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Northern Ireland culture is apparently cuckoo

The Culture Minister for Northern Ireland is a born-again Christian kook who has decided that the Ulster Museum is insufficiently respectful of the notion that a magic man in the sky poofed the universe into existence in 4004 BC — the farmers on the plains of Mehrgarh and the potters of Mesopotamia were probably greatly surprised to be conjured out of chaos so abruptly, their shock only exceeded by the later confused state of Egypt's Sixth Dynasty, which was simultaneously exterminated by a great flood from that psychopath, Jehovah, and also continued unbroken with no notice of their…

"Great" headlines attack!

Africa is threatened by "scorching hot blobs of magma" according to the CSM. Nothing like some fabulous headlines to make your day. The first (courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor) Massive blob of scorching magma discovered under southern Africa Oh my! Yes, again, it seems that the many people in the media seem to be very confused about the nature of magma when it is underground - always expecting giant vats of swirling, molten magma rising up to destroy us all. Very few have a good sense of the real state of the Earth's mantle - mostly solid. The article is in fact about a recent study…

Good news from California

Texas has been using their excessive and unwarranted influence on textbook content to insert right-wing propaganda and lies into the entire nation's school books. I am pleased to see that California has taken the first steps to reduce Texas wingnuts' influence. A California lawmaker has introduced Senate Bill 1451, a law that calls out Texas for its biased agenda, and mandates the formation of review panels to screen new textbooks for violation of the apolitical and non-discriminatory requirements of public school textbooks. Here's the relevant text: (f) Section 60044 of the Education Code…

Belief is part of identity

Ophelia Benson has an odd idea about how identity is constructed: beliefs arenât actually a matter of identity and shouldnât be treated as if they were. This claim seems so obviously false that I can't really imagine how she could have written it. We can see how this plays out in religion: there are religions know as orthoprax, where membership is defined by your practices, and others are known as orthodox, where membership is defined by your beliefs in central doctrine. Christianity is (generally) an orthodox religion, while Judaism and Islam are (generally) orthoprax. The Torah sets out…

Fulton, Mississippi: Skeeviest town in America

I thought the town was bad before, when they cancelled the high school prom because a young woman was going to bring a female date to it. But then there was a ray of hope: the school administrators changed their minds. There would be a prom after all, and Constance McMillen could bring her date! Wow! A progressive, reasonable attitude was prevailing! Except not. They had organized a new prom, all right…a prom just for Constance McMillen. The principal and teachers showed up to chaperone Constance, her date, and all of five other students who showed up, including two kids with learning…

The most secular Islamic country is Creationist

I've pointed out before that the most (reputedly) secular Muslim majority country, Turkey, is more friendly to Creationism and more religious than the United States. This is why I get really agitated by those who argue that Turkey should join the European Union, it isn't culturally appropriate. Europeans might be prejudiced against Turks because they're "oriental" (in the old sense) and Muslim, but that doesn't mean that Turks are just like any European in values. Liberal elites terrified of seeming prejudiced and Eurocentric don't want to acknowledge this generality of difference, but it is…

Idiotic Gitt: AiG and Bad Information Theory (classic repost)

I'm away on vacation this week, taking my kids to Disney World. Since I'm not likely to have time to write while I'm away, I'm taking the opportunity to re-run some old classic posts which were first posted in the summer of 2006. These posts are mildly revised. Back when I first wrote this post, I was taking a break from some puzzling debugging. Since I was already a bit frazzled, and I felt like I needed some comic relief, I decided to hit one of my favorite comedy sites, Answers in Genesis. I can pretty much always find something sufficiently stupid to amuse me on their site. On that…

Swine flu: prepping for tough times

We've been talking about the possibility of a flu pandemic here for four and a half years. The cliché during much of that time was that the right way to think of a flu pandemic was not "if," but "when." As long as no pandemic materialized, however, there was great scope for what it would look like and hence what to plan for. The hoary adage, "Hope for the best, plan for the worst" made sense but left a great deal of scope for different approaches to planning. What, after all, was the worst we could expect? We had two models, one historical, one hypothetical but plausible. The historical one…

Nana Upstairs, Grandpa Down the Hall: The Extended Family and Its Future

When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric's grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed. Grandma and Grandpa's generation of friends and family were mostly very pleased and thrilled - given the bad lot of options available to many of them, finding a compatible home with their grandchildren looked pretty good. Most of them had cared for their parents, and so somewhere inside them, this seemed like a normal relationship. Some of my friends were frankly jealous - they'd lost their own grandparents, and wished for something like what we were going to…

Reflections on a Decade of Not Getting It All Done

It is a very good thing that sound and image do not travel through the internet without forethought and intent. It permits me to write sentences about my life that seem admirably clean and functional, without actually conveying the way they play out in reality. This allows me to write things like "Eli, my autistic eldest is on school vacation and is creatively working on fine motor control using local fibers." Now if you could see what this actually means, you'd see that Eli is taking my yarn, lovingly preserved for knitting, and wadding it up, making spiderwebs and spreading it all over my…

No "Red Hats" Allowed: Dangers of Underground Mining

For the first year on the job, a new underground coal miner wears a red-colored hardhat to signal to everyone on the crew that he (or she) is a rookie.  These so-called "red hats" receive 40 hours of safety training before they are allowed to take on any mining duties, on topics ranging roof control,  mine gases, evacuation procedures, and their rights provided by the Mine Act (1978).  By tradition, after one year on-the-job, "red hats" earn a black hard hat.  I've heard stories of some young miners keeping track inside their dinner buckets the number of days until they can shed…

Building Datatypes in Haskell (part 1)

For this post, I'm doing a bit of an experiment. Haskell includes a "literate" syntax mode. In literate mode, and text that doesn't start with a ">" sign is considered a comment. So this entire post can be copied and used as a source file; just save it with a name ending in `".lhs"`. If this doesn't work properly, please post something in the comments to let me know. It's more work for me to write the posts this way, so if it's not working properly, I'd rather not waste the effort. I've tested it in both Hugs and ghci, and everything works, but who knows what will happen after a pass…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 20 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: General Intelligence in Another Primate: Individual Differences across Cognitive Task Performance in a New World Monkey (Saguinus oedipus): Individual differences in human cognitive abilities show…

To Equine Things There is a Season (guest post by Barn Owl)

As I announced this morning, there will be several guest posts here over the next several weeks. The first one, by Barn Owl of the lovely Guadalupe Storm-Petrel blog, is likely to appeal to a lot of my readers as it combines several of my own interests: ==================== In this guest-post for A Blog Around the Clock, I'll combine three things that Coturnix especially likes: horses, circadian biology, and an Open Access research paper. For the equestrian, there are two main seasonal issues, controlled primarily by photoperiod, or day length, which must be considered, especially if one…

Day Three at SICB

The internet connection was down for nearly 24 hours at the hotel, so I was unable to update you all on the talks I attended yesterday afternoon, which caused me to express much crankiness. Hopefully, I will be able to get that done sometime within the next 24 hours (i.e.; before I return to NYC). Today is the third day of the conference and I am getting tired and overwhelmed by the intense flood of presentations and posters, so now I am attending only presentations that focus explicitly on evolutionary biology or ornithology. Below the fold are the bird presentations that I attended; Beck…

Black Lives Matter and the Marathon: A Pair of Dilemmas (Updated)

______________________ UPDATE: BLM and the St Paul authorities have come to a compromise. ... the Mayor announced that Turner and the St. Paul Black Lives Matter chapter have agreed to refrain from interfering with runners trying to complete the course, as had previously been threatened. Instead, BLM, will demonstrate near the finish line, raising their voices about the issues that have boiled on the front burner since the death of Ferguson, Missouri resident Michael Brown at the hands of a white police officer. "The Mayor took the time to listen, he heard our concerns," Turner shared. "We…

Story of My Life

One of the things required for the tenure review is a full and up-to-date curriculum vitae. Having spent an inordinate amount of time updating and re-formatting my CV, it seems a shame not to make more use of it than that, so I might as well recycle it into a blog post (after stripping out my home address and a few other items). Of course, I'm too lazy to do it in proper HTML, so what's below the fold is an automated conversion from the RTF file into really, really bad HTML. But, having spent an inordinate amount of time updating and re-formatting the Word file to get it to look right, I'll…

Fruity viruses

One of the reasons I started writing ERV was to help demystify viruses for the general public. To Average Joes/Janes, viruses are scary-ass little buggars-- alien creatures that make you sick, kill you overnight in horrible scary ways, and you never see them coming. I hope long-time readers of ERV are now aware that while some viruses are 'scary', the fact of the matter is, humans wouldnt exist without them. Hell, probably all life on Earth wouldnt exist without them. We can use them to study principles of evolution that would be impossible with other organisms. Theyve helped us learn…

Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification

href="http://www.researchblogging.org"> alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0pt none ;"> A fair amount has been written about the topic of motivated reasoning.  Jonah Lehrer href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/09/motivated_reasoning.php">explains the relationship between motivated reasoning and the political process; Orac href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/04/why_projection_isnt_all_its_cracked_up_t.php">addresses the issue with regard to quantum woo. (Plus more at Mixing…

The evolution of deuterostome gastrulation

Do vertebrate embryos exhibit significant variation in their early development? Yes, they do—in particular, the earliest stages show distinct differences that mainly reflect differences in maternal investment and that cause significant distortions of early morphology during gastrulation. However, these earliest patterns represent workarounds, strategies to accommodate one variable (the amount of yolk in the egg), and the animals subsequently reorganize to put tissues into a canonical arrangement. Observations of gene expression during gastrulation are revealing deeper similarities that are…

The strength of Dawkins, and the murk of accommodationism

Richard Dawkins hits this one out of the park: he slams the ignorance of Rick Perry specifically and the Republican party generally. There is no excuse for the foolishness we get from Perry, or Bachmann, or Huckabee, or Palin, or Robertson, or any of the candidates who have sought validation through the Republicans — it's as if they're selecting for stupidity. There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today's Republican party (I disavow the…

"Contrary to their expectations?" Really? Personal experience in science communication

Last Friday, in my post on Nature's comprehensive coverage of science journalism, I mentioned the recent Nature Biotechnology conference paper on science communications co-authored by scibling Matt Nisbet. I also said I'd come back to one of the points in it that bothers me. As I said yesterday, most of the material in this paper (the issues of media fragmentation, framing problems, incidental exposure, etc.) has been expressed elsewhere. I agree with the majority of it, and it's nice to see it all in one place. But I have to take exception to a small piece of the paper - an example that I've…

Thinking About Evolution (Slight Reprise)

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post describing some research showing that there are cognitive barriers to understanding evolution. There I listed three specific factors: Intuitive theism, in which our intuitions lead us to make design inferences about complex kinds or under conditions of uncertainty; intuitions that can be reinforced culturally to an extent that it may be almost impossible to overcome them by the time we reach adulthood. Intuitive essentialism, which causes us to believe that biological kinds have hidden internal essences which determine what they are, how they will…

Emotion, Reason, and Moral Judgment

Research on the role of emotion/intuition in moral judgments is really heating up. For decades (millennia, even), moral judgment was thought to be a conscious, principle-based process, but over the last few years, researchers have been showing that emotion and intuition, both of which operate automatically and unconsciously for the most part, play a much larger role than most philosophers and psychologists had previously been willing to admit. In this context, two recent papers by roughly the same group of people have presented some really interesting findings which, if you ask me (and if you…

Things non-scientists can do to improve communication with scientists.

One of the things that happens when I lay out a problem (say, the difficulties for scientists in communicating with non-scientists about scientific matters) is that my excellent commenters remind me not to stop there. They press me for a solution. I started, in my earlier post, to gesture toward an answer to the question of how to improve communication between scientists and non-scientists: ... because non-scientists count on scientists as a source of reliable knowledge on a whole range of issues, non-scientists have a stake in improving communication with scientists. This means part of the…

Ben Carson: A case study on why intelligent people are often not skeptics

As a surgeon, I find Ben Carson particularly troubling. By pretty most reports, he was a skilled neurosurgeon who practiced for three decades, rising to the chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. Yet, when he ventures out of the field of neurosurgery—even out of his own medical specialty—he routinely lays down some of the dumbest howlers I've ever heard. For example, he denies evolution, but, even worse, he's been a shill for a dubious supplement company, Mannatech. Worse still, when called out for his relationship with Mannatech in the last Republican debate, Carson lied through his teeth…

An antivaccine-sympathetic legislator right in my own back yard!

I've written on multiple occasions of what I like to refer to as "antivaccine dog whistles." In politics, the term "dog whistle" refers to things politicians can say to certain groups, usually groups with odious views, that they are with them without actually echoing the views for which the group at which the dog whistle is aimed. The intended target audience gets the message, while those not familiar with the issues either don't get the message or see what is being said as something unobjectionable, even admirable. Think "states' rights" versus civil rights, for example. It turns out that…

The anti-vaccine movement versus the truth

My alma mater has let me down. As many of you know, I went to the University of Michigan for both my undergraduate degree and for medical school. I still have a fairly strong attachment to the school, which is why I can still be disappointed when its faculty let me down. Unfortunately, it's happened, and this time U. of M. has disappointed by inadvertently providing ammunition for the anti-vaccine movement. I'm referring to a poll released by the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital (which is where I did my pediatrics rotations when I was in medical school). The poll results are being trumpeted…

The Long Dark Tea-Time of Homeopathy

Sometimes politicians actually get it right. I know, I know, it makes me choke on my words to admit it, but sometimes politicians can actually get science right. I'm referring to something that happened in the U.K., yesterday, when the Science and Technology Select Committee delivered its verdict on homeopathy. Indeed, the Committee has gone so far as to call for the complete withdrawal of NHS funding and official licensing for homeopathy. The report is called Evidence Check 2: Homeopathy, and I'll cut to the chase. This is what the report concluded: By providing homeopathy on the NHS and…

Bringing woo to disaster areas

Almost two years ago, I discovered something that disturbed me greatly. Basically, I learned the story of an Air Force officer named Col. Richard Niemtzow, MD, PhD. Col. Niemtzow is a radiation oncologist who has over the last decade fallen deeply into woo. Specifically, he has become known for a technique that he has dubbed "battlefield acupuncture," a technique that he has promoted energetically (word choice intentional) and ceaselessly, to the point where, sadly, the military is starting to take it seriously even though the evidence Col Niemtzow has presented in favor of the technique is…

Preventing injuries during surgery due to technical mistakes

You've probably heard the oft-repeated charge of "alternative" medicine advocates. If you get into a debate or conversation with one, you can almost count on seeing or hearing it before too long. Indeed, we heard a variant of this very claim yesterday coming from über-woomeister supreme Deepak Chopra. I'm referring, of course, to the rant against "conventional" medicine that medication errors claim 100,000 lives a year. Of course, as Mark pointed out, "conventional" therapies actually work, and because they work there's risk to them. Moreover, its hospitals actually care for seriously ill…

Sometimes I hate being right

Believe it or not, there are times when I really, really wish I weren't right. No, I'm not implying that I'm right so much of the time that I wish I were wrong more often. I'm human and therefore perfectly capable of being wrong, sometimes spectacularly so. (Of course, as we all know, that sort of thing rarely happens on this blog, right? Right?) But sometimes, even as I know I'm right about something, deep down I hope that I'm not. Usually such cases involve watching patients choosing alternative medicine reach the point where they have to the consequences of their choice. Despite all my…

Yawn. Another worthless acupunct--I mean acupressure--study

Here we go again. It seems just yesterday that I was casting a skeptical eye on yet another dubious acupuncture study. OK, it wasn't just yesterday, but it was less than two weeks ago when I discussed why a study that purported to show that acupuncture worked as well as drug therapy for hot flashes due to breast cancer therapy-induced menopause. Unfortunately, these days these sorts of dubious studies seem to be popping up fast and furious like Whac-A-Mole, so much so that I can't always keep up with them. So it is again, although this time it's acupressure, not acupuncture. Unfortunately,…

A Bitter Sweet Nobel - Beutler, Janeway, and the Dawn of Innate Immunity

Monday's announcement for the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine should have been a happy occasion for my lab. On the one hand, it was given for early discoveries in the field of innate immunity - my field! On the other hand, it was given to a scientist that many* feel is undeserving of the honor, while at the same time sullying the legacy of my scientific great-grandfather. Let me explain. The Context In the late 1980's, immunologists were riding high. Much of the experimental attention in previous decades had focused on T-cells and B-cells, the drivers of "adaptive immunity," and it…

Nobody promotes antivaccine nonsense in my state...without receiving some Insolence

Readers who've been following this blog a while would probably not be surprised to learn that one of my all time favorite movies is Ghostbusters. In fact, it's hard to believe that the movie is now 30 years old. It makes me feel so old, given that I saw the movie in the theater when it came out. Be that as it may, there's a scene near the end of the movie, where an ancient god Gozer the Gozarian, takes the form of a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, tromping through New York City destroying things, all thanks to a stray thought by Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (played by Dan Ackroyd) that inspired…

Colorado, naturopathy, and "health freedom": Devolving into a quack wonderland?

It's just one more cut on the road to the proverbial death by a thousand cuts. I'm referring, unfortunately, to last week's development in the state of Colorado. Specifically, I'm referring to the Colorado legislature's truly boneheaded decision to license naturopaths, thus giving the imprimatur of the state to quackery and, in essence, legalizing a whole lot of that quackery. It's been a long time coming, and, say what you will about Colorado naturopaths, they're persistent and disciplined. As a result, after years of effort, they finally got what they wanted, although apparently not all…

"Like the tree that stands beside the water ...

We shall not be moved. ..." Fifty five of us jammed in a bus designed to hold fourty people plus a driver, rolling down Highway 90 from Upstate New York to Chicago. As a teenager (just turned 15), I was thrilled to be going to Chicago to attend the Fight Back Conference, a thinly disguised Communist Party meeting. I was going, in part for Keith, the young African American kid (about 12 years old) who was shot in the back by a state trooper just under a year earlier. Keith was driving a mo-ped down the toll road, on the shoulder, where he shouldn't have been. It appears that he did not…

Why do medical conference organizers keep inviting Deepak Chopra to speak?

Way, way back in the day, before I took an interest in pseudoscientific medical claims, I knew who Deepak Chopra was. Back then, though, like most doctors, I didn’t pay much attention to him and didn’t know much about him other than that he was some sort of alternative medicine guru, a physician who had embraced Ayurvedic medicine and blathered about “quantum” consciousness. It didn’t take long once I embraced skepticism to run face-first into the utter woo that s Deepak Chopra’s message, in part thanks to other skeptical bloggers introducing me to his woo. Indeed, back in the early days of…

Licensing naturopathic quackery in Mississippi: If at first you don't succeed...

Here we go again. Naturopaths crave legitimacy for their brand of pseudoscientific medicine. Basically, they delude themselves into thinking that they are real doctors and can function as primary care providers, despite abundant evidence that they cannot. they One (of several) ways they seek to acquire that legitimacy for naturopathy and themselves is through promoting the passage of laws in states licensing them as health care providers, as they have been repeatedly doing (and, fortunately, thus far failing to achieve) in my home state of Michigan and continuing to attempt in Massachusetts…

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray...

Seven score and three years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood and repeated his oath of office. His election four years earlier was plenty contentious, "all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it." As he took the oath the first time, "One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war." His victory drove South Carolina and then the…

More thoughts on the care of animals and students.

My post a couple days ago about Laurentian University's lock-out of researchers from their animal care facility sparked some heated discussion in the comments. Also, it sparked an email from someone close enough to the situation to give me an update on the situations since December. The issue of how, ethically, to use animals in research, and of how the interests of animals and the interests of students should be balanced, seems to have touched a nerve. So, we're going back in. First, here's the update, with thanks to my email correspondent: End of December: they approved our protocols…

What Does It Matter?

We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species. The list of its undeniable abominations is long and hardly bearable. And these abominations are not balanced or compensated or atoned for by the list, endlessly reiterated, of our scientific achievements. Some people are moved, now and again, to deplore one abomination or another. Others - and Hayden Carruth is one - deplore the whole list and its causes. Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come.…

Margulis chat transcript

The chat with Lynn Margulis is over; thanks to Dr Margulis and all who participated. I've included the transcript below the fold. [17:08] * Margulis (~pjirc@ZiRC-60364A8F.hsd1.ma.comcast.net) has joined #pharyngula [17:08] <TimMc> oh, right [17:08] <TimMc> ah, there we go [17:08] * Cairnarvon sets mode: +v Margulis [17:08] * TimMc taps mike "Is this thing on?" [17:09] <Margulis> Yes [17:09] <Margulis> So? [17:09] <TimMc> Well, the gang's all here. [17:10] <Margulis> hat now in my first chat room disexperience [17:10] <Margulis> What now? [17:10] <…

i: the Imaginary Number (classic repost)

I'm away on vacation this week, taking my kids to Disney World. Since I'm not likely to have time to write while I'm away, I'm taking the opportunity to re-run an old classic series of posts on numbers, which were first posted in the summer of 2006. These posts are mildly revised. After the amazing response to my post about ze ro, I thought I'd do one about something that's fascinated me for a long time: the number i, the square root of -1. Where'd this strange thing come from? Is it real (not in the sense of real numbers, but in the sense of representing something real and meaningful)?…

A creationist at the Chicago meeting

Last week, I described the lectures I attended at the Chicago 2009 Darwin meetings (Science Life also blogged the event). Two of the talks that were highlights of the meeting for me were the discussions of stickleback evolution by David Kingsley and oldfield mouse evolution by Hopi Hoekstra — seriously, if I were half my age right now, I'd be knocking on their doors, asking if they had room for a grad student or post-doc or bottle-washer. They are using modern techniques in genetics and molecular biology to look at variation in natural populations in the wild, and working out the precise…

Utility Functions

Before we move beyond zero-sum games, it's worth taking a deeper look at the idea of utilities. As I mentioned before, in a game, the scores in the matrix are given by something called a utility function. Utility is an idea for how to mathematically describe preferences in terms of a game or lottery. For a game to be valid (that is, for a game to have a meaningful analysis and solution), there must be a valid utility function that describes the players' preferences. But what do we have to do to make a valid utility function? It's simple, but as usual, we'll make it all formal and explicit…

E. coli Conservatives, E. coli Liberals, and the FDA

'E. coli conservatives' is Rick Perlstein's phrase, not mine. After all, the Mad Biologist is quite partial to E. coli; I suppose that makes me an E. coli liberal. Most E. coli, including those isolated from retail meats, are not harmful, so I've always thought the bug gets a bad rap. Only a minority of strains cause intestinal disease (e.g., Shigella), unless they wind up in a place they're not supposed to be, such as the bloodstream or urinary tract. These strains, known as 'ExPEC', which is short for 'extra-intestinal pathogenic E. coli', are only a small, albeit nasty, percentage of…

Genetic draft - selection is stochastic, sometimes....

Over the past month or so I've been blogging chapter 5 of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies. This chapter covers "stochastics processes," basically the random elements in the flux of gene frequencies in biological populations. Now, I'm a selection man for real, but to understand selection you need to put it into the context of evolutionary dynamics as a whole, and chance is essential to properly comprehending necessity. First I covered the immediate danger of extinction for a new mutant allele, even those favored positive selection's kiss. Then I traced out the…

Mixed Thoughts About "Do Scientists Understand the Public?"

Chris Mooney is encouraging people to read the longer paper on which his Washington Post op-ed piece was based (some of my thoughts on the op-ed are here). So I did. My short take: there's some good, mixed in with some bad. I'll behave unusually and describe the good first. The powerful influence of politics and ideology is underscored by a rather shocking survey result: Republicans who are college graduates are considerably less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate change than those who have received less education. These better-educated Republicans could hardly be said to…

Moving Overseas, Part 10

In one week and two days, I will be in Germany, beginning my new life as an American expat. Even though I thought I'd be more likely to live in the UK, in Finland, Iceland, or even on one of the South Pacific Islands where my research birds are found, I would be lying if I told you that I am not excited to relocate to Germany. I always thought I'd end up living overseas as an expat, even when I was a child. Despite my excitement about my impending move, I am also extremely stressed out. I have spent the past couple days trying to find my CITES permit, which was mailed to me last Wednesday,…