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random reads

some random links for your reading pleasure Free SF Online - indexed, mostly shorts and audio podcasts. Excellent way to get an intro to some new reads. Then go out and buy the books. eg Ted Chiang David Brin Greg Egan On a different note: "5 things you should know before dating a scientist" Chad has some good stuff going: Shameless Innumeracy Grumpy About Education I have several hundred AAS press releases in my inbox, may get to reading some

Buy Kids Science Stuff: The Mad Biologist's 2007 DonorsChoose Challenge

This year, once again, we ScienceBloggers are raising money to buy equipment for science classrooms. I decided to focus on microbiology and marine biology, because, well, microbiology is what I do now, and marine biology is what I started in. Also, if a new textbook in evolutionary biology is any indication, I think microbiology is going to be emphasized a lot more in college. Anyway, here's what I've put into my challenge: Genetic Research For Immigrants This targets a school with a mostly immigrant population, and it would buy the equipment needed to do gel electrophoresis, so they can…

Finding eBay fraudsters through social networks

The red oval on the right represents a known eBay fraudster. How can we use that information to locate others? Follow the interactions. Fraudulent eBay users typically build up their online "reputation" by conducting transactions with accomplices who give them phony "positive" feedback. These accomplices, a research team at Carnegie Mellon has found, typically interact with many fraudsters. If an eBay user transacts with many known accomplices, who aren't themselves engaging in fraud but have given positive feedback to fraudsters, then they may be a fraudster themselves. Thus, the two "…

Reading Diary: Open Access by Peter Suber

Scholars who grew up with the internet are steadily replacing those that grew up without it. Scholars who expect to put everything they write online, who expect to find everything they need online, and who expect unlocked content that they may read, search, link, copy, cut/paste, crawl, print, and redistribute, are replacing those who never expected these boons and got used to them, if at all, looking over their shoulder for the copyright police. Scholars who expect to find the very best literature online, harmlessly cohabitating with crap are, inexorably replacing scholars who, despite…

How might bird flu arrive in the US?

After all this time and no small amount of heated argument, we are still unsure how H5N1 is making its way around the world in birds. The commercial movements the poultry trade, smuggling of exotic birds or poultry by-products and the migrations of wild birds over long distances have all been blamed. Bird conservationists are fearful that pinning the virus's travel on migrating wild birds will result in destruction of their habitats and crucial stops on their flyways, while the public health community has tended to be more concerned, as has the commercial poultry industry. The bird folks have…

Out now: How to Make a Zombie

At long last, my book on zombies is out! Without doubt the maddest thing I ever did on a whim   You can purchase How to Make a Zombie at all good bookstores in the UK and USA, or online.  I'm indebted to a whole host of people for the book ever reaching the light of day, foremost my agent Peter Tallack and my incredible editor at OneWorld, Robin Dennis, and fellow wordnerd Aarathi Prasad for planting the seed in my head. So yeah, go buy ten copies of it so I can eat tonight.

Geoshagging

Geocaching is a fun nerdy outdoors hobby where you hide tupperware under boulders in the woods and publish their GPS coordinates on the web for other geeks to go look for the tupperware. Sometimes when you look for geocaches in public spaces such as parks, you get funny looks from passing non-geocachers ("muggles", in potteresque geocacher parlance). Lone guys hanging around in parks and acting as if they're looking for something are probably interpreted either as drug customers or gay cruisers. Thus, back in 2005 I came up with the ultimate gay nerd pastime: geocruising, where you publish…

I thought I understood the extent of the bureaucracy here.

I haven't mentioned it here before, but I'm currently working on a project to launch an online dialogue at my university (using a weblog, of course) to engage different members of the campus community with the question of what they think the college experience here ought to be, and how we can make that happen. The project team has a bunch of great people on it, and we thought we had anticipated all the "stake holders" at the university from whom we ought to seek "buy-in". As we were poised to execute the project, we discovered that we had forgotten one: The Institutional Review Board. Yes…

Six Months of Aard

Aardvarchaeology's been on-line for half a year today! Before I came here, I'd been blogging at Salto sobrius for over a year, so by now this blogging thing is a big part of my lifestyle and self-image. I love it -- I write about whatever's occupying my mind, a pleasurable pastime in itself, and then hundreds of people show up to read it every day! Being here on ScienceBlogs helps a lot to attract readers, and so do Stumbleupon and Reddit. (Digg, not so much.) As I've been boasting for a while in the sidebar, Aard is now the world's number one archaeology blog measured by the number of other…

The Future of the Internet

This evening, I was watching The Colbert Report--a show that, along with The Daily Show, I've been enjoying much more frequently lately since they began posting full (free and internationally-available) episodes online--and I stumbled across this interview from last night's show with Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of internet law at Oxford: Zittrain was on the show to promote his new book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It. I have to admit that I haven't actually read the book, but Oxford is admittedly a pretty small world, so I'm at least fairly familiar with what he and his…

Libraries in Economic Bad Times: Academic Libraries

Here are some things academic libraries are doing to cope. The primary caveat is that I have less experience in this area (my research lab is affiliated with a university, but we're different). I have heard a lot about this from my colleagues in my professional association and online. I would be happy to be corrected by those in the know! Academic institutions vary widely - from large state institutions and private research universities to small liberal arts colleges - and so they also vary in how things are funded. Sometimes the various portions of the university- the colleges - will each…

Urgent Action on Science Stimulus Package

We're pleased to repost the latest email from ScienceDebate: Dear Friend, Last Friday you and others in the science community took action and helped to restore $3.1 billion in cuts to science that had been planned in the Senate compromise version of the stimulus bill. That was a good victory for U.S. Science, but it was just the warm-up act. Now we all need to come together as a community for the real show. Even after the $3.1 billion restoration, the final approved Senate version of the stimulus bill falls far short of the House version when it comes to science and technology. You can…

Aquaria are very soothing. So are oceans.

I think the best thing to do with this video by Jon Rawlinson is let it load in HD, put it on full screen, and set back and mellow out for a few minutes. You know, the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan could have a real money-maker video here: just aim a camera at that tank for hours, fill up a DVD, and sell it online. They could do a whole series. I'd buy it. Man, it's a pretty cool planet we've got here. I hope we can take better care of it, so it isn't all confined to a few large tanks here and there.

Mirror Neurons

My Scientific American Mind article on mirror neurons is out, and includes some amusing and apt photographs and art. Mirror neurons, as the story explains, are motor neurons that fire not only when we perform an action (like reaching for an apple) but when we see someone else perform an action -- or even, as it turns out, when we read, think, or hear about someone performing that action. This mechanism, discovered about a decade ago, seems to underlie much motor, social, and even cultural learning. You can read the story here or buy the digital version online via Scientific American Mind.

My article on Mirror Neurons

My Scientific American Mind article on mirror neurons is out, and includes some amusing and apt photographs and art. Mirror neurons, as the story explains, are motor neurons that fire not only when we perform an action (like reaching for an apple) but when we see someone else perform an action -- or even, as it turns out, when we read, think, or hear about someone performing that action. This mechanism, discovered about a decade ago, seems to underlie much motor, social, and even cultural learning. You can read the story here or buy the digital version online via Scientific American Mind.

How much should the president know about the Internet?

Apparently the blogosphere is abuzz with McCain's recent disclosure that he has to force himself to use a computer, that the closest he comes to using email is his staffers showing him email, and that his wife makes all the online reservations when they go to the movies (source NYT). This is in stark contrast with Obama who, on top of looking super-presidential and cool, is apparently a whizz with the technotoys, and even had his own podcast since early days of his senatehood. In the NYT piece, an interesting comment was posed by both the McCain campaign and a blogger associated with the…

The Sam's Club Model of Environmentalism (Buy More!)

This post was written by Wyatt Galusky.* If you love the earth too, buy, buy, buy. So, I suppose it had to happen at some point - the Sam's Club model of environmentalism. Buy More (consumables imprinted with the imprimatur of the Earth). Save More (of aforementioned planet). Alex Williams reports in Sunday's New York Times on the burgeoning commoditization of the environmental movement, and the various views people have taken on this process. This on the heels of the two biggest big box stores - Wal-mart and Home Depot - taking the "green" plunge. As a committed environmentalist, I have…

Pink and Cheap Is No Way To Go Through Space

Around ScienceBlogs recently there's been some discussion about the following eyebrow-raising Toys-R-Us advertisement: The ad has caused rumblings of discontent because it's pretty obvious the pink microscope and telescope are supposed to be "girl" editions, and in both cases the pink one is the smallest, dinkiest, and lowest powered. The bare fact of pinkness in and of itself isn't really something I'd care about - if the same dopey company wants to make "boy" microscopes in MARPAT it would be stupid but as long as it's a good scope then I have no objection to the consumer getting what…

The Encyclopedia of Life is Over-Hyped

The imminent release of an embryonic Encyclopedia of Life (EoL) has journalists buzzing about an exciting new online resource. I wish I could share their enthusiasm. EoL has announced 1.7 million species pages within a decade, providing biological information for all of the world's described species. That's a lofty goal, but their plan for getting the content for those pages goes something like this: Let's build a snappy website, and then the site's awesomeness will spontaneously cause all the biologists in the world to shower us freely with their knowledge. And maybe they'll buy us a pony…

Links for 2012-04-02

MacRecipes | Fathom Have you ever wondered in how many different episodes MacGyver has made an arc welder (answer: 3 times in episodes 6, 52, and 87)? Or perhaps you forgot about your favorite episode (season 1, episode 12) when Mac escapes via a casket that transforms into a jetski. And how many times has Mac made a diversion? In order to placate all of your MacGyver-related curiosities, we offer you MacRecipes. Knight Science Journalism Tracker » Blog Archive » Should science journalists actually read the scientific paper before reporting? And other questions from UK science journalists…

AFA Distortions on Walmart and Gays

The American Family Association is really obsessed with Walmart's decisions to court gay customers, so much so that it is willing to completely distort reality in order to whoop up its mostly mindless followers into an anti-gay frenzy. Look at this Action Alert, where they make it look as though Walmart made the decision to donate a huge amount of money to a gay rights group: In a show of support to help homosexuals legalize same-sex marriage, Wal-Mart has agreed to automatically donate 5% of online sales directly to the Washington DC Community Center for Gay, Lesbian Bisexual and…

Open Lab 2007 - Up For Sale!

Well, The Day has arrived! The Open Laboratory 2007, the 2nd anthology of the best science blogging of the year, is now up for sale on Lulu.com! Yes, you can buy it right here! In a few weeks (and I will be sure to tell you), the book will also available in online and offline bookstores. You can read the background story, see all the submitted entries and the winning 53 posts. All the kudos go to this year's editor, Reed Cartwright for doing a magnificent job on every aspect of the process - from summoning posts for submission, getting volunteers to judge the posts and providing all sorts…

Zombies defend Christmas!

That's all I can imagine: this imaginary conflict has gotten so stupid that it must be mindless undead droning out their need for brains who are still fighting it (oh, hi, Bill O'Reilly!). The latest instance is one of these always-affronted religion organizations that has made a Naughty and Nice List, to "make sure that Christmas does not get secularized or censored from its essence, namely the birth of Jesus Christ". On the naughty list: Disney, because their online store is called the "holiday shop". On the nice list: Best Buy, because Jesus wants a new digital camera they use the word "…

Links for 2011-06-20

Minneapolis "[Don] Rawitsch, a lanky, bespectacled 21-year-old with hair well over his ears, was both a perfectionist and an idealist. He started dressing as historical figures in an attempt to win over his students, appearing in the classroom as explorer Meriwether Lewis. By now he'd made it through to the western expansion unit, and he had in mind his boldest idea yet. What he had so far was a board game tracing a path from Independence, Missouri, to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The students would pretend to be pioneer families. Each player would start with a certain amount of money…

Scholarly Journals Anthology

Last week an anthology I've edited was delivered from the printers. Scholarly Journals Between the Past and the Future. The Fornvännen Centenary Round-Table Seminar. Stockholm, 21 April 2006. Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, Konferenser 65. Stockholm 2007. 109 pp. ISBN 978-91-7402-368-8. On 21 April 2006 a round-table seminar took place on the premises of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in Stockholm. The occasion was Fornvännen's centenary, and the theme was the current status and future prospects of such scholarly journals. This volume…

Finally, iTunes might be sort of worth it

I have purchased a few songs from iTunes, but I don't like doing it. I have the sense that you are not really buying the song in the same way you do when you buy a CD. But I do use the iTunes software (for now) on my Windows box to keep track of the CDs I own. Eventually, I'll change how I do that (I find iTunes to be a bit annoying). Anyway, there is some important and interesting news about iTunes that you may want to know. Multiple UK news outlets are reporting today that Sir Paul McCartney has reached a deal with Apple to offer the Beatles catalog on the iTunes Store. The deal,…

Hansen Profile in the Latest Issue of Seed

The new December/January issue of Seed is now out [it has been out for weeks now, where have you been? - ed] and I wanted to draw attention to a piece that I have in there. The article isn't online and so can't be linked yet, but it's a profile of NASA's James Hansen, who I had the pleasure of meeting with last October. A lot has been, and will continue to be, written about Hansen; knowing this, I wanted to see if I could actually say something new. I'm not sure if I succeeded, but here's the upshot: I argue that Hansen has "shattered some long-held convictions in the scientific community,…

Upcycled Purse Honors Howard U. Grad - it could be YOURS!

Penny Richards has created a new purse, available on her Etsy site. Here's some info about it she shared with me (details about the purse construction available on the site): [the purse honors] Melba Roy, a Howard University graduate (undergrad and masters) who was a mathematician at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1960s. She led a team (four women, seven men) who did computations to track the movements of satellites. I wish I could find more about her, but there's nothing much online--can't even find a birth year (or death date, but she might still be alive). Get it while it's…

On the evilness of the emerging ebook app ecosystem

The theme at the upcoming Science Online NYC panel is Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils and I guess I'm the perils guy. The purpose of this post is helping me to get some of my thoughts down on pixels and, as a by-product, I guess it's tipping my hand a little bit for the other participants on the panel. This session and my role as skeptic comes out of the Science Online session on ebooks in North Carolina this past January. I believe I may have refereed to the emerging ebooks app ecosystem as "The Dark Side." My point was not to explicitly demonize app developers or…

Cognitive Daily -- now full text RSS!

That's right, you can now get the full text of every Cognitive Daily post via RSS. There's just one catch: You must buy a $399 Amazon Kindle and pay 99 cents (per month, I assume) to subscribe to Cognitive Daily. I don't know if this subscription will allow you to view images, and I'm pretty certain video, polls, and other interactive features won't be available, but for some people this might be a very attractive way to get Cognitive Daily. You can also get the amazing ScienceBlogs Select feed, which includes the best CogDaily posts as well as the best from dozens of other ScienceBlogs for $…

Frank Schaeffer throws the ‘atheist fundamentalist’ bomb

Frank Schaeffer really detests most of the New Atheists (except for Dan Dennett; he loves Dennett to pieces). He thinks they're just like the Christian fundamentalists, and he should know, since his father was one of the most fanatical evangelicals around, and he was part of that radical Christianity himself. He starts off with a damning assertion. The most aggressive members of the "New Atheism" movement have quite a bit in common with religious extremists like Pat Robertson and Ted Haggard. Whoa. That's a strong accusation. I wonder what these points of commonality are? I read his whole…

Does Shirky's Cognitive Surplus undervalue meatspace?

  Jonah Lehrer has a nice post elaborating on his Barnes & Noble review of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Like me, Lehrer finds alluring and valuable Shirky's central point, which is that the net is harnessing in constructive form a lot of time and energy that we appear to have been wasting watching TV. Yet Lehrer â who, unlike me, has read Shirky's book â finds that Shirky overplays his case, and that in his enthusiasm for networked contributions and collaborations he discounts both consumption and many offline interactions. He Lehrer mounts a convincing argument, and you really…

Probably not the approach to instilling ethics most likely to succeed.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the University of California is getting serious about ethics -- by requiring all of its 230,000 to take an online ethics course. Yeah, throwing coursework at the problem will solve it.* Indeed, I'm not sure I'd even want to count this as "coursework" given the article's description of what the employees will be getting: The course, which takes about 30 minutes, is designed to brief UC's 230,000 employees on the university's expectations about ethics, values and standards of conduct. ... Although the course was developed to support an ethics policy…

Anything but the obscurity!

I've already mentioned this interesting set of ideas Cory Doctorow brought up. In particular, this part of the introduction made me think: Cory is an author of science fiction (SF) and is published in the US by Tor books (which happens to share a parent company with Nature). He also gives away books on the web. As Tim O'Reilly says, the main danger for most authors is not piracy but obscurity. The number of people who don't buy a book because they can copy the electronic version is trivial compared to the number who buy it as a result of finding it online. Now the biggest factor determining…

Hey to Bristol Instruments

Last week, I made an oblique mention of an equipment failure, and commented about the positive experience I had in dealing with their engineers on the phone. I carefully avoided naming the broken product or the company I was dealing with, out of some obscure sense of blogging ethics. I shipped the broken item off to them, and on Friday got an email telling me it was fixed: Don't ask me what exactly we did; but after some alignment and power-on-power-off, it seemed to come online and give proper readings. Perhaps the power surge mentioned in your blog hung up some logic gates? I did a double-…

Anderson, Chris. Free: The future of a radical price. New York: Hyperion, 2009. 274pp.

This is one of those books that I just seemed to argue with constantly while I was reading it. You know, "Hey, you, book, you're just plain wrong about this!" But, as much as I argued with it, as much as I wanted all of the main points to be wrong, as much as I disagreed with many of the details, by the end I grudgingly accepted that Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price might just have a few very valid things to say about the way the economics of online content is evolving. This is the Google generation, and they're grown up online simply assuming that everythng digital is…

Biological SF and "Getting" the Web

Andre at Biocurious points out an interesting piece in Nature. They interviewed four prominent SF authors--Paul McAuley, Ken Macleod, Joan Slonczewski, and Peter Watts about biology in science fiction. The resulting article is a good read, with lots of interesting anecdotes and examples, and if you go to the supplementary information page for the article, you can get a longer version, including bits that were cut out of the print edition. That is, of course, assuming that you are surfing the Web from an institution that happens to have a site license for Nature, or have a personal…

Global Warming Opportunities?

This week's Ask a Scienceblogger Question involves an article in The National Review Online that was clearly written by a complete bloody moron. The question is this: I read this article in the NRO, and the author actually made some interesting arguments. 'Basically,' he said, 'I am questioning the premise that [global warming] is a problem rather than an opportunity.' Does he have a point? The author of the paper actually does have a point, but not much of one, and it does not justify his line of argument. If the point that the author is trying to make is that global warming can create…

PSP Pre-Conference: The Culture of Free: Publishing in an Era of Changing Expectations (part 1)

I attended this one day pre-conference session on February 3, 2010. I got here after the first group of speakers, unfortunately, due in part to #snOMG and part to parking confusion.   Barbara Kline Pope on Free at the National Academies Press Mission is to disseminate books from National Academies while being completely self sustaining.  Their content is created by volunteers who are subject matter experts asked to examine a particular issue of interest. Everything from global climate change to the care and treatment of lab animals. Very much the long tail, biggest seller had  13k sales, but…

Towards a library ebook business model that makes sense

Over the last week or so a huge issue has sprung up in the library and publishing world, which I touch on in my eBook Users' Bill of Rights post. The publisher HarperCollins has restricting the number of checkouts an ebook version of one of their books can have before the library needs to pay for it again. The number of checkouts is 26 per year. Bobbi Newman collects a lot of relevant posts here if you're interested. There was a comment on my post by William Dix: Publishers are shooting themselves in the foot on this issue. As well as alienating a lot of the potential market with idiotic…

Couple new philosophy entries in SEP

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an online, but highly regarded, source of review articles on philosophical topics, edited by Ed Zalta. Three new articles have popped up lately that have attracted my attention: The first is on Metaphysics, by Peter van Inwagen. Metaphysics is a hard discipline to define, by van Inwagen does a good job of presenting it for first time philosophers. The second is Causal Processes by my colleague Phil Dowe. Dowe is a leading light in the topic of causation, which itself is a topic of metaphysics, and he has proposed a "conserved quantity" account…

New Visa Rules, Lessened US Hospitality

Three years ago I visited the US. Security at Newark was a little slow, but I just showed them my Swedish passport and sailed in. You see, there was a visa waiver agreement back then. And I thought there still was until 1½ hours before I was scheduled to take off to the US again this morning. I don't know if any country still has that agreement with the US. Sweden doesn't, and I found this out at the luggage drop. There's an on-line application routine for the visum (sing.) that often works really swiftly, but in my case it didn't. It's a black box and nobody knows how it works. So I missed…

Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store

A little Sunday reading: "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store," one of several wonderful short stories by San Francisco writer Robin Sloan. It's sort of like magical realism for techies: Back at Supply and Demand. The air is crackÂling with wi-ââfi; Kat and I are havÂing the only spoÂken conÂverÂsaÂtion in the entire place.She's wearÂing the same red-ââand-ââyellow "BAM!" t-ââshirt as yesÂterÂday, which means a) she slept in it, b) she owns sevÂeral idenÂtiÂcal t-ââshirts, or c) she's a carÂtoon character--all of which are appealÂing alternatives. I don't want to come out and conÂfess…

Tiny cities made of crystal

Ken grows crystals. Specifically, he grows free-standing crystals made of bismuth, a metal resembling lead. It has some very interesting properties - it crystallises at right angles, and tends to form shell-like "hoppers", and natural oxidation gives the crystals a very beautiful iridescence. The end result is something that looks like a tiny futuristic city of gleaming metal skyscrapers. The good news is, Ken sells his crystals online, and of you can't afford to buy one, you can win one by correctly guessing its weight. Ken says: Ever drink Pepto-Bismol? Well if you have, then you've…

Book review: Exploring the Mystery of Matter

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most powerful particle accelerator that the world has seen so far. It is a supreme expression of our collective scientific and technological ambition. It transcends national boundaries with components made in many countries and with more than 2000 people from more than 170 institutions worldwide participating in the experiments. The construction of LHC and the detectors is a story that is as varied and as interesting as the people involved in it. LHC has six detectors. Of the these, ATLAS is the largest and most ambitious. Commissioned by CERN…

Free Books in My Phone

I got the Aldiko e-book reader for my Android phone the other day - for free over the net. It came with two apparently random free books in epub format: H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man and Sun Tzu's Art of War. And whenever I like I can get more books for free over the net from within the e-reader: either old ones whose copyright has expired, or newly written ones with a Creative Commons licence. Austen, Doyle, Lovecraft, Twain, you name it! I can also buy copyrighted e-books and put them on my phone. The cost works out to about the same as if I mail-order a used paperback from the UK, the…

The Latest from Awful Yuppie Town: Green Divorce

One of the less attractive features of the New York Times is its tendency to feature little profiles of horrible people. They're not presented that way, of course, but that's the effect-- I read these articles, and just want to slap everybody involved. Today's story on marital tensions caused by environmental issues is a fine example of the form: He bikes 12 1/2 miles to and from his job at a software company outside Santa Barbara, Calif. He recycles as much as possible and takes reusable bags to the grocery store. Still, his girlfriend, Shelly Cobb, feels he has not gone far enough. Ms. Cobb…

Kate MacDowell: bloodless bodies

Entangled, 2010 handbuilt porcelain, cone 6 glaze Kate MacDowell sculpts partially dissected frogs, decaying bodies with exposed skeletons, and viscera invaded by tentacles or ants. It's the imagery of nightmares, death metal music videos, or that tunnel scene in the original Willy Wonka (not a speck of light is showing, so the danger must be growing. . . ). But her medium - minimalist, translucent white porcelain - renders her viscerally disturbing subject matter graceful, even elegant. Some of her pieces, like Sparrow, below, play off the porcelain's resemblance to delicate bleached bone.…

Anthology update....

The entire file is now finished - the last quick round of proofreading is all that's left before the Grand Unveiling right at this place (likely tomorrow morning). Since people nominated the best science posts and those tend to be the most substantial posts which tend to be very long posts (sometimes in two or more parts), the book will be much thicker than I expected - around 330 pages! This, unfortunately, will also make it a tad little bit more expensive (still not hugely expensive - this is online, print-on-demand model of publishing after all). I got 13 out of 50 letters of agreement/…

You have been granted permission

This is very strange. After all the kerfuffle over that ridiculous online bookstore, they just sent me this message: Hi! Abunga CustomerService (CustomerService@abunga.com) has used the Abunga.com Email-A-Friend service to send you this message. Personal message: Please help us Empower Decency by encouraging as many of your readers to register with us. Their votes are needed now more than ever. Thank you Please click this link or copy and paste it into your browser: http://abunga.com Did you know that on Abunga.com ... + You support non-profits with 5% of every purchase? + You can help us…