Occasionally I try to impart some elements of good science storytelling to people, and one of the points I make (based entirely on Garrett Hardin) is the big difference between literacy and numeracy. Literacy understands full well that the difference between a million and a billion is one letter. And that a billion is bigger than a million. But how much bigger? My example is simple enough. If a million seconds is 11 days (which it is, give or take), how long is a billion seconds?

It's especially worrying when the big numbers refer to big money. US Senator Everett Dirksen was clearly onto something when he said, "a billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon you're talking about real money". ¹

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I know there are readers who don’t care that what they see here is now being served by a delicious new all-singing, all-dancing, super-spiffy server -- but they might give silent thanks when they (or so I am promised) receive far fewer error messages in the future. For them, then, which is probably...

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I ask because there's a fascinating blog post -- Malaria, past and present -- over at Aidwatch. Laura Freschi takes a book review in Harper's because "it shows the historical roots of a struggle still raging in public health assistance today". That struggle is the unequal battle between simple, ea...

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This past couple of weeks I sipped from the well of erudition. Professor Leonard Barkan, of Princeton University, gave the 2011 Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome, and his topic was Unswept floor: food culture and high culture, antiquity and renaissance.

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US States that voted Republican in 2008 "are now the biggest losers in the fight against childhood obesity," and yet they are also the states that most reject efforts to reduce obesity.

To me, the interesting thing about this table is what we public health people call “tracking.”  Obesity tracks...

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