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Streptococcus, Antibiotic Resistance, and Israelis...Oh My?!

While many laboratory experiments have shown that antibiotic resistance imposes a fitness cost on resistant bacteria, it's far less clear if this is the case in natural populations. In Europe, the phasing out of a vancomycin analogue, avoparicin, resulted in a dramatic decrease in vancomycin resistance in enterococci bacteria, from roughly seven percent to about three percent. However, the drop doesn't appear to have continued further (although the economic and health burdens of treating vancomycin resistant enterococci make this decrease a good thing). One of the problems with most studies…

You Can Walk Away

File this under caveat mutuor. Henry Blodget points out the obvious in his retort to those who claim people have a moral obligation to remain in mortgages that are 'underwater' (paying more than the house is worth)--it's a business contract. Blodget (italics mine): Importantly, the reason is not that "Wall Street deserves it" or "We've got to teach the banks a lesson" or any of the other bogus "retribution" logic being thrown around. The reason is that you and your lender engaged in an arms-length transaction in which you balanced your competing interests and spelled out your agreement and…

Sunday Sermon: The Need to Know Things In Order to Think Critically About Them

Because the Mad Biologist isn't nearly curmudgeonly enough, especially about things like education [/snark], I thought this post by Ed of Gin and Tacos hit the right notes: Should our educational system emphasize information retention or "critical thinking?" Here's the problem. We do neither. Exams like this are no longer given, at least not commonly, but has it been replaced with anything more useful? In my limited experience we are producing wave after wave of students who reach adulthood utterly unable to distinguish between their puckered assholes and a hole in the ground but with access…

How To Stuff Your Parrot on Thanksgiving

This amusing essay is making the rounds on the intertubes (as usual) this year, so I had to share it with you. Ingredients: Turkey Stuffing Sweet Potatoes Mashed Potatoes with Gravy Green Beans Cranberry Sauce Hot rolls and Butter Relish tray Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream Hot Coffee Instructions: Get up early in the morning and have a cup of coffee. It's going to be a long day, so place your parrot on a perch nearby to keep you company while you prepare the meal. Remove parrot from kitchen counter and return him to perch. Prepare stuffing, and remove parrot from edge of stuffing bowl and…

Mystery Bird: Golden-fronted Woodpecker, Melanerpes aurifrons

tags: Golden-fronted Woodpecker, Melanerpes aurifrons, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Golden-fronted Woodpecker, Melanerpes aurifrons, photographed in Allen Williams Yard, Pharr, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Joseph Kennedy, 2 April 2008 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/800s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: I haven't had a chance to test it, but my hunch is that even…

October is Donors Choose Month!

tags: DonorsChoose, science education, teaching, fund-raising, poverty October is my favorite month of the year because this is when we, the public, get together to support public education by donating money to the DonorsChoose.org's Blogger Challenge 2009! DonorsChoose.org is a charity that uses your donations to purchase specific items and materials for classroom projects that the teacher has requested, and they send these materials directly to the classroom. Basically, this is a "fraud free" way to support public education and to help needy kids have the same educational experiences…

Old scientists never clean out their refrigerators

We all know the story of the Miller-Urey experiment. In 1953, a young graduate student named Stanley Miller ran an off-the-wall experiment: he ran water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a sealed flask with a pair of electrodes to produce a spark, and from those simple building blocks discovered that more complex compounds, such as amino acids, were spontaneously produced. Stanley Miller died in 2007, and in going through his effects, the original apparatus was discovered, and in addition, several small sealed vials containing the sludge produced in the original experiment were also found.…

If we ignore the atmosphere, can we make it go away?

Some of us walk by the bus stop and nervously glance at the scruffy-looking man carrying the ragged sign. I try not to breathe through my nose while I read the sign, carefully pretending all the while that I'm not really interested. Ah, it says "Repent! The world will end tomorrow!" I smile since I always love a testable hypothesis. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up and I will know the scruffy street preacher got it all wrong. It is "An Inconvenient Truth" that global warming presents us with another testable hypothesis. But this one doesn't make me smile. Al Gore has described some…

Nothing to fear but the fear of panic

If your country had thousands of cases of a potentially fatal disease, spread by mosquitoes, would you panic? Not if you lived in the US, apparently. Last year there were over 4200 cases of West Nile virus infections with 177 deaths. I don't remember panic gripping the nation. So I had to laugh when Canadian public health officials tell their citizens that with a particularly bad West Nile Virus (WNV) season underway south of the border, "There is no need to panic": "There's no need to panic," Jean Riverin, a [Public Health Agency of Canada] spokesperson, told CBC News. "Many variables need…

Poultry monoculture?

Public health scientists and professionals have human health and welfare at the center of our concerns. But we have learned that the human species is part of a tightly connected web of other living species and we are all roaming around in a common environment, the surface of the earth. Avian influenza is a good case in point. The influenza virus is mainly a parasite of birds but some forms also infect humans and some infect both. The influenza/A subtype designated H5N1 ("bird flu") is a case in point. It devastates terrestrial birds, like poultry, and when it infects humans it has a truly…

Poultry workers and drug resistant E. coli

Being a poultry worker, in any country is not wonderful. There's the risk of bird flu, of course. And lots of opportunity to be seriously injured. And its strenuous, difficult, low paying and dirty work, which is why it employs so many undocumented workers. It also turns out it is a great way to pick up drug resistant E. coli: Poultry workers in the United States are 32 times more likely to carry E. coli bacteria resistant to the commonly used antibiotic, gentamicin, than others outside the poultry industry, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg…

West Nile woes

If you were an organic farmer you might be a tad pissed if the government came along and sprayed your crop with pesticide without your consent, essentially spoiling it. But that's what happened near Sacramento north of the American River between July 30 and August 1, as the local mosquito control district did aerial spraying to "control" mosquitoes that might be carrying West Nile virus. They aprayed 86 square miles (55,000 acres), home to 375,000 people: Lab tests by Environmental Micro Analysis, an independent lab in Woodland, showed crops from at least one farm in Citrus Heights were…

'Prussian Blue' not making their white neighbors happy after all

Town Tells White Separatist Singers 'No Hate Here' The girls, their mother, April, and stepfather Mark Harrington recently moved to Montana from Bakersfield, Calif., after April told "Primetime" that Bakersfield was "not white enough." Now Kalispell has put the family on notice, "Not in my backyard." Last week a group of neighbors printed information sheets about the family and distributed them door to door. "This letter is not written as a means to harass the family or to begin a witch hunt," the flier said. "We wish the family no harm. Our goal is to peacefully communicate that this kind of…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Back in January, the Huffington Post's Dave Jamieson reported on the case of Reuben Shemwell, a Kentucky mineworker who'd been fired from his welding job with an affiliate of Armstrong Coal. Shemwell filed a discrimination complaint saying he'd been fired because he had complained about safety conditions. The Mine Safety and Health Administration decided not to pursue Shemwell's discrimination complaint, and then Armstrong did something shocking: The company sued Shemwell, claiming a "wrongful use of civil proceedings," which Jamieson explained is akin to a frivolous lawsuit. Jamieson wrote…

Death by Chocolate

by revere Originally posted at Effect Measure  You know any post that starts out . . . Gerardo Castillo, 30 years old, had worked at the Blommer Chocolate Co. for 9 years. His family wanted him to quite ever since an explosion in a roaster killed a fellow worker and injured another. He was fearful himself, but he stayed on . . . is going to end badly. You'd be right. Continuing with our post . . . But on the weekend, something terrible happened at Blommer's four story factory on Chicago's Near West Side, after an unnamed substance was added to a batch of chocolate resulting in a chemical…

Another of our failures as science educators

There's been much written around here about the NYT's David Brooks' foray in to non-materialist neuroscience. Well, today the letters to the editor are in, and some of them are interesting (although most aren't particularly sophisticated). One in particular highlights some failures we've had as science educators (including a failure to educate editors): To the Editor: As an engineer, lawyer, computer programmer and Roman Catholic, I have a problem with the concept that the evolution of the species just happened. From an evolutionary perspective, we are probably somewhere in the chicken and…

A 'demonic Quetzalcoatlus' skeleton!

I said in the freaky giraffoid Barosaurus article that I had one last thing to say on the 'demonic Quetzalcoatlus' meme. It's pretty incredible. Yes, world, I give you: an actual skeleton of a real 'demonic Quetzalcoatlus'. Well, a published drawing of one, anyway... Just like the animals depicted in those various sources from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, this skeleton shows all the characteristic features of its 'artistic meme': it has a long neck (made up of many small vertebrae, and hence presumably quite flexible*), a relatively short skull, a lump-like, posteriorly projecting crest at the…

Because it would be wrong not to mention a sperm whale named like a tyrannosaur

To begin with, I want to thank everyone who continued to visit Tet Zoo while I was away - you managed to keep Tet Zoo in the top 5 on Nature Blog Network - and I was surprised and pleased that several long-running conversations developed in the comments section of the bunny-killing heron article. Awesome, thanks so much. My trip away was great and I had an excellent time, though what wasn't so excellent is that it was literally sandwiched in between two family funerals. I'm ok now though... For now, all I want to do is showcase the incredible new fossil sperm whale Acrophyseter deinodon,…

Friday Random Ten: The "What a Geek" Edition

Haven't done one of these in a while. In light of the "Geek-off" this week, I made a playlist out of what I think of as my "geekier" music, and let ITunes assemble a random list from that playlist. 1. **Elizabeth and the Catapult, "Waiting for the Kill"**. E&tC is a NYC band that plays what they call "baroque pop"; pop music, with heavy jazz and classical influence. I heard them interviewed on the local NPR station, and immediately grabbed their first album - isn't just an EP, but it's fantastic. This is the best track. 2. **Flook, "The Tortoise and the Hare"**. The worlds greatest trad…

Friday Random Ten, Feb 16

Frameshift, "Walking through Genetic Space": a track from an album inspired by the writings of Steven Jay Gould about genetics and evolution. The leader of the project is the lead singer of Dream Theater; the end result has a very DT like feeling to it. The album overall is quite good; bit this track is a slow ballad, and a ballad about genetics just doesn't really work. Robert Fripp and David Sylvian, "Jean the Birdman": Fun, interesting piece of work, from a project that David Sylvian and Robert Fripp did a few years back. Sylvian's usual crooning voice, over his and Fripp's guitar work.…

Rise and Fall of HIgher Education

Here is just a brief excerpt from Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University: The more prosaic truth emerges when you scan the titles of these epics. First, the author rarely appears alone, sharing space with two or three others. Often the collaborators are Ph.D. students who are routinely doing most of the spade work on some low grant in the hope of climbing the greasy pole. Dividing the number of titles by the author's actual contribution probably reduces those hundred papers to twenty-five. Then looking at the titles themselves, you'll see that many of the…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Shift Work Linked To Organ Disease, Study Suggests: Disruption of an individual's natural sleep-wake cycle has been determined to be a contributing factor in the development of organ disease. The findings of U of T researchers were recently published in the Journal of American Physiology. Mass Media Campaigns Can Convince Young Adults To Adopt Safer Sex Practices, Study Shows: -- Two University of Kentucky researchers from the department of communication in the UK College of Communications and Information Studies have learned that targeted mass media campaigns alone can be effective in…

Last day in San Francisco

A month has passed. It was a steep learning curve, but I think I have climbed high enough on it to be confident that I'll be fine on my own back in Chapel Hill. Being a part of the PLoS team is such an exhillarating experience - there is so much energy and optimism around the office, everybody from CEO to the newest intern living, breathing and dreaming Open Access 24/7. Not to bore you about the job any more - you will be hearing about PLoS over and over again here - let me, for now, just show you some pictures (under the fold) from the farewell party last night at Jupiter in downtown…

New Cat Discovered on Borneo and Sumatra

The island clouded leopard, Neofelis diardi on the prowl. Image: WWF. According to genetic research, clouded leopards found on Sumatra and Borneo are a new species. Until now it had been thought they belonged to the same species that is found on mainland southeast Asia. But genetic data indicate that the two species diverged 1.4 million years ago, and have remained separate since. "Genetic research results clearly indicate that the clouded leopards of Borneo should be considered a separate species," said Stephen O'Brien, head of the Institute's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity. "DNA tests…

Harry Potter Theme Park in Florida

tags: Harry Potter, theme park, entertainment Hogsmeade Village from "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter." Inspired by J.K. Rowling's compelling stories and faithful to the visual landscapes of the films, fans will soon be able to experience the world of Harry Potter. Opening in 2009, "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" will feature rides and attractions, as well as shops and restaurants that will enable fans to sample fare from the wizarding world's best known establishments. Image: PRNewsFoto/Universal Orlando Resort [larger] Okay, even though I am a Harry Potter maniac, I will…

Mystery Birds: Pacific Golden-Plover, Pluvialis fulva, and American Golden-Plover, P. dominica

tags: Pacific Golden-Plover, Pluvialis fulva, American Golden-Plover, Pluvialis dominica, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Pacific Golden-Plover, Pluvialis fulva (left), and American Golden-Plover, Pluvialis dominica (right), photographed on Fir Island, Skagit County, Washington State [I will identify these birds for you tomorrow]. Image: Marv Breece, 6 October 2008 [larger view]. Canon EOS 350D 1/640s f/7.1 at 300.0mm iso800. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes:…

In Canada: a morning walk and a cigarette pack

For part of this summer, I escaped the sweltering heat of central Texas and took refuge in Leamington, Ontario, Canada.  It's a lovely place in southern Ontario on the banks of Lake Erie. From my sister's cottage, I could see Pelee Island on the horizon. On a morning walk, the nose of my golden retriever Laredo drew me to a small, smashed cardboard package. It was an empty pack of DK's Full Flavor Premium Canadian Blend cigarettes. But the product and brand on the label were dwarfed by the graphic warnings on four of the six sides of the box. A cigarette pack I found on the side of the road…

February Pieces Of My Mind

Some Facebook updates. Bolsängen: an Uppland smallhold whose name (thanks to the Swedish method of making compund nouns) means "the sexual intercourse bed". The Poupon mustard brand got its name from the firm's coprophiliac founder, who liked to encourage his staff with a friendly "Poop on, guys! Poop on!" I'm helping Adele Adkins with some revision of her lyrics. Her scansion is OK but the rhymes need some touching up. Here's a sample of what I'm coming up with. Don't forget me I beg I remember, you smeg Sometimes it lasts in love But sometimes it hurts my leg Three great Swedish words:…

Antiquity's Spring Issue

Spring has reputedly reached certain areas way south of where I still shovel snow daily, and with it comes Antiquity's spring issue. This is of course an intensely interesting journal, and not solely because the summer issue will feature that opinion piece of mine that I quoted from on the blog recently. In the following are some highlights. All links will give you abstracts and then present you with a pay wall. Lisa Hodgetts of the University of Western Ontario (!) offers a paper on lithics & bone sites of the period 2400-1800 cal BC, located on the Fjord of Varanger, an area that is…

Recent Archaeomags

Here's a quick look at the most recent windfall of popular archaeomags that has reached my big black mailbox. I've decided to terminate a few of the complimentary subscriptions, so these rundowns will be shorter and/or less frequent in the future. If you want, Dear Reader, you can check back at the five instalments I've written since late December: 23 Dec - 27 Jan - 15 March - 30 April - 14 June. To me, the high point of Archaeology Southwest #25:2 (spring '11) are two aerial photographs of the Gran Quivira / San Buenaventura mission pueblo in central New Mexico (pp. 6-7). Here is a major…

Rob Thurman Gets Her Tenses Wrong

I'm a picky reader when it comes to entertainment, and if I don't like the first 50 pages of a novel I rarely continue. The most recent casualty of this policy is a book I was very kindly given by Birger Johansson, Rob Thurman's The Grimrose Path (2010). Its a modern urban fantasy with angels and demons and tricksters, and it failed to interest me much. Usually I don't review stuff I don't like here, since I prefer to offer the Dear Reader recommendations. But this book suffers from an interesting weakness that I can't remember coming across before, and I thought I might say something about…

Recent Archaeomags

Current Archaeology #266 (May) has a big feature on the Medieval and Renaissance version of Saint Paul's cathedral in London. The current one designed by Christopher Wren, I learned, re-uses none of the earlier edifice's fabric and is not even orientated on the same axis. It was the world's first purpose-built Protestant cathedral, completed in 1710. What happened to the old cathedral? Well, first the Reformation, then a century of neglect while only the chancel remained consecrated, and then in 1666 the Great Fire of London. Finally Wren's building crew tore down whatever was left. Then a…

Michigan House Passes Gay Adoption Bill

The Michigan House of Representatives passed a bill that allows adoption agencies to refuse to place children in any situation that violates their "written religious or moral convictions or policies." A second bill passed at the same time forbids the state from considering any such policies when making decisions regarding contracts or funding. Obviously, this is aimed primarily at religious adoption agencies that would refuse to place children with gay couples or individuals, or perhaps even with single people, or people of a different faith. The first law states: A child placing agency is…

Pirates of the Caribbean 2

On Saturday, Kate and I went to see Johnny Depp swish his way through a second movie as Captain Jack Sparrow, with assistance from Kiera Knightly, Orlando Bloom, and a lot of other wooden props. She's posted a review with spoilers, and I'll post some spoilers below the fold, but my one-word, spoiler-free review is here: Excessive. To expand, the movie was not just too long, it was too much. Individual pieces of it were a good deal of fun, but there were too many pieces, and the whole was less than the sum of the parts. More details (with massive movie-destroying SPOILERS) below the fold. To…

Very Unusual Hybrid Storm Headed for East Coast

As pretty much everyone should be aware already, Hurricane Sandy is getting close to landfall in the New Jersey area where it will collide with a strong winter storm coming down from Canada.  It seems no one really knows what will happen, but all the people who should agree it will be very bad.  This storm is huge.  Added into the mix is a full moon causing the highest high tides of the year. As usual, for the most comprehensive coverage of weather events the go-to place is Jeff Master's Weather Wunderground.  The latest posting: Hurricane Sandy has changed little in intensity today, and…

Quantum Optics: The Game

Over on Facebook, my colleague Chris Chabris was talking up a smartphone game from a company he's associated with. Which of course got me thinking "Wait, why don't I have a smartphone game company?" (The Renaissance Weekend is also partly to blame, as I was one of about six people there who didn't have a start-up company of some sort...) Which, in turn, led to the realization that there really ought to be a quantum optics video game. Or maybe a series of games, because you could construct a whole bunch of puzzlers around quantum phenomena: -- The most basic would be to do something like the…

Different Views of our Closest Neighbor

"The distance is nothing; it is only the first step that is difficult." -Madame Marie du Deffand If you've got some solidly dark skies, you might notice -- in addition to the great field of thousands of stars -- a few faint, fuzzy objects. Visible with the naked eye (and captured with only a digital camera), this is the Andromeda Galaxy, as seen from Earth. At a "mere" 2.4 million light years from us, it is the closest large galaxy to us, by far. As far as our best telescopes can show us, Andromeda looks like this. Image credit: Mosaic by astropix.nl. And you don't want to use something…

Raptors of Mexico and Central America

There are about four hundred species of birds we call "raptors" of which most are falcons, hawks, eagles, owls, and so forth. I believe there are about 40 in what is considered the United States (from a person, not a bird, perspective) and many of them are found across much of the US, with the usual breaks across the Rockies, and a certain amount of north-south geography, and varying degrees of migration. A typical page There are 69 species of raptors, many overlapping with those in the US, in Mexico (which is part of North America, from a human perspective) and Central America.…

Is Dark Energy the same as Acceleration?

In a comment on my last post, What is Dark Energy, Kendall asks the following, which is such a good one I think it deserves its own post: I thought the expansion was accelerating? Aren’t you saying that it is on its way down to 85% of its current rate? Sounds like expansion is slowing, but still leaves us with an open universe… People do say the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. But that doesn't mean that the expansion rate is accelerating. It means that if you take a look at any one galaxy that isn't gravitationally bound to us in the Local Group (that is, any big galaxy that isn't…

O'Reilly's Lies about Christmas

Media Matters has been doing a thorough job of following Bill O'Reilly's fake "War on Christmas" crusade of demagoguery. At this moment, they've got posts up catching him in no fewer than three lies trying to turn myth into reality. They are: Lie #1: Saginaw, Michigan tells people not to where red and green clothing: O'REILLY: In Saginaw, Michigan, the township opposes red and green clothing on anyone. [Laughing] In Saginaw Township, they basically said, anybody, we don't want you to wear red or green. I would dress up head to toe in red to green if I were in Saginaw, Michigan. False. Saginaw…

Congratulations to Michael Mann

Michael Mann is one of the key climate scientists of the day. History will crown Mann as one of the great heroes who defended the freedom to do science rationally despite constant attacks from mean spirited and ignorant, self interested, politically motivated, oil-money-soaked climate science denialists. You know of Michael Mann as the coiner of the term "hockey stick" to refer to the alarming uptick in temperature and related measures connected to the human caused release of copious quantities of fossil Carbon into the Earth's atmosphere, causing one of the greatest disasters this planet…

Gun Nuts Stay Home: No Teachers or Staff With Guns in Schools!

The gun nuts did not waste much time after the brutal slaying of 20 six year olds, some teachers, a principal, and some others at a school in Newtown Connecticut to start suggesting that everything would have been fine if only the teachers were armed. And now, after more days have gone by, it seems that the gun nuts are making this suggestion even more frequently. The evidence suggests that when there are more guns around, especially in the hands of untrained individuals, there is more rather than less danger. Don't let anyone tell you that an armed population is a safe population. That is…

You can't trust anything anybody writes today!

You never can tell with Jonah Goldberg — everything he writes tends to be so stupid you're left thinking that he must be joking. He's just finished watching that new propaganda movie, Fitna, which portrays some of the worst atrocities of Islam — beheadings and terrorism and rioting and fatwas, etc. — and what does this bring to his feeble mind? Those awful, evil, odious atheists who put Darwin fish on their cars. After all, chopping heads off people is exactly equivalent to putting a bumper sticker on your Volvo. I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there's the smugness. The undeniable…

Principles Of Wall Erosion, And Our Pulley

Medieval walls are usually shell walls, where you construct an inner and outer shell of finely fitted masonry while filling the space between them with a jumble of smaller stones and mortar. Usually the facing stones don't project much into the core. When the wall is allowed to erode, once the cap stones have fallen off, the facing starts to peel from the core one ashlar or brick at a time from the top down. Before the resulting rubble layer's top (rising) reaches the level of the wall's eroding top (descending), halting erosion, you'll see a ruinous wall that is thick and smooth-faced in its…

Immunity Project: Preliminary (at best) results

Some of you might remember the waves made earlier this year about 'The Immunity Project'. They were crowdsourcing an HIV vaccine that was magical and amazing and they were totally going to give it away for free!! YAY! ... Except 'The Immunity Project' basically had nothing to back their claims up. No publications, the investigators had no connection to HIV vaccine research, and the marketing claims made by 'The Immunity Project' were outlandish (more from Skeptical Raptor). We were assured that a publication was in the works, and to their credit, that publication is now available in a peer-…

Future treatment for acne: Smearing virus guts all over your face. YAY!

Its like, instead of 'Put a bird on it!', scientists are like 'Put a virus on it!' Got cancer? Put a virus on it!  In constant pain? Put a virus on it! Addicted to cigarettes?  Put a virus on it!  Genetic disease?  Put a virus on it! Got acne? Put a virus on it! Propionibacterium acnes Bacteriophages Display Limited Genetic Diversity and Broad Killing Activity against Bacterial Skin Isolates YAY!!! Acne, though not life-threatening, sucks. If you dont have acne, consider yourself lucky.  Some people can get it relatively under control with a combination of over the counter meds and…

Links for 2012-01-19

What I Wish Wikipedia and Others Were Saying About SOPA/PIPA The blackout and other protests today are the result of a long, sustained, full-court press against legislation that's being pushed through despite widespread opposition. Yet, Lamar Smith and many other members of the U.S. House and Senate have been plowing ahead full-steam. Why? Yes, in part because they're well-funded by the entertainment industry, and it wants the bill passed, but also because they think they can. The dirty little secret of SOPA is not that the entertainment industry has far more influence than it ought to have…

More Lindzen, if you can bear it

Just a quickie. In response to my last JM points me at The Greening of Planet Earth (1992), featuring luminaries such as Gerd-Rainer Weber of the German Coal Association (featured just in case you were under any illusion that it was only evil USAnian fossil fuel interests causing trouble; those nice sensible well-educated Krauts show similar) and our hero, Lindzen (looking egg-headed to an astonishing degree; but we're interested in his words, not his looks). As you'd expect, it is the usual mixture of lies, half-truth, some genuine truth and some things technically true but in practice…

Outland It's Not: Billionaires Plan Asteroid Mining

I'm about a week late talking about this, but I've mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires is planning to do commercial asteroid mining. (The post title is a reference to the Sean Connery movie, not the post-Bloom County comic.) I find it kind of amusing that this made the news while I'm doing retrospective blog posts (the next of which is coming), which have turned up a bunch of old posts where I say skeptical things about space in general. So I…

Did Clarence Thomas Really Say This?

New Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker, like former justice Roy Moore, is a bit of a controversial figure. He is, as Feddie from Southern Appeal put it, a Roy Moore clone. After being elected to that position, he had two different non-binding ceremonial swearings-in, one by Roy Moore and one by Clarence Thomas. This report on those ceremonies contains what I think is a stunning claim by Parker: Many stood and applauded former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore as he walked to the stage to administer the oath to Parker. Moore's action was ceremonial, since Parker took his formal oath of…