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"Pet Peeves"

So, here I am, with a huge backlog of things to post--science news and lab reports, fractal art, tips for green living--you know, the usual stuff. And, so, with all that ready to go, what do I do when I get my computer functioning? I write something else. I guess that’s not too unusual. Poetic inspiration comes when it does--the wise writer shouldn’t argue with it. Yet, it wasn’t the fluidity and ease of writing that surprised me--it was the topic. "I don’t write stories about the war," I said on Monday. Five days later, I’m going over the third draft of a story about war. It’s a subject I…

Storm Glass: the mysterious weather-predicting fluid crystal

As it's shaping up to be my final days in Devon, me and my #1 Nerd travelled to Barometer World, a pilgrimage we'd been promising to make since the start of summer. As the name suggests, it's a Mecca of meteorological wonder, boasting hundreds of aneroid and mercury barometers, barographs, thermometers, hygrometers and thunder bottles. It's a bargain at £2.50 and I encourage everyone to go. What intrigued me most of all, though, was the strange crystals attached to many of the old barometers. This, I was told, was storm glass, a curiosity whose origins are hidden in the mists of time. Back in…

Help ScienceBlogs Raise Money for Science Classrooms

OK, people, here's your chance to help out science and math classrooms with much needed funding and to show everybody here at ScienceBlogs that The Scientific Activist has the best damn readers around! To donate to a worthy cause, click here. The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon! Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way. A lot of us fell in love with science because of early experiences in school -- teachers who made science…

Summer Reading

It utterly shocks me every time I make a reference to plastic alligators, Macy's bags with poisonous snakes in them, a guy named Skink or my favorite Bass Lure .... the Double Whammy .... and people look back at me with blank stares. Like, don't you get it? "To be or not to be" jokes or allusions to Sherlock Holmes are always understood. Or at least, people pretend to get them. But does no one read contemporary literature? It is impossible, actually, to explain Carl Hiaasen's novels to anyone without sounding like a fool. All such attempts, made by anybody, start out with an honest…

A Week of Testimonies

It's taking all weekend to sort through everything that happened last week, a banner one if you're concerned about scientific integrity. Thankfully, we can stream the past. The biggest science integrity news of the week had to be the House Committee on Government and Reform's continued investigation on political interference with climate science. From Chairman Waxman's opening comments: Since our first hearing on January 30, we have received over eight boxes of documents from the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The document production is not yet complete. But some of the…

Leaving on a jet plane: CSICon and quackademic medicine, plus random blather

Instead of the usual logorrheic (usually) well-thought out Insolence you've come to expect every day, Instead, you'll hvae an announcement and a couple of random thoughts. The reasons are multiple. First, today's a travel day. I'm heading off to Nashville to attend and speak at CSICon. My topic? What do you think it will be? Why, quackademic medicine, of course! (What else would it be?) Not only will I get to share the stage with old friends and blogging collaborators, but with Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education! Yes, as part of the overall discussion of the problem of…

The Humanist Jesus

I spent a year studying theology at Oxford. I focused on the relationship between religion and science (lots of Galileo and Darwin and William James), but couldn't help learning a lot about the Bible along the way. I went in pretty unimpressed by Jesus (I'm a Jew who doesn't believe in God), but left the program convinced that Bush is essentially right*: Jesus is a fantastic philosopher, like Buddha if the Buddha had been influenced by Neo-Platonism. (In other words, worldly wealth is vanity and the secret to life is compassion.) So I tend to ignore those atheist voices who bemoan the obvious…

Christmas tree lights - surprisingly cool

Let me start off by saying I think I first read about this on HowStuffWorks.com (many years ago). So, why are christmas lights so cool? They are cool because they are a whole bunch of lights in series, but they still work if one of the bulbs gets burnt out. If you are not familiar with circuits, a series circuit is one in which all of the current goes through all of the items in that circuit (as compared to the case where the current gets split up). Here is an example of a series circuit with two bulbs. In this case, the current comes out of the battery, goes through one filament and…

Daydreams

An interesting new study on mind-wandering and the default network was recently published in PNAS. The scientists, led by Kalina Christoff of UBC and Jonathan Schooler of UCSB, used "experience sampling" in an fMRI machine to capture the moment of daydreaming: essentially, subjects were given an extremely tedious task and, when their mind started to wander (this was confirmed with subjective reports and measurements of task performance), had changes in their brain activity recorded in the scanner. It's been known for nearly a decade that daydreaming is a metabolically intense mental process,…

Traffic

I've always been fascinated by traffic. (I grew up in LA, so I had plenty of time to indulge my interest.) City streets are a complex system in which seemingly insignificant changes - a broken street light, a stalled car, a poorly designed highway merge - can have dramatic consequences. In this sense, it's a useful metaphor for all sorts of intricate systems, from gene regulation to neural networks. Perhaps the single greatest mystery of my childhood was this: Why do freeways get clogged when there isn't an accident? I would fantasize on my way to elementary school - we would often be sitting…

The Others could travel by sea

One of the great things about science is that old orthodoxies regularly get overturned; it's not a bug, it's a feature. Of course the personal downside is that it means models which scholars have invested their lives and intellectual capital into may turn out to be unsupportable, but at the end of the day it's not about everlasting fame, but the real world as it was and is and will be. Paradigm shifts are kind of like a box of new chocolates, you never know what new inferences will be generated. Thinking deeply again becomes a surprise. In The New York Times John Noble Wildford has an…

How not to run a blog

A strange little blog has been carping at various atheists blogs for a while now. Called "You're Not Helping", it pretended to have the goal of keeping internet atheists honest and holding them to a higher standard. It wasn't very interesting — it's main claim to fame was a tone that combined self-righteousness with whining — but it has just flamed out spectacularly. The author has admitted to committing flagrant sockpuppetry, with four identities ("yourenothelping", "Polly-O", "Brandon", and "Patricia") who were active commenters there, all reinforcing the same views and sometimes…

Reading Yourself

Zadie Smith, writing in The Believer, offers future novelists some advice: When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second - put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year of more is ideal - but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can't tell you how many times I've sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our…

Talking Sense

Chad Orzel, responding to Sean Carroll, is absolutely right. The question is whether a panel at the World Science Festival (funded by Templeton, ZOMG!) should include incompatibilist atheists in a discussion about science and religion. Chad argues that doing so would derail the discussion: In the end, I'm not convinced you need anyone on the panel to make the case that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. That idea is out there, coming from both sides of the science-religion split (and you'll notice they don't have any young-earth creationists on the panel, either). The…

Is Shah Rukh Khan a Hindu?

I hear that a Muslim Bollywood star was detained at an American airport, Shah Rukh Khan (there is some confusion here, and a possibility that this is a publicity stunt related to a film about profiling which he is promoting). Out of curiosity I checked out Khan's bio on Wikipedia, and found out this interesting datum: Shah Rukh Khan, born into a Muslim family, is married to a Hindu and his children follow both religions. At home, next to idols of Hindu gods he has the Koran. The most important thing is that "the children should know about the value of God". In this YouTube video Khan asserts…

Dog Bites Man: Bush Used Political Ideologues and Cronies to 'Rebuild' Iraq

After reading this Washington Post article about the Iraq War reconstruction effort, I've stumbled across the epitaph of the Bush Administration: Bush Administration appoints political cronies and ideological wackjobs to important positions. Said appointees pandimensionally clusterfuck everything sideways. People suffer and die due to avoidable ineptitude. Let's document the idiocies. Jim O'Beirne was the gatekeeper for hiring in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Because most of these jobs were classified as temporary, provisional jobs, they were exempt from the federal…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

Yup, traveling, but still manged to take a quick look at what's new in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Novel Acoustic Technology for Studying Free-Ranging Shark Social Behaviour by Recording Individuals' Interactions: Group behaviours are widespread among fish but…

Abraham Cherrix and the promotion of pseudoscience in medical school

One of the aspects of blogging that I've come to like is the ability to follow a story's evolution over the long term and to comment on new developments as they come along. If you're good at blogging, you can take that story and make it your own, adding it to your list of "signature" issues for which you become known and about which people come to you for commentary as new developments arise. Indeed, now that the fourth anniversary of the start of this blog is fast approaching (December 11, in case you don't remember!), I can look back and see a number of issues that I've done this with,…

The death of Jade Erick: Why state licensure doesn't protect patients from naturopathic quackery

Ever since I first realized that naturopathy is a cornucopia of quackery administered by naturopaths in a "One from Column A, Two from Column B"-style of practice, I've opposed the licensure of naturopaths. Not surprisingly, naturopaths crave state licensure because it puts the imprimatur of the state on their pseudomedical profession. More importantly, it makes it more likely that health insurance companies will actually pay for their services. Unfortunately, thus far, 19 states, five Canadian provinces, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands have all passed laws…

Questions, questions

The inimitable John B. of Blog Meridian answered five questions posed to him on his blog, and I volunteered to do the same. His questions are above the fold, click through to see the answers: 1) Recall your first politically-sentient moment.   2) Tell a little about your research at KU in language even a liberal arts major who took his last formal science course 26 years ago (that would be me) can follow.  I ain't too proud to be talked down to.   3) Ginger or Mary Ann?   4) Pick an actual or potential political candidate for any office (local, state or national).  Poof!  You've been asked…

Iterated Function Systems and Attractors

Most of the fractals that I've written about so far - including all of the L-system fractals - are examples of something called iterated function systems. Speaking informally, an iterated function system is one where you have a transformation function which you apply repeatedly. Most iterated function systems work in a contracting mode, where the function is repeatedly applied to smaller and smaller pieces of the original set. There's another very interesting way of describing these fractals, and I find it very surprising that it's equivalent. It's the idea of an attractor. An attractor is…

The presumption of Rick Warren

Rick Warren regularly scribbles up these cloying little messages he calls the Daily Hope — and rather than hope, they offer nothing but trite platitudes and unfounded certainty about a godly purpose that I find extremely discouraging. How can people find this lying tripe uplifting? God deliberately shaped and formed you to serve him in a way that makes your ministry unique. He carefully mixed the DNA recipe that created you. David praised God for this incredible personal attention to detail God gave in designing each of us: "You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me…

Some More Thoughts About the German E. coli Outbreak

After Friday's post, I've held off on writing much about the German E. coli outbreak, often referred to by its serotype, O104:H4, or as HUSEC041 (HUS stands for hemolytic uremic syndrome). Having had the weekend to digest some of the ongoing analysis and news reports, here are some additional thoughts: 1) The multilocus sequence type (MLST) of this outbreak is definitely ST678. This means this outbreak strain is related to an older strain found in 2001 that caused disease. A new, improved assembly released by BGI yields a perfect match to ST678. In addition, there is independent…

Around the Web: Access Copyright sues York University

Since I work at York University, I'm going to refrain from commenting on this lawsuit. However, as is my practice I'll be creating and maintaining a list of relevant articles and resources here to help me stay current on the matter. I am not attempting to create a comprehensive list. General Statement of Claim against York University by Access Copyright Monday,April 8, 2013: Canada's writers and publisherstake a stand against damaging interpretations of fair dealing by the education sector (Access Copyright press release) Access Copyright Interim Post-Secondary Educational Institutions…

Putting a mask on wrong

For some reason the subject of masks evokes great emotion here. I'm not sure why. The idea that masks will help in a pandemic is a strongly held belief that might even be true. We don't know. I venture into mask territory knowing that, like gun control and atheism, I'll get a reaction. But a recent paper in the CDC journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, brings up once again the difficulties in proper mask use. The subject was N95 Full Face (FF) respirators, the kind you would need in an influenza pandemic if you were to cover your mouth, nose and eyes, the latter because you can be infected…

Swine flu: features of past pandemics

The spate of swine flu articles in The New England Journal of Medicine last week included an important "Perspective, The Signature Features of Influenza Pandemics — Implications for Policy," by Miller, Viboud, Baliska and Simonsen. These authors are familiar to flu watchers as experienced flu epidemiologists and analysts of archival and other data. Analysis of archival data is sometimes described as archeo-epidemiologic research. In their NEJM article Miller et al. summarize what they see as some common features in the three flu pandemics of the last century (so the generalization that there…

Swine flu: features of past pandemics

by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure The spate of swine flu articles in The New England Journal of Medicine last week included an important "Perspective, The Signature Features of Influenza Pandemics â Implications for Policy," by Miller, Viboud, Baliska and Simonsen. These authors are familiar to flu watchers as experienced flu epidemiologists and analysts of archival and other data. Analysis of archival data is sometimes described as archeo-epidemiologic research. In their NEJM article Miller et al. summarize what they see as some common features in the three flu pandemics of the…

A close-up look at a Hairy babirusa

I covered babirusas recently; you might have noticed. As you'll know if you read those articles, Meijaard & Groves (2002a, b) argued a few years ago that Babyrousa babyrussa of tradition should actually be split up into several phylogenetic species. Coincidentally, I published an article on lumping vs splitting in extant mega-mammals only a few weeks before Groves et al. (2010) split white rhinos into two phylogenetic species. Among the most distinctive of the 'newly recognised' babirusa species is the Hairy or Golden babirusa. Somewhat ironically, it seems that babirusas of this sort…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, reporter Raquel Rutledge follows up her in-depth investigation into diacetyl exposure among coffee plant workers with news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is looking into the hazardous exposures that some 600,000 people face as they work to roast, grind, package and serve coffee. Rutledge reports that in the wake of newspaper’s 2015 investigation, CDC is now conducting tests at facilities across the nation — in fact, the first test results from a coffee roasting facility in Wisconsin found very high levels of chemicals that have the…

Occupational Health News Roundup

In a joint investigation from the Texas Tribune and Houston Chronicle, reporters looked into workplace safety at oil refineries 10 years after an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, left 15 workers dead and injured another 180. Unfortunately, reporters found that “though no single incident has matched the 2005 devastation, a two-month investigation finds the industry’s overall death toll barely slowed.” In the four-part series, reporters chronicle what went wrong at the Texas City refinery, explore the aftermath and talk with survivors, and analyze data showing where and how…

Occupational Health News Roundup

It’s a toxic chemical that made headlines when it was linked to deaths and injuries among popcorn factory workers, and federal regulators are well aware of its dangers. But, unfortunately, diacetyl is still hurting workers. In “Gasping for Action,” reporter Raquel Rutledge at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writes about diacetyl, a chemical that tastes like butter and is used in food products and e-cigarettes, and the dangers it continues to pose to workers who breath it in, particularly coffee workers. She writes: Coffee roasters sometimes add it to flavor coffee. High concentrations of…

Galaxies near the speed of light!

"The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." -Albert Einstein Now that you know how many galaxies are in our expanding Universe, you might be wondering about their speeds. After all, since the Universe is expanding, that means that the farther away a galaxy is from us, the faster it's speeding away from us. Graph credit: Michael Rowan-Robinson. What's more than that, since the expansion itself is accelerating, galaxies speed away from us ever faster as time progresses. It should come as no surprise, then, that galaxies that we see moving away from us at high…

The Polar Vortex Is Dead. But that does not mean it isn't cold out

The term "Polar Vortex" was thrown around a lot last year, in reference to the persistent mass of very cold air that enveloped much of southern Canada and the US. As you will remember, Rush Limbaugh accused climate scientists and librul meteorologists of making up the polar vortex to scare everyone into thinking climate change is real. You may also remember Al Roker pointing out on national TV and on Twitter that the term "polar vortex" has been in meteorology textbooks for decades. This year, with a new wave of cold air arriving unseasonably in the upper middle part of the US, the term is…

My Review of Hillary Clinton's Book Part I

Before discussing What Happened by Hillary Clinton, the nature of the political conversation demands that I preface this review with some context. First, about me. I supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election because I did not want Donald Trump to be president. During the primary, which was not the 2016 election, I seriously had a hard time deciding between the various candidates (Clinton and Sanders). On an issue by issue basis, I preferred Sanders' position over Clinton. However, on the issues about which I have an informed view (climate change and energy related, and…

Musgrave and McDaniel on American Foreign Policy

A fascinating exchange has gone on between two of my favorite bloggers, Caleb McDaniel and Paul Musgrave, about how the two sides tend to look at American foreign policy in a far too simplistic manner. Caleb began by responding to a recent column by David Brooks crowing that the recent movement to get the Syrians out of Lebanon was a direct result of Bush's policy in Iraq. Paul then wrote this reply to Caleb, which is not so much a rebuttal as an extension of the same sort of reasoning. He agrees with Caleb that Brooks' American triumphalism is far too simplistic, but he points out that there…

Idiot of the Week: Bruce Walker

This week's Idiot of the Week is Bruce Walker. It will come as no surprise that I found this cretin through a link from the WorldNutDaily. His article, published in the American Daily, is entitled The Case for America Divorcing Its Haters. In it, Mr. Walker tosses out the old "if you don't love this country, why don't you leave it?" line, original thought apparently being beyond his capability (paranthetical aside: funniest answer to that question ever comes from Barry Crimmins - "Because I don't wanna be victimized by its foreign policy."). This thought is no more rational when it's put down…

In Defense of Short Papers

The Mad Biologist points to and agrees with a post by Jonathan Eisen with the dramatic title "Why I Am Ashamed to Have a Paper in Science. Eisen's gripe is mostly about Science not being Open Access, but he throws in a complaint about length restrictions, which is what the Mad Biologist latches on to and amplifies. Eisen writes: Science with its page length obsession forced Irene to turn her enormous body of work on this genome into a single page paper with most of the detail cut out. I do not think a one page paper does justice to the interesting biology or to her work. A four page paper…

Self-Esteem Is Not the Problem With Science Education

Arts & Letters Daily sent me to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the headline How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science. "Hey," I thought, "Good to see this issue getting some more attention." And, indeed, the article starts off well enough, with a decent statement of the problems in science education: Back in 2003, the National Science Board issued a report that noted steep declines in "graduate enrollments of U.S. citizens and permanent residents" in the sciences. The explanation? "Declining federal support for research sends negative signals to interested…

Emily's Big Day

This is Emily: She sure does look comfortable, doesn't she? And why shouldn't she be? In a tour de force of inductive reasoning she figured that today would be like the previous 364 consecutive days, at least to the extent that I wouldn't even consider stuffing her into a box and bringing her out to my car. But she was wrong. “Why is God angry?” she asked. I explained that while this sudden intrusion into her happiness may seem incomprehensible form her limited, feline perspective, she should remember that I can see the big picture. I understand, in a way that she cannot, that…

O'Leary Proves that ID is Worthless to Scientists

ID folks make numerous assertions said to represent scientific challenges to conventional evolutionary theory. These claims are uniformly wrong, which is one of the reasons scientists generally ignore them. But ID folks also claim that adopting a design perspective could lead to great progress in science, if only scientists would take off their materialist blinders. There is an acid test for all such claims: Go discover something! Writers are fond of saying “Show, don't tell,” and that adage applies very well here. If your perspective is so useful, then prove it by discovering something…

The Florida Keys are Oil-Free!

KEY WEST, FL - After a few days of work and research discussions here, it's time for a couple days of true vacation. The Family Pharmboy chose to leave the 101°F of North Carolina for the cooler and breezier climes of the gorgeous and peaceful Florida Keys. We're here to right a wrong and to also dump this year's summer vacation cash with some of our old and new friends who are currently being adversely affected by the terrible news on the northern Gulf Coast. However. There is no BP Deepwater Horizon oil in the Florida Keys. Repeat: There is no BP Deepwater Horizon oil in the Florida Keys.…

The scientist's role in policy-making, part 459

William "Stoat" Connolley draws our attention to a couple of essays by Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia climate team on the role of climatologists -- and scientists in general -- in the policy-making process. I have to agree with William, it's not exactly clear just what Hulme is getting at. Some excellent points are raised, though, and the essays are worthwhile fodder for thought as the Copenhagen conference begins. Hulme may be a fine scientist, indeed one of the best, but I have trouble following his line of reasoning on this subject in both the Wall Street Journal and the BBC…

How not to negotiate your start-up funds*

If I had the chance to do one thing over again in the whole job search process, I wouldn't hesitate a minute before making my decision of what to change. I did a miserable job negotiating my start-up package. Actually, miserable may be too nice a word. (Let's pause for a moment and put things in context: I had a baby. A month later the whole family flew across the country for an interview. I rocked the interview and I got all sorts of encouraging signs from the department. They told me that they would call within a few days. Weeks passed. About 7 if I recall, but who's counting. I didn't…

The Fight Continues - The First 100 Days

The following was lifted from an email I sent to a friend yesterday. I've since modified it by incorporating David Brooks and Paul Krugman's columns as they clearly support my arguement that the framing wars have begun - it is a critical time and we must all continue the fight. OK here the email: As for Obama, the expectations are high, maybe too high. But politics is a constant battle. We progressives have won a major victory for now, but there's still more to do. We'll see if Obama makes the right moves to enact change, or if the whole thing collapses either due to the DLC, pressure from…

Disagreeing with Wilkins

Wilkins is not happy that I jumped down Pagels' throat for a stupid comment in an interview. He thinks I ought to take Pagels more seriously (as did some of the commenters here), and, unfortunately, also goes on to mischaracterize the uppity atheist arguments, like so: This is what I reject about the Dawkins/Moran/PZ aggressive atheism - it takes the most stupid version of religion, argues against it, and then claims to have given reasons for not being religious. At best (and here I concur) they have given reasons not to be stupid theists. But a good argument takes on the best of the…

When homeopaths kill by neglect

Busy, busy, busy. Between work and getting ready to for the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle on Thursday as I mentioned on Monday, I'm afraid I don't have time for my usual sterling gems of skeptically insolent prose or an analysis of a scientific paper that a couple of my readers have sent me. If too many science or medical bloggers haven't totally deconstructed it by then, maybe I'll take it on either on Friday or Monday. Until then, if you haven't gotten me an entry to the Skeptics' Circle yet, you still have about 12 hours left until the deadline at 6 PM EST. In the meantime, that…

Burning Bushes

In the Fishlake Mountains of Utah, several fires are steadily burning. As the American West enters yet another dry season, there will almost certainly be more. Folks around these parts have been whispering about the increasing fire danger, dreading another year like 2002. We reffered to that period of time as "the summer of fire", when the Hayman fire, started by a disgruntled forest service worker, burned over 7 million acres of land and destroyed over 100 homes. This year is shaping up to be disturbingly worse. Why? The Bush administration thinks that the bulk of our firefighting helicopter…

Who's the Audience for Tierney's Shtick?

Over at Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker says "I wanted to know what actual female scientists thought" about the boring blah blah John Tierney barfed up this week in the NYT. And then gives links to four different responses, included the fabulous Isis's awesome take on why she is bored to tears with this topic. Personally I would rather be forced to watch the second Transformers movie on constant repeat for the next 10 years than continue to have this discussion, but since the New York Time's John Tierney seems to have his head shoved so far up his own ass that his can lick his own tonsils,…

More on the Giant Water Slide Jump

This Giant water slide video is extremely popular on the internets. Maybe you have not seen it (doubtful), then here it is: This is such an incredible stunt that the very first question that comes up is - fake? or not fake? From my previous analysis, I can say: Even though there is some slight perspective issues, the vertical acceleration seems to be constant and has a reasonable scale to give the acceleration of -9.8 m/s2 The horizontal motion is essentially constant (as a real jump would be) The launch speed is about 19 m/s The launch angle is 32.8 degrees If the guy had no friction on…

Opinion pages

I stopped reading the New York Times op-ed page after they put it behind a paywall. It turned out that I could get smart economic commentary from Brad Delong without having to pay the fee to get Paul Krugman. I could get a diverse range of voices by reading other blogs, and never had to contend with Maureen Dowd's asinine gossipy commentary, David Brooks' simplistic conservatism, or the rotating cast of losers brought in to fill the void left by William Safire (Kristol and Douthat). So it's been interesting to note the enthusiasm for a piece in Monday's Times, an essay by Thomas Geoghegan…