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On the scale invariance of army unit deployments

There has been much talk of a proposed surge escalation bump in the number of US soldiers deployed to Iraq, in the near future, for the purpose of doing something vaguely quantum mechanical, I gather, since the mission seems to become more poorly defined as anyone attempts to observe it more closely. But... the number of troops bandied about is 20,000 +/- Which appears minor compared to the 150,000 or so already deployed, except the discussion seems to indicate that these are the combat soldiers to be deployed! Something does not add up. There are currently something like 14 combat brigades…

a dark rumour

there is an amusing rumour on the resonaances blog about cold dark matter The CDMS experiment is a Cold Dark Matter Search experiment, looking for nuclear recoil in lab detectors, due to scattering of weakly interacting massive particles with normal matter. [hmm, link is to UC site for CDMS - the Stanford CDMS website is password protected, don't know if that is usual - I have some recollection of linking to CDMS at Stanford in the past with no problems.] CDMSI ran for several years, and reported upper bounds on WIMP masses and cross-sections, and CDMSII has been running for a while now with…

Happy Pasta

Happy Holidays! May his Noodly Appendages tickle you on this most festive of days. Pagans often fail to understand the traditions of Pastafarianism. As with all the other major faiths, the CoFSM has its traditions, its holy days. Some have, admittedly, been compromised from their pure origin to accommodate the realities of modern life, and scholars make persuasive arguments that the early church parents co-opted the traditions, and pagan rituals of other faiths. We are now in the holiest of all the Pasta days, the legendary Spaghetti Harvest. As the docmentary above shows, this is an…

Corot discovery announcement

CoRoT, the French stellar photometry satellite, had a press announcement at 1 pm (Paris time) today They announced the discovery of CoRoT Exo-2b their second extrasolar planet. 3.5 Jupiter masses, 1.4 Jupiter radii with an orbital period of 1.743 days around a K0V star, 12th magnitude. UPDATE: ESA press release in English Click for large image Should note here that CoRoT is now follow-up limited. Transit discoveries are currently announced after ground confirmation to get radial velocities, so first announcements will be high mass, short period, because those are easiest to follow-up, and…

almost massless world

for all practical purposes we can do most physics under the assumption that space-time is locally flat but it isn't. Locally space-time has some curvature, but that doesn't matter so much. Globally, there is also an issue, since we seem to live in a universe with a positive cosmological constant, and going off to infinity is not going to get us to a nice flat Minkowski space. Technically, this confounds a lot of assumptions in physics, where it is assumed that there is some asymptotic flat space, over there somewhere, where everything is well defined, cleanly separated. In practise, this…

Community College Biotechnology programs and K12 outreach

Over the years, I've seen many biotechnology education programs at community colleges embrace outreach to high schools as part of their mission. This kind of enthusiasm for outreach seems unique to biotech. No other kind of science or engineering program seems to do this sort of thing, at least not on the nationwide basis that I've seen demonstrated in biotechnology. And yet, even though I've always admired and often participated in these efforts, some aspects are a little puzzling. How do the colleges reconcile the energy spent in outreach efforts with the energy spent towards educating…

Music Mondays: Have a heavy metal Christmas

Welcome to the latest feature here at Confessions of a Science Librarian -- Music Mondays! My plan is to have a vaguely music-related post here most Mondays, somewhat in the vein of my Friday Fun posts, but probably not quite as regular. I'll probably mix in short CD reviews, odd bits I've found on the web, the occasional "Five Songs I Love" feature with who knows what else I think of. And speaking of odd bits... Rob Halford, Metal God, Judas Priest front man, solo act with a couple of really great albums under his belt, has a new Christmas CD coming out called Wintersongs Let's hear what…

KITP: extragalactic globulars

it is extragalactic day here at KITP this could get exciting, if you like that sort of thing unsolved problems in dynamical evolution, and why they are interesting... for the five people who care. This afternoon we tackle colour: red and blue, again... All our data belongs to M87 'cause M87 has shitloads (technical term) of globulars. Magic! "Elowitz's Law: Sufficiently advanced image processing is not distinquishable from magic." Yup, M87 SDSS image What we know: we ought to be able to calculate cluster mass loss rates, but we appear to be underestimating it by something like factor or…

H.R. 1 - Recovery and Reinvestment

"Making supplemental appropriations for job preservation and creation, infrastructure investment, energy efficiency and science..." So, the supplemental funding bill is moving through the House committee in sub-sections as different "Titles" of it are processed through the political sausage factory. It is "House Resolution 1" - which is a statement on its priority level. Huffington Post very kindly put up a pdf - all 647 seven pages. Science is in Title III - starting page 48. What have we got? NASA: $400M for science - at least $250M of which to accelerate climate research missions; $150M…

A tale from the trenches of science journalism

I get called fairly often for quick fact checks by science journalists, which is a good thing. I've also written a fair number of science pieces for publication, which get improved by good editors, which is also a good thing. But there are also ugly tales of bad editing and the difficult realities of getting science stories published, and I got one this morning that I post with the author's permission. I just read your post on journalist integrity, which reminded me to thank you again for your help with my article on zebrafish hair cells. I'm a recent graduate of an institutional science…

SuperGrrl Beats the Boys!

tags: Rags to Riches, Belmont Stakes, Triple Crown, Horse racing Rags to Riches (7), ridden by John Velazquez, won the 139th Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park in Elmont, New York on Saturday, 9 June 2007. Curlin, ridden by Robby Albarado (background), finished second. Rags to Riches is the first filly to win the Belmont in 102 years since Tanya won in 1905. Image: Jason DeCrow (AP Photo) Rags to Riches, the bright chestnut-colored superfilly, beat six colts to win the Belmont Stakes today. Her winning time for the mile-and-a-half race was 2:28.74. The world and track record for this distance…

Mystery Birds: Pacific Golden-Plover, Pluvialis fulva, and American Golden-Plover, P. dominica

tags: Pacific Golden-Plover, Pluvialis fulva, American Golden-Plover, Pluvialis dominica, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Pacific Golden-Plover, Pluvialis fulva (left), and American Golden-Plover, Pluvialis dominica (right), photographed on Fir Island, Skagit County, Washington State [I will identify these birds for you tomorrow]. Image: Marv Breece, 6 October 2008 [larger view]. Canon EOS 350D 1/640s f/7.1 at 300.0mm iso800. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes:…

Mystery Bird: Neotropical Cormorant, Phalacrocorax brasilianus

tags: Neotropical Cormorant, Phalacrocorax brasilianus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Neotropical Cormorant, Phalacrocorax brasilianus, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Richard Ditch, 2006 [larger view]. Date Time Original: 2006:10:01 07:47:53 Exposure Time: 1/249 F-Number: 8.00 ISO: 200 Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Look carefully at this bird's right foot, and you'll see that the web actually includes all four…

DonorsChoose Challenge Classroom Proposal Focus, Birds

tags: DonorsChoose2008, education, public school education, fund raising, evolution education, nature education, bird education One of the highest poverty areas in America is in Washington DC, our nation's capital. That's just disgusting. But we do not need to let the kids who live there succumb to the rampant despair of broken dreams, poor health and poverty. This proposal seeks to give these kids wings by teaching them about birds. Birds are a magical gateway into biological sciences; drawing kids into learning about the wonders of evolution and behavioral ecology and conservation. I know…

Mystery Bird: Mediterranean Gull, Ichthyaetus melanocephalus

tags: Mediterranean Gull, Ichthyaetus melanocephalus, Larus melanocephalus, birds, nature, Image of the Day [Mystery bird] Mediterranean Gull, Ichthyaetus [Larus] melanocephalus, stretching her wings. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Rick Wright [larger view]. Two hints: (1) this is not a North American species, and (2) it's not a sandpiper. Read Rick's analysis for identifying this species below .. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: There's little doubt that we're on the coast again, but this bird of the shore is not -- to our…

Birdbooker Report 10

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books "One cannot have too many good bird books" --Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927). Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, which lists bird and natural history books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase. FEATURED TITLE: Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson's Herbarium: A Facsimile Edition. 2006. Belknap/Harvard University Press. Large slipcased folio: 208 pages. Price: $125.00 U.S. [Amazon: $98.00]. SUMMARY: Poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) in her youth assembled a…

In the Blink of an Eye

tags: Venus flytrap, plant, biology, mechanics A Venus flytrap lies open, waiting for an insect to set off its trap. Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan and colleagues have shown that the plant uses stored elastic energy to operate its hinged leaves. Image: Yoel Forterre. How does the venus flytrap accomplish what most people cannot? How does a mere plant capture live flies? The mystery of the Venus flytrap's rapid movement lies in storing and releasing elastic energy, says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, who is the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics at Harvard University.…

The Birdbooker Report 5: Notes on Bird (and Natural History) Books

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, natural history books "One cannot have too many good bird books" --Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927). Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by Ian Paulsen, which lists bird and natural history books that are (or will soon be) available for purchase. FEATURED TITLE: Fries, Waldemar H. The Double Elephant Folio: The Story of Audubon's Birds of America. 2006 (1973). Zenaida Publishing, Inc. Hardbound: 523 pages. Price: $84.95 US. SUMMARY: First published in 1973, this book is often called, "the Bible of Audubon scholars." This…

White House regulatory czar fails to publish rulemaking plan and agenda

When an organization fails to get the little things right, I have difficulty believing they are competent to get the big things right either. That's the way I feel about the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA is part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was created by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, and is charged with reviewing certain proposed federal regulations and approving agencies' requests to collect data from the public. One of OIRA's responsibilities, as outlined in the 1993 Executive Order (EO) 12866, is coordinating the…

Spread the word: Affordable Care Act enrollment open until Jan. 31

We’re just a humble little public health blog. But we can still do our part. If you or someone you know need help getting health insurance coverage before next week’s enrollment deadline on Jan. 31, here are some good resources. First, why do this? Because this week, the Trump administration abruptly canceled advertising and outreach scheduled to run during this final week of Affordable Care Act enrollment. Apparently, he even pulled ads that were already paid for. But, you can still enroll. According to Paul Demko at Politico: (The Trump administration) is also halting all media outreach…

After multiple changes, fewer patients suffer hospital-acquired conditions

As 2015 drew to a close, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality announced some good news: Fewer US patients are dying from hospital-acquired conditions (HACs) like pressure ulcers and catheter-associated infections. Between 2011 and 2014, patients had 2.1 million fewer HACs than they would have if the 2010 baseline rate had continued. The drop translated to an estimated $20 billion in healthcare-cost savings and 87,000 fewer deaths. Of the HACs averted over the four-year period, 40% were adverse drug events, 28% were pressure ulcers, and 16% were catheter-associated urinary tract…

Boardgaming Retreat

This past weekend saw my third annual boardgaming retreat: 48 hours in good company at a small Nyköping hotel during the slow season, all meals included. Me and my buddy Pieter took a walk upriver to the first bridge and back past the castle ruin late on Saturday night, but otherwise I spent my waking hours in the gaming/dining room. I played eleven sessions of nine different games. To give you an idea of how popular each individual game is, I've included its current BGG rank. For instance, Indonesia's “98th” means that right now there are only 97 board games that the largely US-based users…

Current Archaeology 237

Current Archaeology's December issue offers one of the mag's signature feature write-ups of new books, this time The Complete Ice Age: how climate change shaped the world by Brian Fagan et al. Interesting stuff, where the following passage on the coming of our own species into Ice Age Europe struck me as particularly illuminating: "In the past, climate change had either forced movement or engendered physical evolution [in the area's hominid population]. Homo sapiens, supremely intelligent, responded to new challenges through cultural evolution. The interaction between nature and humanity now…

Study Finds Controlled Washington, D.C. Wildfires Crucial For Restoring Healthy Political Environment

Says The Onion. And its right, even if the original is damaged (I've not done it, of course)). But that's not quite what I wanted to write about... I wanted to talk about The war against Exxon Mobil (WaPo) and the contrast between reactions to that and In re Smith v Karl (and several reprints). mt's article is easy for all right-thinking people to agree with. So much so that mt even found one wrong-thinking person who also agreed with it (that's a joke; don't get all huffy). But what about the obvious obverse, which is the witch hunt against Exxon? I asked mt about that and that, oooh, it…

Who is Lawrence Solomon, and what is Energy Probe?

Lawrence Solomon was kind enough to popularise my name. So its time to return the favour, and ask, "who is he"? And indeed, what is "Energy Probe"? If you read the wiki entry on EP only a few hours ago, you would have found that Energy Probe is a Canadian non-governmental organization which promotes alternatives to polluting coal and nuclear power.[1] Energy Probe's executive director, Lawrence Solomon, is a prominent environmentalist... Now I admit that it is possible to be an environmentalist and also a frothing-at-the-mouth GW septic, but I don't think LS has managed that trick. And oddly…

Rob Thurman Gets Her Tenses Wrong

I'm a picky reader when it comes to entertainment, and if I don't like the first 50 pages of a novel I rarely continue. The most recent casualty of this policy is a book I was very kindly given by Birger Johansson, Rob Thurman's The Grimrose Path (2010). Its a modern urban fantasy with angels and demons and tricksters, and it failed to interest me much. Usually I don't review stuff I don't like here, since I prefer to offer the Dear Reader recommendations. But this book suffers from an interesting weakness that I can't remember coming across before, and I thought I might say something about…

Reith Lecture woes

I've just listened to that Jeffrey Sachs, the international economist, giving the 2007 Reith Lecture called "Bursting At The Seams". I was only half listening but woke up when he said: Now like the ozone crisis, public awareness has been the second step. For a long time climate change was discussed as something for the far future. Now it's understood as something that imperils us today as well. The heatwave in Europe in 2003, claiming more than twenty thousand lives; Hurricane Katrina, a storm of devastating proportions, shocking the American people and the world about what climate can do;…

First direct evidence that human activity is linked to Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse

Exciting BAS press release... The first direct evidence linking human activity to the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves is published this week in the Journal of Climate. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, University College London, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, (Belgium) reveal that stronger westerly winds in the northern Antarctic Peninsula, driven principally by human-induced climate change, are responsible for the marked regional summer warming that led to the retreat and collapse of the northern Larsen Ice Shelf.…

Inhofe's NYT refs

Someone has kindly sent me the NYT articles that Inhofe references. Lets have a look... but before we do, there are plenty more out there if you care to look... 1895. The headline ("Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again") is as described, though Inhofe fails to note it appeared on page 6 - hardly headline stuff. And the article itself points out that this is probably a periodic phenomenon rather than a trend, citing previous instances. 1933. Appears on page 1! Inhofe quote "America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise" which is correct (but,…

ADF and Judicial Activism, Take 2

The admin of the ADF's blog has a post responding to this column by Edward Lazarus about judicial independence and judicial activism. Amusingly, he titles the post Why Won't the Left Engage in Honest Debate? You'll see why this is amusing in a moment. He claims that Lazarus "fails to acknowledge that the real issue in the debate is in fact the definition of 'judicial activism.'" And he then refers to an earlier post by Jordan Lorence, where Lorence was replying to a post I had written accusing him of double talk on the subject of judicial activism. He cites the following from Lorence: Jordan…

Glib Fortuna's Latest Absurdity

It's been a couple weeks since Glib Fortuna said something really stupid (or at least since I'd noticed it), which may be a record for him. But he's back with another utterly clueless post about HR 2679. He's accusing the ACLU of being disingenuous for arguing that this bill deprives "citizens" of the ability to recover legal fees in successful establishment clause cases. To whom do attorneys fees go? Attorneys fees go to attorneys, not "citizens." The ACLU's disingenuousness oozes through this entire release. The fact is, this bill would cut them off from millions of dollars. Their lament…

Why Religious Law is Not the Law of the Land

I came across this post at Howard Friedman's religion law blog and it got me to thinking. The post is about Pakistan amending their state law to allow for women convicted of premarital sex to be "rehabilitated" rather than put to death, as their law previously demanded. I was repulsed by the notion that anyone could possibly be so barbaric as to think it's okay to kill a woman for not being a virgin. I'm sure most people agree with me. I'm sure most Christians, even most theologically conservative, inerrantist Christians (everyone but the reconstructionists, essentially) would agree that it's…

Supreme Court Lets Church/State Case Stand

I forgot to discuss this last week, but the Supreme Court denied cert in the case of Baldwinsville School District v. Peck, a church/state case involving a kindegarten student's right to express a religious viewpoint. The class was given an assignment to draw a poster with their perspective on the environment. Antonio Peck drew a poster that showed the earth with people holding hands around it on one side and a picture of Jesus on the other side. When the pictures were put up in the school cafeteria for parents to see during a conference day, the teacher put up Antonio's picture but folded…

Pirates of the Caribbean 2

On Saturday, Kate and I went to see Johnny Depp swish his way through a second movie as Captain Jack Sparrow, with assistance from Kiera Knightly, Orlando Bloom, and a lot of other wooden props. She's posted a review with spoilers, and I'll post some spoilers below the fold, but my one-word, spoiler-free review is here: Excessive. To expand, the movie was not just too long, it was too much. Individual pieces of it were a good deal of fun, but there were too many pieces, and the whole was less than the sum of the parts. More details (with massive movie-destroying SPOILERS) below the fold. To…

Dorks

I'm referring to the fools trying to p*ss around with how banks pay their staff. It am all over de noos, and to spare the blushes of some of my more delicate readers I won't refer you to Timmy, you can have the Graun instead: Don't cap bank bonuses, scrap them. The EU's plan to cap bonuses sounds like good news – but it may simply lead to banks jacking up salaries. Yes, you idiot, that's exactly what will happen. And notice the follow-on idiocy: capping bonuses leads to increases in basic pay, so lets cut bonuses entirely! That will surely lead to... yes, that's right, yet more increases in…

Investigation of methods for hydroclimatic data homogenization?

Well, bumps is over for another year, so some kind of normal service can resume. WUWT was pushing "Investigation of methods for hydroclimatic data homogenization" by Steirou and Koutsoyiannis. Why? Because it appeared to show problems with station data homogenisation. There was some comedy before AW realised it wasn't a peer-reviewed paper, just a conference presentation, although he's still misleadingly calling it a "paper". Open Mind has largely done this, but what I wanted to point to was a trail of (sane) blog conversations. Marcel Crok has a largely uncritical post (uncritical meaning…

Now I know how Jesse James felt

Suddenly, lots of people want to debate me. I'm really not that much into the debate business, and I think most of the people who want to battle me don't need a high-level argument about biology — they need a remedial course in elementary science. Especially since most of the challenges are rather like this one: http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?s=47a2cb894dc2340b;act=ST;f=14;t=1274;st=24870 Note that the drooling animals are clamoring for P.Z. Myers and Dembski to have a "debate." What is to debate? Myers is a rabid mad man, completely out of control. His condition…

More random stuff

Every now and again I'm surprised by the contrast between the sanity that you'll find on good blogs, and the madness that reigns in our useless press. In this case, its dead children again which is very sad, but should not be used as entertainment schlock-horror fodder as our gutter press does. Mind you, I'm less impressed by Timmy on the Greeks. For all I know the conclusion is correct, but the reasoning - small fraction of bonus - is faulty. By putting it that way Timmy is trying to minimise the numbers, which might work, until you realise that a large fraction of profits are paid out as…

Facing up to 4 degree C?

In stark contrast to the hard liberalism of TW is one of the worst pieces of woolly-thinking soft liberalism (well, actually the Green Party, of which I'm a member and supporter, if you care. It is from their mag). And yet somehow it seems all too typical. Life in the Peruvian Andes is hard... blah blah... Recently, these communities have experienced the worst winter to hit Peru in nearly 50 years with temperatures plummeting to a deadly minus 24ºC Oh dear. Well, clearly they could do with a bit of warming, then, no? Or are we really obliged to pretend that all climate change is necessarily…

Bruce Schneier knows Victoria's Secret

Or, more oddities in the Cyberwar stakes. I can't help thinking that the cyberwar stuff, much like conventional terrorism, is vastly overblown as a threat to national security, or indeed anything. A case in point is the normally very sensible Bruce Schneier with a short recommendation of a New Yorker piece about the crashing of a EP-3E Aries II in 2001 in China. So, to recap: the pane is monitoring Chinese comms, crashes, and so is physcially in the hands of the Evil Hordes of Fu Manchu who naturally take it to pieces. Apparently this included operating system created and controlled by the N.…

Horrible English weather

Its all rather manky here: cold, thin snow semi-melted by rain and refrozen. Urgh. Which brings up the obvious question: if I could suddenly make the world, or at least this little bit of it, 2 degrees warmer all year round, would I be better or worse off? I'm just thinking of direct response, mind you, so leaving out any ecological problems and assuming no change in precipitation. +2 oC would mean that we never had snow and hardly ever had frosts. That latter would make breaking up the soil each winter a bit harder (and would have lots of ecological repercussions, but I'm ignoring them, only…

Kids and Construction Update

The big development of this week is that construction started on the Great Chateau Steelypips Renovation of 2017. We're extending one part of the back of the house about ten feet to gain a bedroom on the second floor, and gut-renovating the kitchen, dining room, and mud room. This is a massive undertaking, with a massive price tag (more than we paid for the house in 2002), and is going to be massively disruptive later this summer. Right now, it's very exciting, because we have an excavator and giant piles of dirt in our back yard: The Pip looking at the excavator used to dig the foundation…

SteelyKid and the Makey Makey

A couple of weeks ago, after one of my Forbes posts, I got contacted by a publicist working for Makey Makey. They really wanted publicity in Forbes, but that's above my pay grade; I did, however, say that it sounded like the sort of thing my kids would get a kick out of, and I could mention it here... So, they sent me one. It's a small circuit board with a USB connector and a bunch of places for alligator-clip leads, and functions as an input device for the computer-- if you complete a circuit from one of the clip leads to ground, it records that as a mouse click, or a key press of some sort…

Stuff That Doesn't Belong on Student Evaluations

This was a good week for "Chad bristles at side issues of massively reshared stories," with the Vox and gender bias stories, and also this PBS piece urging parents to tell their kids science stories. That probably seems surprising, given what I do around here, but while I fully endorse the end of that piece, the opening section in which Wendy Thomas Russell explains why she never liked science mostly makes me think that she's an awful person. She attributes her lack of interest in science to bad teaching, and provides a series of examples ending with: Later, at the University of Nebraska, I…

Quantum Optics: The Game

Over on Facebook, my colleague Chris Chabris was talking up a smartphone game from a company he's associated with. Which of course got me thinking "Wait, why don't I have a smartphone game company?" (The Renaissance Weekend is also partly to blame, as I was one of about six people there who didn't have a start-up company of some sort...) Which, in turn, led to the realization that there really ought to be a quantum optics video game. Or maybe a series of games, because you could construct a whole bunch of puzzlers around quantum phenomena: -- The most basic would be to do something like the…

Weekend Diversion: Human-Caused Lunar Methane

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." -Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut may have it right for most of us, but not all of us spend all of our time on Earth. A select dozen of us, in fact, have made it, as Cat Power would sing, to The Moon. Image credit: Apollo 15, Dave Scott, NASA. Back in 1971, the Apollo 15 astronauts made huge strides in space exploration, making use of the first manned lunar rover and spending over 18 hours on activities outside of the spacecraft. But two (of the three) crew members experienced heartbeat irregularities on…

Weekend Diversion: Keeping Portland Weird Beard(ed)!

"There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard." -Jean Cocteau Some traditions are older than we even know. Older than our great-grandparents, older than our countries, older even than the oldest songs and music we know of, which comes to you today courtesy of Planxty, the story of the 1580 defeat of the British at Glenmalure, Follow Me Up To Carlow.Even older than that is the tradition of facial hair. As far as I can tell, facial hair fell out of favor during World War I, when chemical warfare made it necessary to…

More on the Great Blizzard of 2015

The Blizzard continues. The center of the low pressure system moved to the northeast more than expected, so the maximum snowfall amounts have also moved deeper into New England, and it the storm may end up dropping the largest amounts Downeast, in Maine, rather than around New York and southern New England. Nonetheless maximum snow totals are heading for 20 inches in many areas west of Boston. Here, I wanted to alert you to a recent study that talks about "Changes in US East Coast Cyclone Dynamics with Climate Change," which has this abstract: Previous studies investigating the impacts of…

The Comet. It Sings!

Have you heard the comet singing? From the Rosetta Blog this press release: Rosetta’s Plasma Consortium (RPC) has uncovered a mysterious ‘song’ that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is singing into space. RPC principal investigator Karl-Heinz Glaßmeier, head of Space Physics and Space Sensorics at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, tells us more. Sound_comet2 Artist's impression of the 'singing comet' 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NavCam RPC consists of five instruments on the Rosetta orbiter that provide a wide variety of complementary information about the…

Senator Leo Foley RIP

Just a quick note that will be of interest to my local readers. Senator Leo Foley passed away at the age of 87, just a few days ago. Senator John Hoffman, who now hold Senator Foley's old seat, wrote this: Last Friday, Feb. 5 former Coon Rapids Senator Leo T. Foley passed away peacefully surrounded by his loved ones; he was 87. Sen. Foley served the Coon Rapids area for 14 years, serving from 1997 to 2011. I took up the mantle of serving the area following Sen. Foley’s retirement. I first met Leo in 2002, and ever since then I was incredibly proud to call him my State Senator. Leo Foley…