to watching Cosmos, I was reminded of that other source of excitement: Our Universe, published in 1980 by National Geographic.

Our Universe

I hadn’t seen the book in years, but I dug it out of a bookshelf in the basement to refresh my memory.  It’s a large, square book, perfect for a coffee table. And when I was a kid, this book easily contained the greatest drawings and explanations of the universe than I’d even seen before.

Betelgeuse is Big

I would flip back and forth between the pages for the different planets, comparing their sizes, masses, number of moons, ring shapes, and more.  I even liked how the mythology got tied in to the planets as they showed drawings of the gods the planets were named after.

Jupiter

I remember the first time I heard that scientists had discovered more moons around Jupiter.  I went back to Our Universe and just thought about that.  Here’s this great book, only out for a couple years, and it’s already wrong!  I thought that was so awesome.

Jupiter's 14 Moons (as of 1980)

There’s some really great science in here, too.  A good graphic of how Mars appears to go retrograde; a picture of Saturn floating in an impossibly large glass of water, while Earth and Mercury sit like pebbles at the bottom; a discussion of how light spectra are used to determine the elemental makeup of a star; a description of how that brand spanking new Space Shuttle thingy will work; and plenty, plenty more.

Saturn Floats

Our Universe even got speculative at points, suggesting how life might exist on other worlds in our solar system — not suggesting that such life actually existed, but if you postulate that life does exist there, what would it have to be like to survive in that kind of environment.  I loved those pages.  It fired up my imagination.  And that, dear readers, is part of what kept me interested.

Stovebellies and Fishimanders on Titan

The takeaway from this, for me, is how I plan to get my kids excited about science — just put it in front of them.  I wasn’t beat over the head with Cosmos or this book, they were just there for the taking.  Give kids these kinds of wonderful resources, and they’ll eat up it like candy-coated-candy.  Science isn’t about textbooks, balancing chemical equations, free-body diagrams, cell mitosis, gravitational lensing, carbon-dating, or stuff like that.

Science is about imagination!

Science is about wonderment!

Science is about awesomeness!

It’s about letting your kids help you (not just watch you) put together their Galileoscopes and heading outside to look at the craters in the moon or moons around Jupiter.  You don’t have to tell them to count how many they’ll see — they figure that out on their own!

Little Skeptic Girl and Little Skeptic Boy with their Galileoscopes

Both Cosmos and Our Universe lit the fire for me.  They taught me a lot, but they also made me excited about learning more.  Let’s be sure we’re doing the same with our kids.

Big Dipper Side View

..Rob T.

Avengers #1

OK, time to dig out my old Marvel comics…

An article published Friday in the UK’s Telegraph cites a University of Illinois study that found that, contrary to conventional wisdom (and prior studies), reading comic books is as good for developing minds as reading other kinds of books.

The gist is that, even though some kids might prefer to just look at the pictures (which has always been the criticism), that’s no different than for conventional picture books.  And when the kids do begin to read the words — or have them read to them — they are engaging in the same synthesis of images and pictures that other picture books require.

So there’s no reason to shield your up-and-coming readers from comics, right?

Well…

The article didn’t address another concern (because it wasn’t the point of the article) that many parents might have about comic books, and that is their appropriateness for young children.  Little Skeptic Boy has just recently (thanks to a Taco Bell giveaway) become introduced to comic books.  But we check them out before he gets his hands on them.  He’s six, and there’s a limit to the amount of generally-young-teen-intended material that we’d like him exposed to.

I’ll let pictures to the talking…

The Death of Captain America

Robin Dies

Ultimate Scarlet Witch

Psylocke

Some if it has a little more sex and violence than I’d like.  Nice positive body image by Psylocke up there.  She must have some impressive muscles around her midsection that keep her from snapping at the waist due to her ample top-half…

Anyhow…

What’s my point?  Well, I’m not saying that six-year-olds like Little Skeptic Boy should read only Sandra Boynton picture books and Archie comics from the 50’s.  What I am saying is that while this new study means parents don’t need to feel guilty when their kids want to read comics – guilty that it’s not as good as “real” reading – we do – like always – need to be aware of the content.

Just like some PG movies are fine for LSB and his sister, other PG movies will not be appropriate for years.  There’s a spectrum.

So let your kids enjoy the comics – but pick them out yourself.  I’m not going to be buying Watchmen for LSB anytime soon…

NOT The Comedian's last moments alive (thanks, simon!)

A great way to get some that are (somewhat) less violent and sexy is to head to a comic book store and look through the cheap racks for old comic books from the 60’s and 70’s.  You can usually skim through them (these are the cheapies – not Action Comics #1), decide the content is OK, and not break the bank.  Admittedly, though, what you lose in violence and skimpy outfits, you gain in sexism (i.e. The Avengers can’t reach The Wasp to come help stop a supervillain because she was shopping at Macy’s).

..Rob T.

Tip o’ Mystic Mjolnir to Derek Colunado for pointing out the Telegraph article.

We’re having a bit of a kerfuffle in the comments right now, concerning the question of home birth v. hospital birth. And I have to tell you, it’s another time in my life when I realize how amazingly lucky I am to be married to Grrl, and not to any number of previous wives or girlfriends who lack her basic good sense.

When we were preparing to have our first child, there was no debate about a hospital birth. There was no agonizing about the joys and wonders of childbirth. Grrl–rightly in my mind–saw childbirth as a job she had to do, the focus of the job being a healthy, safe baby. Nothing else was particularly interesting to her.

In direct contrast to the picture being painted by the pro-home birth advocates on this site and others, the establishment actually tried to persuade her the other way. The dangers of an epidural were duly explained. The joys of a “natural” childbirth were extolled in our preparatory classes. To all of this, the Grrl simply raised her chin and stuck with her birth plan, as worked out between her and her OB.

The birthing room was quite nice, the bed extremely comfortable, the nurses very pleasant and affable. I had a wifi connection and a bench to sleep on, she was constantly monitored for any signs of danger, helped up if she needed or wanted to walk. We were never treated in any way that was not pleasant and accommodating and respectful.

In other words, the nightmare scenario that some home-birth advocates project, where women are–apparently–strapped down to beds and force fed drugs before being C-sectioned for no reason, is not an accurate portrayal of modern medicine at a decent hospital.

It helps that Grrl works in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). She knows the kinds of things that can go wrong in a birth. She knows what can happen to a baby during a trip to a hospital, how a baby that should be fine can end up on life support, fighting lung infections in it’s first week of life. She swims in that sea.

So there was never any question of where we would be having the baby. Home birth, birthing center… these options were simply ignored. She stayed a focused, dedicated, and fierce advocate for her children.

Grrl worries, now, whether she should have gone natural. She has occasionally admitted to a tinge of regret that she was so businesslike about the whole matter. But we only have the opportunity to have that conversation, and worry about that sort of trivial detail, because we have two beautiful, healthy children. It is a luxury to be able to worry our heads about “fulfillment” or whatever, because the job of bringing the babies into the world is done.

It’s not like we could possibly love them more than we already do!

Dr. Amy Tuteur is to Rikki Lake as PZ Myers is to Ray Comfort. She’s a pit bull that feeds on helpless soy milk drinking, granola crunching, natural home-birth hippies. Hey, those are my friends (and family) she’s eviscerating with evidence-based arguments!!

Dr. Tuteur is a Harvard educated OBGYN who knows her way around a birth canal. She’s currently a full-time Mom and a part-time blogger at the Skeptical OB blog. She also recently joined the ranks at our favorite blog of skeptically-minded doctors, Science-Based Medicine.

She breaks right out of the gate with two articles on home birthing and c-sections. For those familiar with Dr. Tuteur, the information will not be new, but Science-Based Medicine will bring her argument to a wider audience. Considering that she’s substantially shifted my understanding of the issue, I think she deserves to be heard.

At the Dragoncon parenting panel, I mentioned that my wife and I compromised on the birth of our daughter Sasha. My wife wanted a “natural” labor & delivery, and I wanted it at the hospital because I believed, without statistical evidence at the time,  that hospitals would be safer. Then, Skeptrack panelist Daniel Loxton piped in that he and his wife had a home birth because he had looked into the research and decided that home birth was just as safe as hospital birth. It made me shrink a bit to be corrected by a respected professional skeptic, but I still stand by my conclusion that hospitals are ultimately more safe.

I’m pretty sure that Daniel lives in Canada, which might make the difference, but Dr. Amy Tuteur would say that the statistics point to a much different conclusion in America, citing this chart showing that Direct Entry Midwives (home birth) have twice the mortality rate as hospital births…

Four new studies are confirming what I’ve already said. The flu vaccine is safe for pregnant women (who account for 6% of all H1N1 flu deaths) and the little fetuses living within them.

Not only are pregnant women safe from harm, but there’s even been some noted benefits for their babies. Three of the studies show that pregnant women who vaccinated were 80% less likely to have premature babies, 70% less likely to have small babies for their gestational age during flu season, and 80% less likely to have babies who were hospitalized with flu. The fourth study shows that the flu vaccine is even safe during the third trimester.

There has not been one study that has shown any maternal or fetal complications from the inactivated flu vaccine.

The news was announced during a news conference for the annual meeting for the International Disease Society of America.

About 70 Families were treated to a host of Galilean Nights activities, courtesy of  The NAES Astronomy Club, all centered on celebrating the discoveries of Galileo 400 years ago this Oct 23rd.  With the exception of several great power point presentations on Jupiter and other celestial bodies, all activities were hands on- just the way we like them!

Families were given the chance to win a drawing for a free Galileoscope (provided by Skeptikids of SW Florida) by completing several “stations” such as the Jupiter Presentation, several hands on challenges like guessing the scale of the solar system, coloring pages for the younger kids, and finally, making an official observation of Jupiter and the Moon through a small 20mm telescope, sketching and recording the data, just like Galileo!

Finally, everyone was treated to a nice view of Jupiter, the Moon and several Deep Sky Objects, thanks to the SW Florida Astronomical Society! Some other treats included a group presentation of the constellations and all the wonderful myths and stories that they tell, and a “walking tour of the solar system” – a 10 football field long hike around the school property, where kids and adults got to place all the planets at scale distance and size from each other!

The event was a great success!  Many kids – and adults – expressed their thanks for being exposed to the wonders of the night sky!  A winner was drawn for the Galileoscope and the night came to an end, but the whole event was best described by 5 year old Destiny:

“This is so much fun I could do this Every Day!”

Special thanks to the Punta Gorda Middle School Honors Student volunteers, the SWF Astronomical Society, the Bishop Planetarium, The Skeptikids, and the teacher and parent volunteers that made the evening such a success!

A little kerfuffle erupted on Twitter last night when Brent Spiner (“Data” from Star Trek: The Next Generation) tweeted this…

Check out my new follow. Dr. Jay Gordon. He makes a lot of sense.

In the ensuing conversation, he also made these statements:

it’s worth investigating before letting drug cos. bamboozle us.

and

Have not advised anyone what to do other than to investigate all available info. If you’d rather just go with the status quo, be my guest.

and

They have a vaccination for Swine flu. Is there one for pig-headedness?

I was going to write about it this morning, as this is a topic that means something to me (and I even tried replying to @BrentSpiner, but look, I’m just this guy, you know?), but I see that Orac has beaten me to it.  So I suggest people head on over there to see what he has to say.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/10/data_weeps_does_brent_spiner_have_anti-v.php

..Rob T.

This is a very disturbing story.

A fifteen-year-old girl was brutally raped outside a high school dance in Richmond, CA last Saturday night. The assault lasted, objectively, two hours. Subjectively, from the victims perspective I fear that it had no beginning and will never stop. It has become a personal hell that she will spend her life trying to escape.

The attack happened outside a dance. The girl was leaving the high school auditorium, probably reluctantly. Unlike the poor seven-year old who was snatched in Florida, this girl was not walking home alone. In fact, her father was supposed to pick her up, and he would spend the next two hours looking for his little girl, and will spend the rest of his life hating himself for not finding her.

Some people invited her to step into a secluded area to have a drink. She did. I’ll go out on a limb and say that she knew and liked at least some of these people. She certainly didn’t have a reason to fear them. They were all at the same school, all about the same age. Just kids. Having fun.

She got drunk quickly on the hard liquor, and at some point, someone started the assault. Did a boy kiss her? Did she kiss back, then try to pull away? When did she know that this situation has turned evil? When did the sense of horror start to collapse around her world when she realized that in a crowd of 20 people, not a single person was human enough to so much as dial their goddamn cell phone and get her some help? At what point did she realize that even though she was still on the school grounds, school security wasn’t present?

People did take pictures, which will be a comfort to the prosecution, I suppose. And eventually, one student overheard a conversation about the ongoing rape and called the police, which saved the victims life. And according to a school spokesperson, “the dance itself was a success in terms of safety”, so I’m sure that the other parents are relieved.

In the skeptical humanist community, there’s a lot of talk about altruism. The idea is that human beings can be morally better without god, drawing on our own reserves of altruism and cooperative behavior.

But I think that this story is a shocking and terrible reminder that, in a conflict, those not immediately involved can choose either side. And there is a tendency to decide to sympathize with the side that’s winning, or the popular side, or whatever. How else do you explain bystanders sitting around, laughing, drinking, and taking pictures, while one of their classmates was treated like a RealDoll? How else do you explain the school officials washing their hands of an incident that occurred at their event, on their property, by saying that they “don’t walk them [the students] home”?

Now I wouldn’t ask any parent how they plan on raising a child who won’t rape his or her classmates. And I wouldn’t even ask how you plan on raising a child who wouldn’t stand around and watch. Because I think most of us would think that these are basic traits of human beings. I don’t want to ask how you plan on raising a child that isn’t just an amoral, sadistic monster.

But what about the people who knew what was going on, talked about it, but didn’t call the police? How do raise a child who is the one that doesn’t decide that it’s none of their business? I have no real game plan for civic responsibility at this point. Do you?

A co-worker told my wife that deep breathing would help prevent swine flu, and that he learned this fact from Dr. Andrew Weil. He went on to point out that Dr. Weil had appeared on Oprah (a talk show known to promote alternative medicine and celebrity quackery).

It turns out that Dr. Weil, with his twinkling eyes and powder puff beard, is a man easily mistaken for Saint Nicholas. To his credit, he graduated from Harvard, but then he slipped into woo-woo land when he started experimenting with psychedelic drugs and “finding himself” in Native American sweat lodges. Somewhere along the way, he decided that medicine was intuitive, that pathogens were a manifestation of evil, and that mushrooms were super foods.

He also sells all manner of supplements and accessories with his name and face (it’s all the rage) on his web site. But, don’t worry. The profits from those supplements go straight to his foundation dedicated to the promotion of integrative medicine. If we’re looking for a red flag, it might be that the FDA recently slapped him with a warning for selling a product, the Chinese herb “astragalus”, that he claimed could cure swine flu. He also mentioned astragalus on Larry King Live, stating that it had “antiviral effects” and “immune boosting effects”. Oops. Isn’t  that’s the very reason why alternative medicine should stay segregated from traditional medicine? So we don’t have doctors providing cures that have not been thoroughly tested?

And what of these claims by my wife’s co-worker that breathing helps prevent flu. He doesn’t specifically mention breathing on Larry King, but he does say that there are “mind/body” interventions that should be considered. I did find an essay by Dr. Arnold Relman, professor emeritus of medicine at Harvard, that criticized Dr. Weil’s beliefs. This essay mentioned how breathing is a core part of Dr. Weil’s health philosophy; it also pointed out that Weil’s claims on breathing have never been supported by science:

“Breathing” is an important and recurring theme in Weil’s prescriptions for health and healing, and it holds a prominent place in Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, which appeared in 1997. As far as I can see, his opinions on this subject are largely nonsense. There is not the slightest medical evidence that “improper breathing is a common cause of ill health.” All the clinical and physiological evidence points to exactly the reverse relationship. It suggests that many types of disease and physiological dysfunction can affect breathing. Sometimes this secondary change in breathing can be serious enough to change the normal intake of oxygen or the normal elimination of carbon dioxide in ways that further impair health; but the primary causes of the problem are the diseases or the physiological disturbances that cause the abnormal pattern of breathing, not the breathing itself.

While it is true that conscious attention to breathing can help individuals to relax, there is no evidence that the breathing exercises Weil advocates have any special advantage over any other techniques for relaxation, or that they have any special therapeutic powers. Like so many of his other pronouncements, Weil’s claims about breathing come ex cathedra from his own self-asserted authority as guru and healer. Much of what he has to say about health and healing in this book and in his later works is just like this fanciful section on breathing — a bald assertion without any credible rationale or supporting objective evidence.

What about Dr. Weil’s beliefs on vaccines? Is he another antivaccine foot soldier in the war against science? Oddly, no. Dr. Weil supports vaccination, despite the fact that this has become a wedge issue among his peers in the alternative medicine crowd. Unfortunately, he also supports homeopathic remedies, which as we all know by now, are nothing more than sugar pill placebos.

For a thoughtful, reasoned argument against Dr. Weil, you should take the time to watch this video. It’s an interview/debate between Dr. Weil and Dr. Steven Knope. In my opinion, Dr. Knope deserves kudos for his rebuttal to Weil’s brand of integrative medicine. It may even be worth it to visit amazon and buy Dr. Knope’s book, Concierge Medicine.

So the Highlander is ill. A couple of nights ago, he couldn’t sleep. Then yesterday, he didn’t want to eat. Today, trip to the Doctor.

“Could be H1N1. Could be a lot of things. Give him Tamiflu (follwed by instructions)”.

Yes. His doctor really talks in short, declarative sentences. And yes, my full hand holding head patting moment with the H1N1 was “could be a lot of things.” Which, when coming from an infectious disease specialist, is not comforting.

Meantime, there’s debate about whether people should take the vaccine, whether we should all use vaccines, whether we need more money for more stupid studies to prove that Vaccines won’t make Bill Maher poor.

I can’t help thinking that my little boy is suffering from a potentially fatal pathogen, and if we spend the kind of money that we should spend on vaccine research that matters, maybe my county wouldn’t have just gotten the vaccines this week, and we all could have gotten immunized against this disease a few weeks ago.