Search Content

Displaying results 79901 - 79950 of 87950

Yehuda bar Yeshuah

I see SEED has sold ad space for the new Discovery Channel buzz episode, the purported discovery of the family grave of Yeshua bar Yosef, aka Jesus Christ, complete with his bones, along those of his wife Mary, mother Mary, son Judah and two of his four brothers... I wonder who Judah was named after... that had to have hurt. Dan Brown can presumably look forward to another blip upwards in sales (ok, I confess I read the stoopid book, I needed some light reading, I felt I should know what the fuss was about, and a visitor left a hardcover with us... anyway, it had da Vinci in it, right?). But…

I'm back...

...in Iceland that is. Got in at about 6 am, the weather was lovely, a mild frost, and not too windy, just brisk. so I took the bus to town and walked to where I'm crashing. Very refreshing, just the thing to wake you up after a long flight. A bite of skyr, and a walk down to the harbour, and ready for anything. I go to Iceland on occasion, not as often as I'd like, but usually, for obvious reasons, in summer. less often mid-winter or spring. I think this is the first time in a frighteningly long time that I've been here in late autumn. There is snow in the mountains, Tjörnin is partly…

Didgeridoos are not for you, little girl

Harper Collins is about to release a children's book called The Daring Book for Girls(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) in Australia. It contains a very short section on how to play a didgeridoo — and wouldn't you know it, someone is offended. But the general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, Dr Mark Rose, says the publishers have committed a major faux pas by including a didgeridoo lesson for girls. Dr Rose says the didgeridoo is a man's instrument and touching it could make girls infertile, and has called for the book to be pulped. I think Dr Rose has confused aboriginal…

Stars tip over, Relativity left standing

For over 20 years, the binary star DI Herculis has been measured to have anomalous precession, inconsistent with the predictions of general relativity, in the limit of two spherical masses orbiting with the measured orbital parameters. So, either there were some other classical torques in the system, or general relativity was wrong. DI Herculis is a close B star binary, with 10 day orbital period and eccentricity of ~0.5, that is orbiting near edge-on to our line of sight, and thus the stars eclipse each other. The stars are hot and massive - 5.15 and 4.52 solar masses respectively, with…

Iceland 2.0

Interesting things happen when corrupt idiots wielding obsolete laws from colonial times meet modern technology and communication infrastructure... As you know, Bob, Iceland has been having a bit of a "Banana Republic" moment. In particular, we were shocked, shocked, to discover that when the conservative Independent Party finally got to implement their dream of massive deregulation, the small number of well connected oligarchs not only managed to loot the treasury, they also indebted the whole country in a classic privatize-the-gains/socialize-the-losses game of moronic risk taking,…

Vaccine

"Vaccine" is the title of a book by Arthur Allen It has languished far too long on my review pile, and recent events spurred me to read through it: Vaccine by Arthur Allen W.W. Norton ISBN-13: 978-0-393-05911-3 (hardback) ISBN-13: 978-0-393-33156-1 (paperback) A primarily historical account, it starts with the random experiments on smallpox inoculation, and then rapidly moves onto the account of Jenner's discovery of cowpox vaccination. The story recounts the ups-and-downs of vaccination against various major diseases, including both failures of science, industry and regulation; and the…

AbSciCon '08: Super-Earth Lollapalooza

The "Super-Earth" topical session at the Astrobiology Science Conference wasn't quite the "Woodstock" of astrobio, but it was pretty good. There were many a famous pundit sitting on the floor between rows of seats or crammed standing up against the wall when came in to the room thinking they could do the usual trick of catching a talk here and there in different sessions, casually wandering in-and-out. The Super-Earth session was scheduled in one of the small meeting rooms, with seats for about 50, but closer to 100 people turned up. The science is still wide open, but there is some…

iPod iChing - bears?

it is no longer friday, but we blame the weather, and cheerfully ask the mighty iPod one: will the bears come out to play on monday? Whoosh goes the randomizer. Whoosh. The Covering: Mathematically Safe - Half Man Half Biscuit The Crossing: Teenage Kicks - Undertones The Crown: Melbourne Mambo - Mavericks The Root: Hey Mr Yesterday - Jimmy Cliff The Past:Star Light, Star Bright The Future: Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six - Pogues The Questioner: Breaking News - Half Man Half Biscuit The House: M-6-ster - Half Man Half Biscuit The Inside: The Sun and The Rain - Madness The Outcome:…

Fallon out

Admiral Fallon, head of US Central Command - ie Iraq and Afghanistan has resigned. Why? news just coming out. PS: WaPo has some interesting statements by the people involved: "...I don't believe there have ever been any differences about the objectives of our policy in the Central Command area of responsibility..."Fallon added - hmm, so can we read this to mean there are difference about the means by which the objectives are to be achieved? "Gates described as "ridiculous" any notion that Fallon's departure signals the United States is planning to go to war with Iran. And he said "there…

An ‘atheist rock’ genre?

I got a request from a reader that I'll just pass on directly to any musically-inclined readers here… Any chance Pharyngula readers can help? I have been writing and posting songs under the band name Natural Wastage on Soundclick.com (a sort of music version of myspace/facebook, I guess) for a while, and whilst re-installing some songs last month, I was struck by the number of Christian related genres available. Therefore, in mid July I emailed Soundclick and asked "Looking through the categories I note that while there is Christian Rock, Country and Rap, Contemporary Christian pop and Pop…

Extreme Solar Systems II: mo' planets

More planet news from the Extreme Solar Systems conference In addition to the Jupier like planet (did I mention that I like that result...?) the California-Carnegie-AAT team has several more long period jovians, possibly with low eccentricity orbits. Looking at known planet hosts, 179 stars, 25 are known already to have second planets (including 5 triples and 2 quads) and 35 are showing long term velocity trends consistent with giant planets in long period orbits. They see many indications or resonant coupling between planets in the multiple systems (I recall 1/4 of the planets being in mean…

What's that taste?

This wasn't in the lab, but it was an accident, and it was funny later on. Normally, I wouldn't think twice about storing bacterial cultures in a refrigerator. After all, bacteria on a petri plate, inside of a plastic bag, are kind of stuck. They can't get out of the plates, and even if they did, they certainly can't crawl out of a plastic bag. I thought soil bacteria, on agar plates, were mostly harmless. Reposted from DigitalBio's greatest hits. Technorati Tags: humor, bacteria, taste, funny, tasting, food, Streptomyces When my husband was finishing graduate school, he brought home some…

Is it crazy to consider community curation?

or is it just an idea that's ahead of the curve? Last week, I was stunned to discover at least 31 papers in an NCBI Gene database entry that were in the entry for the wrong gene. I wrote about this here, here, here, and here. Now, an oversight like this is a little understandable. The titles of the entries do include the name of the wrong gene (DRD2 - the dopamine D2 receptor). And it was only four years ago that people figured out that the marker in the title of the articles mapped somewhere else. If computers were responsible for the annotation, well, this would be understandable.…

Eur08

Hardly seen any of the footie to date, just caught the second half of the Spain-Italy quarter final, and now the last 30 mins of Turkey vs Germany (replay). ESPN, for some strange reason, feels obliged to tell us, to three significant figures, how many kilometers they estimate various players have run at different times of the game. Which is an absolutely bizarely irrelevant statistic, unless maybe I were a german assistant coach looking for a rationale to get rid of a beloved but aging midfielder. Which I guess is why Germany strangely reminds me of the English teams of the 80s or 90s - flat…

Is computer science baseless?

From the April Communications of the ACM, the Kode Vicious column is on The Data-Structure Canon. The reader question is: In most areas of science there are a few basic underlying laws that inform the rest of the study of a given subject. Physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering all have these basic equations. What are the basic equations in computer science? Or is computer science baseless? In other words, what's the fundamental intellectual basis of computer science? Well, according to KV, it's data structures! If there were any set of basics that I wanted to hammer into software…

Computing: the fourth great domain of science

The September Communications of the ACM has a provocative article by Peter J. Denning and Paul S. Rosenbloom, Computing: the fourth great domain of science (OA version). It's well written and persuasive, certainly worth reading the whole thing. Science has a long-standing tradition of grouping fields into three categories: the physical, life, and social sciences. The physical sciences focus on physical phenomena, especially materials, energy, electromagnetism, gravity, motion, and quantum effects. The life sciences focus on living things, especially species, metabolism, reproduction, and…

Friday Fun: The 5 Strangest Things Evolution Left in Your Body

It's nice to see the occasional Cracked post that is definitely SFW and funny enough to be worth highlighting here. And The 5 Strangest Things Evolution Left in Your Body definitely qualifies on both counts. If you don't believe in evolution, you have to spend a lot of time wondering about the useless shit the creator threw into our bodies. Why don't our wisdom teeth fit in our heads? Why do we need an appendix? The answer is that evolution is a sloppy and haphazard process. Take a close look at your body and you'll see some of the leftover junk. Like... In descending order: Goosebumps…

Mystery Bird: Inca Dove, Columbina inca

tags: Inca Dove, Columbina inca, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Inca Dove, Columbina inca, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Richard Ditch, 2005 [larger view]. Date Time Original: 2005:03:26 18:18:03 Exposure Time: 1/25 F-Number: 8.00 ISO: 800 Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Aww! This bird just looks small and harmless, like a baby bird that's lost its momma (more about that below). That said, I'm at a momentary loss as to how I'd go about identifying it if I didn't know the species well…

Expelled from the Creation “Museum”

There is lots of video on the web from our visit to Ken Ham's Palace of Lies, but here's one of one of the rare incidents to mar the trip. This is the student who was kicked out; I was with him when he was pulled aside, and can verify that he was doing nothing but engaging in quiet conversation with a small group of us godless atheists when Mark Looy arbitrarily singled him out and took him aside to tell him stories about how unruly he had been. It was genuinely bizarre. As you can see in the clip made as we were standing outside, there was no shouting, no disruption, no rudeness at all going…

Today is Equal Pay for Women Day

tags: wage discrimination, sex discrimination, equal pay for women day, employment Today is Equal Pay Day for women -- that happy day day when women's 2006 wages are equivalent to those earned by men in 2006 -- and 2007 is already one third of the way over! But, you ask, these are modern times, aren't women paid the same as men, especially college-educated women? It might surprise you to learn that this is not true. According to a news report that I heard this morning on National Public Radio, women college grads begin their post-college careers by earning 80 cents for every dollar earned…

George Bush Is A Whore

This worthless jackass claims to be my president. George Bush; a hypocrite? Well, I am shocked, simply shocked, I tell you. Well, okay, all sarcasm aside, I am very surprised to hear that the politically conservative George Bush, who demands mindless and unquestioning loyalty from his minions, has shown his true colors by betraying all those people who supported him throughout his entire political career: political conservatives. Today, Bush denied California state's bid to regulate greenhouse gas emissions produced by all new automobiles that are sold there -- a move that flies in the…

GTA, meet LB:EF

Are you ready for the hot new game of the 2006 Christmas season, Left Behind: Eternal Forces? Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and…

Birdbooker Report 73

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…

Series worth re-reading: Visits to Texas worker centers

While we're on vacation, we're re-posting some of our past content. Kim Krisberg's series of posts on worker centers in Texas is well worth a second read (or a first read, or a third read ...): Houston, we have a workers’ rights problem: Profile of a worker justice center in Texas’ biggest city Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren’t members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state…

Are you successful? Depends on the metric

Something that's come up in a couple of the different sessions I've attended at the American Public Health Association annual meeting is the problem of inadequate definitions of success. It's important to set targets and measure progress against them - and missing targets can be a signal that it's time to revise the strategy. But if the targets are set without sufficient thought, a person or group can think they're succeeding when they're not really doing such a great job. One example of this came up in the session "Getting from here to there: Promoting health and environmental justice…

In which I have hurt Ken Ham's feelings

Oh, dear. Earlier, I wrote about Ken Ham's visit to the Pentagon, a soul-shuddering thought if ever there was one, and it seems Ken has read it. He has replied with a blog entry titled Biology Professor Calls Me “Wackaloon”. Ken, Ken, Ken. You act shocked at the thought that one guy publicly stated that you were Mr Flaming Nutbar, but you shouldn't be. Millions of people, including some of the most knowledgeable biologists in the world, think just about every day that you are an airhead, an ass, a birdbrain, a blockhead, a bonehead, a boob, a bozo, a charlatan, a cheat, a chowderhead, a chump…

More Misguided Budget-Cutting: Community Health Centers

Earlier this week, the Geiger Gibson/ RCHN Community Health Foundation Research Collaborative released a policy research brief that estimates the impact of the House of Representatives' proposed reduction in funding to community health centers. (Full disclosure: the Geiger Gibson program is part of the George Washington University's School of Public Health & Health Services, where I work, and I've taken classes taught by Sara Rosenbaum, one of the authors of the brief.) I'm sure most readers won't be surprised to learn that cuts to community health center funding won't really save money…

More Misguided Budget-Cutting: Poison Control Centers

As part of a series on the "penny-and-pound foolish cuts the House Republicans want to impose," the New York Times editorial board lambastes a proposal to cut federal funding to Poison Control Centers from $29 million (Obama's request) to $2 million. This federal money only covers about 20% of the centers' costs, but slashing it will likely force many centers to close. This would be a shame, the editorial board explains, because poison control centers actually save money: The nation's network of 57 poison control centers takes four million calls a year about people who may have been exposed…

Fight back against Bill Donohue!

So far today, I have received 39 pieces of personal hate mail of varying degrees of literacy, all because I was rude to a cracker. Four of them have included death threats, a personal one day record. Thirty-four of them have demanded that I be fired. Twenty-five of them have told me to desecrate a copy of the Koran, instead, or in some similar way offend Muslims, because — in a multiplicity of ironic cluelessness — apparently only some religious icons must be protected, and I would only offend Catholics because they are all so nice that none of them would wish me harm. I even have one email…

Factory farms, manure, and the Empire State Building

Factory farms in the US---the confinements that house millions of beef cattle, dairy cows, hogs and poultry--- generate enough manure to fill the 102-story Empire State Building each and every day. That's more than 13 times the sewage produced by the US population. This factoid and many others are presented in Factory Farm Nation 2015, a report released this week by Food & Water Watch (FWW). The report describes the dominance of factory farms in US agriculture and its affect on the physical, economic, and social environment. It provides examples of consolidation within the beef, pork,…

December Pieces of My Mind

Selected Facebook updates: Dreamed that a podcaster had mixed ham, celery and rice crispies into my favorite tea leaves. Was very angry. Green tea leaves accumulate in our house way faster than we use them. Bothers my logistics brain. Misread a headline on a lady's magazine. "A Retro-Style Wedding" became "A Hetero-Style Wedding". Genital lambada, Sw. könslambada. That's what exceptionally witty Black Metal blogger Hatpastorn calls it. I just realised that penguins are aquatic polar dinosaurs. Darwin FTW! The Mandelbrot set has the nicest ass in all of mathematics. Swedish internet users are…

UK Archaeology Departments Face Sustainability Crisis

As noted here three years ago, UK contract archaeology is in a deep slump where hundreds of archaeologists have been laid off and a number of excavation units have closed shop. Those experienced and well-connected field archaeologists who got the sack didn't evaporate: many of them are still out there waiting for the job market to improve. Now, in Current Archaeology #268, Mark Horton (prof. arch. Bristol) warns about "an oncoming archaeological crisis in universities". After an all-time high in the 90s and mid-00s, UK archaeology student admittance numbers have declined steadily: 1996: 704…

China's Tech Is Independent Of Its Ideology

I had a brief but interesting conversation with a distinguished Chinese art historian the other day. He's my age but has been far more successful than me despite relocating to Sweden. We were talking about science and superstition, because apparently someone had described the Swedish Skeptics that I head to him as “The Swedish Anti-Superstition Society”. Anyway, he told me this (and I paraphrase). “I'm not sure China is going the right way now with its emphasis on Western science, technology and capitalism. Just look at the environmental degradation and rapid urbanisation. If my country hadn'…

TAM London, Sunday

I type this during the last act of TAM London, Alan Moore, who is being gnomic in a basso north English working-class accent. Interesting character, a little perversely irrational ("I worship a 2nd century snake goddess") while leaving no doubt that he's keen as a whip. The day began with a talk by Randi where I learned that he was friends with Richard Feynman! I knew that though my acquaintance with the Amazing One I'm only two steps from Alice Cooper, but Feynman as well - wow! Science writer Marcus Chown then gave us his ten most mind-boggling physics facts. Good stuff! He could have…

A Day With the Amazing Randi

I spent Tuesday in the charming company of James Randi and his assistant, journalist Brandon Thorp. Myself and P.J. RÃ¥smark had taken it upon ourselves to act as native guides and gophers for Randi during his days in Stockholm at the invitation of the Swedish Skeptics. So in the morning we went cane shopping together, though none of the canes we found were sufficiently antique-looking for our guest, and he seemed to manage effortlessly without one. And then we checked out the Vasa 17th century warship museum, since this is Stockholm's one truly unique attraction as far as I'm aware. (You'll…

Tripartite Names in Denmark and China

Danes often have tripartite names, like famous Roman Iron Age scholar Ulla Lund Hansen or NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. And I've been wondering how these names are inherited. Specifically, which names get dropped and which ones get passed on to the kids. So I wrote my erudite buddy, osteologist Helene Agerskov Madsen, and asked her to explain. I learned that the system is not very old (~100 yrs?) and has already started to fall apart. But in its idealised form here's how it works. The middle name tracks a matrilineage and the last name a patrilineage. When a child is born it…

Dating the Looting of Ancient Tombs

Finland has a lot of cairns, usually sitting on hill tops near the sea. Unlike a mound, the cairn consists only of stones, and so it lets rain water percolate through. This messes up the contents of the cairn. Bones and burial goods are rarely preserved, and it seems that the ancient Finns didn't stock their cairns with a lot of interesting stuff to begin with anyway. This makes individual cairns difficult to date, though seen as a class their chronology is fairly well understood. Despite the fact that few Finnish cairns contain anything interesting or valuable to a layperson, a lot of them…

CSIRO: science as a public good

Much fuss about the cuts at CSIRO climate research. This reminds me of a less serious situation 10, or perhaps 15 years ago, when cuts were proposed - I can't recall if they actually happened - due to a conversation somewhat like: Scientists: Global Warming is Real! Government: OK, we believe you're, we going to stop funding you looking for it. Scientists: Oh wait, we didn't quite mean it that way. Cue today: as the Graun puts it In the email to staff on Thursday, Marshall said that since climate change was proven to be real, CSIRO could shift its focus. Before I go further, to avoid…

Cars and planes, young and old

I must be getting old, I'm starting to seriously think of switching our paper order from the Grauniad to the Times. Which forms a lead in to: this piece which provides two interesting points: In the National Statistics omnibus survey, conducted in August 2006, 39 per cent of people thought that cars were the most environmentally damaging mode of transport, while 35 per cent selected planes. When the same question was asked in August 2007 cars had slipped to 34 per cent and planes had risen to 40 per cent. and also Young people were much less likely to be concerned about climate change than…

Boardgaming Retreat

My buddy Oscar doesn't like roughing it at gaming conventions, sleeping on classroom floors, eating cup noodles etc. So for two years now he's organised civilised boardgaming weekends where he's gotten a bunch of gamers together and booked a small hotel for us (here's about last year's). It's 48 hours of gaming in good company with meals and nice rooms, all for a very reasonable off-season price. This past weekend. I played sixteen sessions of thirteen different games, as follows. Innovation. Card game out of MIT, nominally about the rise of civilisations, where the cards keep interacting…

Consider RealClimate

More framing stuff... oh dear. From Dave Roberts. Found whilst trying to establish whether "world climate report" is notable by wiki standards (Got an opinion on that? Feel free to comment here or on wiki...). Anyway, DR says: Consider RealClimate. Did the scientists involved in the site really start it purely to raise the level of public knowledge about climate change? I think not. They wanted to raise the public level of knowledge about climate change because they thought by doing so they would make it more likely that society would address the problem. In other words: they want society to…

More on UK Anti-Gay Speech Case

Volokh linked to a PDF file with the actual text of the flyer that the minister they arrested was handing out at a gay event in Wales. I agree with Eugene that it's about as non-offensive as a flyer expressing those opinions could possibly be. It doesn't rant and rave at gay people, it just lays out their views based on their interpretation of what the Bible says about homosexuality. I disagree with those views completely, of course, but I cannot for the life of me understand why the British government thinks there is any cause for even batting an eye at it, much less arresting someone and…

Balko Shreds McCarthy

For those who think libertarians are nothing more than, as one wag put it, conservatives who like porn, this exchange demonstrates otherwise. Situations like the Hudson v Michigan court ruling last week put libertarians and conservatives squarely at odds with one another, which is why the National Review is busy defending the decision while the Cato Institute is hammering it. Andrew McCarthy - no, not the one from St. Elmo's Fire - is a former prosecutor defending the ruling and Radley Balko is responding to him. And I think you'll agree that Balko is pretty much dominating this debate. I…

Science Is Tedious

There have been a number of responses to my Science Is Hard post over the last several days, and I've been trying to come up with something to say about them. In particular, Steinn points out that science is easier than digging ditches, while in comments, "revere" of Effect Measure says that science is tedious, just like digging ditches. Well, OK, that's flippant-- what he really said was: The dirty secret we don't teach our students is that most real research is tedious, time consuming and routine, just like any other kind of work. Whether you think it's hard or the ride of a lifetime is…

Times Book Review Comments

We get the Sunday New York Times delivered, because there's something infinitely more civilized about reading an actual paper than sitting at the computer browsing news stories on the Web. The message isn't any different, but the medium makes a difference. Also, I'm more likely to stop to read a story on paper than I am to click on a headline link in a page of links. What with travel and all, I didn't have as much time as usual last weekend, so the Book Review ended up being set aside, and read this week. Two quick items from reading two weeks of the Times Book Review section back to back: 1…

Graduation Thoughts

Miscellaneous thoughts prompted by yesterday's Commencement: - Like most of the graduations I've been to, Union's academic procession is led by a pipe and drum band. Why is that? What is it about academia and bagpipes? - Also like most of the graduatiions I've been to, Union's graduation is held early on Sunday morning, with the students required to vacate campus housing by 5:00 that afternoon. This means that all the really big student parties are the night before, which in turn means that a large fraction of the graduating class is nursing a bad hangover during the procession and speeches.…

More lawyer games from creationists

A couple of graduate students have a group called Extant Dodos Productions that uses YouTube to rip into creationist claims. In particular they've used some of Kent Hovind's materials to dissect his arguments. It's a clever idea — they take creationist videos and edit them to insert rebuttals to each argument as they are made. Apparently, though, Creation Science Evangelism doesn't like the fact that their claims are being popularly weighed, analyzed, and pulverized, and they're now trying to strong-arm Extant Dodos Productions with intimidating letters that say they are infringing on their…

Catfight Continued

Over at Jacques Distler's blog, someone has posted what strikes me as an eminently sensible system for solving the Trackback problem with the ArXiv. I attempted to post a comment to that effect over there, and got the following message: Your comment submission failed for the following reasons: You are not allowed to post comments. This is almost certainly a bug (maybe a browser conflict), not a deliberate act of malice, but it's kind of amusing. I'll reproduce the comment below the fold, and maybe somebody who is allowed to post comments can post it for me... There are ways to reduce…

New watch

I have a funky new watch, a Garmin Forerunner 110. It lets me do kewl stuff like: although you only get that after post-processing, of course. In fact I haven't even worked out how to make it work like a GPS when running, i.e. display lat/long or grid refs. Nor have I worked out how to persuade the stupid post-processing software to give me mph instead of mins/mile like all the hard-core runners want, pah. But the upload-from-watch (via the provided nipple clamp) to-web-and-graph is impressively smooth and painless. You're fascinated - I know - so let me tell you that we did two laps: the…

IOP: we were hopelessly wrong

Scientists cleared of malpractice in UEA's hacked emails inquiry says the IOP, which isn't quite the headline I chose, but once again you'll have to forgive a little poetic licence on my part. The Grauniad says much the same, as does Aunty. Perhaps more tellingly, The Torygraph and Times have ignored it entirely. The report itself is here. Thankfully, it is quite short. [Update: other views: * Eli * TL * Keith Kloor - for the "opposition" * HT * mt - this is well worth reading for mt's thoughtful take on what is and what is not worth noting about the report. * CA - McI is deeply miffed that…