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In an op-ed in today's issue of the Los Angeles Times, Michael Shermer wrote about the rush "to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events", with reference to the shooting in Tucson, Arizona and the recent mass bird deaths. Shermer made some good points, but parts of his argument were flawed. For example, he cited statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health to argue that unbalanced people are not uncommon, and Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme tea party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun control laws are in this or that state. By chance — and nothing more — there will always be people who do the unthinkable. In other words, he is pointing out what he sees as an inevitability, and then attributing it to chance. But an inevitability is the opposi...

Fort Chipewyan (often called Fort Chip) is a town of 1200 in northern Alberta. In 2006, a local physician reported 6 suspected cases of a rare form of cancer, cholangiocarcinoma, as well as elevated rates of other cancers. What made this particularly alarming is that Fort Chipewyan is located downstream from the huge Athabasca oil sands development and there is also uranium mining and pulp and paper industry in the area. Yesterday , Alberta Health Services released a report on Cancer Incidence in Fort Chipewyan, Alberta 1995-2006 [pdf]. It turns out that only two of the six suspected cases were in fact cholangiocarcinoma. However overall cancer rates do seem to be elevated. The report concludes that: In particular, increases of observed over expected were found for biliary tract cancers as a group and cancers of the blood and lymphatic system. These increases were based on a small number of cases and could be due to chance or increased detection. The possibility that the increased rat...