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Announcing My New Essay Collection

In December of last year I finished a collection of short humorous archaeological essays. It's my sixth book, my first one in Swedish, my first one aimed at the lay reader. Since then I've been waiting for established Swedish publishing houses to pronounce judgement on it. Five of them have now turned it down, none with any very detailed explanation, but most of them in terms suggesting that they think it's competently written but it probably wouldn't sell much. As a long-time blogger and e-book reader, I am not particularly disheartened by this. After all, this blog has a greater number of…

Ritual Depositions In A Future River

I've linked before to Christina Fredengren's ground-breaking paper in Fornvännen 2015:3 about human and animal remains found in wet contexts in Uppland province (the area around Uppsala). The study's empirical base is solid and eye-opening. I don't find find the theoretical superstructure that the author briefly sketches onto it (the titular ”water politics”) convincing. But that's not my main complaint about this otherwise excellent piece of research. Look at the map above, covering a small part of the study area. Bear in mind that due to the relieved pressure of the inland ice, land rises…

Cutting-edge influenza research frozen

This past weekend I hung out at a brand-spanking new con, the Atlanta SciFi and Fantasy Expo. Made a bunch of new friends-- including the proud owner of an actual T.A.R.D.I.S. Randy and I had a marvelous time talking about ghosts, yetis, and vaccines/viruses. I sent him a link to my FreeOK talks including this one: Randy booped right back with this: NIH moving ahead with review of risky virology studies (February 25, 2015) I gave that talk June 23, 2012, but I started talking about one topic in that presentation a bit earlier: OMFG KILLER FLU WARBLEGARBLE TERRORISM AAAAAAAAAH!!! (April 2,…

'Dismal prognosis' with leukemia? Nothing a GMO virus cant fix.

Using a genetically modified HIV-1 to genetically modify leukemia patients T-cells to teach them how to kill the cancer? YAWN! Thats childs play, at this point. Lets give those GMO viruses a real challenge. Lets get them to fight a real bastard form of leukemia-- B-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (B-ALL) in adults. In kids, B-ALL has high cure rates (>80% cured). In adults, things are more difficult (38% are alive 5 years post-diagnosis). Things get much more difficult if the adult has relapsed (7% alive 5 years post-diagnosis). Can a GMO HIV-1 do better than 7% in relapsed adult B-ALL…

Have a dog? Want to help science?

Record yourself playing with your puppies for 30-60 seconds and upload the vid to the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab website! Dog-dog play has been, relatively, well studied. The signs/signals/noises pups play, the repercussions for not playing by the rules, the benefits of play to an adult pup, its a very interesting fusion of evolution and animal behavior (unless you dont believe in using evolution and observation to study animal behavior...). Some of the dog-dog play stuff I use as a human, I know.  For instance, when puppies are playing, and one plays too rough, the 'victim' will make a high…

HPV and head/neck/throat cancer

The 'debate' over the HPV vaccine has thus far has been a tug-of-war with radical religion/conservative politicians/nutbar anti-vaxers on one side, and the lives of women on the other side. The HPV vaccine has been A Female Issue. Turns out the people opposing the HPV vaccine were damning male children, as well. Though I wrote about how HPV can cause head/neck/throat cancers in both genders before, there is more and more evidence coming to light that everyone, male and female, will benefit from the HPV vaccine series: Local Inflammation and Human Papillomavirus Status of Head and Neck Cancers…

Antivaxers are obviously not suffering from post-polio syndrome

The Oklahoman just had a really interesting article up on polio support groups in Oklahoma City: Oklahoma City polio support group helps residents understand disease I freely admit to forgetting the real-world side of my research, at times. Especially for diseases like polio, which have been eradicated in my country since before I was born-- my study/interest in them is purely academic. Its not 'real' anymore-- its a very interesting chapter in a history book. This article was enlightening. Polio is not just something that happened long ago in a galaxy far, far away. There are people who…

Scientific Commuting: How Much Faster?

Back in the summer, I did a post mathematically comparing two routes to campus, one with a small number of traffic lights, the other with a larger number of stop signs, and looked at which would be faster. Later on, I did the experiment, too.) Having spent a bunch of time on this, I was thinking about whether I could use this as a problem for the intro physics class. I decided against it last fall, but something else reminded me of this, and I started poking at it again. So, I played around a bit with some numbers, and came up with the following possible framing for a question. I'll throw…

Links for 2012-03-15

Ask Moxie: Welcome to Moxie Madness! Welcome to Moxie Madness 2012: Misery Poker Tournament! 64 mothering calamities go mano-a-mano in a single elimination tournament like you've never seen before. Only one mothering problem can be the champion... Vote for which problem is worse in a series of shoot-from-the-hip head-to-head matchups that will leave you breathless. First matchups start Thursday. Final Championship Match April 2. Are you ready to rumble? DOJ vs. book publishers: Who cares if Apple and publishers are colluding to raise e-book prices? - Slate Magazine A bit buried in last week…

On Cox vs. Swans

The other controversial thing this week that I shouldn't get involved in is the debate over whether Brian Cox is talking nonsense in a recent discussion of the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Tom at Swans on Tea kicked this off with an inflammatory title, and Cox turned up in the comments to take umbrage at that. Sean Carroll provides a calmer and very thorough discussion, the comments to which include a number of well-known science popularizers duking it out. My take on it is basically the same as Tom and Jim Kakalios in Sean's comments: unless the two particles you're talking about are within…

The Advent Calendar of Physics: The Spring's the Thing

Continuing our countdown to Newton's birthday, let's acknowledge the contributions of one of his contemporaries and rivals with today's equation: This is, of course, Hooke's Law for a spring, which he famously published in 1660: ceiiinosssttuv Clears everything right up, doesn't it? OK, maybe not. This one's not only in Latin, it's a cryptogram, unscrambling to "ut tensio sic vis," which translates roughly to "as the extension, so the force," giving the correct proportionality between the force exerted by a spring or other elastic material and the amount that material has been stretched.…

Links for 2011-08-20

Things I can only teach you in research § Unqualified Offerings "When I'm teaching a regular class, I know the answer. Or I don't know the answer, but I think I do. Or I know I don't know the answer for sure, but I'm "pretty sure" what the answer is and I'm winging it because it's just that sort of day. But I can't say the things that I said to one of my research students today. (Note that this is a condensed summary, there was a lot of discussion between us, and a lot of pauses to examine data.)" Brian Phillips on Conan the Barbarian - Grantland "As with Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and…

Links for 2011-07-20

The Strategic Plan: Neither Strategy Nor Plan, but a Waste of Time - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education "This interchangeability of visions for the future underscores the fact that the precise content of most colleges' strategic plans is pretty much irrelevant. Plans are usually forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts-and-sciences strategic plan in the past 15 years. No one can remember much about any of those plans, but another one is in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is,…

Great Moments in Deceptive Graphs

This morning, via Twitter, I ran across one of the most spectacular examples of deceptive data presentation that I've ever seen. The graph in question is reproduced in this blog post by Bryan Caplan, and comes from this econ paper about benefits of education. The plot looks like this: This is one panel clipped out of a four-part graph, showing the percentage of survey respondents reporting that they are satisfied with their current job. The horizontal axis is the years of schooling for different categories of respondents. So, I looked at that, and said "Wow, people with more education are…

Graduation 2011

It was the sort of mid-June morning that global warming deniers dream of: cold and threatening rain. the rain held off until all the speakers had spoken, all the graduates had done their walk across the stage, and all the degrees had been passed out. That's as much as you can ask for, really. through a quirk of teaching schedules, I actually knew fewer people in this graduating class than most others-- I didn't teach the big intro courses in their first year, so I didn't see the usual crop of would-be engineers. I've seen this year's physics graduates a lot, though-- I've had them all in…

Links for 2011-05-28

Bob Dylan is turning 70: Let's take a look at some of the weird shit he's done | Music | The A.V. Club Twin Cities "Dylan's musical brilliance is already a solidified fact, his onstage antics have already been covered, and plenty more ink has been spilled about his standing as a prickly interview subject, so why not, instead, honor the man with a list of some of his most randomly wacky moments?" (tags: music culture history avclub blogs silly) The story behind the world's oldest museum, built by a Babylonian princess 2,500 years ago - io9 " In 1925, archaeologist Leonard Woolley…

Links for 2011-05-21

SLR Camera Simulator | Simulates a digital SLR camera "Practice using an SLR camera... Experiment with the lighting, ISO, aperture, shutter, and distance settings while observing the readings in the camera viewfinder Click the "Snap photo!" button Review your photo!" (tags: technology pictures internet computing) Astrogator's Logs » Blog Archive » Area 51: Teen Commies from Outer Space! "Jacobsen's addition (asserted with a completely straight face and demanding to be taken seriously) is that this craft contained "genetically/surgically altered" teenagers engineered by Josef Mengele at…

Thursday Royalty Blogging 042111

I'm sitting on the couch reading when Emmy trots in looking excited. "Hey, dude, I've got a great idea!" she says cheerily. "You know how your puppy is away for the week?" "Yeah." "Well, I think this is the perfect opportunity to class up your blog a little. I mean, you always post pictures of her on Thursdays, but she's not here to take a picture of, so..." "So... What?" "Well, you should post some pictures of me, silly!" "Yeah," she says. "Just like that. I'm an excellent dog!" "Yes, you're the best. The Queen of Niskayuna." She flops over, and I rub her belly. She's quiet for a minute,…

Podcast Passions

A week ago I complained that I couldn't find any good podcasts, and you guys responded with a wealth of recommendations. More to my surprise, a number of irate fans of the popular Nobody Likes Onions podcast showed up. They left a bunch of nasty comments to the effect that I am a stuck-up faggot who needs hair implants etc. This is kind of funny since what I had said in a possibly ironic way was that I don't like the top-10 podcasts, but that this was only to be expected since most people are morons and so anything with mass appeal is unlikely to be any good. I gotta say that the NLO…

I've Been Blog Conned and It Was A Blast

Whew, what a day! I've been to the Second NC Science Blogging Conference, and I've had a blast. The best part was actually to meet loads and loads of blogging friends whom I'd only seen in pictures. Amazing to actually meet them, hug or shake hands, talk and laugh. I even listened in as Bora chatted in Serbian with a compatriot. These are the eighteen nineteen SciBlings I managed to bag (I'll put all those links in later, too tired & jet lagged now): Tara of Aetiology Evil Monkey of Neurotopia Shelley of Retrospectacle James of Island of Doubt Sheril & Chris of The Intersection Bora…

Main Swedish 30s Archaeo-Nazi Named "O", not "SL"

Here's breaking news. Many European archaeologists feel bad about Nazi archaeology in the past. In my opinion, this is usually way overstated: a few of our pre-War colleagues were Nazis, which was opportune at the time, but archaeology had (and has) nothing like the kind of political oomph necessary to take any significant part in actually giving the Nazis power. Archaeologists are political opportunists by necessity because we're so poorly funded, which is one reason that everybody in the field today is a humanistic liberal like myself. We are now in general neither more nor less good-…

11th Century Reliquary Crucifix

A long-time friend of my parents wrote me a letter recently, telling me that she'd found something unusual in her late mother's jewellery box. Today I visited her and had a look. It's a small cast copper-alloy crucifix, darkly patinated, with a semi-obliterated image of the crucified Christ incised onto the front surface. The piece is made like a box, hollow on the back side, with loops at the top and bottom as if it had originally been joined to a back piece. Its dimensions are 82 by 45 by 5 mm, length 70 mm if you disregard the loops. The crucifix has no provenance, and its owner can only…

Six New Coins of Olof

Olof Eriksson skotkonungr (c. 980-1021) is the first man of whom historical sources of adequate quality tell that he managed to get himself elected king of both the Götar and the Svear. These tribal groups had previously been organised separately, and thus Olof may fairly be seen as the first king of Sweden as we know it. Olof's main power base was the town of Sigtuna between Stockholm and Uppsala, founded by his father King Erik as a Christian replacement for the pagan trading post on Björkö (Biaerkey, latinicised Birca). Sigtuna was the site of Sweden's first known mint, where English…

New Age Vibes at Archaeological Sites

Recent discoveries by my friend Lars got me thinking about New Age archaeology. The Mid-summer hippie/druid vs. police battles for Stonehenge are legendary. A few years ago I was given a guided tour of the Salisbury Plain's finest sites by my charming scholar friend Rebecca Montague. Entering the West Kennet long barrow's megalithic burial chamber, I felt a marked scent of joss sticks. Becca told me about Mid-summer nights at Silbury Hill, when she was posted to kindly ask hippies not to scale the vulnerable monument. Many agreed not to, but one greying lady became very irate. Before stomping…

What a strange phenomenon…

MAJeff started it all. Here I go and set up this blog just so I can lord it over a readership, and the readers starthaving a good time talking to each other, and they seem to have noticed that they are of like minds and find each other to be interesting — perhaps more interesting than the blog owner — and there is a growing awareness that they don't need me. So MAJeff is organizing a Boston Pharyngulite get-together, a group with no masters, not even me, but of similar free-thinking, scientifically-inclined minds. Now I'm getting more requests in email to help people gather local…

Modelling the World in Real Time

[More blog entries about memory, psychology, loss; minnet, psykologi, förluster.] Here's a thought that's been floating around my head for a while. Let's look at the world as a stage play. Turns out there's a difference between a) our memories of dramatic events, b) our ideas about scenery and dramatis personae. I spent a finite number of days in my childhood home at Vikingavägen 28. Large, but finite. I do remember events that took place there. But I also carry around a model of the place in my head. Closing my eyes, I can wander around the house and yard as it looked in, say, 1980. The…

Danish Gold Fibula and Ring

Archaeologists love preciousss metals. Not for their monetary value, but because they keep so well. Take a fine damascened sword whose blade ripples like water, so well balanced that you hardly feel its weight, and bury it: it will look like crap after a few centuries. Bury a golden object, and it will in most cases remain unchanged for millennia. It's basically a question of information integrity. Materials like flint and gold allow us to see exactly what prehistoric people saw, and to understand that their material culture was no less skilfully made and eye-catching than ours. Today…

Science Bloggers for Students 2012

I'm barely keeping my head above water with the day job at the moment, so I'm a bit behind the curve on this. It's October, though, which means it's time for a DonorsChoose fundraiser. If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you've seen a few of these. If not, there's too much to explain, but let me sum up: DonorsChoose matches people with money with schools that need money, and takes donations to support specific projects proposed by teachers in needy school districts. A whole host of fine science blogs have been recruited to raise funds through blog-specific pages, and a…

Still Stuck in Paragraph Two

This one's for Matthew Francis, whose tweet from yesterday lodged this in my head until I broke down and typed it out. With apologies to Stealer's Wheel and their Dylanesque pop bubblegum classic: Still Stuck in Paragraph Two Well, I don't know why I came here tonight, I brought the laptop but still just can't write. I try and try but the words just aren't there, and it makes me want to pull out my hair. Nouns to the left of me, verbs off to my right and I'm still stuck in paragraph two. Yes, I'm still stuck in paragraph two, how to go on, I haven't a clue. It's so hard for me to find the…

Links for 2012-06-21

In which we look at the failure of elites, and the international language of bad dancing. ------------ Why Elites Fail | The Nation A pure functioning meritocracy would produce a society with growing inequality, but that inequality would come along with a correlated increase in social mobility. As the educational system and business world got better and better at finding inherent merit wherever it lay, you would see the bright kids of the poor boosted to the upper echelons of society, with the untalented progeny of the best and brightest relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid where…

Spiffy New Digs, Suggestions Wanted

So, as you may or may not have noticed, ScienceBlogs has gotten a makeover. If you read via RSS, you might not notice anything, but if you come to the blog itself, you'll see a new look. The previous three-column layout is gone, and posts on the front page now show only short excerpts and "featured" images. This makes us look more like the blogs at National Geographic, the new Corporate Masters (for a good while now, actually, but they only just did the redesign). On the back end, we've changed from Movable Type to WordPress, which will take a little getting used to, but which lots of people…

Union College in the "Frozen Four"

While none of the college basketball teams I root for made the Final Four in their respective tournaments, I probably really ought to note that there is a team that might loosely be termed "mine" that's playing in the national semifinal. Then again, since they've gotten this far without me saying anything about them at all, maybe they'd be just as happy if I continued my benevolent neglect... We're all science types here, though, so to hell with superstition: Union College, where I work, plays hockey at the NCAA Division I level, and has made it to the "Frozen Four," the semifinals of the…

150 Years of Continual Discoveries

Sean B. Carroll's latest book has been sitting on my reading shelf (and been read by my wife) for over four months, but now I've finally read it. Remarkable Creatures is a collection of mini-biographies of people who have made important discoveries in evolutionary biology. I won't mention names, but we've got both of the scientists who discovered evolution, the guy who discovered mimicry, the man who found the first Homo erectus fossils on Java, the man who discovered the Cambrian Burgess shale with its soft-part fossils, the man who found the first dinosaur nests, the father and son team…

New/Old 6th Century Find on Bornholm

In early May (I was <this> close to capitalising "Early" because I write about archaeological periods all the time.) metal detectorists on Bornholm, Denmark, rediscovered one of the earliest-documented find spots of guldgubbar. These are tiny embossed gold foils depicting people: usually a single man, sometimes an embracing man and woman, less frequently a single woman. They are a diagnostic artefact type of the Vendel Period's elite manor sites (AD 530-790). A cool thing about the new find is that is contains gold bracteates as well, which suggests that we are dealing with one of the…

Bookshelves

I'm now in that state of summer leisure mixed with the responsibility of providing entertainment for the kids that causes a man to forget what day it is of the week. And so a week's fun is no longer restricted to its last two days. But I have done nothing grandiose lately: mainly pottered about and enjoyed being reunited with my lady wife after her recent visit to the in-laws. Anyway, Friday and Saturday were largely taken up by housework of the interior decoration kind. My dad likes to suggest grandiose changes to our house and incite my wife into supporting his ideas, but as he also…

Where The Action Is Rock Festival, Day 2

[More blog entries about wheretheactionis, rockfestival, Sweden, duffy, magicnumbers, jennywilson, elperrodelmar, musik, rock, pop; musik, rock, pop, rockfestival, wheretheactionis, duffy, jennywilson, magicnumbers, elperrodelmar.] Second day of a rainy festival. This time I had the best of company: my wife joined me to hear Duffy. But we started out with excellent popsters the Magic Numbers. Good music, charming banter and nice to look at. Jenny Wilson was yet another impressive Swedish surprise to me. She looks like David Bowie in drag and sings like the love child of Prince and Annie…

Medieval Church Demolished, Rune Stones Found

Högby near Mjölby in Ãstergötland is a magical place because of a serious lack of historical sensitivity. In 1876 (which is really late as these things go in Sweden) the locals demolished their little 12th century church and built a new bigger one a mile to the south. This meant that the parish centre of a millennium or so became a backwater and has not been built over later. It's completely rural, abutting a farm's back yard, very quiet. All that remains of the church is the churchyard wall and one of Ãstergötland's finest rune stones that was taken out of the sacristy wall. Some fine…

Gonzo Investment Suggestion

Eight years ago I sold half an apartment to my former wife and found myself, for the first time, with a sum of money to invest. I did what conventional wisdom recommended at the time: stuck all the money into a mutual fund. I chose an "ethical" one, that doesn't invest in the arms trade etc., but I don't think that's the reason that the whole move proved to be a financial mistake. (The fund in question has a good Morningstar rating.) My share in that fund has never to my knowledge even been worth what I originally paid for it, and the simple reason is that apparently I bought near the top of…

Swedish Peace Activists Vandalise US Arms

A few hours ago, activists broke into two Swedish arms factories and vandalised weapons destined for US and Indian military forces. Among other things, they rendered twenty m/48 Carl Gustaf bazookas inoperable. This really takes me back. An older cousin of mine used to be an activist in the Plowshares Movement. In 1993 him and some friends broke into a military airfield outside Linköping and, using hammers, disarmed a number of JAS 39 fighter planes. They made no attempt to escape afterwards, quietly got arrested and spent a year in jail. While in prison, my cousin was called "Jesus" by the…

My Weird Camp Counselor

A memory. A lot of Swedish middle-class kids get sent to confirmation camp when they're 14. It's basically a crash course in Christianity and ends with first communion. My brother went through his course and then refused the wafer & wine. This actually endeared him to the priest, as it showed him to have taken the issue seriously. But I went through with it all. I was basically agnostic at the time, but one of the camp counselors imparted a piece of non-standard theology that tipped the scales for me. His name was Roland, and he said "It's the world's best deal. Accept communion and get…

Bad beekeeping, 2015

At this time of the year, as I cycle past the rape fields (this isn't a reference to some Balkan horror, just the plant), I take note of the dying of the yellow, for it signifies that the spring recolte is once again due. I measure my life by the passing of such seasons: the winter league; tideway, the summer bumps; and the honey harvest. Today was a bank holiday, so after coxing the dev IV and playing at pairs with Paul, I had time for some beekeeping, and planting a magnolia. Here are the pre-harvest hives. This underplays the degree of weed; task number one was to hack them out of the…

Bad beekeeping, May 2014

It is May, when an old man's thoughts turn to bees. There's been a certain amount of swarm-catching but nothing too exciting. I thought I'd write down where I'm up to, for future reference and perhaps as some light relief from the silliness. Lesson number one, of course, is that if your hive has a pitched roof you need to make sure that the wire mesh covering the ventilation holes hasn't got eaten away by time. Or this may happen. The bizarre roof-garden effect is mostly a bird's nest, and either the moss has survived and thrived or the bird got carried away. If you can't cope with tragedy,…

Exciting times in the Ukraine

Suppose you were a citizen of the Ukraine. Which way would you rather turn: to Europe or Russia? The answer is so obvious its hardly worth asking the question. Now suppose you're the rather thuggish Prez of the Ukraine, and that part of turning towards Europe involves cracking down on your own corruption, not to mention being forced to free the previous Prez PM, who you've banged up on spurious charges. Whereas Russia, in the person of Putin, doesn't give a toss about civil rights or corruption. And so the scene is set for an exciting clash. Just like in Syria, just like in Uganda, the…

ERV on Epigenetics

The discussion PZ and I had a couple of weeks ago sparked a lot of fun questions from viewers/readers. PZ covered a TON of the basics last week, so I figured I better step up to explain my view of epigenetics! Epigenetics is inherited. Take agouti mice, for an example. If you alter how much folic acid a female mouse eats, you alter the epigenetic profiles of her grandpups. Folic acid starts off a chain reaction that leads to methlyation (silencing) of DNA, leading to different fur colors due to differential 'silencing' of a retroviral promoter and the 'agouti' gene. No matter how much…

TWO MORE GAPS! TWO MORE GAPS! WHOOO!!!

Per Ahlberg and his crew just found another fossil along the fish-->tetrapod line! WHOO!!! Ventastega curonica and the origin of tetrapod morphology All the major news sources have picked up on this story already, with all the crappy journalism we have come to expect from most contemporary 'science' writers... ugh... So why dont you all just head over to TalkRational and ask Per himself about his research ;) Side note to Per-- Dear Prof. Ahlberg, This is my second request for your data underlying your recent paper, "Ventastega curonica and the origin of tetrapod morphology," published…

REPOST: PERVs

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 ;) Departmental retreat today! Enjoy some PERVS in the mean time (open access journal, w00t!) PERVs: Porcine Endogenous Retroviruses. hehehehe This months Journal of Virology has a cool article on pigs version of HERVs: Porcine endogenous retrovirus integration sites in the…

Poll crash!!

As PZ reported, my bestest bestest friend in all of Oklahoma has escaped from her cage again. You remember her 'HOMOZ IS GUNNA KILLLLLLL USSSS!!!' rant? That rant also included, you guessed it, "EVILUTION IS GUNNA KILLLLLL USSSSS!!!: Another practical benefit of Christianity was the elevation of knowledge, of learning, of science, okay, of the arts. ... ... he believed that we needed to have a society that was based upon Christian principles because elevation of science, elevation of knowledge is very important if you're going to have an informed public. And I believe it was Thomas Payne…

We have a problem

The archbishop of Wales thinks one of the greatest problems facing the world is "atheist fundamentalism". The only problems he seems to be able to ascribe to it, though, are a dearth of school nativity plays and stewardesses failing to drape themselves with religious paraphernalia, neither of which seem to be exactly pressing crises, especially since it is quite clear that there is no worldwide shortage of public piety. If all outspoken atheism has done is offend a few sanctimonious old bishops, it sounds to me like a virtue that we ought to encourage. I'd say that this is a much more serious…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor, Chapter 47

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 46 Table of Contents Chapter 48 Chapter 47 Symbiosis, September 27, 2056 The next time I got into the lab, I started pulling apart lichen just to get a feel for the territory. Lichen is a symbiosis of an algae and a fungus. The fungus in the north is usually an ascomycetes. The algal component is usually a simple green algae, although occasionally a blue-green algae is found. A lot of work had been done on green algae earlier in the century while investigating their suitability for biofuel. It was the fungal component, the ascomycetes, which…

Catching up...

Things have been quiet here, even more than the usual slow pace... I am back now from a trip to Europe where I left the family with the kids maternal grandparents and I won't see them for nine weeks in all.  This was a bad plan, but it was the plan.  I have been home for a couple of weeks already, but I managed to lose my laptop traveling.  Yes, that is a big pain in the behind and it has made many previously simple and efficient things more difficult.  Mind you, it could have been much worse as the external hard drive I always keep in my laptop bag was not in my laptop bag and this is where…