If you know your organic chemistry (or would like to know your organic chemistry), you should click on this link to see organic chemistry explained through the base unit of Internet expression: the cat.

(Painting created on an iPad, by Don Shank.)

Fox News is, at times, painfully funny in its ignorance. For instance, Bill O’Reilly is apparently unaware that tides are caused by the moon, and insists that it cannot be explained.

The BMJ, last week, accused Andrew Wakefield of fraud. Here at the Big Bad Blog, we have seen a number of comments of the “about time” sort — almost dismissing the fraud as old news. However, given libel law in the UK, here at the Big Bad Blog, we feel that this is huge. Fraud is a deliberate act, purposely misleading others for material gain.

It seemed (to somebody without detailed knowledge of the particulars) perfectly plausible that Wakefield was just a poor researcher who designed his experiment to confirm his pre-established conclusions, and the sort of person who cannot admit that they are wrong. That the BMJ feels confident that his work was malicious and not well-intentioned (though misleading and of poor quality) is certainly newsworthy.

There’s a cafe in Japan where they do not give you what you ordered or what you pay for. Instead they give you what the person before you ordered. The person behind you gets your order.

It appears as though viruses are incredibly important to the human genome. Today’s epidemics might be tomorrow’s genetic building blocks.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield — the man who wrote fraudulent scientific papers that began the vaccine scare amongst parents — might have his medical license taken away, as his behaviour has been described as showing “callous disregard” and abusing his position of trust. This is good. The article I link to is not, as the “Health Correspondent” helps Dr. Wakefield through a fog of BS, rather than cutting through the webs of bureaucracy, scientific/medical jargon and PR that surround the issue.

Decisions are being made right now that will decide whether or not you are insane in the year 2013. In May of that year, a new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will be published. That publication determines what is — and what is not — a mental illness. The decisions made by the group defining mental illnesses will determine whether or not people get locked up in mental institutions or put on drugs for the things they think and feel.

Which is good when those people think that everybody is covered in spiders. There is concern that these people seem to be involved. And think that preferring people who are tall (or short, or fat, or thin) is a mental illness.

(by Talie Lines)

So there’s a “vaccine” for cocaine, now. The vaccine stops the drug from entering the brain, making it impossible to get high from cocaine. There is a problem, however: It does not stop cravings, if you happen to be addicted to the drug. As a result, people on the vaccine take ten times as much cocaine, bankrupting themselves in an attempt to overpower the vaccine and get high.

The person who way mayor of New York on September 11, 2001, has claimed that there was never a terrorist attack on the domestic United States while George Bush was president.

The truth has been revealed: We are mutants, every one of us. So what’s your mutant power? Mine is compulsive blogging.

(by Alexandre Dubosc)

The New York Times provides an interesting piece this morning on the loss of geographical privacy which has accompanied recent technological advances.

Science reporting is notoriously bad. With the vaccination/autism story as its backdrop, this article neatly illustrates how giving equal weight to dissenting problems is often not responsible journalism, nor does it produce a balanced story. When all the evidence points in one direction, the only way to report accurately is to paint it that way.