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Food Preservation and Storage Class

It is hard to believe that summer is coming so rapidly to a close, and that the opportunity to put up for winter will pass so fast.  So if you'd like help and guidance in doing so, I'll be running my food storage and preservation class starting Thursday, August  and running for six weeks into October. The class is online and asynchronous and will cover everything from putting up the summer's glut to building up food storage and a reserve to help temper hard times.  That's going to be particularly important this year with predictions of skyrocketing food prices due to drought and other…

Friday Blog Roundup

In advance of Super-Duper Tuesday voting, bloggers have some thoughts about the Republican presidential hopefuls: Tula Connell at AFL-CIO Weblog reports that the investment firm founded by Mitt Romney is supporting a system that keeps Florida tomato workers impoverished. Michael Millenson at Health Affairs examines Mike Huckabeeâs belief that tackling obesity and smoking can control health care costs. Chris Mooney at DeSmogBlog wonders if we should trust John McCain on global warming. On the Democratic side, Van Jones at Gristmill explains what those âgreen-collar jobsâ the candidates…

"Like a normal blog"... and rabbit-eating herons

I'm now leaving, again, this time for SVPCA. I'm hoping that I might be able to do some blogging from the conference, but the last time I said this (the Munich Flugsaurier conference back in September 2007) there was neither the time nor opportunity for it, so don't get your hopes up. Thanks to SVPCA and other matters, I've obviously been unable to put anything substantial on the blog for a while now... making Tet Zoo all too much like a normal blog... and for personal (family-related) reasons, it's been a strange and sad week here. We're all in need of time off that we can't afford to take…

Science Blogging Conference - who is coming? (Education)

There are 24 days until the Science Blogging Conference. We have 200 registered participants and a few people on the waiting list. The Sigma Xi space accommodates 200 and we have ordered food for 200 and swag bags for 200. Apart from the public list, we also have a list with a couple of anonymous bloggers as well as about a dozen of students who will be coming with their teachers. So, the registration is now officially closed and all future registrants will be placed on a waiting list. The anthology should be published in time for the event. Between now and the conference, I am…

Science Debate 2008 - my Question #6: Space

To keep the conversation about the Science Debate 2008 going, I decided to post, one per day, my ideas for potential questions to be asked at such a debate. The questions are far too long, though, consisting more of my musings than real questions that can be asked on TV (or radio or online, wherever this may end up happening). I want you to: - correct my factual errors - call me on my BS - tell me why the particular question is counterproductive or just a bad idea to ask - if you think the question is good, help me reduce the question from ~500 to ~20 words or so. Here is the sixth one, so…

Sparky Awards

Perhaps you can win one of the Sparky Awards: SPARC Discovery Awards SPARC Announces Mind Mashup - A Video Contest to Showcase Student Views on Information Sharing: SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the first SPARC Discovery Awards, a contest that will recognize the best new short videos illustrating the importance of sharing information and ideas. The contest, details for which are online at www.sparkyawards.org, encourages new voices to join the public discussion of information policy in the age of the Internet. Contestants are asked to submit…

Meme of Four (again)

I don't think I ever refused a meme, even if I have done it already, especially if a lot of time passed, or one can provide new answers every time. But this one is tough, as I would barely change anything from the last time I did it. But, since it is so old, I'll copy it here again and make a few little changes to it: 4 jobs you've had: 1. Horse trainer and riding instructor, Assistant to the Handicapper and Racing Secretary, as well as the Finish-line judge at the Belgrade Racecourse 2. Translator of Disney comic-strips from English to Serbian 3. Biology teacher at various levels to…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Scientists Discover New Life In Antarctic Deep Sea: Scientists have found hundreds of new marine creatures in the vast, dark deep-sea surrounding Antarctica. Carnivorous sponges, free-swimming worms, crustaceans, and molluscs living in the Weddell Sea provide new insights into the evolution of ocean life. DNA Analysis Suggests Under-reported Kills Of Threatened Whales: A new study analyzing whale meat sold in Korean markets suggests the number of whales being sold for human consumption in the Asian country is much higher than that being reported to the International Whaling Commission --…

Thaas outrageous, big Mammy

An old line from Steve Bell, BM of course being Margaret Thatcher (as I recall, this was in the context of "batting for Britain" and Mark Thatcher). Ahem. Anyway. Thatcher, of course, as the destroyer of our coal industry in favour of the dash-for-gas, is responsible for any faint hopes that the UK has of meeting its Kyoto targets, so is an appropriate patron for this post. What brings this on is "Climate change and trace gases" (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2007) 365, 1925-1954 doi:10.1098/rsta.2007.2052 Published online 18 May 2007) where Hansen goes wild with whipsaws and other related stuff ("…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 97

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 96 Table of Contents Chapter 98 Chapter 97 The Trial, March 18, 2061 Although I had resolved never to expose Edie and Anna to Jon's vitriol since the first call, I didn't have a lot of choice when it came to the trial. Unfortunately, I had a class at the same time. By the time I got back to my office, it was over. The video transcript was not yet online, so I headed home. It was a warm day. As I walked along the lake, the trees were turning green. Birds were singing. Ducks splashed in the water. It was beautiful, but I rather dreaded what I…

Ethel Stevens, 1915-2015

A couple of years ago, we got a nasty shock when my 98-year-old great-aunt died unexpectedly. It's happened again, with her sister Ethel (known to a lot of the family as "Auntie Sis," because she had the same first name as her mother, my great-grandmother), who died in her sleep last Sunday night. She would've celebrated her hundredth birthday this fall. You might not think the peaceful death of a 99-year-old would count as a nasty shock, but again, she was a remarkable woman. She still lived by herself in a great big house, and still took care of the place herself, and drove herself…

In light of the SOTU, what about that "partisan bias" study?

I've been meaning to post on this, 'cause it just irks me. I'm sure many of you likely saw this study: Political bias affects brain activity, study finds Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows. "We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and…

Talking about global warming and wikipedia

I was invited to give a talk to CHASE - Cambridge Hi-tech Association of Small Enterprises - nice people even if they haven't quite got round to updating their web site yet :-) The subject was to be global warming - no problem - and wikipedia. The later I've never tried talking about, and found it a bit of a puzzle as to what they wanted and what to say. The talk-in-two-halves is here, and to buff up my rather tarnished open-source credentials I've put it up as a .sxi only. As you can see, the GW bit is only slightly altered from before (apart from a dramatic and startling new paper by…

Risk perceptions

Not directly climate, and risks being somewhat tasteless, but I'll have a go anyway. Two things come past: Light Blue Touchpaper (which is a lovely pun) discusses Camouflage or scary monsters: deceiving others about risk and ends with1 it might be time for a more careful cross-disciplinary study of how we can change people’s minds about risk in the presence of smart and persistent adversaries. We know, for example, that a college education makes people much less susceptible to propaganda and marketing; but what is the science behind designing interventions that are quicker and cheaper in…

Ocular Character Recognition

Ever since individual personal computers first came on-line in large numbers, they have been utilised as a huge opt-in distributed computing array by projects such as SETI at Home and Folding at Home. But there are information processing tasks that can be distributed yet are still impossible to perform with computers. The Stardust at Home project uses the unparalleled image-recognition capabilities of the human brain to process data from an interplanetary sample collection mission. People all around the world take part in their spare time. Auntie Beeb's weekly program on the worldwide use of…

How Would Jesus Smell?

A public elementary school teacher in North Carolina has triggered a lawsuit from parents who are, quite rightly, opposed to the Christian proselytizing she did in her classroom. And the lesson she was teaching is so ridiculous, you couldn't possibly make it up: Scents Make Sense "God's word tells us about a kind of odor only Christians have. 'For we are unto God a sweet savor of Christ ...' (2 Corinthians 2:15). Paul goes on to say that Christians carry forth the fragrance of Christ wherever they go by the way they live; that is, they remind people of Him. "Could someone find Christ by the…

The NCAA vs. Free Speech

As regular readers of this blog know, I'm a college basketball junkie. As far as I'm concerned, the NBA is just a giant methadone program to easy me into the summer, when there aren't any sports worth watching on tv. I'm a big fan of NCAA basketball, but I'm starting to think about how I can manage to watch it without funneling any money to the NCAA, who become more loathesome with every passing day. The latest incident involves the ejection of a credentialed reporter for reporting on the game on his paper's blog: Should the National Collegiate Athletic Association be able to demand that…

Reader Request: LHC

In the Reader Request Thread, Ian asks: I'd like to hear what you think we'll learn (if anything!) when the LHC comes online next month. Well, that sort of depends on the time scale. I'm not a big accelerator guy, but my sense from reading the blogs of people who are is that we're not likely to learn anything at all this year, other than the answer to the question "do the components of the LHC work?" They've got a few weeks of preliminaries before they start any particles going through, and then a whole bunch of sanity checks and calibration tests to do, and a scheduled shut-down in December…

Infinite Jest: My Favorite Footnote

The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I'm not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace with an online reading group. I've been reading a bunch of the commentary that's already been posted (see here for an early round-up, and here for the thoughts of a bunch of political bloggers), and I have to admit, I find a lot of it baffling. There's a lot of hating on the footnotes, and while I will admit…

The Myrmica Phylogeny

The online early section of Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution this week has the first comprehensive phylogeny of a rather important genus of ants: Myrmica. Myrmica is ubiquitous in the colder climates of North America and Eurasia, with a few seemingly incongruous species inhabiting the mountains of tropical southeast Asia. The genus contains about 200 species, many that are common soil-nesting ants in lawns and gardens, and at least one damaging invasive species, M. rubra. The taxonomy ranks among the most difficult of any ant genus, as workers of different species tend to be numbingly…

A Plague of Bed Bugs

Cimex lectularius - the common bedbug Bed bugs are back.  The resurgence of these blood-feeding pests is perhaps the biggest entomological story of the past decade.  Take a look, for instance, at the Google search volume for "bed bugs" over the past few years: Google Trends shows an increase in bed bug interest relative to other pests, 2004-2009 Why am I telling you all of this? I've just posted a new online bed bug photo gallery.  I was fortunate to get my hands on a vial of live bed bugs recently, and it turns out that the little guys are excellent entomological models. Cute, cuddly…

Public high school student takes top national science prize

[Welcome mental_floss blog and Daily Kos readers. After you read about this outstanding young woman, you can learn more about me, my life story, and this blog here.] If you read elsewhere at ScienceBlogs.com, you'll know that several bloggers have been discussing race and gender issues in the scientific and medical research communities as well as the challenges facing young scientists who pursue academic research careers. So, I was overjoyed this morning to see this glowing face on Shivani Sud, a local young woman of Indian heritage who took first prize in the Intel Science Talent Search (…

End of Year Roundup

It's that time of the year again, the time to complete the end of year blog meme. Here is last year's entry. Rules are simple - post the first line of the first post for every month. I've omitted my Monday Mustelid, Today In Science and Friday Poem (semi-)regular posts, so it actually means this is the first post for December. January: It's not like ASU did wonderfully against Texas (losing the Holiday Bowl 52-34), but at least they turned up to play somewhat (albeit not in the first quarter). February: PZ has noted that the boyos over at Uncommon Descent have deep-sixed a comment thread…

Statement regarding the use of bisphenol A

The LA Times has an interesting story about a statement regarding the use of bisphenol A, a compound that has many uses in the plastics industry and also happens to have estrogenic effects. The scientists -- including four from federal health agencies -- reviewed about 700 studies before concluding that people are exposed to levels of the chemical exceeding those that harm lab animals. Infants and fetuses are most vulnerable, they said. This is an important point. Organisms in utero can be exquisitely sensitive to growth factors and hormones, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of times…

Psychology Wiki (poll)

An emailer made me aware of a nice new resource: the Psychology Wiki. From the home page: The Psychology Wiki started on 21st January 2006 and is now one of the largest psychology resources on the internet. We currently have 12832 pages and are working on 8,061 articles and have over 45 MB of content. Here's their summary of the site's mission: The Psychology Wiki's mission is to create an online resource placing the entire body of psychology knowledge in the hands of its users, be they academics, practitioners or users of psychology services. In doing so we are looking to address three…

Science + 1

In my latest "Science Progress" online column, I've tried for something a little bit off my beaten path. The piece takes, as its starting point, a recent Urban Institute study suggesting (among other things) that contrary to many lamentations from the science community, the real issue is not the failure to produce enough scientists and engineers to keep competitive, but rather, the fact that we don't even have enough jobs for the scientists and engineers we're currently producing. Of course, I do not therefore argue that we need less scientists--but rather, that the scientists we're producing…

The Letter Collector

 When I was about eleven years old, I loved to draw intricate ornamental initials with sea serpents twining all over them and castles sprouting out of them, etc. Sometimes my friends would have me draw ink letter "tattoos" on them, but really, the only way I could get satisfactory resolution on my letters was to use a fine tip pen on a full sheet of paper. One letter = math class. (No wonder I don't know calculus). That's why this new group show at San Francisco's Gallery Hijinks has me smiling with nostalgia - it's a full alphabet (plus) of letter-themed artworks. The organic,…

Lord Winston: "science is just one of many truths"

One of the guests on tonight's edition of the One Show, BBC1's highly enjoyable magazine programme, was Lord Winston, the famous fertility scientist and TV presenter. Discussing a segment entitled "Are we ashamed of God?", Lord Winston said that science was only one of multiple truths, or words to that effect. The programme goes out live so I won't be able to check until it's posted online. Yeah, I know if I had Sky+ or some fancy crap I could stop it, replay it, Photoshop goatse images all over the place, but I don't so bah humbug. EDIT: The footage is now available here (from around 07:…

Eco-sexy

How many times have you seen pallets of bottled water coming off the forklift at the grocery store, and felt your stomach turning in disgust? Never? Not once? That's not enough! You should be sick. When you see soccer coaches and construction workers throwing cases of little plastic water bottles into the back of their SUV, your stomach should turn. Bottled water is sooo not sexy. Bottled water is plastic-wrapped with more bacteria than regular tap water, and less fluoride, according to university researchers. More than 60 million gallons of petroleum are used annually to make the 38 billion…

Challenger Expedition

The Challenger expedition of 1872-76 marks the transition form Victorian to modern science: from the world of the gentleman naturalist to the of Big Science, with its requisite institutional, collaborative and multidisciplinary framework and national funding support -Koslow in The Silent Deep Out of this 3.5 year, 69,000 mile expedition came 50 volumes of numerous pages covering every known phylum of organisms collected during the trip.  Yesterday a reader noted, and I very excited to pass on, a link for the Challenger Reports.  This online gift is the full 50…

Abiogenesis as a Tetris game!

So Spawn the Elder (my son) is an avid gamer in such milieus as World of Warcraft, Halo, Civilization, and Lord of the Rings Online, the latter of which, errr, I might have indulged in a few times -- I'm pretty hopeless with gaming so my foray into Middle-earth was an unmitigated disaster. So the elder Spawn was pretty excited to nab the Spore Creature Creator this summer, but he is really jazzed with the prospect of getting his nerdsome hands on the full-fledged game to be released on Friday. Erstwhile Science Blogger Carl Zimmer covered the impending release of Spore in his excellent NYT…

President's plan for energy: Unrealistic and the status quo

The energy portion of the State of the Union is online. As promised, no cap-and-trade. As expected, it emphasizes ethanol. Within ten years, the President proposes to replace 15% of gasoline with alternative or renewable fuels, equivalent to 35 billion gallons of ethanol per year. For comparison, ethanol producers cranked out about four and a half billion gallons of ethanol in 2006. Doing so is estimated to have consumed 20% of the corn crop. If we converted all the corn grown in the US into ethanol using current technology, we wouldn't be able to meet the stated goal. And while…

Fame!

One of my colleagues from Scienceblogs.com.br contacted me a week or so ago to talk about creationists and global warming deniers, and I just checked and his story for Brazil's largest paper is online. Frankly, I think I gave him one of my juicier quotes: "Dos negacionistas do aquecimento global, a maioria é motivada principalmente pelos negócios e pela polÃtica. Um número chocante de pessoas parece se opor à ideia porque não gostam de Al Gore. Muitos trabalham em empresas petrolÃferas ou pertencem a indústrias que teriam de pagar pela mitigação do aquecimento", diz Rosenau. "Então…

Linear Logic

[Monday][yesterday], I said that I needed to introduce the sequent calculus, because it would be useful for describing things like linear logic. Today we're going to take a quick look at linear logic - in particular, at *propositional* linear logic; you can expand to predicate linear logic in a way very similar to the way we went from propositional logic to first order predicate logic. So first: what the heck *is* linear logic? The answer is, basically, logic where statements are treated as *resources*. So using a statement in an inference step in linear logic *consumes* the resource. This is…

Why I ate a Pangolin

The Lese people practice swidden horticulture in the Ituri Forest, Congo (formerly Zaire). Living in the same area are the Efe people, sometimes known as Pygmies (but that may be an inappropriate term). The Efe and Lese share a culture, in a sense, but are distinct entities within that culture, as distinct as any people living integrated by side by side ever are. The Efe are hunter-gatherers, but the gathering of wild food part of that is largely supplanted by a traditional system of tacit exchange between Efe women and Lese farmers, whereby the Efe provide labor and the farmers provide…

Slumming around The DCA Site (TheDCASite.com), the finale (for now)

I've probably beat this one into the ground over the last couple of days; so this will be uncharacteristically brief, because it's time to move on. Also, it was fun to see DaveScot go into paroxysms to try to justify the dangerous, unethical, and reckless actions of Heather Nordstrom and her stepfather in setting up The DCA Site and its sister site, BuyDCA.com, where Heather et al are selling "Pet-DCA" in a ludicrously obvious (and probably ineffective) ploy to be able to claim to the FDA, "Hey, we're not selling this for human consumption." One wonders, perhaps, if DaveScot may actually have…

The DI's Legal Counsel

Astute readers who have followed the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design Creationism movement may have noticed a relatively new name cropping up in the recent press releases concerning the Cobb County case, that of Seth Cooper. Cooper is a recent law school graduate who is now a legal counsel for the Discovery Institute, and he was recently lauded in one of their own press releases as an "expert on the legal aspects of teaching evolution". It turns out that Mr. Cooper also has a blog, SharksWithLasers, and that blog sheds a bit of light on Mr. Cooper's expertise. On March 15th, Mr…

The Swiftboating of Obama Has Begun

By way of maha (and also Roger Ailes the Good), I came across this screed from the conservative National Review's website (italics mine): ... Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City--a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but…

Loving the polar bears to death

"I thought I better come see the bears because the next time I am in this country they will be all gone." -- Polar bear tourist in Churchill, Man. Ecotourism. Sounds so responsible, or least, non-exploitative. But let's face it: Anyone who flies long-distance to get close to some endangered piece of nature at risk from climate change is doing their bit to push those species that much closer to extinction. A paper published recently in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism tries to quantify the irony. "The carbon cost of polar bear viewing tourism in Churchill, Canada" (Subs req'd) looks at the…

OSHA's Foulke Flops on 60 Minutes

OSHA's Assistant Secretary Edwin Foulke flopped and fumbled during CBS's 60 Minutes "Is Enough Done to Stop Explosive Dust?" which aired last night.  Correspondent Scott Pelley pressed Foulke to explain how the 50 OSHA inspectors who have been trained to identify combustible dust hazards will be able inspect the estimated 30,000 worksites with this dangerous volatile hazard. "We're not gonna get in every work site every year. It would be physically impossible from a monetary standpoint and on a personnel standpoint to get in every facility once a year. Or even every five years." Foulke said…

A Food Activist with Farm-State Cred

Our food production system is unsustainable, but those who advocate for healthier agriculture and diets often find themselves dismissed as elitists. While I think this is often an unfair criticism , itâs clear that it hampers advocatesâ effectiveness. So, I was delighted to read in the Washington Post this morning about a good-food advocate from an Iowan farming family. Jane Black writes: Dave Murphy is the founder of a food advocacy group. But he wants you to know, "in no uncertain terms," that he is not a foodie. Foodies are people who obsess about the perfect apple tart. Not that there's…

The Invisible Gorilla

I'm sure by now you've heard about inattentional blindness, as I've posted about it a million times since this blog began. It's an amazing effect! It shows us that we really aren't as aware of the world as we think we are. If you haven't heard about it by now I encourage you to go right here to try out a demo on yourself! Inattentional blindness isn't the only time this happens though, there are a number of cognitive illusions that make you realize you're a lot stupider than you thought you were. There's a brand new book out today by the semi-discoverers of inattentional blindness (well…

Chocolate really does make us feel better

Cognitive Daily would not exist without chocolate. Every week, I buy a bag of chocolate covered raisins, and I portion them out precisely each day so that I've finished them by all by (casual) Friday. I try to time my consumption to coincide with the most difficult part of the job: reporting on peer-reviewed journal articles. The little news items, Ask a ScienceBlogger responses, and other miscellaneous announcements can be completed unassisted by chocolate, but then there wouldn't be much reason to visit the site. Sometimes even the chocolate raisins aren't enough, and I head for the nearest…

Should Scientists Blog?

[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com] Considering the forum, you can probably guess my answer, but it seems the editors at Nature agree... sort of: Institutions need to recognize and to encourage such outreach explicitly -- not just as a matter of routine, but specifically highlighting and promoting it at times of relevant public debate or when the interests and voices of scientists need to be promoted. Web 2.0 doesn't yet have what it takes to add significant value to open academic discourse, but it can surely make a difference to the public accessibility of…

Friday Incoherent Rambling

I'm slowly turning into a cyclist. I currently own three bikes, but that number may change when I buy the fixed gear I've been longing for. I bought a mountain bike a couple of years ago for commuting to and from campus. It's a little over a mile from my front door to my building, but I lost the patience required to walk that distance and driving was out of the question. I was now riding a bike regularly for the first time since the eighth grade. Last summer I picked up a used Cannondale CAD3 road bike from a guy who had only ridden it indoors on a trainer. The bike was in near mint condition…

Conservatives for Hillary?

John discusses an argument by Bruce Bartlett that it made sense for conservatives to support Hillary Clinton in 2008, based on the following reasoning: Surveying the political landscape, I [Barttlett] didn't think the Republican candidate, whoever it might be, was very likely to win against whoever the Democratic candidate might be. Therefore I concluded that it was in the interest of conservatives to support the more conservative Democratic candidate . . . Hillary Clinton . . . probably would be governing significantly more conservatively than Obama. I'm surprised to hear this, because I…

Independence Days Challenge

Note: Most of the Independence Days material will run at ye olde blogge , but I wanted to post the year three start up over here too, since my readership isn't entirely overlapping. If you want to post status updates, the weekly thread for that will be at my other blog, but you can sign up here too! I hope you'll join us! Many of us need nothing in the world so much as more time. Adding new projects is exhausting - and stressful. And yet, we know that there are things we want to change - for example, most of us would like to grow a garden with our kids, or make sure that we know where…

Tree or Trellis

Over the weekend I was part of a panel at the American Anthropology Association, the topic of which was "Updating Human Evolution." I got to listen to ten presentations by scientists, each offering a look at how our understanding of our ancestry is changing with new research. While they were all interesting, I was particularly eager to hear one: Alan Templeton of Washington University. Templeton. Having just finished a book about human evolution, I knew that Templeton has been doing some groundbreaking work to figure out what our DNA has to say about our evolutionary history. I was looking…

Talking Gun Control At Scienceblogs

Matt Springer has written a post Against the gun control that won't work, and he correctly points out that previous gun control efforts have been little more than shameless demagoguery, including the totally-worthless assault weapons ban. People must understand that the previous major legislation the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was an atrociously-stupid piece of legislation. The weapons that fell under the ban were not banned because of function. As Springer points out, the ban focused on cosmetic elements of weapons so that lawmakers could put them on a table and describe how they…

The comic and the box of blinking colored lights

The last couple of days have been a bit surreal, haven't they? After all, how often does this box of blinking lights get into a blog altercation with a Libertarian comic over global warming? Actually, it was a commentary on bad reasoning, but global warming happened to be the topic. In the aftermath of my referring you, my readers, to comic Tim Slagle's blog piece "rebutting" me and to another piece by him in which he used some--shall we say?--creative chemistry and thermodynamics to support a political argument, I'm not sure if I should feel guilty or not. This guilt exists mainly because I…