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HIV and Charlie Sheen

ERV-->TMZ? No, this is an education and outreach opportunity, and I want to use it to the best of my ability as an HIV researcher. 1-- I am so glad Charlie Sheen got tested for HIV. Most people who should be, dont, because even faced with a treatable, deadly disease, denial is *incredibly* attractive. 'If I dont know, then it cant be real' is a tall hurdle *many* of us will have to clear for some reason, at some point in our lives. Sheen got tested, and that is the first step to stopping HIV. 2-- "I have to... I have to. I am here to admit, in fact, I am HIV positive." *wince* 'Coming out…

ERVs and Psoriasis

Time to add another disease to the list of problems associated with wayward ERV expression: Protective Effect of Human Endogenous Retrovirus K dUTPase Variants on Psoriasis Susceptibility Repeat after me everyone: ERVs are junk DNA.  We WANT them to be junk DNA.  Yes, very rarely an ERV is domesticated for Good, but almost universally, ERV expression is BAD. While the main idea of this paper is neat, the experimental biology in this paper isnt very satisfying at all.  There is no firm, obvious experimentally derived connection between ERV protein expression and disease, here. For instance,…

Epic disaster in HIV vaccine world

I can think of at least two 'worst nightmares' for vaccine designers. Your vaccine looked super in animal models and such... but it turns out to be directly harmful to people.  And not 'some' people.  All people. Your vaccine actually does the opposite of what you want it to do-- instead of preventing the disease, it makes people more prone to the disease. That second one is a nightmare come to life for a group of HIV-1 scientists: Extended follow-up confirms early vaccine-enhanced risk of HIV acquisition and demonstrates waning effect over time among participants in a randomized trial of…

Malaria vaccine: A kinda sorta we will take it for now win

Conceptually, vaccines are very simple things-- Dummy viruses/bacteria/pathogen that train your immune system how to fight the real viruses/bacteria/pathogen. All the benefits of being sick (training your B- and/or T-cells how to fight the pathogen) without actually having to get sick. Nice. In practice, however, things are infinitely more difficult. Sometimes we use dead viruses. Sometimes we use crippled viruses. Sometimes we dont need to use whole viruses at all-- little chunks of the virus are fine. Sometimes we just need chunks of the virus, but we keep them dressed up in hollow…

The Story of the Three Giant Hippopotamuses

Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses... No, Daddy, it was three little pigs. This is a completely different story, honey. Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses, who lived together in a river in Africa. They lived in a house. Well, hippos spend most of their time in the water, so they really lived in the river. But they had a house on the bank of the river, which was very nice. OK. And one day, something happened, which was...? A big bad wolf came to their house! No, honey, hippos live in Africa. They don't have big bad wolves in Africa. Oh. Ummm... A…

Links for 2012-03-23

Not To Us, And To Us | Storied Theology "Not to us" is an important step in biblical interpretation. We need to have ears to hear how a story would have resonated with Babylonian exiles; we need ears to hear how "Jesus is Lord" might have resonated, or caused dissonance, for a first century Roman. We need to know that when we read, "Expel the immoral brother!" that it is a word for a first century church and might not be God's word to us about, say, the man in our meetings with a flatulence problem. "Not to us" is a significant moment in our biblical interpretation. Every scientist's worst…

On Neutrinos and Cables

It's not a good week for me to be writing about anything remotely controversial, but if I want to keep my physics blogging license, I need to say something about the latest fast neutrino news. This has followed the usual trajectory of such stories, with the bonus farcical element of people who blasted the media for buying into the initial release seizing triumphantly on an initial rumor in the press that was garbled into incomprehensibility. With a little more time, it's become more clear how their result has become less clear, and the best place to look for a description of this is Matt…

Links for 2012-02-15

Proton Collisions Vs. Quark/Gluon/Antiquark Mini-Collisions | Of Particular Significance Keep in mind that the total number of 7 TeV = 7000 GeV proton-proton collisions that took place in ATLAS while they were accumulating the data for the plot above was about 100,000,000,000,000. [The total 2011 data set was 5 times larger, but the corresponding plot won't appear for a few months.] Of all these collisions, just two had mini-collisions that passed above 3500 GeV -- half the collision energy of the protons. In principle the energy of the mini-collisions can go up all the way to 7000 GeV,…

Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 04

Through a weird quirk of scheduling, I haven't actually taught the intro modern physics course since I started writing pop-science books about modern physics. So, this week has been the first chance I've really had to use material I generated for the books to introduce topics in class. In the approximately chronological ordering of the course, we're now up to the late 1800's, and the next book we're talking about is Einstein's Clocks, Poincar$eacute;'s Maps, which talks about how Einstein and Henri Poincaré were (arguably) influenced by developments in timekeeping as they looked for the…

Links for 2011-09-04

Atlas Mugged: The Ayn Rand Six Step | Common Dreams "Imagine your landlord coming to you one day and saying, "It's everyone for himself. We're not going to supply heat or water or electricity any longer, and we're not going to conduct repairs." Of course, you and the rest of the tenants wouldn't stand for such a thing . You'd kick him out if you could and move out if you couldn't. But suppose, over the years, he cuts the part of the portion of your rent that goes to utilities and repair work. Year after year, he'd stop by and announce his cuts with great fanfare, telling you how much money…

Links for 2011-08-25

A Higgs Setback: Did Stephen Hawking Just Win the Most Outrageous Bet in Physics History? | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network Overblown anti-Higgs hype, just for balance. News: Breaking Bread - Inside Higher Ed "For the project, students were asked about their views on the state of race relations on campus. Not surprisingly (as this is the case at many places), the views of white students about the state of race relations were generally much more positive than those of minority students. Then the sociologists looked at what factors were linked to whether students had a more…

Jim Butcher, Ghost Story [Library of Babel]

One of the problems with a long-running series is that it accretes backstory as you go (unless, of course, you go the Rex Stout route and just pretend that time doesn't pass for the characters, even when you have the client in a later book being the son of a character from one of the earlier volumes...). This is particularly troublesome for the sort of series in which the characters become more experienced and powerful as they go along. After several books, it starts to become difficult to find credible threats for your protagonist to face. For the 13th volume of the Dresden Files, Jim…

Links for 2011-07-07

The Slacktiverse: DragonRaid: moral teaching through roleplaying games? "In the mid-90's a friend and I became fascinated by the "Christian adventure game" (similar to a roleplaying game) called DragonRaid, published by Adventures in Christ. (Details can be found at the DragonRaid website.) We never managed to actually play it, largely because we were living in different countries, but we made characters, read through the initial adventure, and discussed it at length by email. [...] I have been thinking about DragonRaid lately in the context of the Slacktivist and Slacktiverse discussions…

Mindless Blog Popularity

Here are the ten most popular non-carnival entries on Aardvarchaeology for 2007. Djurhamn Sword Excavated Stockholm Art Shows Scandinavian Attitudes to Nudity Wish I Could Do That in Linux Lamprey's Spinal Cord Modelled Djurhamn Sword Star Wars Lego Girls Toys to Teach Little Girls Their Place Indecipherable Punk Reactions Subway Beggar Retaliation These ten have been popular for very different reasons. I'm happy to see such interest in one of my archaeological finds, viz. an early-16th century sword (#1, #6). But I'm not too thrilled to find that most of the top-10 entries are only on the…

Those Haunting Memories

A weakness of mine is that the memories of a few embarrassing events in my past sometimes come back to haunt me and make me cringe with self-loathing. Very likely, I am the only person in the world who ever thinks of (or even remembers) these events, but I just can't help feeling bad about them. Two of the worst have to do with archaeology and English, and so I thought I might as well dump them on you, Dear Reader. 1. Summer of 1993. I am 21, working my second season as a field archaeologist, and I've just learned about context-stratigraphic excavation and documentation methods à la Edward…

Hawking radiation

I must admit I only wrote this post because I thought the title would be amusing. Was I right? Time will tell. Via a variety of sources some of whom I ignored, I find the great physicst saying President Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate change accord could lead humanity to a tipping point, "turning the Earth into Venus."1 That, as we all know, is bollocks. Or in JA's more measured terms, "I don't believe such hyperbole is useful". Don't mince your words, man, you'll never get onto a high-status Red Team that way. My Hawking claim-to-fame is that I was cycling over the Garret…

Perspective: It’s Not a War on Science

Perspective: It’s Not a War on Science by Clark A. Miller puts forward the thesis that What appears to be a war on science by the current Congress and president is, in fact, no such thing. Fundamentally, it is a war on government2. To be more specific, it is a war on a form of government with which science has become deeply aligned and allied over the past century. To the disparate wings of the conservative movement that believe that US strength lies in its economic freedoms, its individual liberties, and its business enterprises, one truth binds them all: the federal government has become…

Full-Time, One-Year Faculty Position at UMM Biology

Full-Time, One-Year Faculty Position in Biology University of Minnesota, Morris The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in undergraduate education, to fill a full-time, one-year position in biology beginning August 18, 2008. Responsibilities include: teaching undergraduate biology courses including an introductory level survey of organismal biology (with lab) and a core ecology course (with lab); advising undergraduates; and sharing in the governance and advancement of the biology program as well as the campus at-large. Candidates must be at least A.B.D…

Higgs Rumors Are the Price of Success

In which celebrity culture comes to particle physics. ------------ It's been about six months since we had a big flurry of Higgs Boson stories, and as enjoyable as the relative quiet has been, it means we're due for another run. And, predictably enough, the usual suspects are stoking speculation about what, exactly, will be officially revealed in a few weeks at the summer particle physics meetings. This spilled over into the rest of the social media universe, with the joke hashtag #HiggsRumors becoming a trending topic on Twitter for a little while last night. As is also sadly predictable,…

Links for 2012-05-10

A rare interview with former no. 1 overall pick Greg Oden about his injury-plagued career - Grantland He was just ... Greg. For instance, as we were finishing our meal, three separate groups of fans approached him and asked for autographs and pictures. Like always, he granted their requests with an annoyed expression, didn't say any more than three words to anyone, and then shook his head as they walked away. "You're a fun-loving guy with a ton of personality," I said. "So why do you hate it so much when people approach you in public? Why don't you let your personality shine through and…

Francis Beckwith and the cold, cruel realities of tenure

Way back in the dim and distant past, like two years ago, there was a bit of a disturbance in the blogosphere, a minor contretemps after a certain Harvard law student, Lawrence VanDyke, published a "book note" in the Harvard Law Review. It was rank creationist nonsense, a work of pathetic scholarship, and it got publicly shredded by Brian Leiter, and I also got in the act. The book reviewed was an apologia for Intelligent Design by Francis Beckwith. In a later amusing twist, NRO published a defense of VanDyke and Beckwith by an anonymous "Texas free-lance writer", who it was later discovered…

Current Archaeology 232

Current Archaeology's July issue offers a lot of good reading, of which I particularly like the stories on human origins (see below) and garden archaeology at Kenilworth Castle. But I have two complaints. First point of criticism. The editors of CA have this weird habit of doing "media tie-ins" without any clear indication of authorship. In the past three issues were excerpts from a forthcoming book by Barry Cunliffe. They weren't billed as written by Cunliffe. Instead you got the impression that a nameless writer had read his book manuscript and paraphrased it for the magazine. "Cunliffe…

How much was that war?

We now have an estimate of the cost of the Iraq war. Remember when our administration was blithely proposing that it would require a few billion dollars? The authors present a damning "Nightline" transcript in which one official, Andrew Natsios, blandly told Ted Koppel that Iraq could be completely reconstructed for only $1.7 billion. (With the war now costing $12.5 billion a month, Natsios' estimate would have been accurate if he had stipulated that it would pay for four days' worth of reconstruction. Which, considering the delusional nature of most of the Bush administration's pre-invasion…

Where Am I Supposed To Publish?

Another career whine. Applying for academic jobs that are invariably given to people who are much older than me, I've come across a frustrating conundrum. In Scandyland, it takes about seven months from the application deadline to decide who gets an academic job. This is because the selection process is guided by two or three external referees. The department doesn't get to choose the person they want, but they can pretty much choose the referees, and so influence whether they'll be likely to get e.g. an empiricist or a theoretician. Now, one of the most important assets an academic can…

Names of the Close Horizon

Looking at a map of Stockholm's suburbs, you find a swarm of place names denoting housing areas. The housing is almost entirely 20th century. But many of the names go back a thousand years or more. Today they're all just suburbs. But not so long ago, all of these names were part of a hierarchical nomenclature, a ladder of names. The names on the ladder's top rung denoted parishes and were used throughout the county. On the second rung down were the names of farmsteads, used among the surrounding few parishes, and among wayfarers in cases where a farmstead happened to be located on a major…

Game Review: Pandemic

Pandemic is a new board game for 1-4 players. The players take on the roles of field operatives for the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA, as four simultaneous pandemics threaten global life and civilisation. It's a collaborative game: either you find cures in time and everybody wins -- or everybody loses. And it's really exciting! I recently learned the term "game fluff" from my old buddy and long-time Aard regular Akhorahil. The fluff is the story that hangs on the abstract framework of a games' rules. In order to win a game, you need to understand and exploit the game mechanics…

Victor and Kennel: re-arrange the deckchairs

David G. Victor & Charles F. Kennel have an opinion piece in Nature arguing that it would be a really good idea to re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic. Or possibly ask the orchestra to play a somewhat different tune. I paraphrase somewhat, you understand. Naturally, you should read their actual article first, and then secondly you should read the excellent RC response by Stefan. However, I disagree with both of them. To be somewhat less sarcastic, V & K urge that Average global temperature is not a good indicator of planetary health. Track a range of vital signs instead, or…

Viruses know us better than we know ourselves.

You know when professors say something thats really obvious, but they say it in such a way that suddenly the universe makes sense, and your head explodes? I had one of those moments yesterday while listening to a professors presentation on a nifty herpes virus, cytomegalovirus (CMV is like EBV-- pretty much everyone has been infected, but it doesnt hurt you unless youre immunocompromised). Now in contrast to my elegant, streamlined retroviruses, herpes viruses are friggen monsterous. HIV-1 is about 10,000 base-pairs long (single stranded RNA), with nine genes, while CMV is 235,000 base-pairs…

Toobin on Scalia

Writing at The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin provides some helpful pushback against the nauseating wave of Scalia hagiography: Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great…

Wisdom From Drum

Prior to Donald Trump's latest expectoration, which has proven to be a bit much even for hard-core conservatives, the Republicans were worked up over a pressing question of semantics. In their telling, if you describe the threat we face as coming from “Jihadism,” then you are a politically correct pussy who just doesn't get it. The proper term, they are quick to tell us, is “Radical Islam.” I was planning on writing a post about how silly this was, but then Kevin Drum went and said everything I was thinking. And since he said it better than I would have, I recommend just following the…

Happy anniversary FakeGate!

So it is about one year ago that Peter Gleick exposed the too-ashamed-to-admit-it donors of the science denialist industry flack Heartland Organization.  Michael Tobis has a very comprehensive run-down and analysis of the event over on P3, I recommend it, especially if you need to get up to speed on what I am talking about. My only comment on the whole morality play aspect of it is that the question "do the ends justify the means" does not have a one size fits all answer.  I have always been a bit puzzled by the seemingly unquestioned moral hammer that question gets used as.  Clearly we all…

Judicial Review as Constitutional Mandate

Via Randy Barnett at VC, there is a new paper at SSRN from John Yoo and Sai Prakash, entitled The Origins of Judicial Review. This was the subject of much discussion recently in posts by me and by Josh Claybourn. It began with me criticizing Tom Delay for his absurd statement that, "The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them," a statement which clearly indicates that Delay is opposed to judicial review itself, not merely to decisions he disagrees with. In doing so, he is offering up a blatantly anti-Constitutional argument. As I pointed out in response, he is flat…

Sanders on the Pope and Federalism

Steve Sanders has a couple of terrific posts up currently at Reason and Liberty. The first is about Pope John Paul II's most recent statements calling gay marriage "evil". You can hear sadness in his voice as he writes this, and I can understand why. Like Steve, I've always held the current Pope in fairly high esteem despite our obvious disagreements. I've admired his ecumenical nature, his respect for science and his breadth of knowledge on a wide range of matters. He is, in short, a scholarly man in a position where it is easy not to be one. And as Steve notes, he is a man who has clearly…

ID and the Constitution Paper

Steven Gey, Matthew Brauer and Barbara Forrest have published a new working paper on SSRN, Is It Science Yet? Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution. Here is the abstract: On several occasions during the last eighty years states have attempted to either prohibit the teaching of evolution in public school science classes or counter the teaching of evolution with mandatory references to the religious doctrine of creationism. The Supreme Court struck down examples of the first two generations of these statutes, holding that they violated the Establishment Clause of the First…

Christian Legal Group on Gay Parental Rights

Okay, here's an odd story, perhaps. The Alliance Defense Fund, the same religious right legal group that is representing Steven Williams in his lawsuit against the Cupertino School District (the group that sent out the utterly dishonest "Declaration of Independence Banned from Classroom" press release), is also representing a woman who was in a lesbian relationship before the Utah Supreme Court in a custody battle with her now ex-spouse. Cheryl Barlow and Keri Jones were a lesbian couple for quite some time. They made the decision to have a child and Barlow underwent artificial insemination.…

Moore v. Gupta: Truth v. False Doubt

As Revere points out, Michael Moore gave Sanjay Gupta a whomping. What I missed in the Moore-Gupta match, though, was the big picture. Basically, they argued over details: Gupta put together a "fact check" that claimed Moore fudged various numbers, while Moore showed that his numbers were legitimate. What appalled me, though, was the spin put on it, the spin that Gupta did not acknowledge. Here's the argument: Moore says the US spends something under $7000 per person per year on health care; Gupta says it's 'only' something over $6000. Moore says Cuba spends $251 for the same thing; Gupta…

Kerr on Impact of O'Connor's Retirement

Orin Kerr makes a couple of interesting points in his post on Volokh about O'Connor's retirement: 9. O'Connor's retirement may shift the Court a lot less than people think. In the big ideological cases of the last Term, Justice Kennedy was the swing vote as often as (or maybe even more often than) Justice O'Connor. Let's assume for now that O'Connor is replaced by a consistently more conservative Justice; even if that's true, the left-of-center Justices presumably still have 4 very reliable votes and a good shot at picking up a 5th vote with Kennedy. Plus, new Justices are hard to predict,…

A very tentative Seattle itinerary

Lots of people want to say hello on my trip to Seattle next week, so I thought I'd better let you all know the public parts of my itinerary. This is mainly a trip to relax, eat seafood, meet family and old friends, so there's a problem of priorities. Most of my time will be spent a bit further south than the Big City—my family lives in Auburn, and I grew up in Kent—so these are tentative times and places where I'll be available in metropolitan Seattle. I might have to revise my schedule if family events come up—if I do, though, I'll mention it on the blog. Sunday, 1 July, 3:00-8:00: I'll be…

Contradictions from the Administration on the Explosives

The first defense story, which White House aides started frantically emailing reporters, was that NBC News had been with our troops when they first got there and confirmed that they were already gone. That was quickly shown to be false by the NBC reporter who was there, who said that in fact there was no search done. And it turned out that this reporter was with the second group of troops through there, not the first, which was a week before. The first group was the 3rd Infantry, and the Colonel from that group admits that they did not do a thorough search either because they didn't even know…

Stallings and the Moonies Spin the Coronation Story

The Moonies held a press conference yesterday to clear up what they claim are misconceptions and falsehoods fostered by us evil bloggers about the March 23rd Moon coronation ceremony at the Dirkson senate office building. The press conference featured Michael Jenkins, George Stallings and other frauds and con men from the Unification Church. They ended up making themselves sound even worse. We've already shown the two contradictory explanations they've given, and their own admission of how they've given two contradictory views of it: "The 'outside' view of the Capitol Hill event was that…

Misleading Political Campaigns

I just went to my local grocery store to pick up a few things for home and there were 2 women outside the store canvassing for signatures on a petition. As I walked out of the store, one of them asked me if I would sign their petition to "restore voting rights to the people of Michigan." I said I wasn't aware that our voting rights in Michigan had been taken away. She said that the state government had passed a law to take away our right to vote on the issue of gambling casinos, which meant the state could put a casino anywhere they wanted and we wouldn't be able to stop it. I said, "I have…

The Multiverse: An Apology

When Chad first asked me to guest blog here, my first response was that I didn't have anything to say. After a little thought, however, it occurred to me that this would be an opportunity to do a little exposition. Unfortunately, my research area is quite a bit on the esoteric side, so I had to look elsewhere for possibilities. Thus, the "ask a string theorist" post below. But, the next thing that occurred to me was to talk about multiple universes. Why do that? Not because I believe that it's central to string theory, and not because I believe that it's even necessarily science. What I do…

Jack McDevitt, Odyssey [Library of Babel]

Speaking of weirdly compelling reads (as I was at the end of the previous entry), Jack McDevitt has a new book out in what I think of as the "Archeologists in Spaaaace!!!" series (which starts with The Engines of God, and includes Chindi, Deepsix and Omega). Odyssey doesn't include any archeologists, but it has a very similar feel. As with the Recluce books, these are very comforting to read, in an odd sort of way. The protagonists are most quiet technical types, who don't run around indiscriminately blowing stuff up, and mostly just work at being good at their jobs. And in McDevitt's world,…

Sunday Football Commentary

Today is the official last day of classes, though my final class meetings were yesterday. I'm also halfway through grading a big pile of lab reports, which I do electronically, so I'm trying to keep my extra-curricular typing to a minimum, lest I suffer another flare-up of muscle spasms in my neck and shoulder. I shouldn't let this weekend's NFL games pass entirely without comment, though. The karmic blowback for slagging college football in general was the collapse of my Giants against the Bears on Sunday night. The loss was not unexpected-- the Bears are a very good team, and the Giants are…

Seven Questions

I'm going to be too busy to blog much for the next few days. This is partly a matter of it being the end of the term, with lab reports due (drafts tomorrow, the final reports Thursday), and exams (next Thursday), and grading, and an end-of-term push in the lab with one of my research students. But mostly, I'm going to be thinking about seven questions. The way the tenure process works here is that candidates have two interviews with the ad hoc committee. The first is to meet the committee, and establish a sort of initial context for their fact-finding, while the second interview is to give…

Waimanu

We haven't had enough fossil penguins here, so let me rectify that deficiency. Below the fold you'll find a reconstruction of Waimanu, a 61-62 million year old penguin that was discovered in New Zealand. Oh, and Carl Zimmer has posted a photo of the bird with its skin and feathers on. Reconstruction of Waimanu (composite of W. manneringi and W. tuatahi, based on original art by Chris Gaskin ©Geology Museum, University of Otago). ca, caudal vertebrae; ce, cervical vertebrae; cm, carpometacarpus; cr, coracoid; fb, fibula; fe, femur; fu, furcula; hu, humerus; sk, skull, md, mandible; oc, os…

The Efficient Part of Campus

There's an academic joke that says that the job of a university president is really pretty simple. To ensure happiness on campus, all he or she needs to do is make sure that there's sex for the undergraduates, food for the graduate students, and parking for the faculty. It's certainly true that parking enforcement has been one of the most efficient departments on every campus I've been associated with. At Maryland, it was practically the only efficient thing there, but it was a fearsome oepration. I once parked my car in a faculty lot just long enough to run inside and drop a homework set in…

L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall [Library of Babel]

I picked this out of the to-be-read pile because it's specifically name-checked in the "SF and the History of Science" panel description on my Boskone schedule. I figure it's pretty likely to get brought up, and since we had a copy lying around, I might as well actually read it so as to be able to say something intelligent about it. Lest Darkness Fall is the story of archeology student Martin Padway, who gets struck by lightning, and wakes up to find himself in sixth-century Rome. Armed with a slightly improbable level of knowledge regarding ancient history, society, and culture, he sets out…

Controversy Sells

A little while ago, John Lynch asked what really draws readers to ScienceBlogs, and listed his top twenty posts. In a similar vein, here are the top twelve Uncertain Principles posts of the past year, ranked by number of pageviews: SAT Challenge: Bloggers Dumber Than High-School Kids Local Realism, Loopholes, and The God Delusion SAT Challenge: They Sound Like... Bloggers Bugs Aren't Features How to Score Well Without Really Writing SAT Challenge: My Entry All That I Want How to Tell a True Lab Story Top Eleven: Time to Vote How to Do a Good PowerPoint Lecture Dawkins and Theology Deep…

DonorsChoose Payoff: The Capital District

Another DonorsChoose incentive claimed: Ewan asks for a blog post about "the neatest attractions in Albany and the surrounding area." "Neatest" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and as is the case with any area, the worst people to ask about local tourism are local residents (ask a Manhattanite how often they visit the Statue of Liberty). Kate and I don't do a lot of sight-seeing. What culture we do get mostly comes in the form of concerts and the like, and there are several venues for that sort of thing in the area. The Egg hosts a lot of different sorts of shows, and the Troy…