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Another mass murder

As I'm sure you've all heard by now, a deranged gunman went on a shooting spree in a fitness club in LA, killing 3 women and injuring 10 before blowing his own scabrous, rotting brains out. The guy was just plain nuts (in a fairly common sort of way, unfortunately), but he also left behind an online diary. Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not…

When Hamsters Attack!

I have a deep, dark secret that I want to confess to you: I love hamsters. I am especially fond of the teensy Russian dwarf hamsters, Phodopus sungorus, particularly their impossibly tiny fuzz-covered feet. So, I was surfing the web during the wee hours this morning instead of sleeping, as usual, and found the most delightful website. When Hamsters Attack is more than simply a collection of news stories about hamsters committing crimes and a list of the Top Ten Most Wanted Hamsters, because it also includes an advice column written by Squiggles the hamster, a list of the top eleven ways to…

Is BEST the Last?

As most of AFTIC readers will know by now, the Berkley Earth Surface Temprature project has pre-released its set of four studies that are still pending peer-review and publication. Bombshell news: the earth has warmed pretty much exactly as all the other analyses have indicated. UHI and micrositing issues do not explain away the measurements. I don't have much to add to the dialogue, but here is a good place for locals to discuss and share links. Watch the cllimate evolve here: Update: here are a few relevant links: Primary sources are here The Economist gets there first Muller has an op…

Anthro Blog Carnival

The forty-fifth and forty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnivals are on-line at Remote Central and Testimony of the Spade. Archaeology and anthropology, two entire carnivals about the ancient uses of buergerite! Buergerite, you will remember, is a mineral species belonging to the tourmaline group. It was first described for an occurrence in rhyolitic cavities near Mexquitic, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. It was approved as a mineral by the King-Emperor of Pannonia-Scythia-Transbalkania in 1966. Submissions will henceforth be sent to my personal email address, not to the old submissions address.…

Ivatepray

An advert in the Economist, and here's the M$ puff online. M$ are trying to persuade the world that Evil Google is invading your privacy by auto-scanning emails to target ads. I can't get exciting by this. Google, and Gmail, are supported by ads (aside: I'm astonished to discover just how much money their is in ads; only with Google did it become clear how much of such useful infrastructure they could support) and I'd rather they read my mail in order to send me useful and/or interesting ads (like this rather tasteful one I've inlined; I got that for searching for same) than spamming me with…

'Songs From the Science Frontier' Update and livestream

Montys project was officially funded, so he is spending today on Ustream, thanking his supporters with videos and songs and getting a chocolate cake smashed in his face at 7 pm Central: Online TV Shows by Ustream Thank you all so much for spreading the word and donating, guys! EDIT 4.55 pm-- One of my readers made A Very Large Donation O.o This person (I dunno who! Tell meeeee!) lives overseas, so they cant collect on their personal concert prize, so they are giving it to me! WHOOO! Maybe we could have it down at the Sam Noble Natural History Museum next to the huge HIV-1! ALSO! We are…

TimeTree of Life

I see that the TimeTree of Life project is now public.  This collaborative project draws on the research of dozens of biologists to estimate the timing of past evolutionary divergences.  The work is available as a book, but the online version has an interactive section that allows the user to name two organisms and get back the date the two last shared an ancestor. For instance, Ants vs. Bees: 163.5 million years ago A word of caution, though.  While the output is extremely precise (i.e., it gives exact dates with decimal places), precision is not necessarily accuracy.  The given dates…

Caltech IQI Postdocs

Postdocs at Caltech's IQI. Now in the new Annenberg Center (named, of course, after Caltech's Ann of the Steele tower :) ): INSTITUTE FOR QUANTUM INFORMATION CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Postdoctoral Research Positions The Institute for Quantum Information at the California Institute of Technology will have postdoctoral scholar positions available beginning in September 2010. Researchers interested in all aspects of quantum information science are invited to apply. The appointment is contingent upon completion of a Ph.D. Please apply on-line at http://www.iqi.caltech.edu/…

Video for NAS Lecture: Communicating about Evolution

Earlier this month, I was honored to give a lecture co-sponsored by the NIH and National Academies at their historic downtown DC headquarters. The focus of the talk was on "Communicating about Evolution," part of a spring lecture series on evolution and medicine. The video and the slides for the presentation are now online and include closed-captioning. I gave a similar presentation this past weekend in Pittsburgh at the Council of Science Editors' meetings. The presentation runs about 45 minutes with 30 minutes of Q&A. For readers of this blog and followers of the "Framing Science"…

Update on NASA Talk: Communicating Climate Change

For those unable to attend next week's talk at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, there is a call in number to listen to the presentation and discussion. See details on the talk here. Audio will also follow online. Also if you are a non-NASA staff member and would like to attend, here are the details. Leave a comment in the space below and I will email you back with the staff contact information: [Non-staff] will need to contact me at least a day ahead of time so that I can let security know how many people to expect. I'll need a couple of days for foreign nationals, since I'd have to get…

The Massive Failure of the IPCC Report to Break Through to the Wider Public Means New Communication Strategies Are Sorely Needed

As I've chronicled at this blog, the IPCC report was a massive failure as a communication moment. The inability of the IPCC report to break through to the wider public about the urgency of climate change is just more evidence that relying on traditional science communication strategies has increasingly limited returns. Instead, as I describe in my latest "Science and the Media" column at Skeptical Inquirer Online, other public engagement methods are sorely needed. Among options, I suggest reaching the wider public not directly via news coverage, but rather indirectly by way of a "two-step…

Trouble in Middle Earth?

I've been catching up on my online reading, and a couple days ago John Hawks offered this tantalizing hint that Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit may be a pathological specimen. Such claims have been made before based on the small skull of the hominid, but they've been pretty powerfully rebutted. But Hawks is claiming that the rest of the skeleton is sickly. He seems to be basing this contention on having seen the bones, and on research by others that will be coming out soon. Now, normally I wouldn't put much stock in this sort of off-hand remark, but Hawks has been so good on his blog that…

Derbyshire on Gilder

Over at National Review Online, John Derbyshire tackles George Gilder's expectorations on evolution. He writes: It's a wearying business, arguing with Creationists. Basically, it is a game of Whack-a-Mole. They make an argument, you whack it down. They make a second, you whack it down. They make a third, you whack it down. So they make the first argument again. This is why most biologists just can't be bothered with Creationism at all, even for the fun of it. It isn't actually any fun. Creationists just chase you round in circles. It's boring. So true. And ... There are two reasons why…

Speaking of Washington (State that is)

Slashdot reports, that the Seattle PI reports, that: Beginning next month [June 7th], Washington residents who play poker or make other types of wagers on the Internet will be committing a Class C felony, equivalent under the law to possessing child pornography, threatening the governor or torturing an animal. Although the head of the state Gambling Commission says it is unlikely that individual online gamblers will be targeted for arrest, the new law carries stiff penalties: as much as five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.' So, poker is equivalent to "child pornography, threatening the…

Public Service Announcement - Don't bother with ebuyer.com. It sucks.

If you are a UK resident, I urge you to consider not dealing with ebuyer.com. Their website did not allow registrations to happen on Firefox (you can login with firefox after registering. I registered using Internet Explorer to give them a try. I should have known). They send you the wrong product (twice in my case, the same product. that's what I call anal) and charge you for the postage. When you return an incorrect product and ask for a replacement, they take in the returned product and go all quiet about it until you call them and urge them to send the correct product. Am sure there are…

Bugs online

This is cool. I always like to find historical documents online; even better when they're free. The Society for General Microbiology has scanned its journal International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM) back to the first edition in 1951 and made the archival articles free to all. Since the discovery of organisms is a once-off affair, subsequent researchers need access to the item that announced it in peer-reviewed print to be able to be sure they are working on the right species. So more than most sciences, taxonomy is a historical science, and since bugs (the…

Biases confirmed!

The OKCupid site dug deep into their database of users and analyzed…a lot of stuff. The interesting one is this chart of reading/writing level by religious belief. Look there: the godless users of OKCupid score higher than the religious users; and furthermore, being more serious about agnosticism/atheism is correlated with better scores, while the more devout you are within a religious tradition, the lower your score. Is anyone surprised by this? Not me. We should regard these data with a little suspicion, though — OKCupid is an online dating site, so it's not an entirely random sample of…

Paperback Pre-orders

Just realized that the paperback version of the book is already available for preorder on Amazon.com (and probably elsewhere). See here. I've changed my book link on the left hand margin to go to the paperback preorder page, rather than to the hardcover page as it has done for the last nine months or so. The paperback itself will be out towards the end of August. Note: For the hardcover version of The Republican War on Science, online pre-orders were a big factor in building momentum for the book. I even made Amazon's list for most pre-ordered titles. For the paperback, I'm not going to push…

Origins: From the Universe to Humanity

Mark your calendars for the launch of ASU's new Origins Initiative on April 6, 2009. Tickets go on sale next week and the event will be broadcast live online. It looks like a terrific line up including Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Brian Greene, and new Director, (and Science Debate co-founder) Lawrence Krauss. The Origins Symposium will inaugurate the new Origins Initiative at ASU, which will be a University-wide transdisciplinary endeavor supporting research building on key areas of strength at ASU including: the origin of the universe, origins of stars and planet, the origins of life,…

Can Scientists Dance?

Generally, no.  But some can.  Some are rather good at it.  A contest was reported in Science Magazine: The rules were simple: Using no words or images, interpret your Ph.D. thesis in dance form. Entrants were divided into three categories—graduate student, postdoc, and professor—and the prize for each was a year's subscription to Science. The winning videos are href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5865/905b#dancegallery">here.  Want more? Wait until next year: 2009 Dance Your PhD contest: Want to dance your own thesis? Stay tuned to href="http://www.johnbohannon.…

Fifth Estate on the Denial Machine

The CBC's Fifth Estate has produced a documentary on the global warming denial industry: The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science…

The Complete BBC Doc: A War On Science

Found this on Google Vids this morning. It features all the regulars in the discussion - Miller, Dawkins - but to me, this doc is valuable and distinct because it features David Attenborough opining on ID and the neocon's dismissal of science, a man who has, for the most part, kept his opinions about this sort of thing to himself over his long career. As an aside, damn American broadcasting. This is the third doc that has been produced for the BBC that I've wanted to watch for a while and couldn't until it was released online (the other's were A Short History of Disbelief, which I never…

Ants in the New York Times

Temnothorax marked for studies of individual behavior at the University of Arizona Today's New York Times is carrying a profile of myrmecologist Anna Dornhaus. It is nice to see Anna's work receiving such attention, great and important, blah blah blah, but the really important part is this. The editors had the excellent taste to illustrate their piece with some ant and bee photographs of mine. The online edition also hosts an ant slide show to accompany the story. The Times trimmed the 22 photos I suggested down to an efficient 15, but I've preserved the director's cut here. For…

Delicious Internet Noms

The Bacon Story -- How science can make even bacon disgusting. Building a Google Earth Geology Layer -- Lots of great resources accumulating in the comments here. Magma Cum Laude: Using Google Earth to visualize volcanic and seismic activity -- A discussion of the different data layers available Geoblogosphere Search -- Can't remember where you saw that awesome geology blog post? Ron Schott has put together a handy custom Google search just for you. Grow Your Own Bismuth Crystals -- Bismuth seems to go for about $15/lb. online, and you can melt it on a household stove. Bismuth photo credit…

Lott misrepresents what happened at the Appalachian School of Law

Lott has an article in the National Review Online where once more misleads his readers about what happened at the Appalachian School of Law: "Last year, two law students with law-enforcement backgrounds as deputy sheriffs in another state stopped the shooting at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. When the attack started the students ran to their cars, got their guns, pointed their guns at the attacker, ordered him to drop his gun, and then tackled him and held him until police were able to arrive." Lott implies that the law students were former…

Trust and Critical Thinking: Zvan, Myers, Schell, Sanford and Laden

Several blog posts posts were written (by me or Stephanie Zvan) explicitly in preparation for Science Online 2010 Session C, Trust and Critical Thinking organized by Stephanie Zvan and including PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, and Kirsten Sanford The most recent post, just put up, is this one: Who Do You Trust When It Comes to Your Precious Bodily Fluids? For many topics of interest to the average person, there seem to be two utterly different and diametrically opposed worlds of information. These worlds are so different that one might be called "Normal World" and the other might be…

I'm the ER

I guess that's why I study it. I usually never take these dumb online quiz things but provoked by another science blogger's entry I did this one anyway ... and yes I'm the ER. You scored 46 Industriousness, 48 Centrality, and 7 Causticity! You're the Endoplasmic reticulum! The ER modifies proteins, makes macromolecules, and transfers substances throughout the cell. It has its own membrane, and translation of mRNA happens within it. You tend to have two sides to you - sort of a jekyll and Hyde kind of story. One side of you tends to be rough and tumble, but also very useful. Your other side…

Why, that poll is almost virginal!

Atheist Ireland is looking to determine the most fervent believer of the year with an online poll (frivolous topic, frivolous poll), and I was astounded to discover it had hardly been touched. It was an almost virginal poll. The really, truly True Believer™ of the YEAR 2010 And the winner of 2010 is… Islamic breast hacking clerics 0% [ 0 ] Vatican Child Abuse as bad as Ordination of Women. 0% [ 0 ] God phoning children in Massachusetts. 0% [ 0 ] Conor Lenihan and the anti science anti evolution book. 100% [ 2 ] Sheikh Maulana Rape ok in marriage 0% [ 0 ] Irish Minister for Social…

SCC meeting tomorrow night

Just in case any of you haven't heard yet, tomorrow night the Science Communication Consortium is going to hold its next meeting on "emerging media outlets" & science communication. The SCC was formed by my fellow Scibling Kate (among others), and Carl Zimmer will be speaking on the panel tomorrow, so Sb will have a definite presence during the gathering. You can register at the door or online (details about the location can also be found here), and I'm sure the discussion will be vibrant. Previously I had said that I would be at the meeting, but that's before I realized that my human…

Laelaps gets covered in AppleSauce

It's interesting where my name or photographs end up. As I vainly searched google to make sure no one was talking smack about me on the 'net, I saw that one of my photos of an Amur leopard (pictured above) ended up in the November 2007 edition of AppleSauce by the South Australian Apple Users' Club (which can be seen online here). If you end up borrowing one of my photos for your own publications or blog (it'd be great if you asked first, but I'm not going to cry about it), just shoot me an e-mail and let me know so I can have a look, too. Even if I stumble upon one of my pictures somewhere…

Shakespeare Goes Multiplayer

I've been hankering for Hamlet: The Game for a long time now. Imagine the possibilities: a first-person-shooter (FPS) that lets you inhabit some of the most famous characters of all time. I'd be Hamlet, but I wouldn't stab Polonius. Or mabye I'd be King Lear, and decide that Cordelia isn't so bad after all: Three-dimensional digital worlds and the world of William Shakespeare--it's hard to imagine two more disparate universes. But bridging the gap between them is exactly what Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and the leading expert on the…

Jane Austen LARP

Though I played a lot of tabletop role playing games in the 80s and 90s, I've never been much of a live action role-player (LARPer). Just seems to be way too much preparation for such short events. So the only real LARP I ever took part in was in May of 1992 (it was called Saturday Night Live, ha-ha-ha) - until this past Sunday, when I tried again. And it was fun! Boardgaming buddies head-hunted me for this extremely well organised LARP because they had a male deficit. The event was titled Kärlek och fördel, "Love and Advantage". The idea was basically to collect all the main characters…

NASA: double down on Science

I heard it from a man who, heard it from a man who, heard it from another... ok, it was an e-mail, but it confirmed the strange tale I had been told. NASA is about to do a Mad Max on its Science Missions. Five missions enter, one mission leaves. Literally. NASA has many houses. Within one is the Science Mission Directorate, which does space science, including Earth observations, Solar/Magnetosphere, Solar System Planets and "Astrophysics" (formerly known as the "Universe" division). Space Science missions are housed within the divisions, and not always where you'd think. Within Astrophysics…

The Friday Fermentable: A Pinot Noir Revelation with Erleichda

I must extend hearty apologies to my colleague, wine and research mentor, and guest blogger Erleichda for overlooking a great wine column he wrote for Terra Sig back in November. November! How could I overlook a post whose third paragraph begins, "The evening began with three different champagnes..."?!? As The Friday Fermentable has been running on-and-off, I should be more grateful to him for keeping this Friday fun feature alive. So, here ya go - cheers! Recent Wine Experiences : A Pinot Noir Revelation By Erleichda I grew up with limited exposure to wine, primarily my father's…

Some links for the weekend

I decided, since there are many, to put them under the fold now. But you should check them out - some excellent, thought-provoking stuff: Journalism is not a zero-sum game If you think the web is useless, make it useful. If you think Wikipedia is full of errors, correct the ones you find, or shut up. If you think the web only consists of ill-informed echo chambers, get in there and add an informed view. Along the way, you might just find that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing exactly the same thing. Guest Post: Energy Ministers of the Americas Come Together in D.C - State…

Spotlight on Kavli Science Contest Advisor Joanne Manaster

By Stacy Jannis The Kavli Science in Fiction Video Contest challenges Gr 6-12 students to examine the science in fiction, including science fiction movies, TV shows, and games. Our contest advisors include science educators , scientists, and Hollywood scifi visual effects experts. Follow #SciInSciFi on twitter  for contest updates. Joanne Manaster is a faculty lecturer teaching online biology courses for the Master of Science Teaching-Biology program at the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois, and has taught lab courses in Bioengineering and Cell and Developmental…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Ernie Hood

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Ernie Hood to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around the Clock. Would you please tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: economist freaked out over atheist bestsellers

Steven D. Levitt, the economist and author of Freakonomics, has made a living explaining counterintuitive notions to people on the basis of hidden incentives for human behavior. I haven't read Freakonomics, although it sounds interesting. My behavior is constrained by time. Maybe an incentive will come out of hiding and ratchet the book up my priority list. Still, you'd think a best-selling author of an economics book wouldn't be so surprised when another genre, that on its face doesn't seem like the stuff of best-sellerdom, makes the grade. But Levitt is still surprised that atheist books (…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: in praise of Christmas celebration

PZ and Greg Laden have 'fessed up and long time readers know I write the same thing on my Sermonette each Christmas: I am a big fan of Christmas, godless bastard that I am. It is my favorite secular holiday and there is hardly anything about it I don't like. Well, there are a few things: like the whining about how commercial it has become and how its "true meaning" has gotten lost. Why do I like Christmas so much? I want to preface this by saying there are valid reasons some people hate Christmas. It's a dark and gloomy time of year in the northern hemisphere and some people react badly.…

The 10xs the Price=10xs Crappier Rule Hits the Healthcare Bill

A while back I argued that there's a rule - when the US spends a whole lot more and uses a whole lot more than everyone else, what we usually get back isn't just less than everyone else gets for the same buck, it is dramatically worse. I called it my rule of 10 times the price = 10 times crappier. It applies to an astonishing range of American actions - from our military budget and its results to the oil we invest in agriculture. Back then, one of my examples was healthcare, which I pointed out was at least 4 times crappier (and at least 10xs or more for those who can't get it at all, an…

Healthcare Legislation Worth Passing

This post was originally published on our Wordpress site In a historic achievement, 60 Senators have agreed to a healthcare bill that will dramatically expand health insurance coverage and curb some of the insurance industry’s worst practices. Getting agreement between the Senate and the House, which has passed its own healthcare bill, will still be an arduous process, but the chambers agree on most essential elements, and this is the farthest Congress has come in decades towards fixing our healthcare system’s serious problems. (If you want to compare the House and Senate bills, the Kaiser…

NYC Street Fair

tags: NYCLife, Manhattan street fair, NYC through my eye, photography, NYC There are so many reasons to love NYC, and surely, the best reason is the street fairs that occur all over Manhattan during the summer. Street fair "season" in NYC runs between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend. Street fairs occupy huge stretches of the surface streets in Manhattan on either a Saturday or Sunday between the hours of 9am and 6pm. This street fair, for example, occupies the downtown-bound lanes of Broadway between West 72nd and West 86th streets. Every weekend and holiday day has at least one…

The WTO Just Ruled Against India's Booming Solar Program?

Says HuffoPo. It is bullshit, of course, but lots of people seem to have fallen for it. I found the HuffPo link because mt posted it; and DA quotes FOE saying Trade agreement trumps climate accord: WTO rules against India solar program. As usual, the usual suspects are so busy being outraged they barely tell you what the actual issue is. The WTO ruling is here. There's some lawyerly blather, but not much of it, and its not too hard to read. Skip to the "Summary of key findings" which starts: The claims brought by the United States concern domestic content requirements (DCR measures) imposed…

Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink!

"Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink!: A Story for Children and their Adults" is a new children's book by Gregg Kleiner about global warming. The idea is simple. Imagine if you could see CO2? In the book, it is imagined to be pink. The imagining takes the form of a quirky father, one imagines him to be an inventor of some sort, coming up with the idea of making goggles that would allow you to see CO2 as a pink gas. This is all described by the man's patient but clearly all suffering son, who eventually dons the prototype goggles and sees for himself. I read this to Huxley, age 5, and he…

Recommended music player and radio for the gym

Several weeks ago I tried once again, after many prior ill fated attempts over several years, to get a device that would play music, audio books, and be a radio. The audiobook part wasn't the most important part, but the ability to play various audio files AND act as a radio AND not be a big giant thing I had to strap to a body part AND be sturdy were all important. This latest attempt has gone very well, and I now have a device that is very nice and therefore, I figured you'd want one too. This time I tried the AGPtEK M20S 8GB Mini MP3 Player(Expandable Up to 64GB), Lossless Sound Touch…

Links for 2012-01-26

slacktivist » Mark Driscoll, John Woolman, Zacchaeus and grace That [Quaker abolitionist John] Woolman was so miraculously persuasive suggests to me that he likely wasn't as monomaniacally focused on a single subject as the old preacher in the story I shared in the previous post. And the more I think about that story and Woolman's, the more I want to qualify my commendation of such a single-minded relentlessness. Woolman certainly was single-minded and relentless. He did one thing for decades, obsessively. Yet he also convinced people to change -- he convinced hundreds of people to change…

REPOST: Message to Traditional Media: Ur doin it rite!

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P I dont trust them staying up at Blogger, and the SEED overlords are letting me have 4 reposts a week, so Im gonna take advantage of that! I am going to try to add more comments to these posts for the old readers-- Think of these as 'directors cut' posts ;) I like to make fun of how crappy traditional media has become as much as the next person, but I also hate it when people complain about how bad something is, without offering positive, constructive criticism. Examples of what is right, so the offending parties can improve…

Building a better polio vaccine: Revisited

Last year I wrote about a cool paper, arguing for the creation of a new polio vaccine. Briefly, polio is an RNA virus, thus has an error-prone RNA-RNA polymerase, thus acts like a quasispecies like HIV-1. Now, a live attenuated polio vaccine is the 'best' because you activate lots of branches of your immune system, which 'remember' the polio virus for a really long time. But because of polios potential genetic diversity, the attenuated vaccine variant can revert back to the wild-type variant, which is 'more fit'. This doesnt matter to you, because youve been vaccinated. But if you shed…

Best Music of 2010

I've shifted the iTunes shuffle from the Christmas-music playlist over to the top-rated songs of the year playlist because, well, it's the time of year when anybody with any pretension of writing about pop culture does some sort of Top N list to wrap up the year. And, since I've got "pop culture" right up there in the masthead, that means I should do one as well. The following list is all the five-star rated songs that iTunes has a "2010" date for, with a bunch of remastered Rolling Stones tracks deleted, because really, while "Sweet Virginia" is a fantastic song, it's not remotely a 2010…

It's not their fault, it's ours.

I take a big issue with breed-specific legislation. Politicians target innocent breeds that they claim are "dangerous" because they're too small-minded to look at the facts of how dogs become aggressive. If you were to outlaw "dangerous" breeds, you'd have to start with the most aggressive - like Dachshunds, Chihuahuas, and Jack Russell Terriers. Pit Bulls don't even make the list - and have only ranked higher than 5th on the Vicious Animal Legislation Task Force's Reports once (in 1992, and were still below Cocker Spaniels). People are killed often by other breeds, including the ever-lovable…