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More on the 30,000 Proposed Troops

Mike responds to a post I wrote that questioned Speaker Pelosi's call to increase the military by 30,000 troops. I agree that given the way the force and its responsibilities (more about those below) are currently structured, the troop rotation schedule is near the breaking point. However, I still disagree with Mike for two reasons. First, I simply don't trust the current administration not to send the troops to Iraq. Nothing the Bush administration has done in the past six years has convinced me that they will do anything other than that, Congress be damned. The only way Bush will not…

I'm Slowly Edging Towards John Edwards

Finally, there might be a Democrat who speaks my language about deficits and budgets. From Tapped (italics and bold mine): I think the honest answer to this question is that there's a tension between our desire to eliminate the deficit and create a stronger economic foundation and eliminate some of the debt our children will inherit, there's a tension between that deficit and our need to invest and make America stronger for the 21st century. I think that, if we're honest, you cannot it, it's just common sense in the math, have universal health care, and invest in energy, and make a serious…

In the Land of the Blind Congresscritter, the One-Eyed Pundit Is King

Because said officials are even more ignorant than the Pundits of the Potomac. A few months ago, Jeff Stein published an op-ed about the many officials who are charged with anti-terrorism and who also know nothing about the Middle East--to the point where they don't know if Hezbollah is Sunni or Shiite. Stein has followed up with an interview with incoming House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes. As far as I can tell, Reyes is marginally more informed than his Republican predecessors, which is damning with faint praise. Shakes and Ezra Klein both pile on Reyes, so I won't do that here…

Focus on the Basics When It Comes to Math

By way of Majikthise, I found this excellent post by Abbas Raza about the problem of mathematical illiteracy. But to step back a bit, this trail of links began with the release of new teaching guidelines by the National Council of Mathematics Teachers: The report urges teachers to focus on three broad concepts in each grade and on a few key subjects -- including the base-10 number system, fractions, decimals, geometry and algebra -- that form the core of math education in higher-achieving nations. I think this is exactly the right approach. It's more important for students to develop…

A Good Response to Kristof's Atheism Bashing

While my theological beliefs (which have very little to do with my religious observance) tend towards that 'ol time agnostic monism, Nicholas Kristof, in one of the daffiest columns he's ever written, has decided that the Christopath Right "has largely retreated from the culture wars." Therefore, any resumption of said wars must be squarely laid at the feet of "the Atheist Left." No, Special K, the Right didn't "retreat", they were driven off the battlefield. There is a huge difference. Kristof's column is nothing more than Compulsive Centrist Disorder rearing its head in the culture wars…

Politics in the Era of the Teevee

Matt Taibbi on politics in the era of television: The thing that people should be concerned about isn't that the news networks are choosing to cover politics like a football game. It's the idea that both televised football games and televised politics might represent some idealized form of commercial television drama that both sports and politics evolved in the direction of organically, under the constant financial pressure brought to bear by TV advertisers. Both politics and sports turned into this shit because this format happens to sell the most Cheerios, regardless of what the content is…

Can There Even Be Political Discourse?

This week's Carnival of Liberals, hosted by Philosophy, et cetera, asks contributors to submit posts that "assess the state of political discourse, or the question of how politics should be conducted." So, let's talk about that state of political discourse. One problem that's always bothered (and intrigued) me is how citizens and voters are supposed to decide highly technical issues. Every day, the government, whether it be local, state, or federal, makes decisions about verycomplex issues that require a great deal of knowledge and training. As an example, ask yourself if you can assess…

MRSA, Needle Exchange, and the War on Drugs

There is a winner in the War on Drugs: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA. A recent article in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology reached the following conclusion: Injecting drug users accounted for 49% of CA-MRSA infections but only 19% of the HA-MRSA infections (odds ratio, 4.2; 95% confidence interval, 2.4 to 7.4). Our study shows that a single clone of CA-MRSA accounts for the majority of infections. This strain originated in the community and is not related to MRSA strains from healthcare settings. Injecting drug users could be a major reservoir for CA-…

Two Good Ideas From Lakoff

While I'm not the world's biggest fan of George Lakoff, he has published two posts that are worth reading. The first, co-authored by Lakoff, Marc Ettlinger, and Sam Ferguson, argues that the "Bush is incompetent" theme is a losing strategy (coturnix has additional commentary on this post): The mantra of incompetence has been an unfortunate one. The incompetence frame assumes that there was a sound plan, and that the trouble has been in the execution. It turns public debate into a referendum on Bush's management capabilities, and deflects a critique of the impact of his guiding philosophy. It…

Somebody gets rebuked

One of the peculiarities of my recent debate with Jerry Bergman was that he announced his definition of irreducible complexity, which he claimed to be the same as Michael Behe's…and under which carbon atoms were IC. It was utterly absurd. A reader wrote to Behe to get his opinion. I recently attended a debate between Dr. P. Z. Myers and Dr. Jerry Bergman on the topic of "Should Intelligent Design be Taught in the Schools?" The topic of irreducible complexity came up, and Dr. Bergman had an interesting definition. His definition of irreducible complexity was "two or more parts are required for…

Balancing selection & pigmentation loci

A few days ago I mooted the possibility that balancing selection may be more common than we had assumed, and that much of the recent evolutionary action in our species' history might be characterized by non-fixed allele frequencies which exhibit the signatures of positive selection because of their shallow time depth. I was interested in the idea for an important reason. Below the fold are are a range of data for two loci implicated in skin color variation in human populations; SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. SLC45A2 SLC24A5 Mozabite 0.4 0.87 Bedouin 0.23 0.97 Druze 0.51 1…

William D. Hamilton was wrong

Last week I reviewed some seminal early papers of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton. Hamilton was arguably the most accomplished theoretical biologist of the second half of the 20th century; Richard Dawkins referred to him as the most "...distinguished Darwinian since Darwin." My review of the papers I selected from Narrow Roads of Gene Land I allowed me to reacquaint myself with his prose style after a few years away, and as it came on the heals of my reviews of The Structure of Evolutionary Theory I could not help but note contrasts. On occasion Hamilton veers into such…

Jerry Coyne smacks down Olivia Judson

Wow. Well, Jerry Coyne has never been one for weak words. A few days ago evolutionary biologist & journalist Olivia Judson posted The Monster is Back, and It's Hopeful on her blog The Wild Side. Jerry Coyne, a prominent evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the magisterial Speciation, has posted a strongly worded response over at Carl Zimmer's weblog: Judson commits two errors of reasoning when arguing a la Goldschmidt (or Gould). The first is what I call the "macromutationist fallacy," for this error is so common that it deserves a name. It is this: we…

Some People See the World As It Is, Some As It Ought to Be. Then There Are Economists

With apologies to RFK. Cullen Roche makes a cogent observation about the state of economics: It is based too much on pie in the sky thinking and not based on what is happening on the ground, in the trenches. Warren Mosler, widely regarded as the founder of MMT, created the theory because he was in the trenches and recognized that what his textbooks taught him did not reflect the reality of the operations he was involved in on a daily basis. And while no economic theory is perfect, I think this is by far MMT's greatest strength. We can all theorize about how best to implement our…

The Problem with College Isn't That It's Worth Less (or Worthless), but That It Costs More

I know that sounds like I'm channeling my inner Yogi Berra, but bear with me. A recent article by David Leonhart refuting claims that college is a waste of money has led to a further round of related posts (as you'll see, I agree). But the reason the 'college is a waste' arguments have any traction is not due to what colleges are delivering, but what students (or their parents) pay to attend college. The price of college is becoming prohibitively expensive in light of an educational model--the real benefit--that really hasn't changed much since the 1950s and 1960s. Before I get to the…

More Science Journalism Is Critical, If Potentially Uncomfortable

This post might have to get filed under "careful what you wish for", but Martin Robbins' latest column about the cozy relationship between science journalists and the scientists they cover seems to have struck a nerve, if The Twitter is any indication. Here's a good snippet: Churnalism is a real problem in science reporting, to the extent that it feels a bit boring to keep going on about it, but the wider issue is this lack of actual, well, journalism. As I said in that piece; if journalists aren't contributing original reporting, or providing context, or challenging statements made by…

The Hidden Costs of Libya

Tom Hayden reminds us of two costs of the Libyan war*: If the US gets lucky this time, Power will be vindicated. It's possible that US airpower can protect opposition ground forces on the road to Tripoli until Qaddafi's regime collapses from within. Even then, the US will have to take part in an unpredictable occupation of Libya until a new set of governing institutions are created, a process that might take months or years. The cost will climb into the billions in deficit spending while the budget crisis worsens at home. Any triumphant new US allies, like the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group,…

Refuting evolutionary materialism

Update: Please read Sandman's response after you look over this post.... New Evidence Debunks 'Stupid' Neanderthal Myth: Blades were first produced by Homo sapiens during their colonization of Europe from Africa approximately 40,000 years ago. This has traditionally been thought to be a dramatic technological advance, helping Homo sapiens out-compete, and eventually eradicate, their Stone Age cousins. Yet when the research team analysed their data there was no statistical difference between the efficiency of the two technologies. In fact, their findings showed that in some respects the flakes…

Steve Fuller; in a word, worthless

Today I stumbled on to this article in The New York Times, In U.S., Partisan Expert Witnesses Frustrate Many, and thought of Steve Fuller; the sociologist of science who testified for the Creationists at the Dover trial. John points me to this awesome take-down of Fuller's book, Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution. A nice sample: ...Newton is supposed to have "presented his mathematical physics as the divine plan that was implicitly written into the Bible [emphasis added]" (p. 54). Fuller must have access to an otherwise unknown veridical edition of the…

Evolutionary genetics in Iceland; it's about the parameters

Another story about recent human evolution, this time, really recent. The paper in PLOS is A Drastic Reduction in the Life Span of Cystatin C L68Q Carriers Due to Life-Style Changes during the Last Two Centuries. A mouthful, but the authors are really good at explaining what they're finding and why it's important: ....The detrimental phenotypic impact of the L68Q mutation appears to have emerged in reaction to common life-style changes almost three centuries after the mutation occurred. We believe that this is the first report of phenotypic flexibility of a monogenic disease in reaction to…

Review of the Dawkins festschrift

Nick Wade reviews and summarizes the new festschrift to Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins : How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. Here is the list of contributors (from Edge): Dr Robert Aunger, Senior Lecturer, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine David P.Barash, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington Sir Patrick Bateson, Professor of Ethology, University of Cambridge Dr Seth Bullock, University of Leeds Helena Cronin, Co-Director, Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, LSE Martin Daly, Department of Psychology, McMaster University Marian Stamp Dawkins,…

Beware of religious maps bearing pious news

PZ's readers are in a tizzy over this somewhat counterintuitive map: Notice something weird? If the "Bible Belt" is measured by "religious adherents," then it is slapped vertically across the middle of the country, not in the south. Something is wrong here. Religion means many things to many people. There are people who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and who try to convert people to this state who don't go to a specific church on Sunday but meet with a roving "fellowship," reject "religion" and sometimes even the term "Christian." There are Unitarian Universalists I know who…

SNP, SV, CNV...does the substrate matter?

Paired-End Mapping Reveals Extensive Structural Variation in the Human Genome: Structural variation of the genome involves kilobase- to megabase-sized deletions, duplications, insertions, inversions, and complex combinations of rearrangements. We introduce high-throughput and massive paired-end mapping (PEM), a large-scale genome sequencing method to identify structural variants (SVs) ~3 kb or larger that combines the rescue and capture of paired-ends of 3 kb fragments, massive 454 Sequencing, and a computational approach to map DNA reads onto a reference genome. PEM was used to map SVs in an…

Canada is sharing in Christian shame

The Canadian government is planning to help a fundamentalist Christian group, Youth for Christ, to proselytize. They've offered to contribute several million dollars to the construction of a youth center in downtown Winnipeg, which sounds like a wonderful, useful idea…except for the fact that the group building it has this as their mission: To impact every young person in Canada with the person, work and teachings of Jesus Christ and discipling them into the Church. They also openly admit to their plans: Sharing the person of Christ with every young person within our target group in Canada (…

Stephen Hawking is not a dumb cripple

I too defend space cadets, what is mankind without a dream? I remember back in the late 1980s a speech by Joseph P. Kennedy II as he stood on the floor of the house of representatives and asked his fellow members if people here at home should eat less so that vessels could fly above them in the cosmos. Should we be forced to make this choice? (shall I point out that many Americans should eat a bit less!) I'm not going to defend the details of Hawking's argument, I think the time scale is a little compressed (I'm being generous). But, I am going to defend the dream, because to venture into…

Dirty old men

Update: Comment from Chris Surridge of PLOS One: Just a quick note. The paper is now formally published on PLoS ONE. The citation is: Tuljapurkar SD, Puleston CO, Gurven MD (2007) Why Men Matter: Mating Patterns Drive Evolution of Human Lifespan. PLoS ONE 2(8): e785. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000785 As it is PLoS ONE you can rate the paper, annotate and discuss it there too. There's a new preprint posted (PDF) on PLOS One titled Why Men Matter: Mating Patterns Drive Evolution of Human Lifespan. The basic question is this: why do humans live beyond the lifespan of the post-menopausal female…

Denialism, Framing, the Kumbaya Fallacy, and Power

ScienceBlogling Matt Nisbet argues that scientists* shouldn't call science denialists, well, denialists. I listened to the audio clip he linked to, and I'm unconvinced. Leaving aside the issue that denialism (or calling someone a denialist) actually has a use--according to the clip, the term describes a certain set of behaviors, which the clip splits into three categories: "Strategic denialism" or cynical denialism. The speaker knows something is correct, and lies anyway. Fear-based denialism. The denialist is afraid to confront a known fact. For example, if you were vomiting blood, you…

DCCC Lowers the Boom on Bachmann

...and the internetz should get the credit. From thereisnospoon: First, the DCCC has taken notice and decided to up the ante in a big way by spending $1 million on the race: The race for the 6th District just keeps getting bigger and more national. Thanks Michele Bachmann! The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will spend more than $1 million in TV ads against Rep. Bachmann, according to Minnesota Public Radio. The race is getting newfound national attention after Bachmann asked the media to investigate members of Congress with anti-American views. Keep in mind that Tinklenberg…

McCain: He Was for the Bear DNA Study Before He Was Against It

Republican John McCain has repeatedly portrayed a study that uses bear DNA to estimate the population size of potentially endangered bears as an example of government waste and pork barrel spending. There's one small problem, however. McCain was for it before he was against it (italics mine): While he tried to cut money for several other projects in the same bill, he never proposed cutting the bear study and voted for the final bill containing it.... The ad goes on to criticize an earmark that provided "$3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana." This is not the first time McCain has…

OK, Now I'm Convinced There Isn't an Anthrax Mixture

Yesterday, I mentioned my doubts about there being two anthrax strains used in the 2001 attacks. Thanks to an article identified by reader TomJoe, I'm convinced that there was only one anthrax strain involved, if the only evidence for the existence of two strains is that there is a DNA inversion. Just to remind everyone, this is what I mean by a DNA inversion: In many bacteria, inversions are used as regulatory mechanisms--when the DNA is in one direction, nearby genes are turned on, and when in the other, they're turned off. Like so (this is a made up example for illustrative purposes only…

God Is a Doorknob?

I recommend Christine Wicker's The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. In it, she describes one of the most devastating forces to hit modern fundamentalism (yes, that's oxymoronic)... Alcoholics Anonymous. Consider: The single best time to convert an adult has always been when he's down and out. He hits bottom; God steps in. Any of "the big D's" will do it. It might be drink, it might be drugs, it might be divorce, it might be death, it might be disaster. A sinner riding high is not looking for Jesus. He's got to be knocked down so hard that he knows he can't get up on his own. For about…

The Founding Fathers Did Not Support an Individual Healthcare Mandate...

...they supported socialized medicine. Last week, Forbes writer Rick Ungar made the following historical observation: In July of 1798, Congress passed - and President John Adams signed - "An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen." The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance. Keep in mind that the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters…

OHRP Reverses Itself on ICU Checklist-More Questions

A while back I wrote about how the Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP) had blocked the implementation of a checklist for ICUs that would most likely prevent roughly 20,000 deaths from infectious disease annually. ScienceBlogling Revere reports that the OHRP has reversed its decision (italics mine): The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) -- part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- has concluded that Michigan hospitals can continue implementing a checklist to reduce the rate of catheter-related infections in intensive care unit settings (ICUs) without…

Evolution: The Utility Defense

During one of the many framing-related flare ups (kinda like zits, aren't they?), I argued that biologists have done the following things well while confronting creationism: Calling creationists fucking morons (because they are). Arguing that a better understanding of how life evolved is good in and of itself, and can imbue us with a certain sense of wonder. Refuting specific creationist claims. But this is what I thought was missing: What we rarely do is make an affirmative, positive argument for evolution (as opposed to against creationism). I proposed one particular argument: we can't do…

Two Reasons Why We Have Political Gridlock: Weak Chairmen and Campaign Finance

Many people have been discussing the structural impediments to passing legislation, or what is often called legislative gridlock. As Matthew Yglesias put it: The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it's not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it's the fact that the country has become ungovernable.... We're suffering from an incoherent institutional set-up in the senate. You can have a system in which a defeated minority still gets a share of governing authority and participates constructively in the…

If You Think Creationism Arises from Poor Framing, Then You Need to Read Neal Gabler

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: everything you need to know about movement conservatives, you can learn by watching creationists (and admittedly, there's substantial overlap between the two groups). Think about creationists, and then consider this column by Neal Gabler: In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents. It's understandable…

Is Peer Review Really This Problematic?

So there's an article that a fair number of people have gotten all het up about in The Scientist which criticizes peer reivew. I'll state for the record that I agree with the article in that the review process needs to be much faster, and more people need to be reviewing (the burden is too great for some people). But I'm puzzled by this (italics mine): Twenty years ago, David Kaplan of the Case Western Reserve University had a manuscript rejected, and with it came what he calls a "ridiculous" comment. "The comment was essentially that I should do an x-ray crystallography of the molecule…

Why We Need to Vaccinate Germ Dispersal UnitsChildren: The Whooping Cough Edition

Maryn McKenna makes a critical, yet neglected point about the recent whooping cough (pertussis) outbreaks that have been hitting California--one that emphasizes that vaccination not only protects the vaccinated, but everyone else: Between a day job as Scary Disease Girl and a childhood spent moving between continents, I am pretty much the most vaccinated person on the planet. I'd had my full series of pertussis vaccinations as a child. Surely I was protected? Actually, no -- and unless you've had a booster, neither are you. The immunity created by the 5-dose childhood series wanes over time…

Poverty and Science Education in Massachusetts

Yesterday, I described the relationship between low-income and poor performance in English and math in Massachusetts (see the post for methodological details). Well, I've saved the worst for last--science education: Just to remind everyone, the horizontal axis is the percentage of children in a school who qualify for free lunch, and the vertical axis is the percentage of children who, according to their MCAS scores, are either classified as "Need Improvement" or "Warning/Failing" in science. The R2--how much of the school to school variation is accounted for by variation in school lunch…

On Avalanches and Publishing

Others have commented on this ridiculous Chronicle of Higher Education article about the "avalanche" of publishing (seriously, how hard is it to use Web of Science or PubMed?), but I wanted to address the authors' three suggestions. First: First, limit the number of papers to the best three, four, or five that a job or promotion candidate can submit. That would encourage more comprehensive and focused publishing. This completely ignores the reality that publications have purposes other than tenure, namely grants. To get research funding, one typically has to show that one has done some work…

Overanalyzing Obama's Pysche: He's Not a Hostage

I don't mean to get all Bob Somerby on you, but Frank Rich's Sunday op-ed is ridiculous. Obama isn't acquiescing to Republican demands because he's suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or some other deep-seated psychological malady. That's clearly overthinking the problem. It's far more basic than that--Obama's gall can be divided into three parts: 1) He really believes that the country needs to be less partisan, and become more bipartisan. Without this, the country will be suffer. He would rather negotiate with the lunatic than be partisan. 2) He is a Rockefeller Republican. That is, he…

Hunger and the Ethical Failure of Our Elites

Last week, I showed pictures of what a food stamp budget actually buys. By way of Susie Madrak, we come across this article describing hunger in Philadelphia: Sherita Parks went shopping in a corner store in Frankford the other day with her too-thin daughter, Joe-anna, 2.... "I only wanted to spend a dollar today, so this is a lot," Parks said. "But she'll eat a slice of cheese for a meal." On the walk home, Joe-anna, who weighs 20 pounds but should be 26 or more, dawdled on the dirty sidewalks of Torresdale Avenue until Parks pulled her into the tidy, small house owned by Joe-anna's father…

The Aftermath of Big Sh-tpile and the Slow-Motion Collapse of the Rule of Law

I remember, back in the 1980s, there was a conservative school of thought that believed many of our problems could be blamed on poor, single, often non-white mothers who refused to 'take personal responsibility' (e.g., welfare queens, Murphy Brown! ZOMG!). I never quite understand how anyone could believe that the most powerless Americans would be able to destroy us. I thought that societal breakdown would be triggered by the failure of political and economic elites. Well, guess what? We're approaching breakdown: Let's look at one example of banana republic faux justice in the US, via a…

Birdbooker Report 43

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "One cannot have too many good bird books" --Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927). The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…

Mystery Bird: Cassin's Kingbird, Tyrannus vociferans

tags: Cassin's Kingbird, Tyrannus vociferans, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Cassin's Kingbird, Tyrannus vociferans, photographed in the central Sonora of Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Rick Wright [larger view]. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Sometimes it's the lousy views that are the most instructive, and this view -- so lousy as to be nearly impolite -- is chockfull of information that most of the standard field guides won't…

How Do You 'Euthanize' A Six Ton Whale?

tags: Tilikum, Tillikum, Tilly, Orcinus orca, Killer Whale, SeaWorld, Sea World, Orlando, Florida, whales, animals, news, behavior, streaming video The latest word is that Tilikum will not be euthanized in retaliation for being associated with his third human death. Of course, if the SeaWorld officials did decide to euthanize him, this raises several problems, not the least of which are the publicity and the mechanics of carrying out this animal's demise. This realist (me) has decided that SeaWorld avoided the "euthanization problem" in the case of Tilikum due to two reasons, and two…

Birdbooker Report 95

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…

Hi, Daryl!

I get lots of hate mail, but it's actually not that often that I'm cc'ed complaints sent to my acting chancellor and the university PR person. Since he's willing to share, so am I…so here's Mr Daryl Schulz's defense of free speech: I have known a few people through the years that have gone to UM Morris and thought it to be a reputable institution affiliated with the University of Minnesota. But you can't be serious about being proud of one of your Associate Professor's blog winning an award when it contains such hate towards religion or faith of any type (http://www.morris.umn.edu/webbin/…

Leavitt and the CDC plane

Yesterday's WaPo story that HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt is the heaviest user of CDC's Emergency jet is being played like a scandal. This is the most scandal-prone administration in recent memory, not a surprise. But I'm of two minds about it (or maybe 1.56 minds). First the details. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt defended his extensive use in recent months of a jet leased to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for emergency use. Leavitt's explanation for his use of the jet occurred at a hearing Wednesday of the House Ways and Means Committee. Moments earlier,…

Reading Diary: Primates: The fearless science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas by Jim Ottaviani

First Second Books is one of my favourite publishers of graphic novels, in particular because they seem to like to do a lot of science-themed books. Jim Ottaviani's book Feynman was one of my favourite graphic novels of the last few years. Perhaps not surprisingly, First Second published Feynman. The latest from the science graphic novel dynamic duo is Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas, this time with the art by Maris Wicks. And it is certainly up to the incredibly high standards set by Feynman, if not even a little bit better. What's it about?…