At last, I am safely home after an excessively long and annoying trip back from Skepticon. One of the pleasures of these trips, at least, is meeting ferocious Pharyngulistas who are otherwise just fierce pseudonyms on a page, and who usually turn out to be fun and interesting human beings. Here's one nice photo of some familiar people:
From left to right, that's:
Mattir, Tone of Death
cicely, Death's Imaginary Friend
Reality Enforcer, Spawn of Death
The Floating Cheerful Head of PZ
Blake Stacey
KOPD, Death's Chia Pet supplier
Jules, Bride of Death
Rey Fox, He who has nothing to do with Death
Now it's almost noon here, and I've got a frantic quantity of work to catch up on, and a whole long evening of administrative duties.
More like this
I'm tempting the fates by putting my words above the fold this time.
Rana was bragging in comments to the previous entry about his blog movie rating. Naturally, being the competitive sort, I had to try to beat his score by using even more naughty words than he did. But did I succeed in my quest? No, I did not.
I think it is worthwhile to update James Wimberly's comparison of surveys of deaths in Iraq. In the table below death tolls have been extrapolated to give a number of deaths due to the war so far.
A new study of violent deaths in Iraq has been published in the NEJM. You can read it here. Here's the abstract: