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The Left Behind Series

Last night I completed one of the least ambitious reading projects I have ever undertaken. I have now read all sixteen volumes of the Left Behind series. As I am sure you are aware, this is a series of novels written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, describing the Earth's last days as foretold in the Book of Revelation. It begins with the Rapture of the church, in which millions of believers disappear from the face of the Earth. This is a bit awkward for those folks driving cars or flying planes at the time. The story then meanders its way through eleven subsequent volumes, documenting…

Ida the Fossil Primate

You probably know that there is a new primate fossil, nicknamed "Ida," and that there is quite a buzz about it. (Well, you certainly do know by now because this is a repost!) Darwinius masillae, aka Ida Ida comes from fossil deposits in Germany, and was originally excavated in two different parts by private collectors, and only recently rejoined and recognized for the amazing fossil it is. This is considered to be a new genus, and is named Darwinius masillae ...holotype skeleton in right lateral view... Ida is a 47 million year old adapid primate of outstanding, unprecedented state…

Will employers scrap their health plans and send employees to exchanges? Do we want them to?

One of the things policy wonks are keeping an eye on as the Affordable Care Act is fully implemented is the proportion of employers who stop offering employees insurance and instead give their workers money they can use to pay premiums of plans sold on health insurance exchanges (or marketplaces). As Robert Pear reports in the New York Times, though, a new IRS ruling will discourage employers from doing that. The IRS will not consider employer arrangements that give workers premium funds (for purchasing insurance through exchanges) to satisfy the ACA requirements, which means employers could…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Strategies for Aspiring Biomedical Researchers in Resource-Limited Environments: Countries struggling with global health challenges desperately need local biomedical researchers to find health care solutions to address the deadly diseases that affect their populations…

More on Slime and Soul Food...

Hagfish are gaining popularity in Korea by the minute! Caravalho Fisheries is now trying to develop a live market for the "primitive and somewhat disgusting eel-like creatures". About 5,000 pounds of hagfish, peacefully coiled at the bottom of their tank, were shipped to Seoul, where they should arrive this weekend. The hagfish are not exactly a status food but more like a comfort food (the delightful article below compares them to jalapeno poppers). And yes, the shipping costs more than the hagfish themselves, which, given the chance, would enter a dead body and eat it from the inside…

Responsible journalism

When Michael Moore tried to ask Roger Moore what responsibility he felt to Flint, Michigan, he got a simple answer. I'll get the same answer if I suggest that media companies like NBC ought to invest more heavily in public service programming (for instance by dropping Imus and his imitators), that major corporations ought to forego cheap foreign labor to keep Americans employed, that oil companies might legitimately be asked to pay some sort of windfall tax, or that Enron's real crime was not its financial chicanery but its abuse of California's energy supply. The answer is simple: business…

War rhinos

So, at last, it's that war rhinos post you've all been waiting for... Remember that all the things I promise will appear eventually, it's just that these things take time. Tetrapod Zoology is becoming an increasingly active site that now generally gets over 1000 hits a day, so to all those who visit regularly, and to those who leave comments, many thanks. Please note that I'm starting to expand the about me section of the site: I've recently added a list of publications and will be adding links to pdfs as and when they become available. On the subject of things becoming available, those of…

200 years of kiwi research

While checking a few details on kiwi skeletal anatomy the other day, I discovered some old material I'd written on these strange birds. I've updated it, and here's the first lot of it. Kiwi have been known to science since 1813. In that year George Shaw (then the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum), writing in the final volume of his series The Naturalist's Miscellany, described a specimen that had been given to him by Captain Barclay, a privateer engaged in the transport of convicts. Investigation of Barclay's voyages reveal that he probably never visited New Zealand, so he must have…

Behe Disproves Irreducible Complexity

One of the interesting segments of the Michael Behe cross examination begins on page 42 of the Day12AM transcript, and it concerns a paper that Behe wrote with David Snoke. That paper, called Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Feature that Requires Multiple Amino Acid Residues, was based upon a computer simulation that attempted to answer the question of how long it would take cumulative point mutations in a single gene to produce a new trait - the interaction of two proteins - requiring a change in multiple amino acid residues if there was no selective advantage to preserve…

A true ghost story. Part I: A City of Death and Misery

Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is true.1 This is a long story, so it will span more than one blog post. You might not want to read this story while you are alone or while sitting in the dark.2 Kimberley South Africa is said to be the most haunted city in the world, and it certainly is a city with a remarkable and dark history. The culture of Kimberley is constructed from the usual colonial framework on which are draped the tragic lives of representatives from almost every native culture from thousands of kilometers around. The city's very existence is highly questionable…

A true ghost story. Part I: A City of Death and Misery

Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is true.1 This is a long story, so it may span more than one blog post. You might not want to read this story while you are alone or while sitting in the dark.2 Kimberley South Africa is said to be the most haunted city in the world, and it certainly is a city with a remarkable and dark history. The culture of Kimberley is constructed from the usual colonial framework on which are draped the tragic lives of representatives from almost every native culture from thousands of kilometers around. The city's very existence is highly questionable…

Giberson Interviews Collins

On the subject of science and religion, Karl Giberson and Francis Collins are not among my favorite commentators. That notwithstanding, this interview actually manages to be pretty interesting. Giberson's questions are in bold face, Collins' answers are in regular type. You seem like a mirror image of the fundamentalists who struggle with this, as I certainly did in college. Fundamentalists like me grow up with a lot of confidence in biblical literalism and then they encounter evolution, so they are bringing their prior biblical commitments to this new problem. You were interpreting the…

Zika virus and microcephaly: The conspiracy theories flow fast and furious

It's an oft-stated cliche that our children our our future. That's the reason stories involving dire threats to children are considered so terrifying. It's why, for instance, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End resonated so creepily. After all, as part of the end of civilization, a frightening change came over the children, who became far superior in abilities and mental power to their parents. Another example includes Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, whose plot involves the human race being plagued by a new disease called "Herod's Flu," which causes pregnant women to spontaneously abort their…

Britain's lost lynxes and wildcats

You might have noticed very little/no activity here over the past two weeks: partly this is because I'm very busy (preparing for Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective, among other things), but it's also because I currently have no internet access at home. Sigh. In an effort to add something new, here's the long-planned, third and final part in the series on Europe's cat fauna, adapted from the Big Cats in Britain talk 'The deep time history of Britain's felid fauna'. In a previous article we looked at homotheres, lions and leopards, and in a second one at jaguars, pumas and cheetahs. This…

CDC: Older workers continue to bear brunt of occupational highway fatalities

For older workers, the most dangerous occupational move may be getting behind the wheel. Last Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data showing that among highway transportation incidents, which are the leading cause of occupational death in the country, the highest fatality rates occur among workers ages 65 years old and older. In fact, workers in that age group experienced a fatality rate three times higher than workers ages 18 to 54. The unfortunate trend was seen across industries and occupations and among most demographic groups, according to data published in…

Project TENDR: A call to action to protect children from harmful neurotoxins

Just 10 years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible to bring leading physicians, scientists and advocates together in a consensus on toxic chemicals and neurological disorders in children, says Maureen Swanson. But with the science increasing “exponentially,” she said the time was ripe for a concerted call to action. Swanson is co-director of Project TENDR (Targeting Environmental Neuro-Developmental Risks), a coalition of doctors, public health scientists and environmental health advocates who joined forces in 2015 to call for reducing chemical exposures that interfere with fetal and child…

Advocates must push regulators to improve, enforce standards

By Dan Neal Ensuring that U.S. workers return home from work healthy and in one piece requires pushing OSHA and other agencies to do more at the state and national levels to improve standards and aggressively enforce them. Meanwhile, health and safety advocates and workers must speak out loudly for worker rights, especially to protect workers who simply report safety problems at their jobs and to protect whistleblowers who reveal criminal behavior. Those points were discussed last week in Baltimore at the 2015 National Conference on Worker Safety and Health. More than 280 workplace safety and…

Fat Rats: Exercise in Childhood May Protect Against Later Obesity

Almost everyone tries to lose weight at some point, but we are remarkably bad at it; most people quickly return to their original weight after cessation of exercise or resumption of a normal diet. A review article by Patterson & Levin elucidates the pathways for this effect, and in the process finds a special role for juvenile exercise in guarding against obesity throughout the lifespan. Patterson & Levin review several reasons for why it's so difficult to lose weight. First, caloric restriction is associated with subsequent "compensatory" increases in food intake, in both humans…

Flu pandemic ethics: rationing scarce resources.

In an earlier post, I pointed you toward the preliminary report (PDF here) issued by the Minnesota Pandemic Ethics Project this January. This report sets out a plan for the state of Minnesota to ration vital resources in the event of a severe influenza pandemic. Now, a rationing plan devised by an ethics project is striving for fairness. Rationed resources are those scarce enough that there isn't enough to go around to everyone who might want or need them. If someone will be left out, what's a fair way to decide who? Let's have a look at the rationing strategies discussed in the draft…

DDT in Uganda

Jessie Stone, who runs a malaria education, prevention and treatment program in Uganda, comments in the New York Times on the WHO's DDT pushing. To many of us in the malaria-control business, it came as no great surprise last week when the World Health Organization recommended wider use of DDT in Africa to combat the mosquitoes that cause the disease, which kills more than a million people a year, most of them children in Africa. The W.H.O.'s endorsement of DDT for spraying inside houses has the support of Congress and the Bush administration. With the W.H.O.'s encouragement, several African…

Inequality and Injustice

Over at the Economist, Jason Furman worries about the long-term implications of growing societal inequality: Regardless of the cause of rising inequality, lefties, utilitarians, Rawlsians and anyone with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system should all be concerned. As Alan Greenspan memorably stated, "income inequality is where the capitalist system is most vulnerable. You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust." I'm as concerned about inequality as the next liberal. I can't help but listen to my inner Marx when some…

The Environmental Cost of Parking

Salon.com has a really interesting article about the hidden and expensive costs of parking. There's lots of interesting stuff in the article, but this bit really stood out (italics mine): Americans don't object, because they aren't aware of the myriad costs of parking, which remain hidden. In large part, it's business owners, including commercial and residential landlords, who pay to provide parking places. They then pass on those costs to us in slightly higher prices for rent and every hamburger sold. "Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for…

Handwashing, Crap Removal, and Infectious Disease

Two stories published in the New York Times today underscore the importance of handwashing in preventing infection. First, from a public hospital in New York: Timeouts to wash hands and put on hairnets, a simple checklist to ensure that such seemingly obvious precautions are done, and advertising campaigns directed at everyone from the most senior doctors to the poorest of patients have been credited with drastically reducing the number of serious infections at New York City's public hospitals. Since 2005, central-line bloodstream infections, which stem from bacteria invading a catheter…

Chrysotile asbestos measure dies

Instead of putting this as an Addendum to today's post, I'll let it stand by its ignominious self. Thanks, Canada. Background: The Rotterdam Convention is a multilateral environmental agreement designed by a United Nations agency to protect vulnerable populations by ensuring that hazardous chemicals which are added to the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) list can only be exported with full disclosure and documentation. Although five types of asbestos were PIC listed in 2004, action on chrysotile asbestos was blocked by asbestos stakeholders including Canada, China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and India…

Celebrating African American History Month with Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Barrington Irving

USA Science & Engineering Festival X-STEM Speaker renowned aviator Barrington Irving sums up his current mission as a role model this way: "Kids want to be challenged, but today too many are bored and uninspired. I want to use aviation to excite and empower a new generation to become scientists, engineers, and explorers." He has a lot to inspire kids about. Born in Jamaica and raised in Miami Florida's inner city, surrounded by crime, poverty, and failing schools, he beat the odds in 2007 when, at the age of 23, he became the youngest person ever (and only African American) to pilot a…

Anathem

Neal Stephenson writes ambitious books. I got hooked with Snow Crash(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), an amazingly imaginative book about near-future virtual worlds; Zodiac(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) is required reading for anyone interested in chemistry and the environment; I had mixed feelings about Cryptonomicon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), but only because it was two books in one, and only one of those books was excellent; The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) was a fabulously weird exploration of a New Victorian culture with nanotechnology; and I ate up his big…

"Show me the money"

Blogging from Bio-Link, part III High school teachers have different techniques for selling their students on the benefits of science and math. When some high school instructors step in front of a class, the quiet demeanor gets put away and another persona steps out - the USED-CAR SALESMAN SCIENCE EVANGELIST. Science is no longer "science," when these instructors head up the class, it's SCIENCE, in all capital letters! Other teachers choose the haughty law professor, from "The Paper Chase," as a role model, even though a post-law student friend of mine thought it should be banned from…

Bush's OSHA: 20 days to garbage pick-up

About ten people sent us links to the Washington Post front page news that isn't news to anybody in occupational health. "Under Bush," the headline read, "OSHA Mired in Inaction." You don't say! In early 2001, an epidemiologist at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to publish a special bulletin warning dental technicians that they could be exposed to dangerous beryllium alloys while grinding fillings. Health studies showed that even a single day's exposure at the agency's permitted level could lead to incurable lung disease. After the bulletin was drafted, political…

Galveston high security laboratory: dumb and dumber

The last time we looked at the high containment laboratory in Galveston, Texas, it was directly in the path of Hurricane Ike. Flooding from Ike devastated Galveston but it was a comparatively weak storm, Category 2 on the Sumner Simpson scale. Katrina was a Cat 4. The worst storms are the huge Category 5 affairs. So Galveston got off pretty well as far as storm intensity goes, although the water damage was catastrophic. To remind you, our post on that previous occasion was, "Why would any sane person put a Level 4 biodefense lab in Galveston?" It turns out that now that the storm has passed,…

Ceremonies honor the 19 fallen firefighters, wisdom of battling wildfires questioned

A memorial service honoring the 19 firefighters killed in the Yarnell Hill, AZ wildfire will be held today at Tim's Toyota Center in Prescott Valley, AZ.  Forty eight hours earlier, an honor guard escorted 19 hearses carrying members of the 20-person Granite Mountain Hotshots on a 125-mile route from Phoenix to Prescott.  This string of somber ceremonies started Monday, July 1 when a crew of 12 firefighters were permitted on the mountain to remove the firefighters' bodies. In "It's something you never want to see again,"  The (Arizona) Republic's Kristina Goetz describes a brotherhood of…

Clumsy Performance and Bad Timing Trip Up Bush Nominee

Earlier this year, President Bush nominated Susan E. Dudley of the Mercatus Center to replace John Graham, PhD, as the head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The office oversees all of the Administrationâs regulatory policies, including public health and environmental rules, and is often the last major hurdle faced by agencies like OSHA or EPA before a new regulation can be proposed. As Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) noted at Ms. Dudleyâs November 13 confirmation hearing, OIRA lacks name recognition among the public, but its work has tremendous âimpact on the lives of all…

My most favouritest dinosaurs: ceratosaurids

One of my most favourite dinosaurs has always been Ceratosaurus but, given that I mostly work on Lower Cretaceous dinosaurs, I've never had the chance to look at it much (Ceratosaurus is Upper Jurassic). Imagine my surprise then when, during a recent visit to Glasgow (Scotland), I was confronted with a complete mounted (replica) skeleton of this neat beast at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. First named by Othniel Marsh in 1884, Ceratosaurus is best known for the type species, C. nasicornis from the Morrison Formation of Colorado... Less well known is that two additional Morrison…

white noise

New calculations suggest the question of whether the universe is holographic or not is testable, and recent data is consistent with the model, and consistent with the universe actually being holographic. h/t Jake at Pure Pedantry Prof Craig Hogan, the new director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at Fermilab, has written a series of very interesting papers suggesting that space-time quantization at the Planck scale ought to show up as white noise in the transverse displacement of laser interferometers, with a power spectrum that is just √(tp/2), independent of frequency, given some…

30,000 Facets Give Dragonflies a Different Perspective: The Big Compound Eye in the Sky

tags: dragonfly vision, facets, opsin, compound eyes, insects, dragonflies, Dennis Paulson, David O'Carroll, Robert Olberg Male Megaloprepus caerulatus, PANAMA, Rio Chico Masambi, near Gamboa, 11 August 2005; photo by Julie Craves, a Natural Science Research Associate at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Color vision in humans depends upon three light-sensitive proteins, called opsins, that are present in our retinas. Each type of opsin absorbs one color of light in the spectrum. In humans, the colors absorbed by these opsins are red, green or blue. The many wavelengths of light…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Sacramento Bee, Ryan Lillis and Jose Luis Villegas report on the effects that Trump’s immigration crackdown is having on California farms, writing that fear of deportation is spreading throughout the state’s farming communities. While many farmworkers believe immigration raids are inevitable, farm operators, many who voted for Trump, hope the president will bring more water to the region and keep immigration officials off their fields. Lillis and Villegas write: Fear is everywhere. The night before, the local school board became one of the first in California to declare its campuses a…

Study finds farmers markets can increase healthy food access among the most disadvantaged

In the last few years, the residents of Flint, Michigan, and its surrounding suburbs lost five grocery stores. Today, within the city limits, there's just one large chain grocery store, about 10 small and often-pricier groceries, and 150 liquor stores, convenience stores and gas stations. People who have a car often travel out to the suburbs for more variety and better prices. Much of Flint is a food desert — a place where accessing healthy, affordable food is a very real challenge. But thankfully, a recent study in Flint found that simply relocating an area farmers market is making a…

Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!

Omar Khayaam, sorry I can't do the bold around "distant" in a title. I gave Hugo the popcorn on friday, but it didn't really apply until today. It looks like the Frogs win the first strike award whilst Gaddafi gets the lying scumbag award. The end result of the Gaddafi-vs-the-West military fight is in no doubt; quite where that leaves the ground war is less clear. Probably in an Afghanistan-type situation, where we (well, the US in that case) bombed the Taliban so the Northern Alliance could take over. Only lets hope this time we don't collude with the drug-dealers; as far as I can tell the…

243-249/366: Cute-Kids Cruise Photo Dump

As promised/threatened in the previous post, here's a big collection of shots from our cruise vacation featuring the sillyheads. 243/366: Bunk Beds: SteelyKid and The Pip like the bunk beds in the stateroom. The sleeping arrangements in the stateroom were pretty slick. We had a double bed that was there all the time, and during the day a sitting area with a couch. While we were at dinner, the housekeeping staff came in and flipped the couch over to become a bed, then lowered a top bunk from a hatch in the ceiling. The kids have never slept in bunk beds before, so this was considered highly…

SteelyKid, Space-Babies, and Transformative Music

As previously mentioned, SteelyKid has started to get into pop music. In addition to the songs in that post, she's very fond of Katy Perry's "Roar," like every other pre-teen girl in the country, and also this Taylor Swift song: I've seen a bunch of people rave about this, but honestly, I found it pretty forgettable until I read Jim Henley's Twitter exegesis in which he shows that the song is really about the tryst with an alien that left Swift with a faceless hybrid infant. That is, a blank space-baby. Now I can't get the idiot song out of my head. Anyway, a week or two ago, I actually went…

It's never too late... to discover science!

"I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like to be taught." -Winston Churchill My very first time leading a classroom  -- on my own -- was back in June of 2000. I was 21 years old, fresh out of college, and was teaching science in a middle school classroom. And I asked what I thought was an innocuous question, designed to pique their curiosity. I asked the class, "What are we -- you, me, and all human beings -- made of?" I was expecting many possible answers common to all living things, ranging from "blood and guts" to cells, molecules, or atoms. From a scientific standpoint,…

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs To Know, by Joseph Romm

Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Joe Romm is just out, and is the most up to date examination of climate change science, the effects of climate change on humans, policy related problems, and energy-related solutions. Everyone should read this book, and if you teach earth system sciences you should consider using this book as a guide in your teaching, or in some cases, assigning it in class. The book is written to be read by general audiences, so it would work well in a high school or college setting. As Romm points out, climate change will have more of an impact on humans,…

Why does your galaxy spin?

"Sometimes I don't want to see the puppeteers, sometimes I just want to see the magic therein, and sometimes I just want to pry open the atoms and know why they spin." -Glen Sutton But it isn't just the atoms -- the minuscule building blocks of matter -- that spin. It's also the individual galaxies, collections of some mind-boggling number (like 1068) of atoms, that spin. Image credit: Jean-Charles Cuillandre, Giovanni Anselmi and the CFHT. Messier 95, above, is just one such example. But how did these galaxies get to be this way? To answer this question, we have to go all the way back to…

Are Miniature Black Holes Everywhere?

"It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years." -Stephen Hawking When we look out at the Universe, you know what it is that we see. Image credit: Misti Mountain Observatory. Light! Light from stars, galaxies, clusters, etc., covering all the different wavelengths you can measure. But there weren't always stars, galaxies, and clusters in the Universe. When the Universe was first "born," in fact, the…

Resolving the Red Controversy?

Blue flower, red thorns! Blue flower, red thorns! Blue flower, red thorns! Oh, this would be so much easier if I wasn't color-blind! -Donkey, from Shrek Earlier this week, I introduced you to the Red Controversy, the observations recorded around 2000 years ago in Europe asserting that the star, Sirius, appeared red. Now, taking a look at Sirius today, it is clearly not red: And, based on what we know about stars, they don't change color on timescales that quickly. Many of you put forth some very good ideas, and I thank you for the comments. In fact, the most common one was the very first…

Freedom of Speech, Resolute Forestry, Stand.Earth, Greenpeace: New Developments

A little while back I posted this: Taking The Axe To The Environmental Movement: Resolute v. Greenpeace. Some of you complained because you don't like Greenpeace. But that is hardly the point. Greenpeace has a history of working towards important goals and sometimes even attaining them, and there are a lot of whales that want you to lay off and give them credit. Anyway, the point of that post was to let you know about a SLAPP lawsuit Greenpeace had been slapped with by Resolute Forest Products. The long and the short of it is this: Resolute, if they get legal traction and win, are setting…

Addressing Climate Change is Legacy Building Stuff. YOUR Legacy.

On Tuesday, President Obama will make a speech outlining his administration’s plans to address climate change. The Right Wing has already responded by calling those concerned with climate change “Terrorists.” How have the progressive and left wings responded? Badly. Very badly. Here is a selection, some paraphrased to ensure anonymity (though these are all public), of comments by people that I know are well meaning climate change activists or otherwise concerned about global warming and such. Obama’s speeches and verbal plans make no difference. It’s what he DOES that counts. He’ll say…

A Remarkable Convergence of Species: The Deadliest Sea Snake

Sea snakes are true snakes that look a little like eels because of their horizontally flattened rudder-like tails, and they spend a lot of time...for most species, their entire lives...in the ocean. Only one species seems to be able to move on land at all. They seem to all be venomous, some extremely so. They are all tropical or near-tropical, and there are numerous species distributed among about 15 genera. One species is Enhyrina schistosa, known as the Beaked Sea Snake, or the Hook-Nosed Sea Snake. It lives in the waters near Indonesia and Australia. This is known to be the most…

Steven Erikson, The Crippled God (Spoilers) [Library of Babel]

OK, having spoken vaguely about The Crippled God, here's a post for spoiler-y comments about the book and the series as a whole. If you haven't read it, but think you might, save this post for reading after you're done. SPOILERS: There's a bit early in the book (too far back for me to find now) where somebody says of Shadowthrone and Cotillion that they became gods because it seemed like the next logical step after conquering a vast empire. Once they were gods, though, and saw how the world worked, they decided they didn't like it, and set out to fix things. That's kind of the core of the…

The politics edition

I find myself unable to resist the calls to comment on the surprise calling of an UK election. But while here I'll comment on Trump, too. Theresa May seeks snap election to take UK through Brexit Says everyone, including the FT, which adds things like The pound rose on expectations that Mrs May would win a much increased Commons majority, allowing her to sideline implacable Eurosceptics in her Conservative party and ensure a phased Brexit concluding with a UK/EU free-trade deal. Polls predict a heavy defeat for the opposition Labour party, which has been in disarray under the leadership of…

Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices

I announced my intention to do some research blogging a little while ago, and managed one pair of posts before the arrival of SteelyKid kind of distracted me. I'm still planning to complete the Metastable Xenon Project blog, though (despite the utter lack of response to the first two), and the second real paper I was an author on is "Suppression and Enhancement of Collisions in Optical Lattices," a PRL from 1998, with a preprint version available here. So, this is another paper about collisions, obviously, but what's an optical lattice? An optical lattice is an arrangement of laser beams--…