Stay classy, Trump administration. Details here.

One mean spirited decision intended to end the effort to end slavery led to one million dead and the end of slavery anyway. I spent some time this weekend comparing prosecutors and other legal eagles, who were all hoping to get the job of Attorney General. They were Candidates General, I guess. Trump was mentioned, and somewhere along the line, Dred Scott was mentioned as well. I turned to a highly placed official sort of dude and said, "Did you know that Dred Scott lived in Minnesota?" He did not know that. So I asked a couple of other people if they knew, and they did not. Finally I…

I've mentioned at various times in the past The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett. This is not a new book, but it is an excellent scholarly and accessible accounting of the situation with respect to emerging diseases at the time of its publication in 1995. One of the most interesting stories covered here is the reaction in the US to the Swine Flu, during the Ford administration. I was reminded of this when we had our tiny outbreak of Ebola. I'm sure you've been following the whole anti-vax thing over the years. I believe that the anti-vax…

Over the years, the field guide and the coffee table book have merged, and we now have coffee table-ish books (but serious books) that include a species description of every critter in a certain clade. In the case of Horses of the World by Élise Rousseau (Author), Yann Le Bris (Illustrator), Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translator), while every living species of horse is in fact covered, the book is a comprehensive guide to breeds of horses. Of which there are 570. A horse is horse, of course, but but is a donkey or an ass? What about zebras? Horse people are very picky about what they call a…

General John F. Kelly is retired from the US Marine Corps, where he commanded the Southern Command. He replaced political operative Reince Priebus as President Trump's Chief of Staff. The White House Chief of Staff is the highest ranking staff member in the White House, and was formalized as such in 1961. This is not a Senate confirmable position. What the Chief of Staff does varies from administration to administration but it is almost always about the same. This person can be the puppeteer, in the case of a President who is weak and in need of a guiding hand. This person is always a…

Greenhouse gases go up and down in three ways. First, there is the annual up and down cycle that happens because there is more land in the Northern Hemisphere. I won't explain that to you now because I know you can figure out why that happens. Second, there is natural variation up and down aside from that annual cycle that has to do with things like volcanoes and such. This includes the rate of forest fires, which increase greenhouse gases by turning some of the Carbon trapped in plant tissue into gas form as CO2. (That was a hint for the answer to the first reason!) Third, humans. There was…

It wasn't much of a corner, he was already pretty much there, but yesterday, Donald J. Trump, pretender to the Presidency of the United States, threw in his lot with the "good people" of the fascist, white-supremacist, KKK-loving movement. There is a lot of commentary out there about this. None of it surprises me, I and others have been pointing at this train wreck all along. But there is one new thing I'll mention now. Listen to Trump's tirade about the protestors. When he speaks of the past notables, including Jefferson and Washington, and the statues, he is plain and articulate, non-…

I have a feeling that foxes are in trouble with the new EPA administration, but FOX is in great shape. According to an analysis by Media Matters, Scott Pruitt has spent considerably more time appearing on Fox News than other networks. In fact, he's spent twice as much time on Fox as he has on all the cable outlets combines. Here's the graph: Here's the analysis. Most of that time has been on, of course, "Fox and Friends" but he's actually spread himself fairly evenly across a range of shows. His time on non-Fox cable includes six appearances, including two on This Week, one on Meet the…

Not the same. Muslims must take the blame for all things done by anyone linked to an extreme Islamic group or ideology. Christians have nothing to do with anything, they were just standing there minding their own beeswax. The video below was fixed by Media Matters for America thusly: In a notably hypocritical segment on Fox & Friends, the hosts and their guest, David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, attacked media outlets that called on Christian leaders to denounce white supremacy and the recent violence in Charlottesville, VA. Fox & Friends highlighted articles that…

Let's start with CheMystery. This is a fun graphic novel mystery book by C.A. Preece and Josh Reynolds. Two cousins experience an incident that would make a physicist cry, but that works in a chemistry book because they now have the ability to observe and change matter. So this is a superhero book, designed to teach chemistry. The story is great, the science is great, and the pedagogy is well suited for kids and adults that like graphic novels. Preece is the chem teacher (high school) and Reynolds is the artist. This is written for grades 7 through 10 (ages 8-12) but some younger kids…

SolarReserve will build, for the South Australia government, a solar thermal plant rated at 150 MW, which is about 25 MW more than that government uses currently. Over time, assuming Australia goes all on clean and green, the amount of electricity used by South Australia will increase substantially, but for now, this plant will provide the extra to the regional grid. A solar plant is a way of making the use of solar more full time. Instead of just producing electricity by sunlight, perhaps storing some in batteries, it uses sunlight to produce heat, which is then used to run a turbine all…

In a series of strange events, President Donald Trump once again invoked violence against a CNN reporter and, apparently, embraced the idea that he is a fascist. Following the homicidal terrorist attack on anti-White Supremacist demonstrators, trump saw fit to post the following tweet, memorialized here in a retweet by Kyle Griffin, an MSNBC producer. Similar to an earlier contrived production in which Trump himself is shown in a video beating a CNN reporter, this shows a train labeled TRUMP running over a CNN reporter in cartoon form. That tweet was deleted soon after being posted. I…

Just forget about Korea and Venezuela and North Carolina for a minute and watch this:

Here is the tweet: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/895970429734711298 Locked and load means ready to pull the trigger. Making that conditional on Kim Jong-un becoming a pacifist means Trump is going to pull the trigger. Based on this statement of policy by President Trump (when President speaks/tweets, policy comes out his mouth or other orifice), bombs should be dropping, missiles flying, ancillary terrorist attacks initiated, naval forces engaged, and possibly action across the DMZ started, by the end of the day, or at least, by the end of the weekend. Tens of thousands will be…

Almost every resource on the Internet on building your own computer is oriented towards building a gaming computer. The second most common discussion is how to build a "budget PC." When I sought out the latest information on building a computer a few weeks ago, I did not like either of these two options. A "gaming computer" is oriented towards two features: a) overclocking your processor and b) having one or two mondo power-hungry and gigunda graphics cards. A "budget PC" is an under powered machine that replicates what I could have purchased in many forms for less than the cost of a build…

Mike Haubrich and I are about to interview John McKay about his new book, Discovering the Mammoth: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory, and the Birth of a New Science, for Ikonokast Podcast.

Tom Levenson is a professor, a teacher of journalism and science journalism, and an Einstein scholar. He also knows a thing or two about Isaac Newton. One of my favorite non fiction books of all time is Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist. One of the reasons this book is so good is because the author is an expert on the subject and a great writer. These are not necessary or sufficient conditions to make a book good, but probabilistically, if you've got both you'll probably be spending your book money well most of the time. Anyway,…

These guys look like they are getting their bong ready, but in truth, they are up to something else. Everybody knows that neutrinos are everywhere, yet, nearly impossible to detect. A group of scientists have managed to pull off over 100 detection events over the course of about a year and a half using an entirely new method. From the abstract of their paper: The coherent elastic scattering of neutrinos off nuclei has eluded detection for four decades, even though its predicted cross-section is the largest by far of all low-energy neutrino couplings. This mode of interaction provides new…

Is it because it wasn't a very big attack, and no one was killed or injured? The FBI has determined that it was an explosive device that blew up at the Bloomington Islamic Center. I'm reminded of the attacks on Secretary Clinton, by the likes of Congressman Nunes, about ambiguity in the identification of an attack as "terrorist" during the very throes of the event. Will Nunes hold Trump to the same standard over Bloomington? Will Nunes even give Bloomington a second thought? A first thought? Speaking of Nunes (who is the guy who tried to derail the House investigation of Trumpskygate), has…

The truth about the Statue of Liberty and that poem and everything. The Statue of Liberty has been a symbol of American openness to immigration since it was built. However, modern White Supremacists want us to believe it was something else. I found one example of that on the Internet, writtne by Hunter Wallace with the tags “Identity” and “The Jewish Question,” and titled “David Brooks: The Great War for National Identity”: …millions of Jews came to the United States during the Great Wave. Much of the early 20th century is the story of how these Jews rose from working class occupations into…