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Weekend Diversion: Never Give a Physicist Your Data!

"Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree." -Terry Pratchett With a high unemployment rate and many people having stopped looking for work, it's pretty hard to live in the United States and not be aware of the struggles many people are facing. Here's a song by Loudon Wainwright III to set the tone, The Home Stretch.Although many people have their theories, it's worth asking just what the income disparity is in America. Thankfully, Catherine Rampell's NY Times article earlier this week came loaded with data from Rachel Johnson of the Tax Policy Center. Specifically, they…

Weekend Diversion: Save The Words!

"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous." -Henry Brooks Adams There are plenty of advocates out there for letting go of the great, descriptive, but outdated words of our language. And I simply can't get on board with that. As Storyhill will tell you, there's value in holding on. Holding OnWhy? Those of you who've been reading this site for a while know that one of the great struggles I deal with is expressing, in a clear, straightforward, and meaningful way, these physical concepts that baffle some of the world's greatest…

Arduino Playground: Book Review of a Serious Maker Book

Arduino Playground: Geeky Projects for the Experienced Maker is not for the faint of heart. Unless the faint of heart person plans to build a pacemaker with an arduino! Most books about making electronic projects, including and especially Raspberry Pi or Arduino projects, have a bit up front about tools and technology. You'll need a screwdriver, maybe a magnifying glass, some extra wire, that sort of thing. Arduino Playground: Geeky Projects for the Experienced Maker does that too, but it is a bit more extreme. Maybe you need a tap and die set, oh, and here are some neat tips on designing and…

Tracking Polls Show Clinton Disaster Looms, But Electoral College Holds

The relationship between the popular vote, roughly reflected in national polls, and the Electoral College vote, is where the rubber meets the road. When you look at states that are very solid for each candidate, neither candidate has a lock on the race, but Clinton has way more electoral votes, currently. These numbers hover around 200-something to 100-something. Then there are the strongly leaning states, which when added to the other states, put Clinton almost exactly at the required 270 electoral votes. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less, depending on which states you think you can…

Explaining The Recent Extreme Weather: Global Warming

The human release of greenhouse gasses has ultimately caused changes in weather patterns so that major storm systems in the Northern Hemisphere get wetter and move along more slowly, causing significant rainfall events to occur at a much higher rate than previously. This has become a nearly ongoing phenomenon, with major floods in Canada, Colorado, Texas, Western Europe, Texas again, various places in Azia, more in Europe, Texas again, and so on. The short version of the story: The jet stream is often fairly linear, traveling around the planet at a high speed, but it can also get all wavy…

Weekend Diversion: Midori and the Arts

Last night, I had the absolute pleasure to hear Midori, one of the top violinists in the world, play with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra. (For those of you wondering, she was spectacular.) What does Midori sound like? Here's her playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto fifteen years ago with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. While I recognize that classical music may not be to everyone's taste, I believe that much like a quality education and quality science, everyone should have access to a quality arts program, too. But the philanthropic work that Midori is undertaking to those ends…

Don't Write off Fermilab Yet!

"By early 2011, [Fermilab's Tevatron] will have recorded enough data to either find the Higgs or rule it out. -New Scientist, August 2009 Sure, there's a whole lot of well-deserved hoopla about the LHC, the world's #1 particle accelerator in terms of energy! But don't forget about #2, Fermilab's Tevatron, which also holds the honor of being the first place I ever worked in physics! Fermilab has been operating since the 1970s, and has been responsible for many of the most outstanding discoveries in the history of particle physics. Remember the standard model? The standard model tells us that…

How Safe is the LHC?

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. --Peter Pan Much like any new venture where the outcome is uncertain, there are a lot of fears surrounding the LHC. And I know, because it occasionally shows up in my comment threads, in my inbox, or in my office. Could it form a black hole and destroy Earth? Could we somehow do something in the future that would destroy the past? Or is it just generally unsafe? The answers to these questions are no, no, and no. The first question -- about creating a black hole and destroying Earth -- requires that we apply the laws of…

Birds of Australia: New Book

There are close to just under 900 species of bird in Australia, and The Australian Bird Guide by Peter Menkhorst, Danny Rogers, Rohan Clarke, Jeff Davies, Peter Marsack, and Kim Franklin covers just over 900 of them. Where do the extras come from? Sea birds in the nearby oceans, I think. This is an excellent bird book that all Australian birders simply need to have. Holiday season is just around the corner. Get one of these for your favoriate Australian! This is not exactly a pocket guide. It is more of a car guide, and you better have a big glove box. The 6.8 x 9.7 inch format is hefty…

How old is the Universe?

One of the most surprising things about the Universe? As vast as it is, it hasn't been around forever. In fact, if you take our plain little rocky home (Earth), it looks like the Universe is only about 3 times as old as we are. It's surprising, considering how huge, expansive, and full of interesting things the Universe is. And yet, our Sun, Earth, and entire Solar System, at 4.5 billion years, represents a significant fraction of the age of the Universe, about 13.7 billion years. But how well do we know that number? If you look at the best data, you find that the Universe is 13.73 billion…

Orson Scott Card, Take 2

At the bottom of Card's article there was a place to leave comments, so I decided to do so. It's a message board on his website. I posted a message to begin this thread and the reaction of one of his acolytes was quite ridiculous. He tried two claims to explain away the absurd claim Card made. Here's the first: Card is saying that these "Darwinists" aren't explaining the flaws in a way that is accessible to non-scientists, not that no one has taken the time to explain the flaws at all. Utter nonsense. Every single link I gave in my previous post was written for a non-scientific audience. They…

Worldnutdaily's Sexual Fear Mongering

Here's a typically hysterical article from the Worldnutdaily: Canada new destination of choice for pedophiles? The article, predictably, is highly inaccurate. They're trying to whip up some irrational fear as a result of the Canadian Supreme Court's recent ruling that legalized group sex clubs in that nation. Here's the CNN report on the ruling: Group sex among consenting adults is neither prostitution nor a threat to society, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Wednesday as it lifted a ban on so-called "swingers" clubs. In a ruling that radically changes the way courts determine what poses a…

O'Reilly's Lies about Christmas

Media Matters has been doing a thorough job of following Bill O'Reilly's fake "War on Christmas" crusade of demagoguery. At this moment, they've got posts up catching him in no fewer than three lies trying to turn myth into reality. They are: Lie #1: Saginaw, Michigan tells people not to where red and green clothing: O'REILLY: In Saginaw, Michigan, the township opposes red and green clothing on anyone. [Laughing] In Saginaw Township, they basically said, anybody, we don't want you to wear red or green. I would dress up head to toe in red to green if I were in Saginaw, Michigan. False. Saginaw…

Those Darned Defense Witnesses

The ACLU-PA blog has a report on yet another defense witness in the Dover case contradicting their sworn deposition under cross examination. But there's another aspect of this that I find really interesting and that is the type of people we tend to put on school boards. The ignorance of the Dover school board is staggering, and they apparently just didn't think it mattered much whether what they did was justified or not. Here's the report on school board member Heather Geesey's testimony: Ms. Geesey followed the reporters on the stand. Parts of her testimony bore a strikingly similarity to…

More Thoughts on Miers

Two of my favorite thinkers weigh in on the Miers nomination. So sayeth Radley Balko: On Monday, the Washington Post ran excerpts of a 1992 article Harriet Miers wrote for Texas Lawyer. I've read the thing several times, now. I haven't the foggiest idea what it's actually about. Or advocating. Or why it was written. It's like she took a couple of New Republic articles, a couple of Legal Times articles, pulled an AP wire story off of Lexis, tossed them in a food processor, then poured the concotion into a new-like article. Like the quotes excerpted by David Brooks a couple of weeks ago, Miers…

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies were last night and I got to watch the immortal Bob Seger get inducted. I generally have little use for Kid Rock, who gave the induction speech for Seger, but he was actually funny. and dead on accurate when he said that Seger had paid more dues than the entire current Top 40 artists combined. I watched the ceremony with my brother, with whom I share, along with our father, a single favorite rock and roll album of all time - Bob Seger Live Bullet. When I was a kid growing up, that album was on in our house every single day, and I'm not…

The Mother of All 9th Amendment Posts

Larry Solum of the Legal Theory Blog has written the 9th amendment post to end all 9th amendment posts (okay, that's not really true - you know we'll all be blathering on about this forever anyway). Larry is a neoformalist on matters of constitutional interpretation and he does a masterful job of breaking down the text here. He doesn't get around to describing all the limits of the 9th amendment that he would advocate, since that might take a whole book. But I think he convincingly shows that the Bork/Scalia version of the 9th amendment is totally unsupportable: What is the forbidden…

Ridicule May Lawfully Be Employed Where Reason Has No Hope of Success

I seem to have attracted the attention of one Mac Swift. Who is Mac Swift? Well, let's let him answer that: I think I can accurately pride myself on being the ONLY pro-Chick Publications and pro-KJV blog on the Internet. Apparently he regards being pro-Chick Publications as something to be proud of. That speaks volumes right there. Jack Chick, for those of you who don't know, is an evangelist who produces comic books. You may have seen them laying around in public bathrooms or left in a hotel room. They are, to put it bluntly but accurately, rather moronic. It's the sort of thing that makes…

Circumnavigating the Americas in a Smallish Boat: One Island One Ocean

When I was in 5th grade one of my classmates announced that she and her family (they were a family of singing folksingers) planned to take a trip in a boat they had built around the continent. In that class were were all required to give talks on various topics of our choosing, and she gave a talk on that. We were all impressed by many aspects of the planned adventure, but one thing stood out: During this trip the folk singing family would pass dangerously close to Haiti, which was on very bad terms with the US at that time (I believe it was a Soviet Satellite or something along those…

Does Secular Humanism Have A Political Agenda?

In March, 2012, I attended a conference called Moving Secularism Forward run by the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry. I spoke as part of a panel called Does Secular Humanism Have A Political Agenda? along with Ronald Bailey of Reason.com, Razib Khan of Secular Right, and former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder. This panel was assembled and moderated by Lauren Becker of the Center for Inquiry. Tom Flynn, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism and editor of Free Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism’s bi-monthly journal liked our session (for good…

Correlation and Causation: Single Mothers and Violent Crime

The phrase "Correlation does not imply causation" has developed in to a Falsehood, as I discuss here. This is in part because people often use the phrase to argue that a particular correlation has no meaning, which is a false argument. It is, of course, true that a correlation does not in and of itself prove a causal link between two things. And, as pointed out in a few places, but I'll refer you to this Mother Jones piece for background, the relationship between single mothers and homicide and other crime is ... well ... interesting. The idea is to blame single mothers for crime. They,…

Birds of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives

Let's look at Birds of India: Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives (Second Edition) (Princeton Field Guides): The best field guide to the birds of the Indian subcontinent is now even better. Thoroughly revised, with 73 new plates and many others updated or repainted, the second edition of Birds of India now features all maps and text opposite the plates for quicker and easier reference. Newly identified species have been added, the text has been extensively revised, and all the maps are new. Comprehensive and definitive, this is the indispensable guide for anyone…

What Open Source Software has Good Usability?

Are you interested in software usability and open source? If so, my friend Jim would like your help. He is doing a study of usability in Open Source software. I'll post his entire request below along with a link to his blog. Also, he'll probably be doing some other interent based interolocution about this; I'll pass on to you whatever he passes on to me. Here's the thing. Jim has been involved in Open Source software for a long time, and is the creator of FreeDOS, and it doesn't get much geekier than that. (I think the FreeDOS developers manual may be written in a dialect of Klingon.)…

The Most Impressive Comeback Story You Haven’t Heard (Guest Post)

The Most Impressive Comeback Story You Haven’t Heard By Ross Chanin & Emilee Pierce If you read the tech press, you know the scoop: Google just bought Nest Labs (the maker of smart thermostats and smoke detectors) for $3.2 billion. For context, that’s more than three times the amount that Facebook paid for Instagram in last year’s blockbuster deal and Google’s second largest acquisition to date. What you probably haven't heard is what this megabuy says about the cleantech industry. In fact, you probably haven’t heard that it involves cleantech at all. That’s because the vast majority of…

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Yes, yes, I know ... Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson did not just come out, and it is not part of any current news story, so I'm not supposed to mention it in a blog post, because blog posts are only about things that happened during the last forty-five minutes or so. But what did happen in the last few minutes is that I finished reading it, and I'm recommending it to you. It is said that Neil deGrasse Tyson is a modern day Carl Sagan ... an astronomer who is superb at communicating science to the masses. That is sort of true but not exactly. Sagan…

Stockholm Film Festival 2016

I watched ten films at the 2014 festival, fourteen last year (at two festivals back to back), and this year I managed ten again. I had bought tickets for fourteen, but stuff got in the way: a huge blizzard that knocked out public transport, subtitles disappearing, and a call to marital duty. The people who book movies for this festival really know what they're doing. Half of the ones I saw get my special recommendation: Small Town Curtains / Småstad. Five middle-aged siblings play five middle-aged siblings dealing with the death of their father. In Vadstena. In a broad Östergötland dialect.…

May Pieces Of My Mind #2

My buddy Anton dug for two summers at Denisova Cave during high school! Any Tolkien fan can tell you that orks are not safe to be with. That's why I'd never ever trust any of my coworkers around a dairy farm. Annoying how the liver, the spleen and the kidneys all do a bunch of functionally unrelated things. Sloppy design. Almost makes me doubt the Biblical creation narratives. Yay! Been asked to return for the third year running and teach landscape history to international exchange students in Växjö during September. Turns out archaeagenetics is not archaeogenetics. Who is that, playing jazz…

Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe

Says The Canadian Free Press (warning: it has lots of stupid ads on it). I wonder what it is? But not very much. What does it *say*? Well, its an attempt to counter Gores movie (oh good, that means people are worried by it...). There is much of the same-old-septic-rubbish in there, but a new (and bizarre argument): that we shouldn't think a vast majority are convinced by GW, because we should only count a small number of those who actually understand detection and attribution. This is a very funny argument, because of course none of the skeptics are in this category. What most of the skeptics…

Future treatment for acne: Smearing virus guts all over your face. YAY!

Its like, instead of 'Put a bird on it!', scientists are like 'Put a virus on it!' Got cancer? Put a virus on it!  In constant pain? Put a virus on it! Addicted to cigarettes?  Put a virus on it!  Genetic disease?  Put a virus on it! Got acne? Put a virus on it! Propionibacterium acnes Bacteriophages Display Limited Genetic Diversity and Broad Killing Activity against Bacterial Skin Isolates YAY!!! Acne, though not life-threatening, sucks. If you dont have acne, consider yourself lucky.  Some people can get it relatively under control with a combination of over the counter meds and…

A few follow-ups

Remember the creationist trying to raise money by selling off his mastodon skull? Now we know why he is trying to get money fast. He got into a nasty, mud-slinging lawsuit with a fellow Christian creationist over ownership of another fossil. The wonderful news: if he doesn't get enough cash from the sale of the skull, he may have to close his museum. Man, you people sure jumped hard on that poor Canadian who thought the title of Darwin's book was sufficient to damn it. Now he has replied with another post in which he demonstrates his stupidity. He really should stop. He has put up a long…

Skeptics of Oz 2012

Skeptics of Oz was great-- Sean Gillespie asked me if I had any requirements/requests to speak, I gave him my usual rider: Sean didnt just fill a brandy glass with brown M&Ms... He filled huge Richard Dawkins Foundation coffee mug with brown M&Ms! AWESOME! Sean was just a fantastic organizer, overall. On several occasions things were not going *exactly* according to plan, and without missing a beat, Sean smoothly resolved the situation. Hes obviously a doer, not a talker, and I was impressed. The speaker line-up obviously reflected his personality, as each and every speaker was…

Prism-induced reversal of retinal images (student post)

I was happily absorbed in my slightly vegetative stupor on the couch when my roommate walked into the room and starting talking about physics. Ugh, physics, I thought, but I politely listened as she began talking about lenses, specifically how they are related to sight. It is common knowledge that the images we see are inverted on the retina, and then further processed. However, my roommate was discussing experiments done on humans that inverted their vision by 180 degrees and found that, though at first they could not function normally, eventually they adapted. I thought this was fascinating…

Links for 2011-12-15

A Muscular Empathy - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings -- to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter, that were we poor and black our sense of Protestant industry would be a mighty power sending gang leaders, gang members, hunger, depression and sickle cell into flight. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct. Still, we are, in the main,…

Links for 2011-12-01

The 5 Best Toys of All Time | GeekDad | Wired.com 1. Stick What's brown and sticky? A Stick. This versatile toy is a real classic -- chances are your great-great-grandparents played with one, and your kids have probably discovered it for themselves as well. It's a required ingredient for Stickball, of course, but it's so much more. Stick works really well as a poker, digger and reach-extender. It can also be combined with many other toys (both from this list and otherwise) to perform even more functions. We Are All 'Closing Time': Why Semisonic's 1998 Hit Still Resonates - Hollywood…

Links for 2011-08-04

The science and magic of beer | Andy Connelly | Science | guardian.co.uk "Beer is the juice of grain skilfully treated: it is liquid bread. The first people to make beers as we know them today were the Sumerians, who cultivated cereal grains specifically for brewing and drank beer to honour their gods. Many cultures have seen beer as a gift from God (a medieval English term for yeast was godisgoode). It is an expression of place and tradition - one of the few truly regional foods to which we are regularly exposed. Brewing is a combination of art and science and great brewers are blessed…

Short Story Club: "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made"

In past years, I have griped at length about the awful, maudlin dreck that Mike Resnick keeps putting on the Hugo ballot-- see this 2009 post for example. I think Abigail Nussbaum put it very well back in 2009, when she wrote of Resnick's "Article of Faith" from that year's short story ballot that "his greatest failing is and has always been the one encapsulated by "Article of Faith"--his ability to take a subject that underpins some of science fiction's seminal works, write his own spin on it which is neither innovative nor unusual nor particularly good, and send it out into the world…

Return of the Project for Non-Academic Science

In keeping with this week's unofficial theme of wibbling about academia, there's an article at The Nation about the evils of graduate school that's prompted some discussion. Sean says more or less what I would, though maybe a little more nicely than I would. I wouldn't bother to comment further, except this spurred Sean to solicit career advice for scientists looking to leave the academic track. Which reminded me that a couple of years ago, I did a bloggy Project for Non-Academic Science (name chosen to have the same acronym as a prestigious journal, because it amused me to do so), where I…

Fieldwork in Kimstad and Kaga

Frag of a brooch decorated with embossed silver foil. 5th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson. Our site in Kimstad parish looked even better than I'd thought. This was one of many cases where I've come swooping in to sites that I've never visited before and directed metal detecting. In Kimstad, I had been attracted by Ãstergötland's only (probable) Viking Period wetland weapon sacrifice, a fine sword found during drainage work. But I didn't want more swords. They're too expensive to conserve, and my project is about the settlements of people who could afford to sacrifice that sort of thing…

Avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate change?

ATTP started it by posting on Well below 2 °C: Mitigation strategies for avoiding dangerous to catastrophic climate changes by Yangyang Xua and Veerabhadran Ramanathan. But as you can tell from ATTP's post, the principal question - although he is far too polite to put it so bluntly - is "where's the novelty?"1 All their GHG and temperature scenarios, as they themselves stress, are consistent with IPCC; so there's nothing new there. Neither are the stochastic runs and attempts to assess the probabilities of exceeding various thresholds. Neither, alas, are the attaching of arbitrary labels to…

More Lindzen, if you can bear it

Just a quickie. In response to my last JM points me at The Greening of Planet Earth (1992), featuring luminaries such as Gerd-Rainer Weber of the German Coal Association (featured just in case you were under any illusion that it was only evil USAnian fossil fuel interests causing trouble; those nice sensible well-educated Krauts show similar) and our hero, Lindzen (looking egg-headed to an astonishing degree; but we're interested in his words, not his looks). As you'd expect, it is the usual mixture of lies, half-truth, some genuine truth and some things technically true but in practice…

It's Been Fun, But I Need a Break

The title pretty much says it all. One of the reasons I wanted to get the Ten Years Before the Blog series done was that I'm incredibly burned out on everything right now, and I need to step away from the Internet for a while. There are too many things that aren't getting done, and I just can't keep putting in the time needed to produce blog content. I figured that re-reading the highlights of the last ten years would either re-invigorate me, or failing that, it would at least provide a good placeholder for when the blog goes dark. I'm not officially quitting ScienceBlogs or anything like…

Hymen Reconstruction and Public Healthcare

Big Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet heads today's edition with a two-page story about surgical hymen (re-)construction. The news is that a number of tax-funded Stockholm clinics offer the procedure for a fee of about $40 (SEK 260), and ample space is also devoted to an explanation of why the whole thing is controversial. (Patriarchy, honour-based society, control of female sexuality, I don't need to explain it to you, Dear Reader.) This recalls the issue whether public health care should offer male circumcision. As I have argued before, all genital mutilation of minors should of course be…

Snakes and Saints and Ants

Got up early this morning, six thirty, and slipped out for an hour's walk. The sun was already pretty high but still veiled in mist. I walked past vineyards and olive groves toward a farmhouse until yapping guard dogs made me turn on my heel, and then I left the road. The area is heavily altered by agriculture, but still there is quite a lot of woodland and brush. I descended into the valley of a little stream, dodged bushes and a large spider web, and found water trickling at the bottom of a deep-cut little channel, like a ditch among the bushes. Stepping over, I entered untouched greenery.…

Book Review: Greenblatt, Will in the World

I'm not a very frequent theatre-goer, and if I don't like a play, I leave in the intermission. But I have had the good fortune to see some excellent productions through the years, notably of Shakespeare. (It is of course entirely possible to play Shakespeare poorly too, and I've seen it done both by professionals and by amateurs.) I haven't seen all his plays, and I've read only two, but dangle an opportunity to conveniently see more in front of me, and chances are I'll bite. During my recent Orkney jaunt, I read a fascinating biography of William Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt's best-…

Lindzen jumps the shark

You may say "but you declared Lindzen emeritus in 2011", and so I did. But that was over the issue of peer review. This is concerning science: arctic sea ice is suddenly showing surprising growth. That's just stupid. Really; its nothing but propaganda: designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind to quote one R. Lindzen quoting one G. Orwell. And if you really don't know why, the answer is: this is just natural variability. Last year was exceptionally low; this year isn't exceptionally low. This is very basic stuff, and…

SPORE: Obvious happens, EA shocked

So, EA just released the 'Creature Creator' pre-SPORE game. You cant do much with your monsters at this point, but its a super easy program for making basically any creature you can think of (I have zero animator skillz, but I can do it. Point/click/drag-- My dad could handle this). Its been really fun playing on Sporepedia, and seeing little videos of what my friends have created... Like sporn. Yes, the first place a LOT of people went when given the reins of such an amazing animation program was to generate: Huge penis/boobage/butt/etc An organism with a huge/suggestive penis/boob/butt…

What ya wanna do when you grow up?

What do I wanna do? Um, be a PI. Get to play in a lab forever. Contribute to my field. Be respected. Be loved by my students. hehehe My dream is to do research until I die, thus to have the opportunity to totally traumatize my grad students by letting them discover my cold, dead body slumped over the tissue culture hood one morning (ah, if I could only be there to laugh at them!!!) But do I plan on being a PI? Do I hang my hopes and dreams on it? Will I be crushed if I cant be a PI? Nope! I mean, I think Im smart enough. I think Im creative enough. I think Im a pretty hard worker.…

Hi new ERV readers!

Hi SciBlogs! Please excuse the mess as Im moving in (this blog feels so naked!), and my ridiculously formatted posts as Im learning the new blogging system-- Classes are over in a week and I will have more time to play :) And hi to any new ERV readers! I would just post a link to the old ERV so you new people can learn a bit about me and my writing style, but Im having some issues with the old site... So I thought Id better post a short introduction! Im Abbie Smith, and Im obsessed with viruses. Im currently finishing up my first year of graduate school, where Im getting my PhD in '…

Once more into the breach

Hmmm. That creationist who emailed me a question the other day has sent me another. It's like feeding raccoons—pretty soon they get the idea they should hang out in swarms around your house, they're digging in the trash, and they're pooping all over your lawn. Oh, well, one more time: Here is another question for you kind consideration: There are a very large number of species on earth; so many that no one has been able to count them. Many of them are much older than humans, yet none of them - not even one of them - evolved to a level comparable to that of humans? What stopped them? Or,…

Sunday Chess Problem

This week I have another short, one-liner for you. It is another one I found at the end of one of Aviv Friedman's videos. He did not mention the composer, but I got a real kick out of it. The solution is short, but there is a lot of strategy packed into it. It is also one of those problems where you can be one move from the end and still not see where it is going. White is to play and draw: It sure does look bad for white, doesn't it? His passed pawn is firmly under control, while black's passed pawn is unstoppable. Game over, right? Not so fast! There is one glimmer of hope: black'…