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King Björn Invited Me To His Mead-Hall

Yesterday Jrette, her buddy and I went down to Ströja in Kvillinge outside Norrköping and had a look at the mead-hall excavation I've blogged about. Arkeologikonsult's Björn Hjulström very kindly showed us around. The site will become an Östergötland classic, not only for the 6th century manor hall but also because of its long habitation continuity and for the keen appreciation its excavators have for stratigraphy. I saw hachured plans that would make British urban archaeologists proud. The excavation is caused by and funded through a planned road widening and railroad improvement which are…

Happy Veterans Day

We have to stop making new veterans, especially VFWs, but until we do we should honor them for their service. Huxley's grandpa, who served in the Navy in the Asian theater during Viet Nam, is stopping by Huxley's school today for a flag raising ceremony. I'm always on the fence when dealing with issues of patriotism in child raising. My family is not big on American Exceptionalism, and jingoistic patriotism is part of that. But honoring vets is fine. Of course, I had to explain to Huxley what a "veteran" was, and that opened a whole can of worms. It is rather amazing what kids put…

Dembski Finally Responds....Kind Of

It seems that William Dembski can be shamed into more obfuscation, but can't be shamed into actually being honest. First, a little background. On October 29th, Dembski posted an item on his blog in which he claimed the following: Ask yourself why, after submitting almost 200 pages of materials against me in his expert witness report and after submitting to a deposition with the Thomas More Law Center in July, Jeffrey Shallit did not take the witness stand in Dover for the plaintiffs. Answer: his obsessiveness against me and ID made him a liability to the ACLU. Clearly, the implication here is…

Who won the Bill Nye - Ken Ham Debate? Bill Nye!

In the Spring of 2010, evangelical Bible scholar Bruce Waltke, in speaking about the overwhelming evidence for evolution, said “To deny that reality will make us a cult, some odd group that is not really interacting with the real world.” In response to this, Ken Ham, president of Kentucky’s Creation Museum, commented, “What he is saying ultimately undermines the authority of God’s word.” Both statements seem to be true. (I don’t think you necessarily need to have faith in a god to accept the basic logic of Ham’s statement.) Also, that’s really all you need to know about young earth…

Michael Egnor is a friggen nutbar.

(H/T AtBC) Oooooooookaaaaay. I think its time for nappy-nap time at the Discovery Institute. Casey-baby is all cranky, and now Michael Egnor, who is normally the most adorable cuddliest toddler ever has thrown a mighty temper tantrum. While their ba-bas are warming up in the microwave, lets preserve this rant for posterity. Cause its all about how awesome Creationism is. Yes, Creationism. Engors word. Not mine (well, its mine too for describing ID, but he did it *points*): Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human…

The Friday Fermentable: "Mixing Drinks With Work and Staying Sober, Too" (NYTimes)

Figure 1. SouthernFriedScientist (@SFriedScientist) and Kevin Zelnio (Deep Sea News; @kzelnio) and their 40s preparing to leave to attend the 4th International Symposium on Chemosynthesis-Based Ecosystems - Hydrothermal Vents, Seeps and Other Reducing Habitats - in Okinawa, Japan. Yes, Dr Zelnio, those are absolutely gorgeous beards. I don't know if Kim Severson of the New York Times knew this when writing her thought-provoking article earlier this week, but it coincided with the annual meetings of the Research Society on Alcoholism (RSA) and the College of Problems on Drug Dependence (…

Things to read, Weekend Edition

Turns out DC has, or once did have, a hidden subterranean labyrinth - and you thought it was just a plot device from last fall's South Park election special! Even better, it was dug by a lepidopterist. Take that, you engineers! ONE of the oddest hobbies in the world is that of Dr. H. G. Dyar, international authority on moths and butterflies of the Smithsonian Institution, who has found health and recreation in digging an amazing series of tunnels beneath his Washington home. The New York Times revealed its 50 most looked-up words, and Nieman Journalism Lab had commentary: "All of the 25-cent…

Mono, ah, mono

To all those who were expecting to see me at SfN, the DC bloggers meetup, or the upcoming ScienceOnline09, I apologize: I am really sick. And it all started, as catastrophes always do, with a cat. Shortly after Election Day, my feisty tortoiseshell cat (above, looking angry as usual) was suffering from a bacterial infection. Unfortunately, the local vet's staff were unable to handle her, and in the process of the examination, she bit me through the arm. The bite swelled up and changed color. Nasty. But I've had cat bites before, so I was unconcerned. The next morning, however, I woke up…

The diversification of consumer genomics

Following the dramatic appearance of the field of personal genomics just over a year ago the major players in the field have worked hard to distinguish themselves from their competition: 23andMe has emphasised the intellectual joy of learning about genetics, and also attempted to actively engage its customers in the company's research projects; deCODEme has leaned heavily on the impressive academic credentials of its parent company, deCODE Genetics; Navigenics has committed itself utterly to an image of sober, responsible reflection on the medical information present in its customers' genomes…

The invasion of well-meaning quacks into West Africa continues apace, part three

I hope my U.S. readers have all had a happy Thanksgiving. Today has been known at least since the mid-1970s as Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. Whether it's still true or not, given the relentless proliferation, progression, and metastasis—yes, the use of terms related to cancer is intentional—of holiday sales right up until Christmas, I don't know. I do know that I plan on going nowhere near any store bigger than a convenience store until next week if I can possibly help it. I'm also sitting back and congratulating myself on one of the smartest decisions I've made in a…

Cancer, cults, and kids

I've been reluctant to write about the Daniel Hauser case. I don't even want to imagine what his parents are going through. If you're not a parent, I can't explain it to you, so you'll have to trust me---having a kid with a life-threatening illness can drive you to do the unimaginable. And what Daniel's parents have chosen to do is nearly unimaginable, but until you've been there, judgment must be tempered by compassion. But that compassion is only for the parents and the patient, not for those who are supporting their horrible decisions. The basics Daniel is 13 year old boy with…

The more things change, the more they stay the same: David Irving reverts to form.

Well, that didn't take long. Only a few days after his conviction for Holocaust denial, David Irving has reverted to form: Far-right author David Irving's repudiation of his views on the Holocaust and Hitler's role in it has not lasted very long. In a prison interview just days after he told an Austrian court he had been wrong to deny the Holocaust, he reverted to insisting that the slaughter in Nazi death camps was exaggerated, and that Jews "bear blame for what happened". He went on: The author was jailed on Monday for three years for denying the Holocaust during two lectures and in a…

Physics of Linerider III: Air Resistance

There is no air resistance in line rider. Sorry to spoil the suspense. To test for the presence of an air resistance force, a track was created that let the rider fall.  (note the markers on the side. These are used to keep track of how the origin is moving). Below is the y position of the rider as a function of time:  In this situation, the rider falls about 100 meters. A quadratic line is fit to the data…

Sunday sermonettes: Burroughs and Jefferies

While working on an unrelated project, I came across two fascinating passages, the first by John Burroughs, the second by Richard Jefferies, both from the excellent Norton Book of Nature Writing. If nothing else, it is a reminder that people have been presenting sensible arguments against the design intuition for a very long time. John Burroughs was a great nature writer and a student of Walt Whitman. Here is a passage from his essay "The Gospel of Nature." After explaining his view that "Nature-love … has a distinctly religious value. It does not come to a man or woman who is wholly…

Temnospondyls the early years (part II)

At last, I fulfill those promises of more temnospondyls. Last time we looked at the edopoids, perhaps the most basal temnospondyl clade: here we look at the rest of the basal forms. Scary predators, marine piscivores, late-surviving relics, and some unfortunate beasts burned alive in forest fires... Studies on temnospondyl phylogeny mostly agree that 'post-edopoid' temnospondyls form a clade, the most basal members of which include Capetus, Dendrerpeton and Balanerpeton (Milner & Sequeira 1994, 1998, Holmes et al. 1998, Ruta et al. 2003a, b) [though some workers have found some of these…

Curveball deception & Koufax as god, cont'd

Found some Koufax footage. About halfway through this short clip he Ks Mantle, looking, and a bit later, in the dark footage toward the end, is a good strip of him throwing the devastating curve. Note there the emphatic downward motion of his shoulder -- which brought down his hand the faster, which (along with big, flexible hands and fingers) helped him make the ball spin 15 times on the way to the plate instead of the MLB-standard 12-13. Following up my curveball coverage of last week, faithful reader and Cognitive Daily maestro Dave Munger wrote in noting that Arthur Shapiro, one of the…

Yet another Patagonian Giant: Futalognkosaurus dukei

An artist's reconstruction, released by the National Museum of Brazil, of the paleoecology inhabited by Futalognkosaurus (left). It is being menaced by Megaraptor, now known to be a tetanuran theropod. For quite some time it was thought that after the Jurassic period the massive sauropods that roamed North America were all but extinct, a radiation of ankylosaurs, ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, and other ornithischians becoming the primary herbivores in place of the massive long-necked saurischians. At least one genus did hang on until the Late Cretaceous, the titanosaur Alamosaurus sanjuanensis…

Making it up as you go along: So-called "functional medicine" is pure quackery

I often describe "integrative medicine" as integrating quackery with medicine because that's what this inadvertently appropriately named branch of medicine in essence does. The reason, as I've described time and time again, is to put that quackery on equal footing (or at least apparently equal footing) with science- and evidence-based medicine, a goal that is close to being achieved. Originally known as quackery, the modalities now being "integrated" with medicine then became "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), a term that is still often used. But that wasn't enough. The word "…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 69 new articles in PLoS ONE 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: Comparison of Pattern Detection Methods in Microarray Time Series of the Segmentation Clock: While genome-wide gene expression data are generated at an increasing rate, the repertoire of approaches for pattern discovery in these data is still limited. Identifying subtle patterns of interest in large amounts of data (tens of thousands of profiles)…

Fukushima Update #70: If you can't measure it ... (UPDATED)

Fukushima Update #70: If you can't measure it, you can't analyze it. by Analiese Miller and Greg Laden It has been suggested, by various commenters on the internet, that the problem with Fukushima is not that there is a dangerous radioactive mess there, but rather, that the authorities in charge have decided that exposure to radiation is dangerous, when it really isn’t. The argument has been made that the evacuation of the region around Fukushima at the time of the meltdowns and explosions was unnecessary. This presumably also means that the exclusion zones, where people are not allowed to…

Expert! Part One.

I know I haven't been around for a while. Sorry about that. A bit of the summer doldrums I guess. But now I have big news to report, for the handful of people who like my chess posts. As big a chess fan as I am, I have been mostly retired from tournament play for a number of years. Sure, I would play in the big team tournament in February, and occasionally I would get the bug and go to the World Open or something like that, but it's been quite a while since I made any serious effort to improve my play. But as I reported previously, some good results in the team tournaments over several…

Rosenhouse on Dean on Lynn on ID

No, that's not a pyramid setup of the sort done at cheerleading camps or Iraqi prisons. One of the good things about blogs is the ability for response and counter response. In this case, Barry Lynn wrote an op-ed piece about ID; Darrick Dean wrote a critique of Lynn's article; and Jason Rosenhouse wrote a critique of Dean's critique. And now I'm writing a follow up to Rosenhouse's critique of Dean's critique of Lynn's article. Got it? Good. But I want to focus on this statement made by Dean: The Rev. Barry W. Lynn is executive director of the far left, anti-religion, anti-constitution - yet…

Study of 16 developing countries shows climate change could deepen poverty

Here is a major press release by Elizabeth K. Gardner on the link between climate change and poverty, reproduced below the fold for your edification. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Urban workers could suffer most from climate change as the cost of food drives them into poverty, according to a new study that quantifies the effects of climate on the world's poor populations. A team led by Purdue University researchers examined the potential economic influence of adverse climate events, such as heat waves, drought and heavy rains, on those in 16 developing countries. Urban workers in…

Fashionable Nonsense: Reconciling science with Genesis

Eden, from The World Before the Deluge. At least I know that, if I fail at everything else in life, I could write a book claiming to reconcile science and Christianity. People love them. No matter how many times the same old talking points are trotted out there always seems to be room for one more volume on the subject. And even if readers do not entirely agree with the content of such books many are still comforted by their existence. Among the "Things Christians Like" is to see scientists saying that hard evidence from nature supports Christian beliefs. I do not say this to belittle the…

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM): Your Tax Dollars at Work

What's an advocate of evidence- and science-based medicine to think about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, better known by its abbrevation NCCAM? As I've pointed out before, I used to be somewhat of a supporter of NCCAM. I really did, back when I was more naïve and idealistic. Indeed, as I mentioned before, when I first read Wally Sampson's article Why NCCAM should be defunded, I thought it a bit too strident and even rather close-minded. At the time, I thought that the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff was to apply the scientific method to the…

The Physics of Crazy Sleds

In the Uncertain Dots hangout the other day, Rhett and I went off on a tangent about the physics of the Olympics, specifically the luge. If you're not familiar with this, it's basically psycho sledding: people riding tiny little sleds down a curved track at 80mph. The "featured image" above shows Erin Hamlin of the US women's luge team during a training run (AP photo from here); she went on to win a bronze medal, the US's first in individual luge, so congratulations to her. The photo gives you an idea of what's involved: tiny sled, icy track, curved walls. (In the Winter Olympics context,…

Jerry Fodor: Still getting it wrong about evolution

Way back in 2007, when I was still a neophyte science blogger, Rutgers University philosophy professor Jerry Fodor published an op-ed in the London Review of Books called "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings." It was a critique of a straw man version of evolutionary theory characterized by a brand of adaptationism so narrow that (if it were at all true) biologists could be charged with just making things up as they went along. But Fodor was not so much concerned with science as the extension of evolutionary ideas outside of biology. Motivated by his irritation with evolutionary psychology, a…

After all this time, Dr. Bob Sears finally tips his hand on vaccines, part IV

As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I (sort of) gave "Dr. Bob" Sears the benefit of the doubt. You remember Dr. Bob, don't you? Son of the famous pediatrician Dr. William Sears, who was best known for his "Sears Parenting Library" and is a not infrequent guest on TV, where he goes by the name of "Dr. Bill." Like his father, Bob Sears, likes to do the "Dr. First Name" thing and calls himself "Dr. Bob." (What is it with pediatricians and this annoying affectation?) Along with his wife Martha Sears, RN, Dr. Bill is known as a major proponent of "attachment parenting."…

Messing with big numbers: using probability badly

After yesterdays post about the sloppy probability from ann coulter's chat site, I thought it would be good to bring back one of the earliest posts on Good Math/Bad Math back when it was on blogger. As usual with reposts, I've revised it somewhat, but the basic meat of it is still the same. -------------------- There are a lot of really bad arguments out there written by anti-evolutionists based on incompetent use of probability. A typical example is [this one][crapcrap]. This article is a great example of the mistakes that commonly get made with probability based arguments, because it makes…

"Let me introduce you to my little friend": 2014, warmest year

Andrew Revkin has this commentary at the New York Times: How ‘Warmest Ever’ Headlines and Debates Can Obscure What Matters About Climate Change. I will argue below that Revkin has, inadvertently or not, linked a science denialist trope to the important scientific finding that 2014 is the warmest year on record, as part of his presumably well intentioned effort to focus on trends rather than individual points. (See his comment on this blog below.) Yes, the trend is more important than a given data point, but the headline does not really obscure, but rather, underscores. I'm afraid the…

Democrats: Do these things

A lot of people are offering free advice to the Democratic Party these days. This is natural in the wake of a resounding defeat, especially a defeat that was snatched so clumsily from the jaws of victory. I gave some advice a while back (see: Why Trump Won And How To Fix That For Future Elections). Since then, I've spent a lot of time with a lot of those folks who appeared on the scene, often as members of Indivisible groups, after the election. I see a lot of frustration with the Democratic Party (and our local DFL, which is what we call the Democratic Party in Minnesota). Here are my…

Weekend Diversion: Our years of shared songs

"Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I don't always have all the answers, but every weekend I strive to bring you something interesting -- in some form or other -- to help remind you that whatever it is you may be most passionate about, there's a diverse world (and Universe) out there for you to discover, no matter how you look at it. And one of the best parts of that (at least for me) is music, something I try and share with you every week. The new song I'…

Tools of the Cold-Atom Trade: Optical Lattices

Last time in our trip through the cold-atom toolbox, we talked about light shifts, where the interaction with a laser changes the internal energy states of an atom in a way that can produce forces on those atoms. This allows the creation of "dipole traps" where cold atoms are held in the focus of a laser beam, but that's only the simplest thing you can use light shifts for. One of the essential tools of modern atomic physics is the "optical lattice," which uses patterns of light to make patterns of atoms. OK, what do you mean "patterns of light"? Well, remember, light has both wave and…

Dr. Josephine Briggs needs your help! NCCAM needs a new name!

Pretty much everyone who's gotten through junior high recognizes the line from the William Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says, "What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title." It's a succinct contemplation of how much a name means, which, according to Juliet, isn't that much. She (and Shakespeare) were right then, and the same thing is still true. In particular, it's true when referring to things perhaps less appealing than young love…

Confusion due to cancer care choices

Saturday, I thought that I knew what I'd be writing about for Monday, which, I've learned from my two and a half years of blogging, is a great thing when it happens. A certain Libertarian comic had decided that he wanted to argue some more about secondhand smoke and indoor smoking bans, starting a few days earlier with a rather specious analogy (which was handily shredded by you, my readers) and then finishing by annoying me with a comment and a post that implied that I didn't "care about the little guy." It looked like great fodder for a post to start out the week and a chance to apply a…

Strange Attractors and the Structure of Chaos

Sorry for the slowness of the blog; I fell behind in writing my book, which is on a rather strict schedule, and until I got close to catching up, I didn't have time to do the research necessary to write the next chaos article. (And no one has sent me any particularly interesting bad math, so I haven't had anything to use for a quick rip.) Anyway... Where we left off last was talking about attractors. The natural question is, why do we really care about attractors when we're talking about chaos? That's a question which has two different answers. First, attractors provide an interesting way…

Staph in Food: Reservoirs of Resistance and the Need to Embiggen Research

ScienceBlogling Tara Smith has a great summary of the recent paper reporting high frequencies of multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus in uncooked meat products (S. aureus is the "SA" in MRSA--methicillin resistant S. aureus, so I won't go through the whole paper here (and Maryn McKenna, as usual, had the best early report). But there are two issues I want to raise, the first being that the agricultural system can serve as a 'reservoir' of antibiotic resistance genes and resistant organisms. That is, unlike Las Vegas, what happens on the farm doesn't always stay on the farm. Tara:…

A Story About Why Froomkin Was Let Go, but Ezra Klein Remains

It's simple--as long as one doesn't criticize the press corps from the left (doing it from the right is ok and accepted--you get to be the house liberal. Bob Somerby: For starters: We of course have no way of knowing why the Post has dumped Dan Froomkin. Let's repeat that: We simply don't know. But if we were going to write a novel, as Rosen did--if we wanted to pretend that we knew--our novel would look like this: Dan Froomkin criticizes the press corps. In the press corps, if you're a liberal, that just isn't done. Duh. We've explained this bone-simple point for years. If there's one…

Is This the Beer of Tomorrow?

What would you do if someone told you it was possible to get merrily drunk with none of the unsavory consequences? No hangovers, no unidentifiable party injuries, no "where-did-this-tattoo-come-from" screams the following morning? What if you also heard that there was a pill you could pop to sober you up quickly, giving you the option to drive home after a night at the bar, or at the very least, not pass out on the subway and end up in a place you can't even pronounce? Personally, my first reaction would be to drop my half-drunk beer, hug everyone within a half-mile radius while singing the…

Study: Safe Routes to School investments save millions and improve quality of life

Building safe ways for children to bike and walk to school is more than just a way of encouraging kids to go outside and get active. According to a new study, it’s also an investment that reaps millions of dollars in societal gains. In other words, smart walking and biking infrastructures for kids make good economic sense. Published in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health, the study examined the cost-effectiveness of Safe Routes to School (SRTS) infrastructure in just one city — New York City. SRTS was initially enacted in 2005 as part of a massive federal transportation…

100 Years Ago Today: Deadliest US Coal Mine Disaster

The New York Times' headline read: 350 Men Entombed in Mine Explosion. Rescue Force at Work in the Debris of Two Shattered Mines at Monongah, West Va.  Poisonous Gas Pours Out. At about 10:00 am on Dec 6, 1907, a violent explosion of methane gas and coal dust killed hundreds of workers at two adjacent underground coal mines owned by Consolidated Coal Company.  The official death toll is listed at 362, but in Davitt McAteer's new book Monongah, his research suggests the disaster claimed the lives of more than 550 men and boys. In the days following the disaster, the New York Times…

Student guest post: Seasonal Flu Vaccine: Why we need it

It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Fifth one this year is by Nai-Chung Chang.  Of the many health problems that everyone is bound to have at some point, influenza, or just “the flu,” is one of the most prominent. In fact, we call the time during which it is most prevalent the “flu season”. It has now become a regular occurrence in the U.S. to just get a shot before the flu season hits, and be free of it for the rest of the year. In some cases, like me, people just decide not to get the vaccine at all. I say…

What might have caused my cousin's nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Student guest post by Anh To. When I found out my only non-smoking cousin had nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), I was puzzled. With all the hype about cigarette smoking associated with various kinds of cancers in the media, I did not understand why none of my smoking cousins had NPC but the one who didn't smoke did. At first, I thought it must be due to the second hand smoke. Now, I understand that the picture is very complex. Before I go into what I have learned over the past several months, I need to make a disclaimer. I am not an expert in NPC. I am an average college student. This…

Newly discovered Ebola viruses: filling in gaps in viral ecology

It's only taken 30 years, but information about Ebola in nature is finally starting to snowball. First, after almost 15 years of disappearing from the human population, Ebola returned with a vengeance in the mid 1990s, causing illness in 6 separate outbreaks in Gabon, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and South Africa (imported case) between 1994 and 1996. As doctors and scientists rushed in to contain the outbreaks, they were also able to collect viral samples, and trap animals and insects in the area, searching for a reservoir for the virus. In this decade, there have been…

Bet they don't list this on their tourist website

Some towns have all the luck. Brainerd, Minnesota, population ~13,000, was previously famous as the home of Paul Bunyan, and the setting of the Coen brothers' film, Fargo. Little did I know it had another claim to fame: its very own brand of mysterious diarrhea. All about it after the jump. Brainerd was the site of the first outbreak of this eponymous diarrhea back in 1983. It is described as an idiopathic syndrome--meaning that we don't have a clue what causes it. The diarrhea is acute in onset, explosive and watery, can last for months, and doesn't respond to antibiotic treatment…

Goodbye, Beautiful Dream

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. -- Carl Sagan A trio of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, Campephilus principalis. Adult male (left) and female (lower right). Painting by John James Audubon (1785-1851). With every day that passes, the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker looks more like an apparition or, more likely, a case of mistaken identity. Bird artist and ID expert, David Sibley, and several of his colleagues, Louis Bevier, Michael Patten, and Chris Elphick, published a rebuttal that was released today at 2pm EST by the top-tier journal, Science (this rebuttal should be…

How do we perceive risk?: Paul Slovic’s landmark analysis

By Sara Gorman In the 1960s, a rapid rise in nuclear technologies aroused unexpected panic in the public. Despite repeated affirmations from the scientific community that these technologies were indeed safe, the public feared both long-term dangers to the environment as well as immediate radioactive disasters. The disjunction between the scientific evidence about and public perception of these risks prompted scientists and social scientists to begin research on a crucial question: how do people formulate and respond to notions of risk? Early research on risk perception assumed that people…

Luttig's Resignation: the Real Story?

Sandefur links to this article by Harvey Silvergate in Reason about J. Michael Luttig's resignation from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to become the chief counsel for Boeing. That article in turn refers to a piece in the Wall Street Journal that is no longer available, unfortunately. Both articles argue that Luttig's resignation was prompted by Luttig's anger at the administration's handling of the Padilla case. I'll post a long excerpt below the fold, beginning with Silvergate's explanation of the Padilla situation and how Luttig was involved: Simply put, after years of helping…

Semi-Competent Astrophotography and Sidereal Days

I'm teaching my "Brief History of Timekeeping" class again this term, and as always, I'm tweaking things a bit. This is one of our "Sophomore Research Seminar" courses, intended to introduce students to academic research, so it's not specifically a physics class, but I'm choosing to take the statements about research outside the student's field at face value, and thus will be requiring them to do final projects involving some empirical measurement of the natural world, that being the essence of scientific research. (Last time, I included that as an option, but nobody took it, so I ended up…

Why does Particle Physics matter?

"[S]cience is not a consumption good to be expanded in good times and restricted in bad times. The doing of science as well as the supporting of science is an expression of faith in the future. It would have been possible to have told Newton and Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein, Bohr and Heisenberg that, given the poverty and squalor around them, their research were luxuries which could not be afforded. To have done so would be to destroy the economic c progress that came out of their science and which was the main factor in relieving that poverty and squalor. We seem to be on the verge of…