I skim Smallville. Fast forward through all the teen angst, stopping to capture pics of scenery/locations. Most of the early episodes have the following plot: Person with powers/special science knowledge goes bad. Clark Kent tries to stop them. Gets his butt kicked because of Kryptonite/super strength in the bad guys. Kent then figures out a way to beat the bad guy. Ends with teen angst.

Another recurring theme is Lana Lang gets conveniently knocked unconscious so she never sees Clark do his super power thing--that woman must have brain damage by now and I'm only halfway through the second season.

Well, that's a step up from the first Superman series. Phyllis Coates, who played Lois Lane, once complained that each episode involved her and the others sitting around tied up, waiting for Superman to rescue them.

Just skimmed 5 more episodes. Lois knocked out two more times (think she's at 8 times now), Lex Luthor knocked out twice (he's at 6 times), Chloe knocked out once (she's around 4 or so), and Pete is also around 4 or 5 times too---and i'm not even done the 2nd season yet. The moral is being friends with Clark Kent is bad for your coconut.

Since this is general science I'll post a couple of my pet bad science peeves.

1. If you fall off a building and Superman catches you at the bottom, you will splat all over Superman as surely as you'd splat all over the pavement. Even worse actually--think of your body landing on two steel beams.

2. Having Superman outrun bullets and push you out of the way is another "splat" moment. If bullets are moving fast enough to punch their way through you, what do you think will happen when you're hit by 220 pds moving faster than bullets?

That was a Matrix pet peeve. Neo saves Trinity from a fall by flying and catching her. His speed was so great that his wind vortex picked up cars and flung them through the air. So instead of Trinity hitting the ground at 100 mph, she's hit by Neo flying at 2000 mph.

3. Internal logic fail. Bad guy driving a big rig stops on a long country road and shoots Clark and Pete's car and makes it blow up (Mythbusters busted that one, by the way). Clark hauls Pete out of the car, makes sure he's okay, and then looks for the shooter but the shooter has jumped back in the truck and is gone so Clark can't go after it. Uhh...I can hear big rigs on the highway a mile away, a big rig is barely moving after 4 seconds and even 10 seconds later isn't exactly speeding. And even if this was a special quiet fast rig, Clark can run faster than bullets so all he has to do is zip up the road. If he doesn't find it within a few seconds of running (4 miles, lets say), then turn around and run the opposite direction--it's a straight country road in Kansas (no hills) for goodness sake.

And why can he dodge bullets yet can't get out of the way of someone tossing something heavy at him, or taking a running tackle at him? In fact, he keeps getting clocked with a fist or backhand and goes flying through the air, usually landing on something breakable. Does lightening speed only kick in when someone shoots a gun?

Hmm, think you're right, Ed. This stuff must be damaging to the brain--look what it has done to the writers. Can I be far behind?

On another note, Andrew Wakefield now labeled a fraud. He was the primary author of a now discredited Lancet study that claimed to find a connection between the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism in 1998. Ten of his coauthors withdrew their names from the study once discrepancies showed up. But it wasn't until last year was the study withdrawn, and later Wakefield stripped of his license to practice.

This latest news goes further and comes right out and calls him a fraud and his work deliberately deceptive. And that is done in libel-friendly United Kingdom, a place with such archaic libel laws that it is host to libel tourism. That is, lawsuits that would get thrown out in any other country are allowed to proceed in the UK. Simon Singh was recently sued simply because a chiropractic association didn't like him saying chiropractors were happily promoting bogus claims (cure diseases, for e.g.). Singh won (see link), but at a financial cost that most people couldn't afford. It has a "chilling effect" on science when anyone can sue you for saying something they don't like.

So, coming right out and calling Wakefield a fraud in papers, on the news, in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), means they consider the evidence of fraud irrefutable. Journalist Brian Deer played a very large part in uncovering this (Wakefield tried to sue him which was a mistake because that meant Wakefield's lawyers had to make available numerous files that otherwise may not have been available--and it was the information in these files that were later used to demonstrate Wakefield's deception).

btw, UK libel laws are being reexamined. Sense about Science is gathering signatures from people around the world who want the UK to update their libel laws.

I remember bits of the news when Andrew Wakefield's 'research' hit the news - the TV and newspapers all came out with emotive stories of parents whose kids starting showing autistic symptoms within days of having the MMR vaccine. I don't remember it being as long ago as 1998, though. I guess there must have been another round or two of reporting since then.

Anyway, I'm glad to see that good sense seems to have won out eventually.

There has been a more-or-less constant wave of stories about kids developing symptoms soon after receiving their vaccinations since the original publication. A lot of the parents who have such children remain convinced that it is the vaccinations.

It is unfortunate that the autism spectrum disorders show up around the same time that MMRs are generally administered. The very human tendency to see patterns and causality is extremely strong and difficult to counter with rational argument.

What is missing are the stories of kids who develop symptoms before they get their MMRs--and such children do exist. After telling one such story a physician commented that had the symptoms occurred a few minutes later (the child was waiting for their MMR) he could completely understand why the mother would have blamed the vaccine.

It will be a long time before rationality wins on this one.

The irony is that even if the vaccines were as dangerous as falsely claimed, they would still be safer than diseases they prevent.

A short article about investing that has some relevance to scientific thinking. (Assuming I read it correctly.)

Here's part 2 of Brian Deer's investigative journalism into the Wakefield fraud. Wakefield stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars if he could demonstrate that the MMR vaccine was linked with autism and Crohn's disease.

Oncologist researcher Orac has his usual respectful insolence and overview here. Prometheus (a biomedical researcher in molecular biology and microbial ecology) has shorter versions here, and he points out how Wakefield went from blaming measles for Crohn's to blaming the MMR vaccine for Crohn's to blaming MMR for autism.

COIF: yes, I would say that does have relevance to scientific thinking. I would also argue his other definitions of contrarians are really definitions of good scientists.

I saw a really good comment in an aol.com story today. And when I say good, I don't mean good, I mean funny. A lot of the comments there are just nasty or abustive, but this was pseudo-intellectual.

It was a story about reconsidering the whole Planet Pluto thing. We went into that when it happened, and there's no need to rehash the whole thing. Suffice it to say that a couple of years back the IAU decided that Pluto was no longer a planet, and they came up with a dubious new definition of planet to reflect this (a definition that seemed to also deplanetify several other planets if applied to them). It was mildly controversial at the time.

The story today was about scientists who want to reconsider the whole thing. This one guy commented to argue with one of the pro-Pluto people, and came up with one of the weirdest things you can imagine. He seemed not to understand the difference between science and language, and thought that they were both objective. His take was that the definition of the word "planet" was as objective a fact as its chemical composition. That we once incorrectly believed that Pluto was a planet but we've now discovered that it isn't. His analogy was that our believing that Pluto was a planet a couple of years ago was akin to believing that the world was flat (!!).

I tried to explain the difference. That "planet" is a word that human beings made up, and are still trying to decide exactly what they mean or want to mean when they use it. But he'll probably never see it. You know how those stories are. People sound off, write their comment, and go. It's not like a message board where you hang around and keep coming back to see what answers you get.