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June Pieces Of My Mind #1

One of the synths on Gentle Giant's "The Boys In The Band" sounds like mp3 glitches. Very soon my commuter train will enter a many-years-long period of refurbishment chaos. It's going to be a hassle. But I just feel excited about it. Something new along some of the most well-trodden and least pretty paths of my life! A film studies professor once told me that prior to the VCR, a lot of the basic data presented in published research in her field was simply wrong. It was really hard for scholars to rewatch and pause movies. Like studying frogs and only being able to glimpse one a few times a…

July Pieces Of My Mind #1

A Vaisala RS92 probe has dropped onto Landsjö Castle in the past year. No mark of ownership, but it probably originates with the Swedish Weather Service in nearby Norrköping. I tried to call my son. No reply. I tried to call my boss. No reply. This must mean that I have no responsibilities until they call me. Learned from Melvyn Bragg's programme today that Frederick the Great of Prussia was most likely gay and his brother, the exceptionally successful general Prince Henry, was openly so. Never noticed before that "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" has this really basic drum machine. There's a guitar…

US govt leaks IPCC report

The Grauniad echoes Nature (subs req, but since the Grauniad appears to have copied Nature fairly thoroughly you're not losing much) in saying that the US govt has leaked (do they use that phrase? well I shall) the IPCC AR4 second draft. This is of course naughty of them. To test that they actually had, I sent a mail with "giant stoats are nice" as the subject line (you're supposed to send your name and affiliation) and "I wonder if this will get me the password? OR if there some filtering?" as the message. I got a reply in about 10 secs with the password, so clearly there is no filtering at…

O Canada! O Women!

The North looks ever more attractive — read this excellent article on the collapse of organized religion in Canada. The numbers of church members is simply plummeting up there, a state we can only dream of bringing to pass here in the US (numbers are declining here, too, but we can hope that this is an inevitable descent and that Canada is only leading us by a few years.) One interesting hypothesis for why it's happening is that we can thank, in part, feminism. Women the traditional mainstays of institutional religion in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church's patriarchal exemplar of…

How old are complex retroviruses? At least 400 million years old!!!

Paleovirology seems to work the opposite of the way the Creationist want.  The more information we have, the further back the timeline shifts, not vice versa. For example, we used to think HIV-1 started in humans ~1930, but after we found more 'old' HIV sequences, the clock got pushed back to 1902-1921. We used to think Simian Immunodeficiency Virus emerged 1266-1685, but after we found more 'old' SIV sequences, the clock got pushed back 76,794 years. After a recent finding in fish, the evolutionary history of retroviruses got pushed back... 400 million years. An Endogenous Foamy-like Viral…

PERVs in your pork chops

Well this is a new one: This will sound radical to most of you, but the latest information available to us now could improve your health, should you decide to take this seriously. Have you ever considered why Muslims and Jews are forbidden from eating pork?  Both religions consider it unclean.  Dr. Jeff McCombs, author of the book “Life Force,” found that by eliminating pork, there is a consequent and immediate increase in energy and health levels as well as the body’s disease-fighting capabilities. According to health experts, the danger of eating pork is an unseen one—a retrovirus called…

GMO bacteria vs malaria

WARBLEGARBLE!!! Fighting malaria with engineered symbiotic bacteria from vector mosquitoes. Malaria kills 1.24 million people a year.  Mostly babies under 5 years old. Malaria is becoming resistant to our drugs. We cant figure out how to make an anti-malarial vaccine. We can make GMO mosquitoes that are resistant to carrying malaria, but we dont know how to implement them in nature. NEW IDEA: Make GMO bacteria that make mosquitoes resistant to malaria colonization.  'Bait' wild mosquitoes with sugar water filled with GMO bacteria.  See a potential 84% decrease in mosquitoes carrying malaria,…

Thursday Family Blogging 031512

Yesterday was "Pi Day" (3-14, in the American style of writing dates), and while I personally find it kind of silly, The Pip took it to heart, using it as the occasion for his first rotation of π radians about his long axis. That is, he rolled from his back onto his stomach. Which is both good and bad: good, because it's a milestone, bad because now we can't leave him unattended on any flat, elevated surfaces. Anyway, to mark the occasion, here's a picture of the two kids. With Appa for scale, even. He's not in the porta-crib very often-- he prefers to be held so that he can "stand" on his…

How to Give a Good PowerPoint Lecture, 2012

My timekeeping course this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar," which means it's supposed to emphasize research and writing skills. Lots of these will include some sort of poster session at the end of the term, but I decided I preferred the idea of doing in-class oral presentations. Having assigned that, of course, I felt I ought to give them a class with advice on how to give an oral presentation. I went looking for advice on this, and found that I wrote a guide to giving good PowerPoint lectures back in 2006 (God, I'm a blogging dinosaur...), which holds up pretty well. So, I dusted that…

Links for 2012-03-04

When There's More To Winning Than Winning : NPR When last we left the NCAA, it was February madness, colleges were jumping conferences, suing each other, coaches were claiming rivals had cheated in recruiting -- the usual nobility of college sports. And then, in the midst of all this, the men's basketball team at Washington College of Chestertown, Md., journeyed to Pennsylvania to play Gettysburg College in a Division III Centennial Conference game. It was senior night, and the loudest cheers went to Cory Weissman, No. 3, 5 feet 11 inches, a team captain -- especially when he walked out onto…

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog in the Washington Post

If you're allergic to hype, you might want to tune this blog out for the next couple of days, because How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is officially released tomorrow, so it's all I'm going to talk about for a little while. Because, well, I'm pretty excited. And tonight's exciting finding is that it's mentioned in the Washington Post: If "Physics for Dummies" left you baffled, maybe it's time to go a step further: Why not physics for pets? In "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog," physics professor Chad Orzel attempts to explain Einstein's theory of relativity via a dialogue with his dog,…

Random Note That Wouldn't Bother Normal People

In a book that I read recently (either The Cloud Roads or The Serpent Sea-- I finished the first and immediately started the second), as some characters are traveling from one place to another, there's a passing mention that they weren't able to hunt at night because the moon wasn't out and it was too dark. Which sort of bugged me, and I was reminded of it tonight when I took Emmy out for our post-dinner walk-- it's very clear tonight, and a lot of stars were visible, even here in the light-polluted suburbs, but the moon wasn't up yet. And the thing is, while it's darker when the moon isn't…

Links for 2011-12-06

How Doctors Die « Zócalo Public Square It's not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don't die like the rest of us. What's unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently. Paris Review - Document: The Symbolism Survey, Sarah Funke…

Links for 2011-08-22

hwrnmnbsol: Michele Bachmann: EXPLAINED "[I]t seems that a great many statements made by Michele Bachmann have the effect of generating bewilderment among a certain class of the population, a class that for brevity's sake I shall label 'people who know things'. I have a new theory to help explain some of Michele Bachmann's statements in a context that will clear up the confusion. This theory is sure to be controversial to that segment of America that is suspicious of all things theoretical, such as the theory of human-generated global warming, or equally spurious and unprovable theorems…

Scientists and Science Fiction

Yesterday was apparently Gender in Science day here, while the theme for today is Tab Clearance-- a couple of shortish posts about things that deserve more than just a Links Dump mention, but don't really cohere into any kind of grand synthesis of deep thoughts, or whatever. This particular link was prompted by an item in the SF Signal links dump for today, with the title Writing Science Fiction as a Non-Scientist, by Jamie Todd Rubin. that made me blink a little, because it's never really seemed like a science degree was a necessary condition for writing SF. Even within so-called "hard SF,"…

Greatest (Nonscientific) Nonfiction

While I was off at DAMOP last week, the Guardian produced a list purporting to be the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time. Predictably, this includes a tiny set of science titles-- five in the "Science" category, two under "Environment," and one each under "Mathematics" and "Mind." And that's being kind of generous about the boundaries of science. This sort of thing is so depressingly common that it's almost hard to be outraged about it any more. Almost. Because, really, your list has room for Herodotus, but not Galileo or Newton? The modern world owes vastly more to the early…

Links for 2011-04-27

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science As someone who blogs about science and occasionally about politics, I am contractually obligated to link to this article. Fortunately, it's also good and interesting. (tags: psychology science politics neuroscience climate vaccine culture society cog-sci medicine magazines) The Non-Science That Explains What's Wrong with Science Explaining Non-Belief in Science « Easily Distracted "I have a lot of complicated misgivings about the implications of this overall approach in its reconsideration of the public sphere, deliberative processes, the act…

Links for 2011-04-01

How to Get Tenure at Almost Every Other Research University | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine A useful counterpoint to Sean's post about tenure at top-tier research universities. (tags: academia jobs blogs science physics cosmic-variance) A Lament for Diana Wynne Jones « Bookselling with Granger "One of the pillars of bookselling is to answer this question: If you like X, you will probably enjoy reading Y or Z too. Hence the first, though not actualized in-store yet (that would come at the turn of the millennium) thought of If you like Harry Potter, try these fantasies. And the one…

Concert Review: Hayseed Dixie in Stockholm, Sweden

Last night's Hayseed Dixie gig rocked. This is the bluegrass band playing metal songs that I blogged about recently. Me and Paddy K went there after checking out some stand-up comedy with the ladies. We had been given the wrong starting hour, so we arrived at the Debaser Slussen club in the middle of the fourth song. But I believe John Wheeler and the others played for about an hour and a half. Afterwards they scattered into the crowd and chatted with everybody. I spent the entire gig with a big foolish smile on my face. They placed so fast and so skilfully with a constant feeling of…

Austrian Anthroposophy Waldorf School Hit by Measles Outbreak

The Austrian city of Salzburg has been hit by a measles outbreak among private-school children. Measles are no laughing matter, and thankfully outbreaks like these are rare in the West these days thanks to vaccination. So it comes as no surprise that the school in question is the Rudolf-Steiner-Schule in Mayrwies, a Waldorf school run by anthroposophists. Anthroposophy is an old New Age movement based upon the supernatural visions of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Its current altie medical practices include a strong antivaccination ideology. Said Steiner in the fifth lecture of his 1910 series…

How is US Archaeology Organised?

Here's a really good primer on the institutional landscape of US archaeology by Michael Dietler. Some of the perspectives he offers are just mind-boggling. "There are at least 450 colleges and universities in the United States that offer a B.A degree in anthropology ... . Of those institutions, 98 universities offer PhD programs in Anthropology" [which includes archaeology]. Imagine a country where an archaeology PhD has hundreds of potential academic employers, all of them speaking the same language... If I looked at the nearest 450 undergrad programs measured radially from my home, I'd find…

Dimitri Kouznetsov, Repeat Offender in Science Fraud

In the autumn issue of Antiquity is a fine debate piece (behind a pay wall) by William Meacham of Hong Kong about the Russian Baptist science fraudster Dimitri Kouznetsov. In 1989, 1996 and 2000, Kouznetsov managed to trick three peer-reviewed journals to publish papers full of faked data, references to non-existent journals and thanks at the end to fictional scholars. And all three papers are in different fields. Much of the information about the Russian's scams has been unearthed by Italian skeptic Gian Marco Rinaldi who published his findings in his mother tongue in 2002. Kouznetsov's 1989…

Mistranslations of the Third Kind

Over at David Nessle's, his witty readers are discussing translations -- more particularly, bad translations. I collect crap translations from English to Swedish, so I decided to offer some to you, Dear Reader. To make this palatable to non-Swedish-speakers, I'll add a second step to explain what the Swedish mistranslation means literally in each case. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Main character drives around on a rainy night looking for a place called Cornflower. Meeting someone, he asks for directions, but the other guy just drives off and our hero yells an insult after him. "Excuse…

Me and My ISP

Me and my Internet Service Provider go way back. I got my account with algonet.se in early 1995 and put up my still current web site there after a few months. I've been using my e-mail address there as my main one ever since, publishing it indiscriminately all over the web and UseNet, and still I don't get too much spam. Algonet is a legacy domain. There is no longer an ISP by that name: the domain and its user accounts have passed from ISP to ISP and are currently handled by an outfit called Glocalnet. Since new Algonet accounts haven't been issued for years, I guess us users are a dwindling…

Used To Be A Kobold

From age twelve to twenty-five, I was a gaming geek. It started with the Swedish version of Runequest (Drakar och Demoner) and the Lone Wolf solo adventure series, and soon branched out into computer games and sundry board games. Gaming was a big part of my life and I had a lot of fun with it. In my teens I used to hang out at a gaming store and go to gaming conventions. There my friends and I encountered innumerable somewhat younger and even more enthusiastic gamers who milled around at belly height of us big guys. We scoffed at their "hack 'n' slay" gaming style, so much cruder than our own…

Ubuntu Slip of the Tongue

Ubuntu Linux is a free Open Source operating system with office software, intended to empower the Third World by freeing it from dependence on Western software companies. It shares its name with a humanist ideology promoted by people such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. The software is also popular in the West, where most of the development takes place and where most of the installations running it are likely located. The project's Swedish homepage prominently features a fine piece of inadvertent colonial condescension. It's actually quite heartwarmingly naïve in its complete lack of…

Wish I Could Do That In Linux

For a few weeks, I've been slowly, slowly learning my way around the Open Source operating system Ubuntu Linux. Lots of things work just fine. Indeed, they work incredibly well considering that I downloaded an entire operating system with office software for free from the net. But every now and then I run into things that force me to boot Windows XP or lower my expectations. They may be fully possible to do in Ubuntu, though too complicated for me to accomplish at my current level of ignorance; or semi-possible to do in Ubuntu through an ugly kludge that's not worth it; or they may simply be…

Archaeology at the Crossroads

I'm generally no fan of "contemporary archaeology", where 20th century sites are investigated and interpreted. If you want to know what those people did, ask them or read the local paper. But Claes Pettersson at the Jönköping County Museum has written a piece in this genre that I actually like a lot. (It's in Swedish.) In recent decades, the Torsvik highway crossroads has been one of those marginal places on the outskirts of a town that are left over between car dealerships, parking lots and supermarkets. This particular place was also an Iron Age cemetery, and last year the time had come to…

My Parental M.O.

I love my kids and a lot of that affection spills over on their friends as well. But I'm not the kind of dad who finds children's games very entertaining. I rarely even pretend to enjoy them. In my opinion, the best baby sitter is another child of about the same age. So I'm not the kids' play mate, I'm their support staff. Since my son reached the age when he no longer saw other kids as a kind of unusually loud and mucuous furniture, he has had a lot of visitors in the weekends. At about half past nine on a weekend morning, I reckon other families with kids will be awake, and I tell him to…

US Archaeological Sites & Finds Protection

Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science has a great post comparing US and Swedish site protection rules, a response to my entry on who owns archaeological finds in Sweden. I'm definitely recruiting his entry for next week's Four Stone Hearth carnival. (To which all readers are invited to contribute.) Here are some questions that popped up when I read Chris's entry. What happens if a member of the public makes a clearly prehistoric find on federally owned land, without digging or damaging anything, and alerts the local authorities? For instance, a collection of lithics from the erosion slope of a…

GWPF membership declines?

The Evanescent published an article entitled "Global Warming Policy Foundation – the UK home of climate change sceptics – hit by 60% membership fee slump. That link is to an archive of Google's cache; the article no longer exists [Update: but a few hours later is back: archive]. However, we can still do what the article says: Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London, unearthed the figures after they were submitted by the GWPF to Companies House. and see if we can verify These show that the income from…

Massive Cover-up Exposed: 285 Papers From 1960s-’80s Reveal Robust Global Cooling Scientific ‘Consensus’?

It's the folks over at No Truth Zone again. Thanks (do I mean that? No, I don't) ATTP for drawing it to my attention (via the swamp that is Breitbart). The wiki part is tediously wrong; see A child’s garden of wikipedia, part I in the unlikely event of your not being able to work out why yourself. It is though important to realise that Breitbart and NTZ are lying about everything; not just the important bits. Notice also the way that Peterson is Rasooled. NTZ achieves it's trick by the not-very-subtle method of redefining the meaning of "global cooling scare". Instead of being a worry about…

Against Kaku-ism

I had lunch with Ethan Zuckerman yesterday, and we were talking about technology and communicating science to a mass audience, and Michio Kaku came up. Specifically, the fact that he's prone to saying stuff that's just flat wrong, if not batshit crazy-- see this angry post from 2010 for an example. It was amusing, then, to return to my RSS reader and find first Sean Carroll and then Matt Strassler expressing outrage and annoyance over some incredibly dumb things Kaku said about the Higgs Boson. My initial reaction was along the lines of "Yeah, welcome to the club," but I suspect that that's…

The Story of the Three Hippopotamuses

Tell me a story. Tell me the story about the three hippopotamuses. Ummm... OK. Once upon a time, there were three hipopotamuses. And they lived in Africa, in a river. Right, it was a great big long river, that had so much salt in it that they could float! Well, salt does help things float, but rivers are usually fresh water. Anyway, hippos are pretty fat, so they can float in fresh water. OK And one day... What happened then? One day, a nice giraffe came to the river and said "Please can I drink a little bit of your water." And the hippos said "OK." Then the giraffe drank a little bit of…

Links for 2012-04-30

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Class Dismissed In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder if the root of the problem with public higher education in America is that it was designed to create and support a massive middle class. And we've tacitly decided as a society that a massive middle class is not a priority. We're trying to fulfill a mission that the country has largely abandoned. When the goal of a prosperous middle class was tacitly dismissed, dominos started to fall. The meme making the rounds last week was the announcement that outstanding student loan debt in America…

Links for 2012-04-18

What's up in the solar system in April 2012 - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society Lest you get too depressed about the mothballing of the Space Shuttles, a roundup of all the cool space probes out there producing real science. Yes, I Took My Ninth Grader on a College Tour (and It Was Worth It) - NYTimes.com The purpose of bringing busloads of middle-school children to campuses is not to emphasize a particular place. Mr. O'Hara says he downplays the names of particular campuses. They visit student centers, libraries and dorms, take in a varsity basketball game, and meet with…

Runic Aerobics Disliked by Nazis

In Nazi Germany and its occupied territories there were many ways to get thrown into an extermination camp. But Friedrich Marby broke some kind of record: he was sent to Dachau for publishing too silly ideas about runes. He survived. The Nazis themselves were no strangers to occultism, particularly Heinrich Himmler, whose neo-Pagan religious movement I've touched upon before. Movements similar to today's New Age, neo-paganism and occultism flourished in the early 20th century. But Marby was too much even for Himmler: he invented runic aerobics. Marby's ideas took off from the cosmic and…

UK Contract Archaeology in Deep Slump

As pointed out here many times before, archaeology is a bad career choice as the labour market is tiny and ridiculously overpopulated. I mainly keep tabs on the academic subset of this labour market. But via Alun I've received news that UK contract archaeology, the business where you remove and document sites that get in the way of land development, is in poor shape because of the economic recession. The Institute for Archaeologists announces that one in six jobs in contract archaeology has been lost since the start of the recession, with more losses likely in the near future. In Sweden,…

Unsuccessfully Greening Public Transport

Skiing Break was action packed for the kids. Monday museum, Tuesday playland, Wednesday skiing with grampa, Thursday swimming, Friday museum & puppet theatre and a museum-organised LAN party for the 10-y-o. Yesterday's museum was the Public Transport Museum which shares an entrance and a ticket with the Toy Museum. Lots of buses and trams, including one bus standing on a service pit where you can descend and check out the under side of the vehicle. Juniorette and I made a pink train carriage in the children's workshop. One thing that caught my eye was a mothballed experimental hybrid bus…

With Juniorette at the Playland

I never thought I'd be writing about Iron Age political geography at a place called Andy's Playland. It's Skiing Break, and because of preparations for our recent move my wife and I never got round to booking accommodations up north as we often have in recent years. This week, instead we take turns with the old folks at minding the children while they're on break. Yesterday, having been tipped off by Ãsa of Ting & Tankar, my wife took our daughter to the Museum of Nordic Culture where she had a blast in the kids' room. Today, she wanted me to take her to Andy's over at the old Sickla…

Fighter Plane Ammo

Ammunition is extremely easy to find with a metal detector. Cartridges are large chunks of brass, which would make them obtrusive even if they were just spheres. But they are in fact sheet-metal cylinders closed at one end, which means that whatever orientation they have in the ground, there is usually two metal planes reflecting the detector's signal. They shrill like mad. Above is a pic of two cartridges I picked up at Sättuna today. The left-hand one is the most common type in Swedish farmland, used mainly to hunt large mammals, but also I believe in standard-issue army rifles of the…

Swedish Pitfalls

Swedish has a number of subtleties designed to keep furriners from learning the language of glory and heroes™. A famous one is the genders of our nouns, where almost every one is either of our two neutral genders -- apparently haphazardly selected. Another one is certain non-trivial uses of the definite article suffix: you can't say "I'm looking for that record by Roy Zimmerman, you know", you have to say "I'm looking for that record-the by Roy Zimmerman, you know". A particularly good thing we've got going is that we don't have any verb corresponding to "to put". Instead, everything you…

LeGuin Physics Bug

Since some time in the early 80s I've laboured delightedly and intermittently to catch up with Ursula K. LeGuins oeuvre. I've covered her collections of short fiction and essays, and I will soon have her novels done, leaving the poetry and short kids' books. Apart from her latest novel, I've yet to read 1980's The Beginning Place. In fact, I'm reading it now. And it's a good read so far, a critique of modern US society foreshadowing Always Coming Home. But there's one curious bug in the logic. Imagine a gate to another world. When you pass the gate your perceptions continue without break: you…

We'll be back next year

The belated conclusion to the exciting saga of this year's Cambridge town bumps. As you'll recall, yesterday we fell to Press, and today (well, Friday the 25th, I'll date-change the post but this is actually written in August) we went down again, to St Neots, for a net minus one on the week. That's maybe a touch unfortunate in our choice of surrounding crews, but such is life. Today's plan was simple and the only one available to us: start fast and see if maybe we could sneak up on Press. It wasn't really viable, and although we got to 3/4 of a length at First Post that was the high point.…

Pattern Recognition in Physics: its back! Sort of

At pattern-recognition-in-physics.com/ There's an editorial which at the end notes The journal will initially be run on private founding, later to be transformed to a permanent publishing house. Or, put another way, currently its a blog, but if they can fool anyone into taking it on, they will. The editorial also announces the happy re-opening of the journal under a new management. New management? Well the new editorial board is here, and the old (via wayback machine) is here. The new board is definitely slimmed down. Its: Editor In Chief: - Sid-Ali OUADFEUL Co-Editor In Chief:- Nils-Axel…

The AR5 comments are available!

Can I really be the first to snark about this? Expert and Government Review Comments on the IPCC WGI AR5 Second Order Draft – General is now available for download. As you'd expect, the pompous "Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, United Kingdom" notches up a string of "reject", please read the guidelines. Someone called "Jyrki Kauppinen, Finland" gets all his comments rejected with "please read what we said the first time". That was just the general stuff. There may be some treasures buried in the individual chapters. John McLean gets lots of retractions; he seems to be some NN from the ASSC…

Dada

Quite some time ago I re wrote the Dada article on wiki to be more in the spirit of the movement. It didn't last long. My thoughts were irrestistably drawn to that when I saw a can climate count global How lay on skeptic’s view warming ("thanks" R) at WUWT; here I present a translation that makes more sense than the original, a sort of anti-Dadaist art, if you will. A a a a a a a a a agitated alarmists am an an And and and any apart apple apple argue ask at back bodies Bowring but But by call Cambridge can can century change Christopher climate climate climatology dare dare day denier…

Just 90 companies caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions?

That's what the Graun says. Timmy says Complete and total bollocks here. Or, if you prefer a more measured version he says Fossil Fuel Companies Do Not Cause Carbon Emissions, We Consumers Do. Timmy is right. The Graun is wrong. The Graun says Climate change experts said the data set was the most ambitious effort so far to hold individual carbon producers, rather than governments, to account. But it isn't. Its an attempt to shift the blame off us lot so we can all relax and spew out yet more CO2 and say "oh no, its not our fault, look, the Graun says its all the fault of those nasty fossil…

The Bottleneck Years, by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 49

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 48 Table of Contents Chapter 50 Chapter 49 Solstice, December 27, 2056 I have not been writing much, because I have been busy with the lichen. Annoyingly, the symbiotic signalling continues to elude me. A colleague at CCU collaborated with me on a paper. "An examination of the laboratory growth rates of the lichen eFontaine1" by Luc C. Fontaine and George R. Collins. eFontaine1 was the proper name, but we all called it eF1. Last year by unspoken assent, Edie and I both more or less ignored xmas. This year Anna was old enough that she would…

Democracy and Liberty

Sheldon Richman of the Future of Freedom foundation has an excellent article in the Chicago Sun-Times about the distinction between democracy and liberty, a point I make regularly and loudly on this blog. Richman writes: But it would be a mistake to equate democratic procedures with freedom, which the Bush administration and many others are eager to do. There is a big difference between democracy and freedom. In fact, democracy can be, and has been, the engine of freedom's destruction. Definitions matter. What is democracy? Literally, it means that the people rule. But what does that mean?…