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An old friend told me about a conversation he had with his daughter over breakfast, where they mused about which cereal has the most sugar. That led him to create a simple diagram comparing about a dozen different cereals against their sugar content. While I was reviewing his graph, I noticed it had a few major design limitations. The most glaring was that he used the serving sizes listed on the cereal boxes. I decided to make my own comparison graph, using weight and percentages by weight instead of measurements by volume. This led to many more comparisons, and was part of the inspiration for my recent book. The first graph below is the result for different cereals, sorted in order of most to least amount of sugar.

As I was looking at this graph, I thought about how sugar and carbohydrates are basically the same thing. (A carbohydrate is just a bunch of sugars chained together. The body breaks these down into their component sugars and moves on from there. There's more o…

Covid-19: Epidemiology is useful

I pulled this data from Google Trends of searches for "coronavirus". I had to set a range that excluded everything from mid-December 2019 to the present, because they dwarfed all the other searches and compressed the scale.

As you can see, there's a natural die-off of coronavirus-related searches by mid-March, which is good news for those concerned with the present crisis. I've heard a lot of speculation about the current coronavirus, Covid-19, and I want to talk about a few ideas from epidemiology to get at more general principles. First, the reproduction number (R0) of Covid-19 looks like it's about 2.2. Meaning each infected person is likely to infect 2.2 additional people before they clear the virus or die and are no longer infectious. That means it's likely to spread quickly - or more accurately exponentially.

In fact, given an R0 of that magnitude, it's unlikely we'll be able to stop it from spreading, no matter how good our quarantine is. …

Open Questions Meet Settled Science

This is a direct follow-up to my last post. In that post, I explicitly questioned Darwinian Evolution - to the extent that the first comment asked me about other articles that do the same.

I want to defend Darwin here and everything he got right, because I read a lot of articles from people who read what experts say and piggy-back on that to proclaim that Darwin's work is being "overturned" or similar war-of-ideas-and-Darwin-is-losing kind of language. This is the wrong way to understand the scientific process of expanding beyond the clear limits of Darwin's theory. But I suppose part of the reason people turn to it is because they don't understand the right way to understand this process. I'm going to spend much of my time here working through that, partly by comparing Darwin's contributions to those of Newton's discovery of universal gravitation.
The Universe Before Newton When I was young, I always had a problem understanding why Newton got so …