My Dad sent me an article today about Portland’s ongoing debate about putting fluoride in their water.

There’s a lot of interesting science around water fluoridation, but that’s not what caught my eye.  What I noticed was this paragraph:

 Almost every credible national, state, and local health and science organization—private and public—gives its blessing to optimal levels of water fluoridation: The American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, the Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, American Academy of Family Physicians, and  the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which named the measure one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20^th century. They all agree that fluoridated water is perfectly safe and extremely effective at preventing tooth decay.

I was intrigued by that paragraph because the link they provide for the organizations that support water fluoridation has 11 pages of organization names and their statements supporting it.

While there’s many well known names on there, I was thinking about how hard it really is to know about lesser known organizations, and how easy it is to confuse various organization names.

Example: the American Medical Association is one of the biggest medical groups in the country.  The Association of American Physicians is a group dedicated to furthering biomedical research.  The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is a group dedicated to “fighting socialized medicine and the government takeover of medicine”.

Now you might recognize the difference between the first one and the other two, but my guess is most people will not remember which one is which 20 minutes after you finish reading this blog post.

Now I’m certainly not saying that these 11 pages are crap…there’s some big names on that list.  What I am saying is that random names of groups is something people must take some due diligence to investigate.  I’m sure that the anti-fluoridation people could also come up with a long list of organizations that support them, even if it represented far fewer people.  In this age of propaganda, we must remember that organization names alone may not be enough to convince people.   Too much data causes overload, and we can’t blame people for this.  Now go brush your teeth.

Hey it’s Friday!  And Arrested Development’s almost back!  Here’s a graph of all the running jokes!

Speaking of which, want a text the second Netflix posts the next season?  Instructions for text notification here.

Now seriously, Friday is tough.  Here’s the 21 stages of Friday.

On a down note, the cicadas are coming.  Here’s how far they’ve gotten.

Oh well, apparently they’re edible.  Here’s how to cook them.

Does that gross you out?  Fine.  Here’s how much money it would take to build the Starship Enterprise.

Recently, my brother was a contributor to an infographic his organization put together about race and the wealth gap.   Despite knowing that I am inherently biased against infographics, he called me and asked my opinion on some criticism it had received.  The whole thing’s fairly large, so I’m only posting the piece that caused the controversy:

What digit is the most frequent between 1 and 1,000 (inclusive)?

What digit is the least frequent?

Also, can you beat the AVI’s score on GeoGuesser?  Apparently he hit 28,000.  I think I created a monster on this one.

I saw an interesting study today that claimed that 51% of Christians were actually acting more like Pharisees than Christ.  It was based on a survey given to almost 800 people of a variety of Christian persuasions (practicing Catholic, practicing Protestant, notional (identifies as Christian but does not go to church), Evangelical, and born-again but non-Evangelical), and it asked them a series of 20 questions to assess their attitudes and actions, and gave them a score of “Pharisee-like” or “Christ-like”.  Here’s what they found:

• I listen to others to learn their story before telling them about my faith.
• In recent years, I have influenced multiple people to consider following Christ.
• I regularly choose to have meals with people with very different faith or morals from me.
• I try to discover the needs of non-Christians rather than waiting for them to come to me.
• I am personally spending time with non-believers to help them follow Jesus.

• I see God-given value in every person, regardless of their past or present condition.
• I believe God is for everyone.
• I see God working in people’s lives, even when they are not following him.
• It is more important to help people know God is for them than to make sure they know they are sinners.
• I feel compassion for people who are not following God and doing immoral things.

• I tell others the most important thing in my life is following God’s rules.
• I don’t talk about my sins or struggles. That’s between me and God.
• I try to avoid spending time with people who are openly gay or lesbian.
• I like to point out those who do not have the right theology or doctrine.
• I prefer to serve people who attend my church rather than those outside the church.

• I find it hard to be friends with people who seem to constantly do the wrong things.
• It’s not my responsibility to help people who won’t help themselves.
• I feel grateful to be a Christian when I see other people’s failures and flaws.
• I believe we should stand against those who are opposed to Christian values.
• People who follow God’s rules are better than those who do not.

Now I don’t know how many of these statements most people would or would not agree with, but I thought a more interesting list could have been generated by asking various scholars in each of the surveyed denominations what their definitions were.  Different people have different interpretations of things, and statements like “I find it hard to be friends with people who seem to constantly do the wrong things.” seem pretty likely to mean different things to different people.  I mean, I’m not friends with people who steal my stuff or are continuously mean to me.  Is that self-righteous?

Last week I ran in to two different studies about beards.  This was interesting, as it’s not normally a hot topic in academia.  

Would you care to ponder your place in time and space?  Here’s a good visualization.

As for space, I have my favorite new game.  It’s called Geo Guesser.  It gives you a random picture of a spot somewhere in the world, and you have to guess where it is.  The closest I’ve been is 1800 km off.  My high score is 7329.

If that games got you tripped up, explore your neighborhood while running away from zombies here.

Speaking of geography, check out this infographic on which state employee makes the most money in each state.  Spoiler alert: it’s coaches.  But who should be the best paid?  Jonathan suggests the state house tour guides.  I like that.

Hey, it’s my first Mother’s Day!  Husband’s out of town on business, so I’m spending the day babysitting (can you still call it that when he’s yours?)  Anyway, here are some animal moms that deserve a break.

Oh, and a very happy graduation day to my little sister who’s getting her bachelors of nursing today!  Your patients are lucky to have you!

I have some fun links for later in the day, but looking at the news this morning I wanted to ponder something that’s truly bugging me.