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Villa Sophia Cab 2008: The Beginnings

This weekend the grapes for my second "real" batch of wine were delivered to Mountain Homebrew and Wine Supply. Last years vintage, Villa Sophia "La Gruccia" was a success in that it didn't turn to vinegar and that over time it is definitely mellowing out, but I wouldn't say it was a fantastic wine. This year I'm a bit more hopeful and have some ideas for how to modify my process to produce a better wine. Saturday, October 25: Picked up grapes from Mountain Homebrew. I order 150 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon, a full 50 pounds more than last year which should give me a yield of around 70 to…

Memory chips from Neuron Cultures

Memory for computers is getting pretty large, but it is still based on basically the same system that it was several years ago. They have just gotten better a fabricating them. It is an interesting question to ask whether we could store memories in alternative substrates such as biological ones. The idea is an intriguing one, particularly when we are talking about neurons, because while the capacity of biological networks isn't infinite, it is pretty damn large. Just think of the system for long-term memories in your brain. The fact that you can remember your first grade teachers name…

No, Obama really did not say that...

One of my occasional readers just forwarded me the following email. A quick google search reveals that the same story has been making the rounds of the wingnuttier segments of the intertubes over few months. (By the way, nutbars, the word you're looking for is "gaff", not "gaft". UNBELIEVABLE PRESIDENT??? THIS HAS GOT TO BE THE MOST OUTRAGEOUS STATEMENT EVER MADE BY A PUBLIC OFFICIAL, LET ALONE BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. THIS GUY IS OUR "COMMANDER IN CHIEF". HE IS A DISGRACE! HERE IS HIS RESPONSE WHEN HE BACKED OFF FROM HIS DECISION TO LET THE MILITARY PAY FOR THEIR WAR…

Terror Attack on Australia Shock Horror

The Power Line blog informs us that the Kerry campaign has mounted a "terrorist attack on Australia": "We all know that Kerry's sister is over in Australia telling the Aussies to vote for their [leftist] candidate if they want to be safer from terrorist attacks; that they need to pull their troops out of Iraq, and not help the U.S. (because that's why they will be, and have been attacked). So, how is this NOT a soft terrorist attack on Australia from the Kerry campaign? She goes over there, and with words instead of bombs, terrorizes the…

Energy Efficiency

I think one of the most important tests of behavioral economics will arrive in the next few years, as we attempt to persuade consumers to improve energy efficiency in the home. Just imagine if, instead of installing granite on every kitchen countertop, we'd instead spent that money on better window seals and insulation. Of course, if people were rational agents, we wouldn't need cleverly constructed "choice environments," since the vast majority of efficiency improvements pay for themselves with reduced energy bills within a few years. (According to Energy Star, buying more efficient…

Storm World Receives Starred Reviews From Both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus

My new book, Storm World, will not be out for another two months yet; it hits in early July. However, the early reviews are coming in from outlets serving the literary and publishing industry such as Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. And I'm now tremendously pleased to be able to report that both of these publications have singled out the book, giving it starred reviews. The reviews themselves are reproduced in full below the fold; the Publisher's Weekly version is also available online without a password (search for my name or the title). From Publishers Weekly: (Starred Review) Storm…

Saving face on the ice

Liz and Celeste are on vacation, so we're re-posting some content from our old site. By Celeste Monforton, originally posted 11/4/09 I admit it: I have a soft spot for hockey players. It probably stems from my Michigan upbringing, including my family's winter-time ritual of making an outdoor hockey rink, and the annual trek from Detroit to Nantias Sport Shop on Wyandotte Street in Windsor, Ontario to buy new hockey skates and gear for my male siblings. Brothers Roger and Dave wore (Bobby Orr's) Boston Bruin jerseys while brother Tony favored Chicago Blackhawks' (Keith Magnuson's) colors…

With Great Traffic Comes Great Responsibility

At the suggestion of our resident ethicist, we've decided to try to use the power of ScienceBlogs to do some good. Thus, we present the first-ever ScienceBlogs Charity Fundraiser. Here's the deal: An organization called Donors Choose solicits proposals from school teachers who want equipment that their districts can't provide. They then accept donations toward the purchase of those items, and give the money to the districts and teachers who need it. The proposals range from requests for money to buy computers and other tech gadgets (LCD projectors are a popular request) to books for use in…

“We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”

We were discussing insects. What about eating insects? When it comes up that I've lived in the Central African Rain Forest, certain questions often come up, and one of them is: "Did you eat bugs?" Every one has seen those National Geographic specials where some natives somewhere are eating insects, and of course, Westerners who think they generally don't eat insects are fascinated with the idea. However, Westerners eat a lot more insects than they think. You should really consider any processed food you eat that started out as a plant crop to be part insect. If what you are eating is…

Giant Comics Round-Up

I stopped by the library the other day, just to see if they had anything new, and I happened across the graphic novel section, which actually had a fairly decent selection of collected comics. As I've said before, I balk at paying $20 for soemthing that will take me an hour to read, particularly if I don't know whetehr I'll like it. You can't beat free, though, so I checked a bunch of stuff out of the library to see what it's like. I'll collect them together here so as not to swamp the blog with separate comic posts. 100 Bullets I originally picked up just the first volume of this, and then…

Lost Tomb of Jesus

Last week, I promised I'd watch this documentary about the "lost tomb of Jesus" because it was being advertised here on Pharyngula. Promise fulfilled, but the ghastly program was two hours long—two hours of nothing but fluff. I've put a bit of a summary of the whole show below the fold, but I'm afraid there's nothing very persuasive about any of it, and it was stretched out to a hopelessly tedious length. 8:00-8:30 We learn that there were some ossuaries pulled out of a tomb in 1980. The names scrawled on them: Jesus bar Joseph, Jose, Mary, Matthew. They really didn't have to drag that out…

On Why I Should Have Slept Through Planet Earth

Sunday night, cocktail in hand, I prepared myself for an anticipated 3 hours of glorious nature footage. The flash website, the advertisement at the top of this very webpage, and Peter Etnoyer managed to bolster my fervor for Planet Earth. Less than a year ago, at the Deep-Sea Biology Symposium, BBC representatives revealed a few of the excerpts from the series-a shark engulfing a sea lion, ispods swarming a food fall, and birds of paradise in stunning displays of mating ritual. Three hours later, I added this to my ongoing list of anticlimactic experiences. At least the cocktail(s) were…

Big Pharma Screws the (Fat) Pooch

Let's see, the Biz shot its right foot with the Vioxx debacle, then its left foot with Zyprexa (and others, but that's a recent one), so now it must look for another site for further damage of its tattered n' shattered image. Hmmm, how about lobbing off a couple of fingers? The FDA's approval of Slentrol, Pfizer's new chemical entity (NCE) for treatment of obese dogs ought to do the trick. Zing! There go the fingers. As a minion of the dark overlords, I have to say that the announcement made me cringe for a number of reasons, the primary one being that this further solidifies the…

Dr. Oz's "green coffee bean extract" scammer guest must repay $9 million

If there's one aspect of 2014 that I enjoyed, it's that it was a very bad year for our old friend, America's quack, a.k.a. Dr. Mehmet Oz. It seemed that, finally, some of the chickens were coming home to roost and Dr. Oz was starting to suffer a bit for his promotion of quackery and pseudoscience on his daytime medical talkshow. The most delicious height of schadenfreude (for skeptics, at least) came mid-year, when Dr. Oz was asked to testify in front of Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill's Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Consumer Protection,…

Praxis

A run-down of good recent stuff, highly recommended for your weekend reading and bookmarking: PLoS One: Interview with Peter Binfield: ...In my view PLoS ONE is the most dynamic, innovative and exciting journal in the world, and I am proud to work on it. In many ways PLoS ONE operates like any other journal however it diverges in several important respects. The founding principle of PLoS ONE was that there are certain aspects of publishing which are best conducted pre-publication and certain aspects which are best conducted post-publication. The advent of online publishing has allowed us to…

Tales of the 300 … more accounts of the Creation “Museum”

You know, it wasn't just me at the horrible little creationist theme park — there were over 300 of us! In this blog entry, I intend to collect your stories about the zerg in Kentucky. E-mail links to me and I'll add them to this list. Or, if you'd rather, just leave links in the comments here and I'll promote them up top as I find the time. I want more! Send them in to me soon. News We were the top story on the ABC News site for a while. The Examiner covers the story. Blogs Tell us your side of the story! No Guy in the Sky has some overall thoughts and thinks the Creation "Museum" is KY…

How Not to Write a Food Miles Column

Example #2,724: Ronald Bailey, "The Food Miles Mistake," in Reason Magazine. As readers of this site know, we've weighed in numerous times of the Food Miles issue. Among the great many cases of public environmental debate that require a move beyond superficial parlor talk, the agriculture-energy connection has been an area of particular interest here. (image from the BBC) In this recent article, from last November, Bailey uses flawed assumptions, undeveloped concepts, and weak historical awareness to guide a column. "Thank you for the disingenuous article," writes one reader, which I…

Very young people blogging about science - let's welcome them

A few days ago, I asked what it takes for a young person to start and, more importantly, continue for a longer term, to write a science blog. The comment thread on that post is quite enlightening, I have to say - check it out. What is more important - that post started a chain-reaction on Twitter and blogs. Arikia Millikan, herself a young blogger, wrote a post in response which also attracted a lot of interesting comments. Go and comment. Mason Posner wrote not one, but two posts in response: Science blogging in the classroom, an update and Young science bloggers need community. Go and…

Science Online Advice: Long Term Blogging

This is the second post in which I'm pulling a revise-and-extend job on some things I said at Science Online at a few panels on bloggy stuff: in the how-to-do-outreach session (posted yesterday, the blogging long term session, and the what-to-do-when-people-start-taking-you-seriously session. In order to get these out in a timely manner, while catching up on all the work I have to do, I'm splitting these up into individual posts, though really they all kind of fit together. Blogging for the Long Haul There were two easily misinterpretable things that I said at this one, that deserve a bit of…

Mastermind by Maria Konnikova

I saw Maria Konnikova's Mastermind on the book lottery stacks at Science Online, and the subtitle "How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes" practically screamed "This is relevant to your interests!" Not only am I writing a book about how to think like a scientist, one of the chapters I have in mind uses mystery novels and the reading thereof as an example of scientific thinking. I didn't score a copy of it at Science Online, but I did pick up the ebook shortly thereafter, and have been working through it during baby bedtimes for the last month or so, a process prolonged significantly by having to…

Birds in the News 177

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter The first Seychelles Paradise-flycatcher chicks, Terpsiphone corvina, to fledge successfully outside La Digue Island, Seychelles for over 60 years are flying on Denis Island. Image: David Hosking [larger view]. Birds in Science One of the fifteen Frisian 'transmitter godwits', which was still in Friesland on one week ago on Saturday, arrived in Senegal in West Africa on Tuesday morning. The bird, nicknamed Heidenskip, appears to have flown from Friesland via Spain and over the Sahara in one go. The distance, over…

Piped water: two edged sword

If you want to know what advances in public health and medicine in the last 150 years have done the most for the overall health of the community a major contender for the top spot would have to be the provision of safe and abundant drinking water. The first piped water supplies for major American cities date to shortly before the Civil War (mid nineteenth century) and disinfection with chlorine didn't start until the end of the first decade of the 20th century. The results for major waterborne infectious diseases like typhoid fever and various maladies just categorized as diarrhea and…

Findings from China show the post-antibiotics future approaching

Last week was World Antibiotics Awareness Week, and a new study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases showed just how dire the antibiotics situation has gotten. Authors from the South China Agricultural University, the China Agricultural University, and other institutions identified a gene that confers resistance to a last-resort antibiotic, and then found that gene in E. coli isolates from 15% of raw meat samples, 21% of pigs about to be slaughtered, and 16% of hospital patients with infections. (The study is behind a paywall, but there's a helpful summary here.) The authors warn that given…

SLIDESHOW 1C: It's the end of the world as we know it.

Continuing on from our previous lecture notes (the last being about historical awareness of "global" - i.e. characterization of the Earth from both a physical and place context), we have planned that Immediately after that lecture, Allen would next go over a "State of the World" type summary. A bit of a "we're all going to die" type of thing, which would nicely prelude 20 minutes of me talking about why we've kind of been there before. In other words, there have been many instances in the past, where events (often tied into the amalgamation of the humanities and sciences) have essentially…

Dyslexia and the Cocktail Party effect

IMAGINE sitting in a noisy restaurant, across the table from a friend, having a conversation as you eat your meal. To communicate effectively in this situation, you have to extract the relevant information from the noise in the background, as well as from other voices. To do so, your brain somehow "tags" the predictable, repeating elements of the target signal, such as the pitch of your friend's voice, and segregates them from other signals in the surroundings, which fluctuate randomly. The ability to focus on your friend's voice while excluding other noises is commonly referred to as the…

RoundUp Ready Round-up is Ready: (a) Atrazine and (b) Big Organic

Environmental Science/Studies in Review, Volume 1 Here is a rundown of some recent pieces of note w/r/t environment, science, and technology -- specifically, a few on atrazine and hermaphroditic friogs, and then a few on Big Organic (farming and planting and eating and such). From the August issue of Harper's comes an article (not available on-line - I'm just saying, maybe go read it at a newsstand, like one of those guys who stands there reading select articles and learning for free) "It's Not Easy Being Green: Are weed-killers turning frogs into hermaphrodites?" by William Souder . The…

Friday Random Recipe: Homemade Tonic Water

This is an interesting recipe, in a very unusual vein for me. Homemade tonic water. I hate tonic water. I really despise the stuff. But like a lot of people, I have some strange twitchy muscle ticks, in my legs and my eyelids. A few years ago, I was talking to my opthamologist about the eyelid twitch thing, and he said that while there was a prescription drug that he could give me for it, he'd found that most people got more relief from just drinking tonic water. The quinine that gives it its distinctive bitter taste works better than the prescription. So I gave it a try. It didn't actually…

Harry Potter Visits Chicago Museum of Science and Industry

tags: Harry Potter, Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, books, film, movies, streaming video Image: Garrett Hubbard. In what is probably the cleverest scheme to capture any remaining pocket change that Bernard Madoff has not swindled out of the average American, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry is slated to open a Harry Potter exhibit on Thursday, 30 April. According to what I've read, Harry Potter: The Exhibition takes visitors from the Hogwarts Express train platform through the Gryffindor common room, classrooms, the Great Hall, the Forbidden Forest and Hagrid's hut…

Shout out to The Open Helix Blog!

I recently discovered this blog post from early January that mentions the USA Science and Engineering Festival. We would like to give a Shout out to Mary at The Open Helix Blog for her post on January 4th covering the science festival! Do you have a blog and would like to help us get the word out about the science festival? Contact us if you have written a post about the festival. We will re-post it here and link to your blog. Thanks! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ USA Science and Engineering Festival 2010 4 January, 2010 (10:31) | General Science | By:…

Pandemic planners and the wisdom of crowds

There is an apocryphal story of a politician during the Revolution of 1848 desperately running after a crowd in Paris's Jardin du Luxembourg. "I'm their leader," he cried. "I must follow them!" A couple of years ago most national pandemic planners were occupied with procuring stockpiles of antivirals, worrying about the lack of a vaccine and reassuring people that they had the matter under control if a pandemic were to strike. No one believed them and they knew they were whistling past the graveyard, but the poverty of vision was amazing. There has been much progress since then. Now there is…

Why should I trust you?

On call one night as a medical student, I was presenting a case to my intern. As I recounted the patient's ER course, the intern stopped me and said, "Pal --- trust no one." That sounded a little harsh to me, but the intern was nice enough to explain further. "Look, you're going to be taking calls from doctors and nurses the rest of your career. They are going to give you information about a patient, but it's you who will be responsible for everything that goes right and wrong. Do you want to hang yourself on someone else's evaluation?" As any internist knows, there is a perpetual tension…

Could the Cervical Cancer Vaccine Gardasil also Protect against Breast Cancer?

This is the first of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease. by Matthew Fitzgerald Viruses cause cancer? Cancer researchers have for decades known that viruses can cause cancer. It is now estimated that 15% of the world's cancers are caused by infectious diseases including viruses. Some of these include: Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and cervical cancer; Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) and nasopharyngeal cancer & lymphoma; Hepatitis B and liver cancer. In fact cancer researchers use this knowledge of viruses causing cancer by utilizing EBV and SV40 and other viruses to "…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Science Professors Know Science, But Who Is Teaching Them How To Teach?: U.S. science and engineering students emerge from graduate school exquisitely trained to carry out research. Yet when it comes to the other major activity they'll engage in as professors - teaching - they're usually left to their own devices. That's now beginning to change, thanks to work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the Nov. 28 issue of Science, a team led by bacteriology professor Jo Handelsman describes its program of "scientific teaching," in which graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are…

Evolutionary Trade-Offs: Big Brains or Big Balls?

Okay guys, if you had a choice between having a big brain or big .. er, testes .. which would you choose? A recent scientific paper reveals that as sexual selection pressures increase in promiscuous bat species, males evolve larger testes and smaller brains. But in bat species where females remain faithful, males had comparatively smaller testes and larger brains. Conversely, male sexual behavior had absolutely no effect on either brain or testes size. Because brains and testis are the most metabolically expensive tissues to grow and maintain, the balance between their relative sizes…

The OpenOffice challenge: can you do what needs to be done?

Okay OpenOffice fans, show me what you can do. Earlier this week, I wrote about my challenges with a bug in Microsoft Excel that only appears on Windows computers. Since I use a Mac, I didn't know about the bug when I wrote the assignment and I only found out about it after all but one of my students turned in assignment results with nonsensical pie graphs. So, I asked what other instructors do with software that behaves differently on different computing platforms. I never did hear from any other instructors, but I did hear from lots of Linux fans. And, lots of other people kindly…

Luskin Keeps Digging

Everyone knows the first rule of holes: When you're in a hole, stop digging. Apparently no one told Discovery Institute lackey Casey Luskin. He's still trying to pretend that their inane charges against the Judge in the Kitzmiller decision have any merit. Recall that their latest brainstorm is that Judge Jones, in following standard procedure by using verbatim portions of the plaintiff's proposed findings of fact in his opinion, somehow rendered himself a pawn of the ACLU. Luskin persists in trying to make an issue out of this. Over at The Panda's Thumb, Tim Sandefur offers a reply. So…

Harsh Criticism From An Unexpected Direction

Here's my reply to the reader's question about the effects of being harshly criticised by a colleague you respect. I was a highly independent grad student. Some might say obstinate and unruly. This was due to a combination of my personality, my tender age and the science wars of the 1990s. I came to the university of Stockholm as a science major right about the time that Northern European archaeology fell into its belated infatuation with post-modernism and went badly anti-scientific for a while. At age eighteen, after fifty pages of Ian Hodder's turgid Reading the Past, I decided I would…

Open Source Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology is the study of tree-rings to determine when and where a tree has grown. Everybody knows that trees produce one ring every year. But the rings also vary in width according to each year's local weather conditions. If you've got enough rings in a wood sample, then their widths form a unique "bar code". Collect enough samples of various ages from buildings and bog wood, and you can join the bar codes up to a reference curve covering thousands of years. Dendrochronology has a serious organisational problem that impedes its development as a scientific discipline and tends to…

Nordita Workshop for Science Writers, aka "Quantum Boot Camp"

Since this part of the trip is actually work-like, I might as well dust off the blog and post some actual physics content. Not coincidentally, this also provides a way to put off fretting about my talk tomorrow... I'm at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers on quantum theory, which a couple of the attending writers have referred to online as boot camp, though in an affectionate way. The idea is to provide a short crash course on cool quantum physics, so as to give writers a bit more background in subjects they might need to cover. The first talk was from Rainer Kaltenbaek (whose name I…

The Friday Fermentable: Wedding anniversary champagne and some bad juju in Denver

As a former resident of The Queen City of the Plains, my goal today was to write some travel tips for those bloggers attending the DNC in Denver next week. However, I got a bit sidetracked by the case a couple of weeks ago about the gentleman who died of cyanide poisoning at a hotel near the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. You'll recall that "a pound" of sodium cyanide was also found with his dead body in room 408 of The Burnsley Hotel at 10th Ave. & Grant St. one needs only 50-100 mg of sodium cyanide to kill oneself so I still don't know what the other 453.9 grams was intended for.…

Ghosts and Kamikazes

Another grad student potluck today! Not sure what I'm going to make, as I'm writing this yesterday (relative to you reading it on Saturday). Last time I posted my recipe for praline bacon, so continuing the tradition today I'm going to post a cocktail of my own invention: The Pearl Harbor 1 part vodka 1 part blue curacao 6 parts lemonade, frozen into cubes Combine in blender, blend to a slush. Enjoy. The curacao and the lemonade combine to form a nice sea blue color. This is essentially a more tropical variation of the Kamikaze, thus inspiring the name. Now, some news. This has been…

Which Came First, the Snake or the Venom?

Back in February I discovered the remarkable work of Australian biologist Bryan Grieg Fry, who has been tracing the evolution of venom. As I wrote in the New York Times, he searched the genomes of snakes for venom genes. He discovered that even non-venomous snakes produce venom. By drawing an evolutionary tree of the venom genes, Fry showed that the common ancestor of living snakes had several kinds of venom, which had evolved through accidental "borrowing" of proteins produced in other parts of the body. Later, these genes duplicated to create a sophisticated cocktail of venoms--a cocktail…

The External Reality Filter: A Right-Hemispheric, Ventral Attention Network

A variety of new cognitive neuroscience shows how our ability to ignore distractions - to "perceptually filter", in a sense - is based on a ventral attentional network, is related to working memory, and may be involved in putative inhibitory tasks. First, a little background. In 2004, Vogel & Machizawa showed that some people may appear to have a lower working memory capacity merely because they are unable to filter distractions from their environment. The authors found a particular wave of electrical activity on the scalp - over the parietal cortex - which corresponded to subjects'…

What's the best way to report car fuel-efficiency?

Suppose you're running a small organization with five motor vehicles used by your staff and you want to replace them with more fuel-efficient versions, both to save money and reduce your organization's carbon footprint. Each vehicle travels 10,000 miles a year. Based on your budget and the requirements for each vehicle, you can do the following, but you can only afford to replace one car every six months: Replace a 16-MPG car with a 20-MPG car Replace a 22-MPG car with a 24-MPG car Replace a 18-MPG car with a 28-MPG car Replace a 34-MPG car with a 50-MPG car Replace a 42-MPG car with a 48-…

Considering learning styles

There's a little tangent in the course design tutorial I'm working through, and I think it's worth considering outside the context of any particular course. How are my students different from me, in terms of how they learn best? The tutorial uses the Index of Learning Styles to get participants thinking about how they like to learn, versus how their students like to learn. There's an online questionnaire that anyone (students, teachers, blog-readers) can use to assess their own learning styles, and a description of learning styles that explains the results. The results are plotted on sliding…

The Island Effect in Dinosaurs

Everyone these days knows about the "island effect" where certain animals evolve to a diminutive size because they live on islands. You know this because of the Flores hominid. Now, it has been shown to have operated in a dinosaur. Thecodontosaurus Thecodontosaurus is also known as the Bristol Dinosaur. It is one of the first named dinosaurs, having been found in 1834, even before dinosaurs were recognized as a phenomenon. It is a diminutive dinosaur that was originally thought to have lived in an arid area of the mainland. Research just published in Geological Magazine shows that…

A Topical Issue

Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a strong recommendation to citizens of this country: Stop drinking anti-itch gels. They're meant to go on your skin. People who swallow them - and the FDA has been tallying up a series of cases - tend to suffer from dizziness, hallucinations or fall unconscious. At that point, they probably aren't too bothered by itching, of course. But I have to think there's an easier way. Most of those who mistakenly gulped down a few squirts of gel were consumers of Benadryl Itch-Stopping Gel. They apparently assumed this was just another…

Dems: Romney Is Our Worst Nightmare

Other than Atrios, I'm the only one who thinks Romney would be the hardest Republican for Democrats to beat. Here's why. The Somerby Effect. One thing to keep in mind is that the traditional media narratives, while trivial for all politicians, are strongly biased against Democrats ("Obambi", obsessive hatred of the Clintons, "The Breck Girl"). Second, on a factual claim, a counter-argument always receives less attention than the original argument because political reporters are stupid and ignorant (not necessarily true of beat reporters), and after adding in the bias, if a Democrat has to…

Reading Recommendations: Books about Clocks and Sleep

This list, written on December 17, 2005, is still quite up-to-date. There are also some more specialized books which are expensive, and many of those I'd like to have one day, but I cannot afford them (though I have placed a couple of them on my wish list, just in case I see a cheap copy come up for sale): I know the holidays are coming in just a couple of days, but perhaps you still have time to order a book or two for your friends and family. There are tons of books about sleep out there, mostly of suspect quality. Books about clocks tend to be either very old (thus out-dated) or far too…

"Before his Throne a Trump is blown"

Thus one and all, thus great and small, the Rich as well as Poor, And those of place, as the most base, do stand the Judge before. They are arraign'd, and there detain'd before Griffin's Judgement seat With trembling fear their Doom to hear, and feel his Anger's heat. with apologies to Wigglesworth, doesn't scan anymore... Craig mongers... NASA rumours "I understand that heads of all major departments will be briefed on Sept. 5th, and the public press conference on the 6th. I also understand that the true result has been leaked and is out there (somewhere); and also that there are…