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Following the crowd one last time...

Yesterday, it was a personality quiz. Today, other ScienceBloggers have been assimilated into the LOL Cat craze. Given that I've had a tangential brush with the craze myself in the past when I posted a bunch of LOL Doctor Whos, and because last week was sufficiently serious, with all the posts about secondhand smoke and DCA, I figure, why not? I'll see which LOL Cat I am too. My only resistance to assimilation is that I'm doing the test on Sunday, rather than "Caturday": Your Score : Serious Cat 30% Affectionate, 30% Excitable, 53% Hungry Hungry for knowledge in any internet…

International Digital Curation Conference

By way of amplifying the signal: the 5th International Digital Curation Conference is coming up in London in December. I will be there in spirit only, I fear, but I hope there will be a Twitter hashtag I can follow? Chris Rusbridge has blogged the program. (If I seem more scatterbrained than usual, it's because most of my spare time and brainspace is currently devoted to building a course I will be teaching online in the spring for Illinois's GSLIS. It's a "Topics in Collection Development" course, which means I have to view things through a lens I'm almost completely unfamiliar with—I don't…

From The Desk of Zelnio: R. Cadwallader Smith's Within the Deep

As part of the Gutenberg Project to make available copyright-free (i.e. old) books available in print online, I came across Within the Deep by R. Cadwallader Smith as part of Cassell's "Eyes and No Eyes" Series Book VIII. I have no idea to the original print date but I am guessing mid to late 1800s by the look of the plates and figures. I really love and admire old texts, especially those many figures as does this one. The art was so descriptive and inspiring then, before the age of computer animation. The lessons, or chaptes, include such grand subjects as: Fish For Breakfast The…

From the Annals of Arachnophobia Vol. 5, Issue 2

I have been known to display my love-hate relationship with spiders here on the Refuge. Knowing my ambivalent feelings toward arachnids, on-line droogs have shared photos of a couple of cool orb weavers, the type of spider I like, versus the lycosids which freak me out. Spider porn below the fold... First, Spacebee of Texas shares these pictures of a fine Gasteracantha cancriformis (Crab-like orb weaver) specimen. This spider resides in her backyard, having strung up the web between a starfruit and guava tree. Now why am I reminded of a Dalkon shield? And the rear-view: ST of the UK…

Women & Science/Technology Policy Seminar - For Students

Announced on the WMST-L listserv: Women & Science/Technology Policy Seminar in Washington, DC The Public Leadership Education Network (PLEN) will be holding its Women & Science/Technology Policy Seminar January 4-8, 2010 for women science majors who want to explore what life is like as a science advisor. This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for women students to discover a different way to professionally apply their scientific and technological knowledge - in a career developing public policy. The seminar teachers are women scientists in diverse areas of government and the private…

Don't forget, Nisbet and Mooney at Stowers tomorrow

Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet will kick off their Speaking Science tour tomorrow in Kansas City, in the Stowers Institute auditorium at 4 pm. It should be a fun event and a good chance for science advocates to start a discussion about how to communicate science to nonscientists. Nisbet and Mooney kicked the discussion off with their article in framing in Science and the associated op-ed in the Washington Post. There was a vigorous debate online about those articles, what it means to "frame" science, and what framings might be useful. Missouri recently fought back a state law forbidding…

Kansas Guild of Bloggers: Busy, busy, busy edition

When Kurt Vonnegut passed away, I pointed out that the Bokononist mantra "Busy, busy, busy" is one that I find useful in my own life, especially this week. So it goes. The Kansas Guild of Bloggers, normally put online on Monday, is thus appearing on Friday, and incorporates only submissions to the blogcarnival.com system. Heck, I'm even using their boring "instacarnival." I'm sure there's been a bunch of good stuff out there that I've missed, and I apologize. Next Monday it's at Paul Decelles' place. Submit! John B. presents A stretch of river XXXV: "Here comes a frame-house down on the…

Eruptions Mailbag

So, I get a steady diet of email messages here at the Eruptions HQ, so I thought I could try a little roundup of the great information/links that you readers are sending (and I apologize for taking so long for some of these). Enjoy! - Tim Stone tells us about GeoEye pictures of volcanoes. GeoEye is the new satellite launched to add to the Google Earth images of the planet. There are some quite striking images of volcanoes included in the collection. - Richard Roscoe sends us to some updated images of the on-going volcanic activity on Montserrat. As usual, there is an abundance of excellent…

Science Roundup: We're Back

Long, long ago on a website far, far away (OK, 2006 on Blogcritics.org) before I joined ScienceBlogs, I used to do weekly or biweekly roundups of science, health and tech in the news. In these I would make no attempt whatsoever to interpret or even accurately represent the articles involved. Sometimes they were even funny. Funny or not, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed writing them, so I think I am going to bring them back. So here is your Science Roundup for February 9th, 2009. Soon WiFi will be available on airlines, but not everyone is pleased with the convenience: But the…

Books I'd Like to Read

For your reading and collection development pleasure: 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller "The history is fascinating, as are the insights into the personalities of these great thinkers."--New Scientist Is there a number at the root of the universe? A primal number that everything in the world hinges on? This question exercised many great minds of the twentieth century, among them the groundbreaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Their obsession with the power of certain numbers--including 137, which describes the…

Elvis has left the Building! (Guest Post by Scott Church)

By now everyone knows that last June the UAH (University of Alabama Huntsville) team led by Roy Spencer and John Christy released updates to their satellite derived lower troposphere temperature trends. These trends, which come from their "TLT" dataset use data from the Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) packages that have been flying aboard NOAA's Polar Orbiting Environmental (POES) satellites since late 1978. This dataset uses combinations of nadir (straight-down) and off-nadir views of MSU Channel 2 to create a "synthetic" channel that isolates a lower and thinner portion of the atmosphere…

Deficit Models, Bureaucratic Empathy, and Work-Life Juggling

Every now and then, I run across a couple of items that tie together a whole bunch of different issues that weigh heavily on my mind. That happened yesterday courtesy of Timothy Burke, whose blog post about an NPR story is so good that there aren't enough +1 buttons on the entire Internet for it. The NPR piece is about eating and exercise habits, and the way families struggle to do what they know they ought to: More than half of children ate or drank something during the "crunch time" window that can lead to unhealthy weight gain, as perceived by their parents. And more than a quarter of…

Periodic Table of the ScienceBlogs, Part 4: Blogs D-E

Discovering Biology in a Digital World Categories: Biology, Academia Sandra Porter earned a BS in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota, and an MSc and PhD in microbiology from the University of Washington. She did a postdoc at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and spent a decade leading the biotechnology program at Seattle Central Community College. Now she engages in "semi-random acts of teaching" while also working for a bioinformatics company called Geospiza. She writes about how bioinformatics can be used as an educational tool, and what and how we can learn from it.…

Obama's Support of Corn Ethanol Unlikely to Change

I've been pretty open here about my support of Barack Obama's bid for the presidency, but one issue I certainly disagree with him on is his support of corn ethanol subsidies. Unfortunately, it looks like that this is one issue he's unlikely to improve on, as The New York Times reports today that ties to the corn ethanol industry permeate the highest levels of the Obama campaign: Mr. Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence of special interests. But like any other politician, he has powerful constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes to domestic…

Andrew Wakefield: Destined for even more disrepute

I must admit that I never saw it coming. At least, I never saw it coming this fast and this dramatically. After all, this is a saga that has been going on for twelve solid years now, and it's an investigation that has been going on at least since 2004. I'm referring, of course, to that (possibly former) hero of the anti-vaccine movement, the man who is arguably the most responsible for suffering and death due to the resurgence of measles in the U.K. because of his role in frightening parents about the MMR vaccine. I'm referring to the fall of Andrew Wakefield Wakefield has shown an incredible…

NSF AST: the bell tolls...

Heads up, peeps. NSF Portfolio Review is out Mayall, WIYN, 2.1m KPNO, GBT and VLBA are out in recommended scenarios. Shit. Portfolio Review - full text 170 pp (pdf) To summarise: Kitt Peak telescopes cut; Green Bank Radio Telescope and Very Large Baseline Array cut; McM-P Solar Telescope cut before Advanced Solar Telescope starts. Committee recommends pre-emptive cuts based on pessimistic budget scenario. LSST, CCAT and GSMT in. Two scenarios: A presumes 10% effective cut over decade B presumes 30% effective cut over decade From Exec Summary: "We recommend that AST avoid the risk of…

China, Pig Intestines, and the FDA

I wrote last week about how the FDAâs mixup with Chinese factory names kept it from inspecting the Chinese facility producing the main ingredient for Baxterâs heparin; this problem came to light after the drug was implicated in four deaths. (To date, more than 400 adverse reactions have been reported.) Today, articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal explain what drug companies and the FDA are dealing with when they rely on Chinese production. The NYTâs David Barboza and Walt Bogdanich get different answers about the supply chain of the factory that generated much of Baxterâs…

Links for 2010-07-31

slacktivist: If you can make it there "Newcomers are often insecure, and a debt of gratitude can make anyone feel a bit awkward, so I try my best to be patient with some of the sillier things often said by those from the American "heartland" about supposed "East Coast elites" in general and New York in particular. But that patience has its limits and I may have reached those limits listening to various non-New Yorkers bloviating about where and how New Yorkers ought to be allowed to worship. (I'm from the heartland of New Jersey, myself, where I was taught that real Americans don't imagine…

We, Pine Beetles and Global Warming Make Three

Ed has a great review of a recent paper in Nature presenting new research that describes just how extensive the damage done by the mountain pine beetle in British Columbia. The culprit of the outbreak is most likely climate change since sudden drops in temperature common in northern areas like BC have historically been a check on the beetle's population; in recent years, the winters have been less intense and the beetle populations have benefited from the extension. It immediately reminded me of the extinction-themed AAAS session I attended and blogged about last year, where ecologist Jim…

Tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate (Jake leg blues)

Yesterday's entry on diethylene glycol reminded me of another public safety incident that occured pre-FDA: Jake leg. Jamaican ginger extract, or "jake," was just like the extracts you buy at the grocery store today - full of alcohol. During prohibition, a lot of people realized it made a decent substitute for real booze. As far as I know, extracts can't use denatured alcohol - they're intended for consumption. Soon, the treasury department wised up to this and declared that ginger extract had to have a certain amount of dissolved solids. Solomonic - if you wanted ginger extract, you were…

The Big 3: Shrimp, Tuna, and Salmon

If you read Blogfish, MBSL&S, and DSN, I think you see that Rick, Mark, and I are not advocating a complete ban on eating seafood. To the contrary seafood tastes good, especially with lemon and butter, and tastes even better if harvested sustainably. It is no surprise that the recent Cooking for Solutions event at the Monterey Bay Aquarium dedicated a session entirely to the Big 3. Rick Moonen, chef for rm seafood in Las Vegas and author of Fish Without a Doubt, noted that 60,000 lbs of shrimp are consumed daily in Sin City alone. However, eating bluefin tuna is like scarfing down…

Fuzzy Yeti Winner: The "Beauty" Industry Is Destroying Our Society With Their Lies

Since this won a Fuzzy Yeti Crab (The Fuzzy) for 2006, I thought a repost was in order. There is a great article at the San Francisco Chronicle on cosmeuceuticals and the extent people are distributing snake oil including this beauty... At the highest end of the skin-care spectrum, Saks Fifth Avenue on Union Square sells Estee Lauder's Re-Creation daytime and nighttime cream set (a store exclusive), which contains "deep sea water" for minerals and sells for $900. So what are the purported effects of deep-sea water? I collected some claims from around the internet which range from plain…

Senator Reid's Foot in Mouth Problem

Senator Harry Reid, the incoming Senator minority leader, caught a lot of flak for saying that Clarence Thomas' legal opinions are poorly written and that he was "an embarrassment to the court." Some of that flak came from me, in a post where I pointed out that while I am on the opposite side of most issues with Justice Thomas, Reid's claim was unjustifed and beneath the dignity of a Senate leader. Alas, Reid is not quite done making himself look like an ass. James Taranto, writing in the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web, quotes Reid's response when asked on CNN to provide an example of…

Eat Local

Notice of a local event, here in central Virginia, and a comment on the idea of local itself. I'm currently teaching environmental history (summer school), and we're to the point where we're discussing modern food systems. We had a nice trip to Whole Foods last week, with a scavenger hunt for all things so-labeled: organic (unsurprisingly, almost everything) "natural" (unsurprisingly with a great range of justification and definition) local (not so much, but cheese and wine) non-GMO (only a few volunteered to label as such) or otherwise. You know, just to see what's out there.…

Bulletproof T-shirts?

While it might sound science fiction or comic book fodder, scientists have actually developed a kind of wearable protective cloth from T-shirts that contains the same ultra-strong material used to armor tanks. Modern high-impact military vehicles and bulletproof vests are reinforced with a substance called boron carbide. It's the third hardest material known to man at room temperature, with a hardness of 9.3 on the mohs scale, just a hair behind diamond's hardness of 10. It's hard to imagine how such a rigid material could be comfortable to wear, but scientists have recently developed the…

Clueless about big tuna

What's happening in the Science News section at the Washington Post? A recent story about bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) made me wonder exactly what's going on behind the journalist's desk. The article in question is called "Advocates hope science can save big tuna", published Dec. 24, 2007. The Post article reviews scientific approaches that illustrate bluefin tuna migrations to and from spawning grounds in the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean Sea, then notes the bluefin populations are plummeting, but finally surrenders the problem to "political will" and the federal government. This…

Tirman in Editor and Publisher on Iraqi casualties

John Tirman has an article in Editor and Publisher. Extract: The charge, repeated in all these media, that the Iraqi research leader, Riyadh Lafta, M.D., operated "without U.S. supervision" and was therefore suspect is particularly interesting. Munro, in a note to National Review Online, asserted that Lafta "said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey," which he also had noted in the National Journal piece. When he interviewed me he pestered me about two anonymous donors, demanding to know if either were Arab or Muslim. A pattern here is visible, one which reeks of…

Conservation Psychology: Think You're Green? Think Again!

Happy Earth Day, everyone! In honor of the day, here's a modified re-post of piece I wrote recently for LAist. Figure 1: Photo by poloroid-girl via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr. The great philosopher Kermit the Frog once said, "It's not that easy being green." Maybe he was on to something. You can't walk three steps down an aisle in any store without running into eco-friendly or "green" products. You probably have many of these products. Is your refrigerator or dishwasher Energy-star compliant? Do you have a paperless Kindle? Maybe bamboo guest towels in the bathroom? A Prius? Why do you…

Obesity rates decline among low-income preschoolers

After years of hearing about alarming increases in states' obesity rates, it was nice to get some good news: CDC reports that the percentage of low-income preschool children classified as obese has declined in 19 states. (Height and weight data came from 11.6 million children aged 2-4 participating in the Pediatric Nutrition Surveillance System, which monitors the nutritional status of low-income children. Children whose body mass index was at or above the 95th percentile on CDC's growth charts were classified as obese.) Improvements among obesity rates of school-aged children have been…

You Just Might Find You Get What You Need

I have a vivid memory as a teenager of yelling at my Mother, "I didn't ask for two mothers! I don't need two mothers! I don't even want *you* and you got me this other one who won't leave me alone!" I was 14 and about as revolting as every other fourteen year old, or maybe just a little more. And like most step-children, I resented the heck out of my step-Mom, Susie. I have to say, I'm awed by anyone who sticks with it through the outs and ins of step-parenting - you've got my admiration - just thinking back on how unrewarding it was for my step-mother makes me realize y'all who take on…

My question for Luskin IV

I officially retract my question to Luskin as it has been answered. When I last asked my question of Luskin in regards to their assertion that the denial of tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez was a matter of "academic freedom", I really wanted an answer to it. My question was: Mr. Luskin, is it the considered opinion of the DI, UD etc., that it is never acceptable to discriminate against a professor in a tenure decision based on their ideas? Now, Tara shows me the answer to my question in her post Why deny only one part of science? IDists branch out into AIDS denial. I think my question is…

Mario Molina: Energy and climate change: is there a solution?

There are a few people who will now appear on the blog who will be extremely peevish about Molina's talk, because he simply clearly stated the scientific consensus. We are now living in the anthropocene, when so many people exist that that we are affecting the planet's functions. CO2 and CH4 concentrations have been changing rapidly in recent decades, along with changes in temperature, and the fact of the matter is that the changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere are causally connected to changes in temperature. He showed long term records of 450,000 years of temperature and…

Real Love

I don't think Eric and my eyes have ever met in one of those soppy, romantic looks couples give each other over a puddle of vomit before.  Yesterday, however, they did. We've been battling a nasty, slow moving stomach virus at our house (four down, four still to go ;-P), and one of the children threw up rather spectacularly all over their bed, the rug and (especially helpful) a gigantic pile of library books (I guess we now own a smelly $50 copy of the illustrated Silmarillion.  Yay.)  I walked in on the scene, yelled for husbandly help, and he set to the rug while I faced the library books…

Buyer beware when purchasing nail guns, salespeople know little about safety risks

[Updated 9/21/11: see below] Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk......is the familar sound around house framing and roofing jobs of the pnuematic nail gun. !Expletive! Expletive! Argh....Expletive!....is the cursing yelps from guys whose fingers, hands, and other body parts are punctured by nails inadvertently shot from these construction tools. An estimated 37,000 individuals in the US are treated annually in hospital emergency rooms for nail gun injuries. Moreover, nail guns are responsible for the most tool-related hospital admissions for workers in the construction trades…

Grumpy review of An Inconvenient Truth

At the third or fourth chance, the convenience of having this thing screened at BAS in the (extended) lunch break was too much to miss, and I've seen it. Its a documentary (I suppose) but a partisan one (maybe they all are...). Nothing really gets any caveats, unlike all my posts (for which see Ms. Rabett's Nude Scientist Exam). It ends with a fervent exhortation to do Your Bit and visit http://www.climatecrisis.net/ - when I did that, the first thing it offered me was the chance to buy the DVD, so clearly this is Consumption for Climate. How would we stop global warming? Since Gore fervently…

Cline vs. Woit

As an amusing follow-up to Friday's post, have a look at this lengthy op-ed from McGill University physicist Jim Cline, in The Ottawa Citizen. Here's an excerpt: Why is it that string theory has become such a favoured paradigm? Have theoretical physicists deluded themselves? Have they been pressured by social forces to blind themselves to other possible theories? Is there a behind-the-scenes string-theory conspiracy that is propping up a pseudoscientific house of cards? We could ask a similar question about cars. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Hondas have been the most…

ID Books and Peer Review

The ACLU-PA blog has an interesting post on a key point in the cross examination of Michael Behe in the Dover trial. Behe was asked whether his book, Darwin's Black Box, had gone through a peer review process similar to the process used for articles submitted to scholarly journal: It has been stated here before that Behe has not submitted his own work on intelligent design for peer review. At the same time, Behe agreed, when asked by plaintiff's counsel Eric Rothschild if the "peer review for Darwin's Black Box was analogous to peer review in the [scientific] literature." It was, according to…

Shooting Down the New Confirmation Spin

The latest development in the Harriet Miers confirmation fight is this ridiculous talking point from the White House, via James Dobson: Some of the other candidates who had been on that short list, and that many conservatives are now upset about were highly qualified individuals that had been passed over. Well, what Karl told me is that some of those individuals took themselves off that list and they would not allow their names to be considered, because the process has become so vicious and so vitriolic and so bitter, that they didn't want to subject themselves or the members of their…

Street of the Horn

Hot on the heels of my paean to the Stockholm Sluice, here's something about the Hornsgatan street in Stockholm. Be warned, though: this work has been deemed substandard by the Swedish editor of Vice Magazine. HORNSGATAN By Martin Rundkvist, 19 March 2007 Hornsgatan, the Street of the Horn, used to be Stockholm's Wild West. It starts sedately enough at the 17th century South Town Hall but then ploughs straight through the churchyard of St. Mary, the bones of poets and burghers flying. Gathering speed, it passes Marijuana Square (as St. Mary's square was known in the 70s) and shoots off west…

Media Kick Swedish Heritage Board in Groin

As discussed here in a recent entry, there has long been a conflict over Ales stenar, a prehistoric stone ship monument in Scania, southern Sweden. Scholarship has argued that like all other large stone ships in southern Scandinavia with ample space between the standing stones, Ales stenar was built as a grave marker (or perhaps assembly site) in the late 1st Millennium AD. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed the date. On the other hand, amateur archaeo-astronomer Bob Lind has led a vociferous campaign asserting that the ship is several thousand years older than that and originally built as a…

How Do You Make People Care About Topological Insulators?

I had planned to spend some time this weekend trying to make sense of this new result on topological insulators, and maybe even write up the relevant paper for ResearchBlogging. Family life intervened, though, and I didn't have the time. I get enough of it to understand the basics of what's going on, but there's a whole lot I don't understand about topological insulators generally, so I'd need to do a bunch of reference chasing to get to something I can understand well enough to work back up to this week's Nature paper. And, to put it bluntly, there just isn't that much reward for the work…

Plastic Surgery Bimbo attacks Oklahoma State veterinary school

T. Boone Pickens. Never heard of the guy till I moved to OK. Some gazillionare that donates a shitload of money to Oklahoma State in Stillwater. Now while Pickens seems kinda like a cliche Republican (oil man, Swift Boat contributor, hoarding water), evidently his wife is a PETA nutbar. Oh certainly shes done 'good' things-- donated money to help pets stranded after Katrina, horse rescues-- But Madeleine Pickens is causing OSUs vet school to be under lock-down right now due to bullshit shes been puking to the local media. So the Pickens donate lots of money to OSU, right? Well Madeleine…

Pubs in London

While I kill time waiting for it to be a reasonable time to call Kate and the kids back in the US, a list of most of the pubs I've visited during this trip to London. Because why not? In more or less chronological order: The Victoria in Lancaster Gate. Or maybe Paddington, going from the URL. The naming of London neighborhoods is an enduring mystery to me. Anyway: given the name and location (two blocks from Hyde Park), I expected to be hip-deep in American tourists, but it was mostly a local crowd. Lots of Queen Victoria pictures, which mostly made me think of Eddie Izzard calling her "One…

Quantum Mechanics Is Not Magic, No Matter What Amazon Says

While I'm thrilled to see How to Teach Physics to Your Dog listed on Amazon, I am distressed to see it offered as a pair with something called The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart. I'm not linking to the Amazon page for that book, because it's a giant pile of crap, and I wouldn't want anyone to accidentally one-click-order it after following a link from my page. If you should choose to look it up, you can read bits and pieces of it via the "Look Inside" feature, and it's true that the opening chapter or so is a reasonable-sounding description of the physics of quantum entanglement,…

General Motors vice chairman: cunning genius or blathering idiot?

It's got to be one or the other. How else to explain the latest attempt by GM vice Cchairman Bob Lutz to attract attention to himself and his company, which continues to hemorrhage money? "Global warming is a total crock of shit," Lutz reportedly said told journalists at a Texas restaurant. "I'm a skeptic, not a denier." Those bon mots represent one of the most unambiguous denunciations of an entire body of scientific knowledge ever uttered by an American corporate executive. They trounce even Sen. James Inhofe's ever-so-slightly hedged claim to have presented "compelling evidence that…

On Gates

Far be it from a ScienceBlog to bloviate insufferably about current events, but I suppose I should weigh in on the whole Henry Louis Gates thing. I suppose this because I've had a very similar thing once happen to me. First Gates' story, then mine. The accounts of Gates and the arresting officer vary on several points, and each paints the other in a very poor light. From the points of agreement we can reconstruct a minimal but probably accurate recounting of the events. Gates and his driver arrived at Gates' home. They could not easily get the door open either as a result of malfunction…

Nat Geo Specials: And Then There Were Two

Tonight, I presume, you all are going to tune in and check out National Geographic's Morphed series. It was truly a blast to watch! But, what are your plans for this Tuesday? Because the fun's only just begun, and let me tell you, they saved the best for last. On Feb 10th starting at 9 PM, the National Geographic Channel premiers two other Darwin special features, and they are AMAZING. Technically, I watched the second one first, so I'm going to review it that way. You'll just have to deal. At 10 PM on Tuesday you should tune in to catch Monster Fish of the Congo. It tracks a team of…

Locking the Barn Door

You are a university president. You naturally wish to avoid scandal and negative publicity during your administration. The time to make it mandatory for all faculty and staff to undergo training in how to avoid sexual harassment is: A: When you take office, or shortly thereafter. B: After one of your professors is caught emailing female students a quid pro quo: A's if they would expose their breasts and allow him to fondle them. If you are University of Iowa president Sally Mason, you will, of course, pick option B. If this is only the first time the esteemed Professor Miller has engaged…

Bluewashing, Seafood Health, and Romantic Lobsters

Bluewashing. It's everywhere. In his article Beware of 'bluewash': Which fish should you buy? Nic Fleming covered our research on confusing seafood eco-labels in this week's NewScientist. In addition to the dangers of seeming eco-friendly, consumers are also up against an industry very set on convincing consumers seafood is healthy. Earlier this week, Dr. Melina Jampolis, the CNN diet and fitness expert, got the question: Is farm-raised salmon as healthy as wild? She consulted a senior vice president for research of the Environmental Working Group, who said: Eating farmed salmon…

Roland Martin, sorry to offend, but you are an offensive dit

Roland S. Martin is a CNN commentator who is coming late to the War on Christmas. The name Roland Martin reminds me of Rowan and Martin. I'm pretty sure that is why Rowan S. Martin uses the "S." .. so people don't think of Rowan and Martin when they hear his name. Rowan and Martin were funny in their day. Roland S. Martin is not funny. Yet it is hard to not laugh at the guy. In a recent commentary, Martin whines ... Because of all the politically correct idiots, we are being encouraged to stop saying "Merry Christmas" for the more palatable "Happy Holidays." What the heck are "…