"Everybody relax, I'm here"

Welcome, welcome. Realizing I share a lot of things on Facebook that are likely of zero interest to ~97% of my friends, I started thinking, there must be some way for people to choose whether they want to be exposed to my links. Two years later I signed up for Blogger.

Getting down to brass tacks, issues of science and technology cannot be uncoupled with politics, and deeply-held political beliefs cannot be challenged by merely stating facts. Environmental risk factors, from GMOs, synthetic chemicals, pollution, vaccines, and so forth are constantly associated with horrible outcomes from cancer and autism to nothing short of the end of humanity. Clearly, there's issues of cultural identification at play (our team vs. your team, etc.), and those simply must be considered if those of us with a particular set of skills are going to communicate effectively. My goals are simple but ambitious: explore different ways of informing people about issues pertaining to molecular biology, toxicology, biotech, medicine, nutrition, and so forth that don't just rely on spouting facts from an air of supposed authority. 

I want to help people understand why evidence matters, how you assess the quality of evidence, and appreciate the nuance of the things I spend my days immersed in. Illustrative explanations of, for instance, the limitations of certain study designs and statistical significance cannot be completely done away with, but they should be enhanced with language that attempts to be consensus-building. I look forward to failing, and adjusting, failing some more and seeing if maybe I stumble upon something that clicks from time to time.

The title of this blog comes from Mr. Show. The title of this post comes from Big Trouble In Little China, so you better goddamn well believe there will be miscellaneous cultural bric-a-brac as well.

And maybe probably a little basketball, too.