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Hearing The Uncertainty Principle

If you read about science at all, you've heard of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It's the canonical example of quantum weirdness, the strange idea that you can't simultaneously know the position and momentum of a particle. Pack a particle into a small enough box and your accurate knowledge of position will necessarily cause that particle to have a very uncertain momentum, "bouncing" around crazily inside that box. What you may not have read is that this isn't just quantum weirdness, it happens just as often in the classical world of waves. In fact, the very fact that quantum particles…

The Speed(s) of a Wave

All right, the answer to yesterday's question about the maximum speed of a stadium wave, as many commenters rightly said, is "as fast as you want." The comments went into some depth on this, and I like the way Zifnab put it: I mean, if you've got two independent agents doing their thing, the "speed" between the two just gets faster the farther apart they are. But if they have no relation to one another... what are we even asking? If our imaginary stadium is the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the seats are stars and you stand up on Alpha Centari and I stand up on the Sun less than 4 years…

Ape Culture and Science Culture on the Planet of the Apes

Even in the small theater where I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it was clear that this is, to some degree, a father and son movie - there were several father and son pairs in the audience - more than I've seen in any other movie. "Yes, son, now you will see why our planet eventually will be taken over by apes." "Yes, dad, now you will see how CGI replaces this Roddy McDowell person you keep talking about." Caution: spoilers. Andy Serkis's Caesar and the rest of the ape-men were wonderful, as was slow build of the story. I also loved that the apes' goal was not world domination but to…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (8/29/07)

Gene Expression has 10 Questions with Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms: Clark also provides archival evidence that in medieval Britain (and to a lesser extent in China and Japan) the wealthy-who presumably had those "middle class" skills in abundance-raised more children than the average person. If you put these pieces together-a system that rewards a new set of abilities, plus greater reproductive success for those who have those abilities-then all you need to get some form of selection is one more link: A transmission mechanism. On the nature of the mechanism, Clark leaves the…

The Price of Bias

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports California legislators plan to look into whether there is widespread gender bias in the California State University system following a lawsuit that resulted in a multi-million dollar award to Cal State-Fresno's former women's volleyball coach. State Sen. Don Perata, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, said lawmakers were alarmed by the cost of the case to taxpayers, and also want to find out whether Cal State had turned a blind eye to gender discrimination elsewhere in the system, the AP reported...Fresno State said it would…

Repost: Novelist reinvents ethology

From the old blog: Tom Wolfe, whose works often show a considerable pretentiousness in my opinion, has a piece in the New York Sun entitled "Darwin meets his match" [old link dead, so this will have to do]. In this he adduces Zola and Weber, and most of all the 1950s American sociologists whose works stressed status seeking and display, to show that there is something missing from Darwinian theory. Like social dominance ethology and psychology never happened, right? Darwin talked about social dominance and submission several times, and much of Weber's dialectic comes from the tradition of…

Maps, directions, and video games: A model for how we perceive them

[Originally posted January, 2007] Nearly all video games that offer a first-person perspective -- where the view on-screen simulates what a real person would see as she navigates through the virtual environment -- also include a virtual map to help in navigation. Even my favorite golf game has one. Such maps can be indispensable, but they also invite a question -- should the map rotate to align with the player's viewing angle, or should they remain at a constant orientation? Aligning the map with the viewer's perspective makes it easier to find items, but constantly rotating the map might…

Maps, directions, and video games: A model for how we perceive them

Nearly all video games that offer a first-person perspective -- where the view on-screen simulates what a real person would see as she navigates through the virtual environment -- also include a virtual map to help in navigation. Even my favorite golf game has one. Such maps can be indispensable, but they also invite a question -- should the map rotate to align with the player's viewing angle, or should they remain at a constant orientation? Aligning the map with the viewer's perspective makes it easier to find items, but constantly rotating the map might make it difficult for gamers to…

Katrina One Year Later: Slaughtering Strawmen

Timed for the Katrina anniversary, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has put out a short report on the hurricane-climate issue (PDF). Without taking a premature stand on who is or isn't winning the scientific debate at the present moment, I'd like to point out how CEI misrepresents the state of that debate. The chief technique seems to be to debunk strawman arguments that no one is actually making. Consider the following: Claims of a definite link between hurricanes and global warming rely on the simple hypothesis that, as waters warm, storms get stronger. In fact, some storms may get…

More on videotaped confessions: Can court procedure mitigate abuse?

What's the best way to ensure that law enforcement officers don't abuse their authority and coerce innocent suspects into confessing? Yesterday we discussed research suggesting that a side-view videotape of a confession was more likely than a head-on view to result in an accurate assessment of whether that confession was voluntary or coerced. But the Lassiter team's study was still open to some key criticisms. First, the study participants were all college students -- certainly not a typical jury demographic. Second, jurors don't see videotaped confessions in isolation -- when a confession is…

An experimental test of flashbulb memory

The Stroop effect is a well-documented phenomenon that shows how easily we can be distracted from a simple task. In the classic Stroop experiment, we are shown a word, such as GREEN, and asked to indicate the color it is printed in. When the meaning of the word itself conflicts with the word's color, the task is more difficult. There's a good demo of the effect here. Go ahead and try it—it's easy and it only takes about 30 seconds. If you're like most people, you will take longer to respond to the words that are printed in an incongruent color. The Stroop task can also be used to measure…

More on Antidepressant-Suicide Link

This is starting to look like a never-ending saga, and I have written about it extensively before.  But this latest update certainly deserves some attention. It comes from an article ( href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/ajp;164/7/1029">Suicide Attempts Among Patients Starting Depression Treatment With Medications or Psychotherapy) and an editorial ( rev="review" href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/ajp;164/7/989">Antidepressants and Suicidal Behavior: Cause or Cure?) in the latest (July 2007) issue of the href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.…

ID floats a lead-lined trial balloon

We're getting signs that the Discovery Institute is going to be shifting their strategy a little bit. Thoughts from Kansas has an excellent discussion of the subject. Basically, they're going to embrace more of the actual science, and focus their dispute on finer and finer points. What does this mean? Common descent is now in. DaveScot on Bill Dembski's blog (TfK has the link) has a bit of a rant on it—he's going to kick out anyone who questions the idea of common descent, and goes on and on about how denying common ancestry is a religious idea that goes against all of the scientific evidence…

Alex Necropsy Update: Cause of Death Unknown

Well, just heard that the necropsy of Alex was performed and that no discernible cause of death could be found. This is puzzling and sad, since it would have been better to have some sense of closure, but I suppose we may never know what killed Alex. I was also sent the official obituary of Alex, written by Irene, which is under the fold. RIP Alex. In addition, Irene Pepperberg was be interviewed on NPR's "All Things Considered" today, check out the summary of the interview here. The audio of the interview will be at that link at 7pm Eastern Time. 8pm UPDATE: The audio link is now up!…

Friday Sprog Blogging: more about matter.

As mentioned earlier, the younger Free-Ride offspring's first grade class is learning about states of matter. We continue to get reports back about the content of these lessons, and then the sprogs set about trying to extend them ... in ways that suit their aesthetics more than their parents' aesthetics. Younger offspring: Today we poured water in lots of different containers, and the water always was in the same shape as the container. Dr. Free-Ride: And you did this because ... ? Younger offspring: We were seeing that liquids can change their shapes depending on the container. Solids don'…

The Magpie in the Mirror

A typical adult human recognizes that the image one sees in a mirror is oneself. We do not know how much training a mirror-naive adult requires to do this, but we think very little. When a typical adult macaque (a species of monkey) looks in the mirror, it sees another monkey. Typical adult male macaques stuck in a cage with a mirror will treat the image as a fellow adult male macaque until you take the mirror out of the cage. (Experiments that attempt to determine if an individual can recognize themselves in the mirror ultimately derive from what is known as the Gallup Test, after Gordon…

Johann Hari on Journalismgate

Johann Hari has written an excellent article in The Nation on the scandalously poor reporting in the main stream media on climate science and scientists: Yet when it comes to coverage of global warming, we are trapped in the logic of a guerrilla insurgency. The climate scientists have to be right 100 percent of the time, or their 0.01 percent error becomes Glaciergate, and they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01 percent of the time for their narrative--See! The global warming story is falling apart!--to be reinforced by the media. It doesn't matter that their…

Plimer the plagiarist

Eli Rabett has been investigating Ian Plimer's claim that climate scientists were cooking the books on the CO2 record. Plimer wrote: The raw data from Mauna Loa is 'edited' by an operator who deletes what is considered poor data. Some 82% of the raw data is "edited" leaving just 18% of the raw data measurements for statistical analysis [2902,2903]. With such savage editing of raw data, whatever trend one wants can be shown. [p 416 of Heaven and Earth] The raw data is an average of 4 samples from hour to hour. In 2004 there were a possible 8784 measurements. Due to instrumental error 1102…

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend, by Barbara Oakley

Originally posted by Grrlscientist On March 27, 2009, at 10:59 AM I have lived and worked with people whom I have decided, in retrospect, were more than merely hateful and mean-spirited, they were just plain evil. So when Barbara Oakley asked me to read and review her book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend (Prometheus Books; 2008), I readily agreed. This well-written and very readable book is an exploration of evil people who exhibit an extreme form of Borderline Personality Disorder, which profoundly damages the lives of so many…

Are You an Egghead? The Instant Egghead Guide to the Mind, by Emily Anthes

Review by Scicurious, from Neurotopia Originally published on: February 5, 2009 1:45 AM I am an unabashed lover of Scientific American. Well, ok, I'm also a grad student. So I can't AFFORD Scientific American. But luckily, Scientific American has podcasts! There's a regular weekly one that is around 40 minutes long, and then there are daily ones, called '60-second science'. 60-second science represents the latest science tidbits as they come out, and, most endearing to Sci, they cover the good, the bad, and the weird. So I was very excited when I found out that Scientific American,…

Saturday Review: Oral Vaccines

Last week, I talked about strategies to improve vaccine efficacy and safety. Most of those strategies were in the context of standard, inject-into-your-arm vaccines, but what about totally new delivery methods? This week, there was a review in PLoS Pathogens of strategies for generating vaccines that you can swallow: Enhancing Oral Vaccine Potency by Targeting Intestinal M Cells The immune system in the gastrointestinal tract plays a crucial role in the control of infection, as it constitutes the first line of defense against mucosal pathogens. The attractive features of oral immunization…

"The Same and Not the Same"

"The Same and Not the Same" is the title of a fantastic book by Nobel Prize winning chemist Roald Hoffman. It's a great place to get a hearty dose of science + culture. Part Eight of the book is titled "Value, Harm, and Democracy" and has all sorts of interesting stuff in it on chemistry and industry, environmental concerns, chemistry, education & democracy. It does not have a section on what to do when you are running a media empire and your advertisers want you to censor your writers because they are still feeling a bit touchy over that whole messy Bhopal business, but you can't…

How many Iraqi deaths?

The Lancet has published a study of mortality in Iraq, a followup to a similar study from a year ago. In this study, they estimated that over 650,000 more people died in Iraq during the US occupation than would have died otherwise. The Questionable Authority has some objections. I'll start off by pointing out that he isn't disputing the basic conclusion. Mike writes: even if I am correct, and all of these errors result in overestimates of the total number of deaths, the number is still going to be much higher than the "official" totals. The population of Iraq is being harmed by this war,…

Prozac and Plasticity

Prozac (aka fluoxetine) is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has been prescribed to more than 80 million people around the world. Currently, approximately one in ten Americans are on an anti-depressant, with the vast majority taking SSRI's like Prozac. How does Prozac work? At first, the answer seemed simple: the drug is supposed to increase the brain's supply of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, by blocking its reuptake. This inspired an elegant theory, known as the chemical hypothesis: Sadness is simply a…

Buffett

The power of Warren Buffett is impressive. He decides to invest a few billion in Goldman Sachs and panicked investors calm down. And why not? Nobody has an investing record that can even come close to comparing with Buffett's record: he is the lone outlier of Wall Street. According to most calculations, since 1951 Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has generated an average annual return of about 31%. The average return for the Standard & Poor's 500 over that period is 10% a year. The stock market is a random walk, but Buffett has somehow found a way to consistently beat the randomness. So what'…

Earthquakes → progress?

Tectonic environments of ancient civilizations in the eastern hemisphere: The map distribution of ancient civilizations shows a remarkable correspondence with tectonic boundaries related to the southern margin of the Eurasian plate. Quantification of this observation shows that the association is indeed significant, and both historical records and archaeoseismological work show that these civilizations commonly suffered earthquake damage. Close association of ancient civilizations with tectonic activity seems to be a pattern of some kind. In the hope that dividing the civilizations into…

Commensal Bacterium May Reduce Crohn's Disease Outbreaks

A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the gut bacterium Faecalibacterium prausnitzii reduces the recurrence of ileal Crohn's disease. In the study, the authors determined that the percentage of total bacteria that were F. prausnitziii found in the ileal muscosa was roughly five percent in patients who did not have recurrence of symptoms six months after surgery versus roughly 0.1% in those patients who had symptoms six months later. When F. prausnitzii was grown with cultured intestinal cells, it was found to have an anti-inflamatory effect.…

Creationist Jonathan Wells Moves Goalposts Up Own Ass

There's not much to add in terms of rebutting intelligent design creationist Jonathan Wells' latest misappropriation of science that Larry Moran, Orac, and Ian Musgrave didn't already write. But Wells' latest screed demonstrates just how pathetically low intelligent design creationism has sunk. An argument that stupid is a tacit admission of defeat. Essentially, Wells' argument can be summarized as "if evolutionary biology isn't cited in every single biology paper EVAH!, then evolutionary biology isn't relevant to biology." Never mind that every step in genomic biology involves…

Funny, I Thought Publication Practices Were Why We Haven't Defeated Cancer

You mean it might have to do with something substantive, like clinical trial issues? Go figure: Not long ago, at a meeting of an advisory group established by Congress to monitor the war on cancer, participants were asked how to speed progress. "Everyone was talking about expanding the cancer work force and getting people to stop smoking," said Dr. Scott Ramsey, a cancer researcher and health economist, who was participating in that January 2008 meeting of the President's Cancer Panel. "Lots of murmurs of approval." Then it was his turn. The biggest barrier, in his opinion, was that almost…

I Get Books ..

I receive a fair number of books to review each month, so I thought I should do what several magazines and other publications do; list those books that have arrived in my mailbox so you know that this is the pool of books from which I will be reading and reviewing on my blog. Froth!: The Science of Beer by Mark Denny (Johns Hopkins University Press; 2009). Review Copy. Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed and Forgery in the Holy Land by Nina Burleigh (NYC: Collins; 2008). Review Copy. Evolution and Ethics by Thomas Henry Huxley (Princeton University Press; 2009). Review Copy.…

Fool Me Twice

My review of Shawn Otto's new book, Fool Me Twice Fighting the Assault on Science in America, is up over at the relatively new sustainability-oriented blog/resource site, Planet 3.0. Here's how I start: Shawn Otto is a big name in the campaign to restore science to its rightful place as a major player in the public sphere. He spearheaded the first "Science Debate" effort in 2008 to get the presidential candidates to address scientific issues, and has been working, tirelessly but not entirely successfully, it would seem, since then to keep the home fires burning. The frustration that comes…

The Buzz: Ghastly Delights on ScienceBlogs

In honor of Halloween this weekend, we scared up some classic spooky ScienceBlogs posts. Brian Switek of Laelaps discusses ghosts, UFOs, psychics, witchcraft and other "paranormal rot" many people use to explain "rather ordinary phenomena." On SciencePunk, Frank Swain contemplates the mathematical improbability of vampires due to sure vampire population explosion. However, Frank also points out "Efthimiou's conjecture doesn't rule out the possibility of vampires--just that the outbreak hasn't happened yet." The not-so-obvious origins of witches flying on broomsticks is covered on Terra…

The Buzz: The BMI Challenge: How To Do it Right

One week ago, physician PalMD of White Coat Underground began to document his day-by-day attempts to reduce his BMI through a combination of diet and exercise. Other ScienceBloggers were quick to jump in: Isis the Scientist, Janet Stemwedel, Bora Zivkovic and BikeMonkey have all offered dietary guidance to PalMD and related their own efforts to stay healthy. Dave Bacon of The Quantum Pontiff's advice is perhaps the most succinct. "Eat like a monk and run a lot," he suggests, with a chart of his own results to back it up. And Isis the Scientist took the opportunity to inform readers about a…

The Buzz: Obesity and Lessons in Heritability

A recent post by Megan McArdle on her Atlantic blog about the heritability of obesity prompted a discussion on ScienceBlogs about the often confused meaning of heritability. As Razib explains on Gene Expression, "Heritability is the proportion of trait variance within the population explainable by variance of genes." The more an environment is able to effect differences between individual expressions of a trait in a single population, the lower the heritability of that trait. In the case of the US obesity epidemic, generational differences in obesity levels do not mean that obesity is not…

Kavli Video Contest Top 10 Finalist--Nicholas LaJoie

Entry: Why is Science Cool? Science Experiments What is your age? I am 14 years old. Where do you go to school? I go to the Van Buren District Secondary School (VBDSS) Maine What do you plan to study in college? Something involving either science, technology, engineering, or film, I'm not sure yet. What is your favorite subject? I enjoy most subjects, but my favorite is Science! What inspired you to make this cool video? My 9th grade science teacher informed me of this contest because she knew I was interested in this sort of thing. I just thought it would be really fun to explain why…

Et tu, Exxon?

New reporting by Inside Climate News shows that petroleum giant Exxon knew, more than thirty years ago, that burning too much fossil fuel would cause catastrophic climate change. Comparing Exxon's subsequent emphasis on profits over planetary health to the efforts of Big Tobacco hiding the dangers of cigarettes, PZ Myers writes "the future is going to look back on rabid capitalism as one of the damning pathologies of our history." Now that the wider public is accepting the fact that anthropogenic global warming will transform and could destroy our way of life, Exxon is very much on the hook.…

Talking Right

I just finished listening to Fresh Air on NPR. Terry Gross had an interview with Geoffrey Nunberg whose book, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show just came out. As you know, I am interested in the way the Right has appropriated English language in the US so I listened carefully. You can also hear the podcast (a little later today, I assume) and read a little excerpt from the book on the link above. While most of what he said is pretty…

Annals of McCain - Palin, XXV: the last hundred days or prelude to four more years?

This weekend we passed a milestone. George W. Bush, the current incumbent of the White House, has less than 100 days left in his ill-starred Presidency. In 22 days we'll find out if we will have to suffer through four more years of the same thing under a McCain-Palin (or Palin - ?) administration. Heaven forbid (just a saying, not a religious statement). Bush is near historic approval lows in the Gallup poll (25%) and has been below 30% longer than any President in Presidential polling history. He is irrelevant to most people and has turned the government over to President Paulson. Notice…

Home Again

If you've ever done a long car trip with four kids - 10+ hours up and back, with multiple stops along the way, you know just how I feel. The trip was wonderful - I got to talk about food and agriculture right in front of Thomas Jefferson's own vegetable garden, got to let my kids see enormously cool things they would otherwise have had no chance to view, and had a wonderful time visiting friends and family. We made some wonderful, wonderful new friends - including our hosts in Charlottesville who were insane enough to take in our whole family, sight unseen! 99% of the time, I take Amtrak…

Cancer 102

In Cancer 101, I gave some basics to understanding cancer. A commenter asked a good question, and our next lesson will attempt a simple answer. The question regarded how a pathologist can tell if a cancer is "invasive" by looking at a specimen. Well, depending on the specimen, the answer changes, but let's use the colon as an example. Most colon cancers start out as benign polyps. Eventually the cells in the polyp can become malignant, and after that, they can they can begin to grow through layers of normal cells. Here is a diagram of a cancer of the colon at various stages. As you can…

Misc. link-lovin'

I've been really terrible at spreading around some link love this year, largely because my time to read other blogs has been significantly diminished due to my other responsibilities. However yesterday I was able to do a tiny bit of catching up. I've not blogged much on HIV denial recently (no time, alas, to keep the comments cleaned up). However, regular readers may recall how much the HIV folks hated to be compared to creationists. ERV points out a post by an evolution denier championing HIV denial as well. Birds of a feather... In a related vein, James muses what should be done…

New from Weekly Toll

Over at the Weekly Toll blog, Tammy says farewell to Carolyn Merritt, whose five-year term as chair of the Chemical Safety Board is coming to an end. She writes: Carolyn is a strong, compassionate leader who has been in politics but hasn't let it pilot her ethics. Carolyn has done a terrific job of letting the families be heard and putting the human factor back into the system. God knows I will miss her in her role and I pray she has the same success in her family life that she had during her duration at the CSB. Also, don't miss the most recent Weekly Toll - writeups of 109 deaths that…

Innumerate Fundamentalists and π

The stupidity and innumeracy of Americans, and in particular American fundamentalists, never ceases to astound me. Recently on Yahoo, some bozo posted [something claiming that the bible was all correct][yahoo], and that genetics would show that bats were actually birds. But that's not the real prize. The *real* prize of the discussion was in the ensuing thread. A doubter posted the following question: >please explain 1 kings 7.23 and how a circle can have a circumference of 30 of >a unit and a radiius of 10 of a unit and i will become a christian > >23 And he made the Sea of cast…

Is a parthenogenetic female a 'group of one'?

A few weeks ago John Wilkins wrote a long and thoughtful 5-part review of a recent paper by E.O.Wilson and D.S.Wilson: The two Wilsons on sociobiology Sociobiology 2: Theoretical foundations Sociobiology 3: Kin selection and pluralist explanations Sociobiology 4: individuals as groups, and a summary Sociobiology 5: What is at issue Since I always thought of group selection in the Unto Others sense of the term, I am not as confused as some others who are familiar with some older, unrealistic models. I still think that the best explanation is by Robert Brandon in, I think, fifth chapter.…

Heart Nebula

Light from the Heart Nebula What powers the Heart Nebula? The large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all created by a small group of stars near the nebula's center. A close up spanning about 30 light years contains many of these stars is shown above . This open cluster of stars contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, many dim stars only a fraction of the mass of our Sun, and an absent microquasar that was…

Eagle

Adult Bald Eagle, Haliaeetus leucocephalus, the only eagle species that is unique to North America. Image: Dharma Bums. The photographers, who live near my other beloved home, Seattle, wrote; I'm sure you heard we had an amazing snowfall last week. We've been taking walks along Chimacum Creek and checking out all the wildlife. It is beautiful in the winter with the snow and ice. We've been seeing eagles a lot lately. We know their favorite trees, so can pretty much find one most days. I particularly like this snag. It's right behind some houses that hug the cliffs above Port Townsend Bay…

Crab Composite

Composite Crab. The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, expanding debris from the death explosion of a massive star. This intriguing false-color image combines data from space-based observatories, Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer, to explore the debris cloud in x-rays (blue-purple), optical (green), and infrared (red) light. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is the bright spot…

Pain is Not My Friend

I am recovering -- too slowly -- from what appears to be a pinched nerve in my neck. I have been trapped in a cloud of agony since Sunday (well, Saturday, actually, but the alcohol kinda blurred that memory), barely able to move, but in so much pain that I was unable to remain still and unable to sleep. I have been taking tremendous amounts of ibuprofen (as many as ten in an hour) to reduce the pain to barely tolerable levels, but it hasn't worked very well. As you might remember, my left arm is nearly useless because I am recovering from a fractured left shoulder. But this nerve thing has…

What the next President must know

The Apple Pro-Sessions Science Blogging panel is done, and jolly good fun it was too. Good crowd, very good questions and decent banter - interesting to meet the various sciblings, including the ringers in the crowd. The last question, and I paraphrase, was interesting: "What one thing should the next President understand about science?" There were several good answers, mine was: "The next President must understand that you CAN NOT make your own reality" here is the original: "The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people…

One thing I would really like to know

Has Senator Obama actually read the text of FISA Amendments Act of 2008? aka H.R. 6304 (new pdf link) Not one of his staffers, he himself? I mean all of it. Specifically Title II Section 802? Specifically a) 4) B) ii)? I would like a lawyer to explain to me how "determined to be lawful" is consistent with US law and precedent? As far as I understand it, a deputy head of an element of the intelligence community indicating that the action was "determined to be lawful" is meaningless. Determined by who? A court? A judge? Their dog? I understand the pragmatism, the political traps and the…