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More Pro-Slavery Nonsense from the League of the South

I'm still reading this stuff, and it's just unreal. It's like I've overturned a rock and all these southern nationalist whackos are streaming out. How about this story about a book called Southern Slavery, As It Was, written by League of the South board member Steve Wilkins: Students at one of the area's largest Christian schools are reading a controversial booklet that critics say whitewashes Southern slavery with its view that slaves lived "a life of plenty, of simple pleasures." Leaders at Cary Christian School say they are not condoning slavery by using "Southern Slavery, As It Was," a…

I get email

Here's another sample of strange creationist email. This one spares the freaky fonts and excessive style changes, and instead we get an abrupt opening with no explanation, and a healthy dose of paranoia. First, a little background: David P. Wozney is basically a dinosaur denialist (and also a conspiracy theorist—he has doubts about the Apollo moonlanding, for instance). Archy has a good overview of Wozney weirdness. The person who sent this to me, Cyndy Kenickell, is also a dinosaur denialist. The fun begins when she tries to explain why dinosaurs don't exist: dinosaurs were faked to justify…

An Indecorous Plea for Perspective

Mike Dunford didn't like my previous post, and says that it's important to talk about gun control right now: But we also cannot forget that people are dead. We cannot forget that people have been murdered. We cannot forget that many - too many - lives have been brought to a sudden, random end. We cannot forget that these deaths were not necessary, that they could have been avoided. [...] How, in good conscience, could we possibly be expected to shut up right now? I managed to edit all the f-bombs out of yesterday's post, but this annoys me. I'm not sure exactly which straw caused the fatal…

Sizzle: Framing :: Hit-With-A-Brick: Stabbed-With-A-Fork

I've been somewhat decoupled from blogdom in general recently, as I've been busy working on the book and getting ready for FutureBaby. It's also been a useful mental health break, though, as I'm a little less worked up about stupid stuff than I was a few months ago. Every now and then, I catch the edges of some kerfuffle-of-the-moment, though, and it reminds me that continuing the decoupling is probably a Good Thing. The latest is the ongoing squabbling over Sizzle, which is the new "framing" fracas. This has been dragging on for a week, now, with the latest entries to catch my eye coming…

The Truth Is In There

According to a widely disseminated story (see this) the Large Hadron Collider broke only hours after it started operations last week. This is an atrocity and an example of something seriously, endemically wrong with science more generally. Why is the fact that the LHC broke right away an atrocity? Well, actually, that it broke is not the atrocity. The atrocity is that you are only hearing about it now, a week after the fanfare linked to the startup. There are only three possible explanations for this: 1) They forgot to mention it . Slipped their minds. Oops, sorry, I guess I didn't think…

The Fermi Alternative

Given the recent Feynman explosion (timeline of events), some people may be casting about looking for an alternative source of colorful-character anecdotes in physics. Fortunately, the search doesn't need to go all that far-- if you flip back a couple of pages in the imaginary alphabetical listing of physicists, you'll find a guy who fits the bill very well: Enrico Fermi. Fermi's contributions to physics are arguably as significant as Feynman's. He was the first to work out the statistical mechanics of particles obeying the Pauli exclusion principle, now called "fermions" in his honor (Paul…

"Gen Ed" Relativity: Pondering Books

This coming fall term, I'll be teaching Astronomy 052, "Relativity, Black Holes, and Quasars," because the guy who has traditionally taught it (a radio astronomer who studies active galactic nuclei) has to do other courses instead. But I said "Well, hell, I've written a popular audience book explaining relativity. I can teach that." And since I get to make teaching assignments (the one and only positive feature of being department chair), well, I put myself down to teach it. Now, of course, I find myself thinking about ideas for that class, months in advance, when I ought to be working on…

Cytogeneticist Dr. Janet Rowley receives AACR Lifetime Achievement Award

The 101st Annual Meeting of my primary professional society, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), convened in Washington, DC, on Saturday and will run through Wednesday, April 21. The theme for this year's meeting is "Conquering Cancer Through Discovery Research," and focuses strongly on the translation of discoveries into cancer treatments. Although the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic dust cloud has delayed many European participants, over 17,000 attendees are expected at the Washington Convention Center where over 6,300 presentations are to be given. AACR was founded in 1907 by 11…

Bacteria on your keyboard point to your identity but forensic value is unlikely

We all know that as we type on our keyboards or click our mice, we leave behind fingerprints that could be used to deduce our identities. But these prints aren't the only remnants of our presence. Bacteria from our skins also linger on the things we touch and they could act as a sort of living fingerprint. The thriving community of bacteria and other microscopic passengers on our skin has many traits of interest to a forensic scientist. For a start, they are remarkably personal in their membership and stable over time. Just 13% of the bacteria on my palm also live on yours, and even…

Genetic study puts damper on gray whales' comeback

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Twenty-two thousand sounds like a huge number. It's happens to be number of eastern Pacific gray whales currently swimming off the coast of North America. It's certainly much larger than 140, the number of whales that aboriginal people of this area are allowed to hunt. And it's far, far bigger than zero, the population size that the whales were rapidly approaching in the mid 20th century. Obviously, it's all relative. Twenty-two thousand is still much less than ninety-six thousand. That's the size of…

Puijila, the walking seal - a beautiful transitional fossil

Seals and sea-lions gracefully careen through today's oceans with the help of legs that have become wide, flat flippers. But it was not always this way. Seals evolved from carnivorous ancestors that walked on land with sturdy legs; only later did these evolve into the flippers that the family is known for. Now, a beautifully new fossil called Puijila illustrates just what such early steps in seal evolution looked like. With four legs and a long tail, it must have resembled a large otter but it was, in fact, a walking seal. Natalia Rybczynski unearthed the new animal at Devon Island, Canada…

Epistasis and pathways in fly eye pigmentation

I was going to talk about a cool recent paper that described the evolution of novelties by way of modifying modular gene networks, but I started scribbling it up and realized that I was constantly backtracking to explain some fundamental concepts, so I stopped. I was concerned because one of the most common sources of confusion I've found in my students in the past was difficulty in distinguishing phenotypes from the complexities of the underlying genotype, and I have to be slow and thorough in setting up those differences early on until it sinks in, a habit I'm continuing here. It's so easy…

Everybody Post About Mirror Neurons!!!

Mixing Memory brings up some excellent points regarding mirror neurons in primates, and Frontal Cortex follows up with his thoughts. To both of them I say "bravo, but your skepticism probably doesn't go far enough". We give Rizzolatti et al too much credit with their conclusions. After all, they've only demonstrated the existence of mirror neurons in monkeys. Due to the obvious inherent difficulties associated with recording from human neurons in vivo, no one has yet (to my knowledge) published anything that demonstrates the existence of mirror neurons in people. Instead, we stick…

War on Straw

On his blog, John Ray makes a remarkable claim: "Greenies" are wrong about ozone depletion. He writes: In 1991, the Greenies got everyone to ban CFC chemicals. CFCs were the normal gases that has always been used to make refrigerators and air conditioners work. CFCs even used to put the puff in all our aerosol cans. The ban was because CFCs supposedly destroyed earth's ozone layer and caused the ozone "hole" over Antarctica. So the hole has of course shrunk by now, right? Wrong! As this U.N. report shows, the hole is as big as ever! Another…

Sunday Evening Sermon - Inverse Pascal

I was sitting and thinking earlier today - it's a dangerous hobby, and I try not to do it too often, but sometimes I can't resist - and found my thoughts drifting toward the topic of Pascal's Wager. As some of you probably know, Pascal suggested that it is always a better bet to believe in God than to disbelieve, because if you believe in God but are wrong, you won't ever really know it, but if you don't believe and are wrong you stand to lose a hell of a lot more. I've never been particularly impressed with that argument, mostly because I've never been able to conceive of a deity that…

Evolution and accident

A common attack upon evolutionary biology, from ranking clerics in the Catholic church to the meanest creationist blogger, is that it implies that life arose and came to result in us by accident. We are asked to believe, they say, that three billion years led to us as a series of accidents. No matter how often evolutionary biologists and informed respondents try to point out that the sense of "accident" in biology is based on the lack of correlation between the future needs of organisms, the trope is repeated ad nauseum. Why? The reason is deep in the history of western thought. In…

The F-word

Idiots and the ignorant should not speak on matters they do not understand. As I am both, I want to make some vague and ultimately useless comments about Framing, yet again. This has been motivated by Chris Mooney's admirable attempts to get to the heart of the matter: here, here and here. In a book that I really liked– The Science of Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen refer to teaching as "lying to children". The reason is that teachers can only teach what children are ready to receive. So they get cartoon versions of science and other topics, which are then refined…

Making the world a continuous place

Aristotle wrote that drama must be guided by three principles, the Unities. All aspects of a good play must take place in the same location, within a short time period, and contribute to a single plot. Otherwise, forced to stretch their imagination, the audience wouldn't be able to suspend disbelief, and the play would cease to be a reasonable imitation of reality. The ideal play would take place over the same amount of time it took to perform (say, two hours), would be set in the same place, and would have a single course of action. It is indeed an interesting feat when a play or a film…

Pre-election media tid-bits

Here are some things for you. If there is one radio show you should listen to every week it's This American Life. This week: What's in a Number? 2006 Edition. The preview from www.thislife.org: A new study in the British medical journal The Lancet estimates the number of Iraqi dead since the U.S. invasion at over 600,000. This week, we look at whether that number might be accurate, and return to a in-depth look at a similar study in The Lancet, with similar methodology. That study came out a year ago, and was largely ignored by the press. We also hear U.S. forces dealing with the aftermath of…

The Antivaccine Ten Commandments

Although I'm interested in skepticism in general, I have a tendency to gravitate towards one particular form of pseudoscience (alternative medicine) and, in particular, a certain kind of that particular form of pseudoscience, namely antivaccine quackery. However, as much as I keep returning to the antivaccine movement, I keep noticing just how much it shares with other forms of science denialism and pseudoscientific thinking. I was reminded of this when one of my readers e-mailed me a link to a Facebook group, Pro-Vax Quacks. I have no idea who's behind the group, but what I do know is that…

Sedalia, Missouri, you should be ashamed of your schools, or: The dumbest anti-evolution victory I've ever seen...

It was just a high school marching band, like so many other high school bands in this country, a band that no one outside of the area of Sedalia, Missouri would be likely to have heard of, were it not for a breathtakingly stupid action by its school superintendent. You see, the band had an idea for a clever and amusing way to illustrate their theme for the year of the "Brass Evolutions." It was this T-shirt, to be worn by band members and reported by the Sedalia Democrat: When I saw it by way of ERV, I thought it was kind of cute and a rather clever way of illustrating the theme. As the…

Pinata whacking not outsourced

Commentator 1: Hello, and welcome to a special Good Friday edition of INTELLECTUAL CAGE MATCH. Today we have a great match up for you. The topic is Global Warming and it's the collective wisdom of Tim Blair's commenters against Ryan Gwin, who is six. Commentator 2: Ooh, that's not fair. Commentator 1: I know, but we couldn't find any four year olds who wanted to take them on. But Team Blair has been training hard so we may have a contest here. Here's hollingshead on their training program: Hence why I stock up on Tim Ball videos. C2: Ooh, they might sue Ryan if they lose. I remember…

Reader mailbag: What is woo?

I don't often do reader mailbag sorts of posts, but this question was so good that I thought it would be worth answering on the blog. Indeed, I almost thought of making this whole question another in my Friday Woo series, but decided that I wanted to answer it now. Reader TB writes: I've been following your blog for a few months now and love being both educated and entertained. The Friday Dose of Woo is great. While I have an idea of what you mean by woo it would be helpful to me and others visiting the page if you included a definition and perhaps the etymology. My first temptation was to…

Destiny; a Manifestation

American Progress by John Gast Take note of the bison in the painting above, fleeing from America’s angel of death, a now-fallen angel named Manifest Destiny.Take note of the bison, fleeing alongside horseback-riding natives and dwindling wildlife.Take note of the bison, pressed ever-more westward towards a finite boundary, towards the Pacific Ocean. Now, notice the complete lack of fences. Destiny, in the painting above, carries a reel of telegraph wire, but I can’t help but see it as barbed wire. Sure, this picture was trying to depict civilization as this beautiful, progressive thing,…

Giant Squids, Other Squids, and Manatees

Dr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey and her husband Benny, as part of their H-O-W series of books, have produced an absolutely dispensable piece of misinformation, the third in a series of we can only hope not too many, ineloquently titled Animals of the Ocean: In Particular the Giant Squid. They claim that their World of Unbelievable Brilliance series, of which Animals of the Ocean is the third in a series of we can only hope . . . um, they claim that their series . . . well, I don't really know what they claim, because they never get around to it. Dr. and Mr. Haggis-on-Whey are neither not biologists…

The Refusers: Proving Orac's corollary to Poe's Law

Over the last week or so, I've been a bit--shall we say?--dismissive of claims by anti-vaccinationists when they insist that, really, truly, honestly, they aren't "anti-vaccine," usually with a wounded, indignant, self-righteous tone. Either that, or they make like the Black Knight in Monty Python and The Holy Grail by demanding the surrender of the public health community, even as limb after limb of their claims have been lopped off by the sword of science, all the while not even realizing how risible it is to demand respect for their views after they have been totally discredited…

Documents and Data...

Last month I was on Dr. Kiki's Science Hour. Besides being a lot of fun (despite my technical problems, which were part of my recent move to GNU/Linux and away from Mac!), I also discovered that at least one person I went to high school with is a fan of Dr. Kiki, because he told everyone about the show at my recent high school reunion. Good stuff. In the show, I did my usual rant about the web being built for documents, not for data. And that got me a great question by email. I wrote a long answer that I decided was a better blog post than anything else. Here goes. Although I'm familiar with…

Prozac

Sharon Begley has an excellent Newsweek cover story on the rise and fall of anti-depressant medications, or how a class of drugs that were once hailed as medical miracles are now seen as barely better than placebos: In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, Kirsch and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants--not the 75 percent he had calculated from…

IP: Real or Bogus?

There's been some talk among the sciencebloggers about the idea of intellectual property, and href="http://www.scienceblogs.com/clock/">Bora over at "A Blog Around the Clock" asked me to convert my thoughts into a post. It's a serious topic, which is worth giving some deep consideration, and it's something that I've given a lot of thought to. Back when I was at IBM, I worked on some projects that were internal and confidential, and also spent several years working on open-source. I've got two software patents to my name. I didn't do any of that lightly; I spent a lot of time thinking…

The History of Pretty Much Everything

"Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go." -e. e. cummings Sometimes, you just need to take stock of what we know, and appreciate how far we've come. A hundred years ago, we thought the Universe consisted of the stars and nebulae in our Milky Way. We thought Newton's Law of Gravity governed it all, and that the other forces -- electromagnetism and a few weird quantum things -- were all there was. So why not -- all in one article -- go through the entire history of the Universe, from as early as we can say anything sensible to as late as we can say anything sensible? Let'…

J.J. has a chance to live!

Over the years I've written about a lot of topics. After all, I've been at this for more than a decade now, and I still grind out four or five posts per week, with only occasional breaks for vacations or medical or scientific meetings. Topics have included science-based medicine, antivaccine nonsense, topics of general skepticism, and of course medical quackery, among others. There's one type of recurrent story I've been commenting on periodically since 2005, when I began by discussing the case of Katie Wernecke, and these include stories of children with cancer who do not receive the therapy…

The precarious position of physician-scientists in academic medicine today

Jake over at Pure Pedantry pointed the way to an article in Science that I hadn't seen yet because of my absence. Just like yesterday's topic, this one too is right up my alley. Specifically, it's about something near and dear to my heart, namely the trials and tribulations of being a physician-scientist. The article paints a rather grim picture, with the observation that, although most MD/PhD's would like to remain researchers, many are dropping out in order to become straight clinicians, clinical instructors at medical schools, or industry researchers. Jake's commentary is certainly worth…

Quackademic medicine infiltrates the New England Journal of Medicine

One of the things that disturbs me the most about where medicine is going is the infiltration of quackery into academic medicine. So prevalent is this unfortunate phenomenon that Doctor RW even coined a truly apt term for it: Quackademic medicine. In essence, pseudoscientific and even prescientific ideas are rapidly being "integrated" with science-based medicine, or, as I tend to view it, quackery is being "integrated" with scientific medicine, to the gradual erosion of scientific standards in medicine. No quackery is too quacky, it seems. Even homeopathy and naturopathy can seemingly find…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Tampa Bay Times, Neil Bedi, Jonathan Capriel, Anastasia Dawson and Kathleen McGrory investigate a June 29 incident at Tampa Electric in which molten ash — commonly referred to as “slag” — escaped from a boiler and poured downed on workers below. Five workers died. A similar incident occurred at Tampa Electric two decades earlier. If the company had followed the guidelines it devised after that 1997 incident, the five men who died in June would still be alive, the newspaper reported. In particular, the five deaths could have been avoided if the boiler had been turned off before workers…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Denver Post, John Ingold and Monte Whaley authored a year-long investigative series into the dangerous conditions facing Colorado’s oil and gas workers, the role of subcontracting in heightening worker safety risks, and the lack of employer accountability and oversight. The series, “Drilling through danger,” noted that 1,333 workers died in the nation’s oil and gas fields between 2003 and 2014, with 2014 being the second-most lethal year for oil and gas workers in Colorado in a decade. According to the newspaper’s analysis, there was about one oil and gas worker death per every 12 rigs…

Saying Goodbye to Agassi

I've mentioned before that I was a big tennis fan growing up and for most of my adult life. Like so many other tennis fans, the game has lost my interest more and more in the last few years. I grew up watching first Borg and McEnroe, then Lendl, Becker and Edberg, and finally the greatest generation of American players in Sampras, Agassi, Courier and Chang. Agassi is the last to retire, at 36 years old, and I share the universal feeling that his retirement represents the end of an era. And frankly, I'm quite surprised that he's the last one standing. Early in his career, I didn't care for…

Quantitative Analysis of Bullshit in Physics Abstracts

Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to "unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text." Like Bee, I couldn't resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I wrote up on the blog as part of the Metastable Xenone Project a few years ago. The abstracts, their scores, and some comments below: Paper 1: Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions: Near-resonant light is used to modify the collision dynamics of magneto-optically trapped metastable xenon…

Friday Sprog Blogging: I owe my soul to the classsroom store.

In which we become acquainted with one aspect of the classroom culture in the younger Free-Ride offspring's second grade. Younger offspring: In my class, we earn ten play cents for coming to school on time, and I earned sixty play cents for bringing back those signed forms, and for bringing in my emergency card, and for bringing all my school supplies. Dr. Free-Ride: You get paid a bonus just for being on time? Younger offspring: It's not real money. Elder offspring: So what do you do with it? What can you use it for? Younger offspring: Once a week, there's a classroom store, and you can…

Get out the popcorn! This internecine war among antivaccinationists is getting interesting (part 2)

It's been well over two weeks since I urged everyone to get out the popcorn and sit back to enjoy the internecine war going on over in the antivaccine movement. The reason for my chuckling was the way that everyone's favorite Boy Wonder Reporter Propagandist for the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism, Jake Crosby, had apparently turned on his masters because he was ticked off at a perceived betrayal of purity in their antivaccine beliefs, so much so that he actually posted a screed against the other wretched hive of scum and quackery besides AoA or The Huffington Post, namely the…

“Religion is…a lot like a girl”

Sometimes, reading the shrill words of theists trying to interpret atheists is a real trip to Bizarro World. What you see, generally, is freakishly far off the mark and often more a case of projection than understanding. It would be hard to get more overt than this: someone named Kathryn Lofton has written an essay titled "So you want to be a new atheist", which, presumably, is about describing some common set of properties, a dogma and doctrine, that anyone can follow to be one of the New Atheists. Unfortunately, she falls off the rails from the very beginning, since we're all a diverse…

Why All the Fear?

I've never thought of myself as a particularly brave or courageous person. Plenty of things make me a little bit nervous at the very least. But the overt fear many claim to have felt since Sept. 11, 2001 really hasn't been part of my thinking. Let me make it clear: I was angry and sad after the 9/11 massacres. But I didn't feel afraid or fearful; my attitude was always along the lines of "We have to find the people responsible, prevent them from doing this again, and let justice take its course." And I never wanted to gratutiously hurt someone. Related to this, Josh Marshall, whom I…

Lives not worth living?

Via William Saletan, Prenatal Test Puts Down Syndrome in Hard Focus. Being an numbers man, I found this interesting: Until this year, only pregnant women 35 and older were routinely tested to see if their fetuses had the extra chromosome that causes Down syndrome. As a result many couples were given the diagnosis only at birth. But under a new recommendation from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, doctors have begun to offer a new, safer screening procedure to all pregnant women, regardless of age. About 90 percent of pregnant women who are given a Down syndrome…

Selection on many levels....

I'm rereading Unto Others, David Wilson and Elliott Sober's argument for Multilevel Selection. One of the core planks in the book is that supra-individual levels of selection are necessary for the evolution of altruism, and much of the book details what Wilson & Sober perceive are the stretched and implausible explanations that scientists who are straight-jacketed into individual selection need to concoct. So how can selection between groups lead to the emergence of altruism? Consider two groups: Mixed & Selfish Assume that both groups begin in generation 1 with 100 individuals.…

A Question for Conservatives: How Many 'Lone Wolves' Does It Take to Make a Wolf Pack?

Whenever some right-wing associated nut shoots someone, we always hear it described as the actions of a 'lone wolf.' Well, if that's the case then them wolves have formed themselves a pack: -- July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how "liberals" are "destroying America," walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others. -- October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama. -- December 2008: A pair of "Patriot" movement…

At Long Last, the End of the War on Christmas Is in Sight

Onward, Anti-Christmasian Soldiers! (from here) "Hello, this is Liberal Controlled Media, coming to you with a breaking report on the War on Christmas." [Camera angle narrows in on anchorman] "Today, Anti-Christmasian forces launched a decisive assault on the remaining pro-Christmas Arctic stronghold. Our LCM teams are on the story, and will bring you round-the-clock coverage of this breaking story. First, we go to LCM Foreign Correspondent Sarah Townsend. Sarah?" "Thanks, Jim." [image of firing artillery piece, crash of the gun, ejection of shell casing] "Jim, I'm here at Fire Base…

Birdbooker Report 85

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…

Friday Fun: We all believed in science at some point...or did we?

The world is going to hell in a hand basket. But at least we can laugh as we're sucked relentlessly into the Hellmouth. Maybe if we all collectively understood science and evidence better, the path to Hell wouldn't be quite so straight and narrow. So maybe that's what's making me think of these particular funny bits today. And by funny I mean so funny in hurts. First up, we have retired basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal, who apparently really and truly believes the world is flat. He has a doctorate in Education, by the way, which I just can't even.   Shaquille O'Neal agrees with Kyrie…

Obscure-but-Good Movies

Here's a fun old one...(December 04, 2005): ------------------------------------------------------------------------- When Milkriverblog asked for obscure-but-good movies the other day, I was busy and distracted, so I did not give it enough thought. If you ask nicely, he will send you MSWord file of the list (more than 150 titles) so you can print it out and take with you when you go movie-shopping. I seconded other people's suggestions (Milkriverblog has links to them), specifically "Fast, Cheap and Out Of Control" (a movie I adore), "My Dinner With Andre" and "Zatoichi". My own suggestion…

Hot boiled wine in the middle of the winter is tasty....

The latest AskTheScienceBlogger question is: "I heard that within 15 years, global warming will have made Napa County too hot to grow good wine grapes. Is that true? What other changes are we going to see during our lifetimes because of global warming?..." Answer under the fold.... I am not a big wine connoisseur, though I like an occasional glass of French burgundy, German riesling, Adriatic cabernet or Argentinian malbec. Also, I heard that wine is generally thought to be good for you (although you should take every claim in that article with a grain of salt, e.g., aboutmelatonin in wine…

Swine flu: what did you expect?

Usually "What did you expect?" is a rhetorical question, but we have a more serious point to make. Let's start with the familiar and move on to the less familiar. Many of you are coming here to find the latest news about swine flu. It's an imprecise term that covers two different things: what has happened that is new, in the sense of surprising and we didn't already know it would happen; and what is the current situation. Overnight (in the US) Europe (Spain) registered its first confirmed case. That's additional data but not surprising. We know this virus is seeded out there and we shouldn't…