Over the weekend, I spent some time with some close friends at a local sandwich shop - laughing, debating, drinking copious amounts of fountain beverages, and, of course, eating. Our conversations are always boisterous and vociferous and usually move pretty quickly from topic to topic with no apparent order or logic. At some point that afternoon, we found ourselves mocking a creationist argument we heard about chemical laws.

A man in his late fifties approached the table and interrupted. He seemed like a shy man - despite his approach - and was wearing simply a white tee shirt and jeans with black dress shoes and a tan belt like one sees on a rancher. He said he couldn’t help but overhear our conversation - which no doubt was true - and wanted to know if he could ask a question since we were talking about molecules. To avoid being rude, we agreed and he asked: “if atoms are always moving and can never stop, how does that not violate the second law of thermodynamics?” I gave a quick response demonstrating why his question made no sense, to which he said he already had an answer dealing with quantum physics. I cannot remember his reason precisely and it matters very little here, but after smiling and thanking us for allowing the interruption, he went back to his table and we resumed our conversation.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, the conversation at our table had turned to eugenics and genetic engineering and into a rousing debate on the ethical sticky wickets of such research. At that point, the man returned and asked if he could join us.

And that’s when things got interesting.

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I was intrigued when I opened Salon’s daily email yesterday to discover an article filed in the Neuroscience category entitled “Near death, explained: New science is shedding light on what really happens during out-of-body experiences – with shocking results.” Shocking results - how exciting! I clicked on the article from my cell phone and began reading.

And then was quickly disappointed.

Unfortunately, this article was not about new discoveries in neuroscience. Nor was it about “new science”. Nor even about science at all, really. Instead, the article was a collection of unconvincing anecdotes strung together with less-than-stellar logic. For anyone interested, I suggest reading the article in full, but I’ll cover some of the more troublesome aspects of the article herein.

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AB 2109 is a bill introduced in the California State Assembly to increase child vaccination rates. It would require the existing philosophical exemption to be accompanied by a physician-signed form indicating that the physician has supplied the parent with “information regarding the benefits and risks of the immunization and the health risks of specified communicable diseases”.

Why is this important? As it exists, any parent can exempt their child from public school vaccination requirements by simply signing a form indicating a philosophical objection to vaccination. Considering both the public health risks of decreasing vaccination rates and the proven safety and efficacy profile of vaccinations, why should it be harder to have a child vaccinated than to exempt her?

The law simply requires informed consent on behalf of the parent through a visit with a qualified health care professional, which visit is almost surely covered by either their private insurance or Medicaid/Medi-Cal benefits.

Solid coverage of the bill can be found in this article by Dr. David Gorski at the wonderful Science-Based Medicine blog and the full text of the bill is attached.

I ask my friends in California to join me in writing a letter to our state assembly and senate representatives as well as to Governor Brown asking for their support for this important cause.

Today is Charles Darwin’s (and Abraham Lincoln’s) birthday, making this International Darwin Day. In celebration, I will be posting throughout the day on the topic of Charles Darwin (and of evolution in general) on my Twitter and Google+ feeds.

Evolution is easily the most powerfully connective, interdisciplinarily resonant, and socially important scientific theory to date. Its consequences are far-reaching and its controversy always near.

Come on by and share something too.

Okay, so I got tired of the MongoHQ server connection issues that caused exceptions on my EC2 instances, and since this particular instance was running only this blog, I decided to make a change. I have been curious about the potential for hosting a site on Amazon Web Services’ Simple Storage Service (S3) since their announcement earlier this year of support for serving an index.html, if present when just a directory is requested, e.g. www.joshdmiller.com returns www.joshdmiller.com/index.html.

As this blog is relatively simple, I thought it would be a prime candidate to test this. Using Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby, I rewrote the code for this site, which involved only a few major steps: (1) seting up the basic infrastructure of the site; (2) translating the SCAML templates I used in Scalatra back into HTML; (3) translating the dynamically-generated content into its static equivalents. The posts were already in Markdown format, so nothing was really needed here, save some YAML Front Matter, per Jekyll’s docs. All said, this took only a few hours and I don’t have to pay for a server anymore. My verdict: Jekyll’s pretty cool.

I’ll throw the code up on a public repository within the coming days in case someone wants inspiration.