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Carl Michael Bellman's Butterfly

One of the brightest stars of Swedish literature is Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795). Much of his work is a kind of humorous beat poetry set to music, chronicling the lives of Stockholm drunkards and whores. Central themes are boozing, sex and death. "You think the grave's too deep? Well then, have a drink Then have another two and another three That way you'll die happier" "A girl in the green grass and wine in green glasses I feast on both, both gather me to their bosom Let's have some more resin on the violin bow!" But Bellman wasn't strictly speaking part of the underworld he wrote about…

Prized Possessions

I got to thinking about my most-prized possessions. Which are they really? Which of my stuff would I try to rescue if the house caught fire, or if we had to flee enemy troops and bring along or hide our valuables? One way to look at it would be to simply enumerate the most expensive stuff I have, the things that would cost the most to replace if they disappeared or would fetch a good price if I sold them. But YuSie and I don't really have any valuables. No gold or precious stones or artwork or other collectibles worth mentioning, and our home electronics are simple and years old. So's our car…

Sorry, Canada. We didn't know it was that contagious.

Brian Alters, of McGill University, had a grant proposal turned down for an unusual reason. In denying his request, the research council's peer-review committee recently sent Mr. Alters a letter explaining he'd failed to "substantiate the premise" of his study. It said he hadn't provided "adequate justification for the assumption in the proposal that the theory of evolution, and not intelligent-design theory, was correct." Oh, well…another researcher with a grant that hasn't been funded, trying to rationalize his failure. We need to see the whole letter—surely he must have just lifted that…

Barrow Building Rituals

Sun Spurge My friend Dr Jens Heimdahl is a Renaissance man. He's a quaternary geologist, an urban archaeologist, a palaeobotanist, a talented painter and a writer of essays on weird literature. He's co-translated Lovecraft's novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath into Swedish and illustrated it. Jens recently studied the plant macrofossils me, Howard and Libby got out of a barrow in Sjögestad parish we test-trenched back in September. According to radiocarbon, the barrow was most likely built in the late 8th or the 9th century AD, that is, the Early Viking Period. With a diameter of 35 m…

Swedish Archaeological Site Protection

Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science gave a speedy reply to my questions of this morning. It seems that any evaluation of whether the US has strong or weak site protection depends upon what standards are actually followed when a site is considered for the National Register of Historic Places. I wonder what sort of sites fall through the safety net in practice. (As for the NAGPRA protection of graves, that doesn't seem to be of much use to archaeology as it largely keeps my American colleagues from studying burial sites -- for reasons of political correctness and belated post-colonial guilt.)…

Woy and the Black Helicopters

UAH V6 has finally been published (archive). Once upon a time this kind of stuff was dead exciting, but now it is just another revision of just another dataset, and no-one cares very much. The paper itself is paywalled, but RS kindly points to the submitted version. As DA points out, RS needs a reason why his lovely shiny new paper is in a relatively minor journal. RS's explanation is the Evil Klimate Konspiracy but I think two three other explanations are more likely. The most prosaic is that the paper simply isn't very exciting or novel; it is, as I said at the start, just another…

Physics vs. Chemistry: Nobody Does Research on Newtonian Mechanics

Not long ago, I had a meeting with the Dean, who is a chemist. One of the things I talked about was my plan for distributing teaching assignments in the next few years, which ran into an interesting cultural difference. I explained how I was trying to make the distribution of assignments a little more regular and uniform, getting everybody to teach both intro and upper-level courses, and he said (paraphrased), "That's funny. We never have a problem with that in chemistry-- the organic chemists teach Orgo, and the rest of us teach general chemistry, and that's that." It took me a minute to put…

Links for 2012-04-05

The Gravitational Force in Angry Birds Space | Wired Science | Wired.com As anyone that has played the game can tell you, this air looking stuff surrounding an asteroid defines a region in which the angry birds will interact with the rock. If the bird is outside of this region, there will be no force on bird. No force means no change in velocity and the bird will move along at a constant speed in the same direction. Ok, I admit it - I missed this one. Why? Why would the game do this? I have no idea, but it is probably either because it makes the game more fun to play or because it makes it…

Archaeology is Not a Good Career

Björn in Helsingborg wrote me with a few questions regarding archaeology as a career. Where did you study, for how long, what exactly? University of Stockholm. Three years crammed into two years at 150% speed, that is, a BA / fil.kand. Four terms of Scandinavian archaeology, one term of history, one term of social anthropology. Later I did a PhD as well, but that's not needed to work as an archaeologist. What's the labour market like? Is it true that there are no jobs? The labour market is crap and there are no jobs. All Scandinavian countries produce new archaeologists at a vastly higher…

Ruderhofspitze: fail

Prev: September 9th: Dresdener to Neue Regensburger Next: September 10th: Neue Regensburger to Franz Senn Another in the line of mountain climbing posts; I need to get them all out before next year. This one contains few decent photos because I failed due at least in part due to cloud; but its still quite instructive I think. Here's a portion of the GPS trace for orientation: The green dot on the left is the summit, 3474 m. We'll be going back there in a future post. My high point this day was 3230 ish, say 250 m short, but more than just distance I had very little clue where to go. The…

A clever compiler is indistinguishable from malice

One disadvantage of working for my current employers is that pretty well everything I do is technically commercially sekrit, no matter how dull it might be. But this little fragment isn't, and its fun. Perhaps it would make a good interview question. What does the following C fragment compile into... { extern bool other_thing(void); int a; if (other_thing()) a = 1; report_thing(a); } ...when compiled with gcc, version 4.2, for C89, and certain optimisations that I won't go into? Specifically, what value does "report_thing" get…

Cooling: one we missed: Petersen and Larsen, 1978

Global cooling again; via a comment on this rather dodgy page I find Stockton, C. W. and W. R. Boggess, Geohydrological implications of climate change on water resource development, Contract Report DACW 72-78-C-0031, for U. S. Army Coastal Engineering Res. Center. That isn't P-R, but contains on p 159 a "Projected Climatic Trends" which in turn references A statistical study of a composite isotopic paleotemperature series from the last 700,000 years, Erik Lundtang Petersen, Søren E. Larsen. Tellus Volume 30, Issue 3, pages 193–200, June 1978; which is of course P-R. And which sayeth: An…

Atheist Q&A

I like these tag games when theyre nice and short :) Q1. How would you define "atheism"? Lack of belief in any form of deity. It doesnt mean you wont fall for a pyramid scheme. It doesnt mean you dont believe in ghosts or astrology or Tom Cruise. It just means you dont believe in a deity. Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition? My mom is 'Jewish' and my dad is 'Catholic.' I have cousins who are 'Southern Baptist', 'Mormon', 'Lutheran', 'Pagan', 'Deist'... So no. I wasnt raised in a religious household. Q3. How would you describe "Intelligent Design", using only one word…

HIV-1 Vaccines: A step in the right direction

If youll recall one of my first posts on SciBlogs, I urged everyone not to give up on an HIV-1 vaccine. Ya, we are sucking right now, but if we can get over our 'AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!' response to HIV-1, refocus on the basic virology of HIV-1, we can get this mo-fo. The first step in the right direction was a paper published a couple days ago in PNAS: Identification and characterization of transmitted and early founder virus envelopes in primary HIV-1 infection If youre wondering about who the gawds are in HIV-1 research, just look at the last three names on this paper: Bette Korber,…

What happens when a PI dies?

I always joke to summer students and rotating grad students: Your lab notebook. Keep it up to date. If you get hit by a bus tomorrow, I expect to be able to pick up exactly where you left off. Heart attacks happen. Car accidents happen. Random acts of violence happen. But we stand on each others shoulders in science. We build upon the hard work of others, and expect others to build upon our work. So you have to plan for crazy shit (like getting hit by a bus) so all of your hard work isnt lost forever and everyone else is screwed. Well, the news just reported that Senator Kennedys…

The Republican Debate

Since I didn't have any grading this time, and since Republicans are harder to listen to than Democrats (and remember, I used to spend hours at a time listening to Creationists), I couldn't bring myself to watch the entirety of the recent Republican debate. I kept flipping back and forth between it and game two of the World Series (which, as a Mets fan, was also hard to watch.) But I saw enough of it to form a few impressions. The first is that the CNBC folks absolutely disgraced themselves. They all need to go home and resign. I actually briefly cheered Ted Cruz, for heaven's sake, when…

Warring sexes

Both Twisty and Amanda seem a bit weirded out by this news that the fetus can be viewed as a kind of parasite. This story has been around long enough that a lot of us just take it for granted—I wrote about the example of preeclampsia a while back. There are worse feminist-troubling theories out there, though. In particular, there is the idea of intersexual evolutionary conflict and male-induced harm. In species where there is some level of promiscuity, it can be to the male's evolutionary advantage to compel his mate to a) invest more effort in his immediate progeny, b) increase her short-…

Gay Pride in Jerusalem?

Wouldn't you know it, the gays have riled up the Jerusalem Prayer Team by hosting a gay pride parade in that holy city. Now I'm not a big fan of such parades, but this one sounds pretty tame even according to the people opposed to them: The global homosexual gathering, organized by InterPride, the International Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered Pride Coordinators, was last held in 2000 in Rome, where it attracted about a quarter of a million participants. Images of the Rome festivities, featured on various homosexual websites, shows throngs of shirtless men in shorts and…

Stupidity on Parade

I have pretty much ignored the whole Cindy Sheehan protest thing. I don't really care whether President Bush meets with her, I don't think the rightness or wrongness of the war rests on the fact of her personal loss (tragic as that is, obviously) and I couldn't possibly care any less which celebrities visited today. I don't doubt that the woman is sincere, nor do I doubt the sincerity of the many parents of fallen soldiers who have said that they disagree with her. But the sheer hypocrisy of some of her conservative critics has reached staggering proportions. Self-righteous gasbag Sean…

Court Rules Against Medical Marijuana

As I'm sure everyone knows by now, the Supreme Court has ruled in Gonzales v. Raich, the medical marijuana case in which the real question was one of federalism and the reach of the interstate commerce clause. California passed a law allowing patients with certain illnesses who would benefit from the use of marijuana to do so with the advice of their doctor. John Ashcroft, as attorney general, asserted the primacy of the federal Controlled Substances Act, arguing that it in essence trumped the state law. Further, he ordered DEA agents to arrest those in California who followed that law. Two…

Why the First Amendment is Uniquely Important

The US is hardly the only democracy in the world that seeks to limit the power of government, but we do have one thing that many of our fellow western democracies do not have - the first amendment. To the American mind, it's bracing to read about the existence of "human rights commissions" in nations like Canada. The laws which establish such commissions generally establish protected groups that may not be insulted in any way, and the list of protected groups is rather broad. The Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act, for instance, says that: no person shall publish…

Juan Cole on Trading Places with Iraq

Juan Cole, the historian from the University of Michigan, has an excellent blog that I don't read nearly often enough. This piece is really quite brilliant, as he asks the question, if America were like Iraq, what would it be like? As President Bush goes around the country sounding like Baghdad Bob (insurgents? There are no insurgents here, only the glorious American military heroes invited here to join us for dinner in our Eden-like paradise), telling people not to listen to those "pessimists" who think that it's a problem that we no longer have control of central Baghdad much less the rest…

Hellmuth Makes an Ass of Himself - Again

Okay, so at least one guy was bothered that I revealed that Annie Duke won last night's Tournament of Champions poker tournament on ESPN, but there was still a LOT of fun to be had by watching it. Most notably, you could watch Phil Hellmuth once again make himself look like a total ass. During the tournament, they were showing snippets of interviews with him where, at one point, he said, essentially, "I know it makes me look bad when I talk so much after losing a hand. Why can't I just say 'nice hand' and be done with it? I'm working on it. I want to be known as the gentleman of poker instead…

Kudos to Joe Carter

I don't often cite Joe Carter's writings at Evangelical Outpost favorably, but I have to give credit where credit is due. His post condemning Jimmy Swaggart's vile statement about killing homosexuals is dead on the mark. Swaggart said on a recent broadcast: I'm trying to find the correct name for it . . . this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. . . . I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died. Joe Carter responds: I wish I could honestly say that…

Reading Lolita in Tehran

I was out of the office and on the road all day today, and part of it was spent in a college town. I live in a small town that is nearly an hour to the nearest bookstore, so I took the opportunity to stop into one and pick up Azar Nafisi's book Reading Lolita in Tehran. I'm about 50 pages into it (I read fast and took a long lunch) and finding it enormously compelling so far. Nafisi is an excellent writer and she manages to transport even this American male into the world of an Iranian woman living under the rule of the Ayatollahs. "It is amazing," she writes, "how, when all possibilities…

The Randian Majesty of Sex?

There's something just plain weird about this commentary by Ilana Mercer in the WorldNutDaily. She is discussing a couple of books, one entitled Ayn Rand, Homosexuality, and Human Liberation by Chris Matthew Sciabarra, and one entitled The Hijacking of a Philosophy: Homosexuals vs. Ayn Rand's Objectivism by Reginald Firehammer (theres a porn star name if ever I've seen one). In particular, she is discussing the foreword to the first book, written by Lindsay Perigo, in which he pledges to challenge Ayn Rand's "outrageous view" of homosexuality "in the name of objectivism". Now, I have read…

Scalia and Political Controversy

Justice Scalia has been very active lately on the public speaking circuit. In addition to his debate with Nadine Strossen, he also made an appearance, along with Justice Alito, at a conference sponsored by the National Italian American Foundation. The AP reported on that talk and something jumped out at me, because he made a very similar statement in his debate with Strossen and I find it odd. In talking about judicial independence, he said that the court puts its own independence at risk when it wades into controversial issues: "The court could have said, 'No, thank you.' The court have said…

Those Wacky Liberal Academics

Via Inside Higher Ed, the Center for Responsive Politics has a new report on political contributions by academics So far in the '08 election cycle, people who work for institutions of higher education have given more than $7 million to federal candidates, parties and committees, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Nearly 60 percent of that money has gone to presidential candidates. The industry's favorite, Barack Obama, has raked in nearly $1.5 million in the campaign's first six months, followed by Hillary Clinton with almost $940,000. Seventy-six percent of the…

Memorial Day Nostalgia Tunes

For most people in the US, this is a day off. For most academics in the US, this is already summer. Not so for us-- we're on trimesters, so we're still in session, and have classes scheduled. This tends to undercut the solemnity of the occasion. There's also an Admissions event today, and then I'm having a class over for dinner, so I'm going to be pretty busy. In addition to being a solemn official holiday, this is also the semi-official start of the sumnmer season, so I thought I'd acknowledge that aspect with a little pop-culture thread... Stretching the Memorial Day theme a bit, these are…

Farewell to the Hellmouth

So, over the course of Saturday and Sunday, I watched the first eight episodes of Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, through a combination of general boredom and wanting to give the show a fair shot. So, does this mean I'm now hooked? Well, when Kate got home, I was just starting episode 12 ( the other one specifically recommended by the guy who loaned me the DVD's). "What happened to 9, 10, and 11?" she asked. "I'm getting a little tired of this," I replied. On the positive side, the execution improved dramatically from the first few episodes. The cast are clearly much more…

Not the Same Old Song

The iPod giveth, and the iPod taketh away. Back in the day, there was this technology called "audio tape," which people used to record music. On a typical tape, you could record maybe ten or elevent pop songs, and then you had to flip it over, and record another ten or eleven songs on the other side. As a result, mix tapes of that era tended to come in distinct "sides." I always thought it would be amusing, in a just-about-as-dorky-as-the-guys-in-High Fidelity way, to make a mix tape where the two sides featured the same song titles in the same order, but with all the songs being different--…

Weekend Sports Round-Up

There were several sporting events worth commenting on this weekend, none of which I saw in their entirety. Hence, the combo recap post. Maryland-BC The Terps got beat by Boston College in a game that I didn't realize was on TV until Kate told me about it about midway through the second half. I'm still used to thinking of Sundays as football days. Maryland was down ten when I started watching, and made a game of it for a little while, before dropping behind by double digits again in the final two minutes. The game was pretty much consistent with what I've seen previously this season-- the…

The Christmas Tunes Experiment

As previously established, I don't much care for Christmas music. Last year, I compiled the few holiday songs I owned, and came up with a whopping ten, and that required stretching things a bit. Based on comment thread recommendations, I expanded that to 22 songs (mostly by adding Sufjan Stevens tracks), but it's still not good, and I don't really like all the songs on the list. With the AV Club debating Christmas music, though, and every PA in the country blaring dire holiday songs, it seems like a good time to revist the crucial question from last year's post: Are there Christmas songs that…

The Pipeline Problem

One of the things that ends up bothering me about the discussion of how to get more women in science is that it tends to focus on the college and professional elvel. Everybody seems to have an anecdote about a creepy physics professor, or an unpleasant graduate student, or a sexist post-doc. This bugs me for a couple of reasons. The obvious one being that I'm a college physics professor, and I'm not that guy. I'm not fool enough to try to deny that unreconstructed sexist pigs exist in the profession, but I'm not one of them, and neither are my immediate colleagues, and sweeping statements…

Jim Butcher, White Night [Library of Babel]

I stopped by to support my local independent bookseller yesterday, and was immediately confronted with a dilemma: A big display of signed copies of White Night by Jim Butcher, the new Dresden Files novel. The signed part has nothing to do with the dilemma-- I'm a reader, not a collector-- the dilemma was that I haven't been buying these in hardcover, and it's only out in hardcover. But I've really been in the mood for a Dresden Files book lately, especially since the Rob Thurman book mentioned previously turned out to be so unsatisfactory. As you can tell, I ended up buying it, and tore…

Tenure: Threat or Menace?

Over at the Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt takes up the question of tenure in academia. As you might expect, it's bad from an economic perspective, and ought to be eliminated: If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers. What does tenure do? It distorts people's effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as a consequence) and…

DonorsChoose Payoff: "Favorite" Book

Another question from a generous donor, in this case Natalie, who asks: As for my question, how about "who is your favorite author, and why?" or, if you'd rather, "what's your favorite book, and why?" This is a difficult question, because it's subject to a sort of quantum projection noise. That is, my "favorite book" and "favorite author" exist in a sort of quantum superposition of all the various possibilities. When someone asks, I can give an answer and either the wavefunction collapses to that value at that instant, or the universe splits into many parallel universes, each with its own…

Prospective Hugo Nomination Update

The Hugo Award nomination deadline is fast approaching, so I've been doing a bunch of reading to make sure I've covered a reasonable range of potential nominees. I've been really bad about book-logging recently, but I thought I'd at least post some brief comments on my crash reading here, for those who are just dying to know my thoughts on the awards this year. Recently read books: Undertow by Elizabeth Bear: A professional assassin on a corporate-controlled frontier planet gets involved with a group of people who want to help the exploited indigenous aliens. I probably would've liked this…

Tenure-track position in vertebrate biology

Are you trained in vertebrate systematics or natural history? Would you like to work at a liberal arts college with undergraduates? We have the perfect opportunity for you. Tenure-Track Position in Biology University of Minnesota, Morris The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in undergraduate education, to fill a tenure-track position in vertebrate biology beginning August 18, 2008. Responsibilities include: teaching a two-year rotation of undergraduate biology courses including upper level electives in vertebrate systematics or natural history and…

Christmas Songs That Don't Suck, 2007

Thanks largely to the leather canary, I've amassed a surprising number of non-sucky Christmas songs this year. There's some painful stuff in there, too, but most of the tracks on their mixes aren't likely to make you want to stab ballpoint pens through your eardrums. If you're in need of a holiday soundtrack, you could do a whole lot worse. The tracks added this year that rated four or five stars: fairytale of new york," the pogues w/ krsty maccoll "only you can bring me cheer," alison krauss "christmas comes but once a year," amos milburn w. charles brown "yeah, i know, it's christmastime…

Links for 2010-08-20

An 18 Billion Mile Journey is almost complete! : Starts With A Bang In honor of the upcoming completion of Neptune's first full orbit since its discovery, a discussion of how it was found. (tags: science astronomy planets blogs starts-with-bang) Fixing a Hole: The Beatles' Imaginary Post-1970 Albums, Part 1 | Popdose "I'm actually quite surprised there isn't something like this out there already. A few web searches I did unearthed one article in Reader's Digest that did put together three such albums out of the early '70s material, but then stopped. But why stop at three? I'm going to…

Links for 2010-05-20

The Virtuosi: Cell Phone Brain Damage: Part Deux "I thought I'd take another look at cell phone damage, coming at it from a different direction than my colleague. Mostly I just want to consider the energy of the radiation that cell phones produce, and compare that with the other relevant energy scales for molecules." (tags: science physics medicine biology quantum optics thermo atoms molecules blogs virtusoi) Can we please stop talking about Supreme Court nominees like they are real people? - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine "What I see in the national obsession over Kagan's unmarried…

Through a (Noble) Gas, Darkly

There's a minor kerfuffle at the moment over the XENON experiment's early data (arxiv paper) which did not detect any dark matter in 11 days of data acquisition. This conflicts with earlier claims by the DAMA experiment and recent maybe-kinda-sorta detections by the CoGeNT and CDMA experiments. As a result, a couple of members of other collaborations have posted a response on the arxiv saying, basically, that they don't believe the sensitivity claimed for the XENON detector in the energy range in question, and that their result can't really be said to rule out the possibility of dark matter…

Links for 2010-04-27

News: Science for Non-Scientists - Inside Higher Ed "Next January, Bard's science and math faculty - along with postdoctoral students and faculty from other institutions -- will try to change all that with the Citizen Science Program, three weeks of science learning modeled on the success of Language and Thinking. Also required of all 500 of the college's freshmen, and ungraded, Botstein hopes it will become similarly entrenched as a landmark of students' first year at Bard. "We'll give young people in their first year of college a real understanding of what science does, what it's about,"…

Antiquities Dealers in Spaaaace!!! [Library of Babel]

Not long ago, I booklogged Odyssey, the latest of Jack McDevitt's Archeologists in Spaaaace books. When I picked that up, I also grabbed a paperback copy of Seeker, the latest in his other series of novels, these ones about, well, antiquities dealers in spaaaace. I don't believe I've booklogged the previous volumes, A Talent for War and Polaris, so we'll lump them all together here. A Talent for War introduces the setting and main characters: Alex Benedict is a dealer in antiquities a few millennia in the future, when humans have discovered FTL travel and spread out among the stars. There…

Please don't vote for John Campbell

Hey, residents of the North Mason School District on Hood Canal in Washington state! Don't put John Campbell on your school board! You may be wondering who he is and why we should care. John Campbell is better known by his full name, John Angus Campbell, and he's a professional stealth creationist. He has long been a fellow of the Discovery Institute, and his specialty is something now called "framing" — he tries to weasel himself into positions where he praises Darwin fulsomely, calling him a master rhetorician, gushing over the guy to such a degree that you begin to wonder what's wrong with…

Sometimes, conflict is the only answer

Mooney says that because polls show that Americans are so blinded by religion that they would choose the words of a bloody-handed Middle Eastern sky god over the evidence of science, Dawkins and all us uncompromising atheists are wrong in our tactics. We are henceforth to heed the words of Nisbet and stop confronting people on their religious biases. Huh? But that's exactly the problem that we're addressing — that people will foolishly prefer "white-beard-in-the-sky-guy" over reality. And the message he takes home from this is that we're wrong? This is nuts. I read that poll and it says we…

Steve of 'Homer' blog left an anonymous death threat on my friend's blog. Bad move, Steve.

OK, there is this blogger named Steve. Steve is of some interest, so let's see who he is. This is what Steve says this about himself in the about section of his own blog: Though I grew up in Garland, I was born in Irving. And my dad's biggest bragging point about me is that you could see Texas Stadium from the window in the room where I was born. So, as you can see, I never had a chance. I love the Dallas Cowboys more than most of my family members and I'm here to keep haters on the straight and narrow. I'm also the resident hippie-hater. Don't bring your liberal crap in here, because it…

King Leopold's Soliloquy

Through the filter of time ... a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago. I'm reminded of this work of literature owing to a recent discussion on another post. I like to point this text out whenever I get a chance, and since I've got a blog, this is an excellent chance! The text is here. I first became aware of, and read, King Leopold's Soliloquy while in the ex-Belgian Congo, where the point of the story takes place. I lived in an area that was at one time a plantation area, but the plantations were long gone. The "road" through this area was passable only with a…

White Supremacist Shoots Guard in Holocaust Museum (Update: Charged)

MORE UPDATES: The guard, Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, shot earlier today by right winger von Brunn has died. The 89 year old gunman, James Wenneker von Brunn 88, of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, shot one person, who is in grave condition in hospital. The gunman was himself shot by one or more guards and has also sustained life threatening injuries. Reporters on the street are saying he is not expected to live. The gunman was using a rifle. D.C. police spokeswoman Traci Hughes said the suspect walked into the museum at about 12:50 p.m. ET with a rifle and shot a guard. U.S. Park Police…