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AAS: scientism vs religiosity

The annual AAS meeting opened up with the award of the van Biesbroeck Prize of the society to Father Dr George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory. The van Biesbroeck Prize is for extraordinary service to astronomy, in particular his role organizing the Vatican Observatory Summer Schools, and the role he has played at the juncture of science and religion. A topic that occasionally stirs sciencebloggers, and their readers, from torpor. Dr Coyne gave a brief and gracious speech, but touched on what I thought was a bit of a strawman: he appealed, and I paraphrase, for people to…

children of our time

Schools around here get a lot of parent volunteers and rely heavily on them. Some of the kids have an interesting attitude about this. I was talking to a friend recently. As with many of the volunteers she has no training in education and no experience with actual teaching of groups. She is a professional with two kids of her own. She mentioned the "two trouble boys" in the class she was helping with, and said she had tried to work with one of them. After trying to cajole him and then order him to do something, he turned to her and told her bluntly: "I'm not doing it, and you can't make me".…

carrier reinforcement

The Nimitz Carrier Strike Group is being reinforced. That is not good. It is generally true that aircraft carriers to not launch air strikes while in harbour. I believe it has been done, probably by a UK carrier at Malta, but generally not a good idea. So, if one were to worry that intemperate rhetoric on war is something to be taken at face value, and if one assumes that the US armed forces like to use the advantage their large and many aircraft carriers provide, then it is prudent to keep an eye on the very public deployment of these carriers. At any given time, of the 11 currently…

hedging your bets

so apparently insurance conglomerate giant AIG is on the verge of bankruptcy, again, despite something of order $200 billion bailout from the US, which now owns 79.9% of the company the news solution is to request the US government guarantee the outstanding CDS that AIG issued I propose a solution So, AIG is "Too Big To Fail" - they have too many pension annuities, hold trust funds for progeny of the political elite, and other critical social functions AIG also, apparently, has enormous one sided exposure to Credit Default Swaps. When people started taking out very low premium insurance on…

Living Fossil Captured in Indonesia

tags: coelacanth, Latimeria menadoensis, fish, living fossil, Indonesia Indonesian fisherman, Yustinus Lahama, holds up a coelacanth, an ancient fish once thought to have become extinct at the time of the dinosaurs, in a quarantine pool after he caught it in the sea off North Sulawesi province 19 May 2007. Image: Stringer/Reuters An Indonesian fisherman captured a coelacanth, Latimeria menadoensis, in the sea off North Sulawesi island near Bunaken National Marine Park in Indonesia. The coelacanth (pronounced SEE-la-kanth) is an ancient fish once thought to have become extinct at the time…

The End of Harry Potter?

tags: Harry Potter, books, book review One of my devoted blog readers must be able to read crystal balls because he mercifully sent me a book about Harry Potter. Even though I have been going crazy waiting for the next movie and the last book to come out in July, this gift is a book that I never thought of reading while I wait, a book that I would never would have heard about if he hadn't sent it to me, in fact. And thank goodness that he did send this book; I can re-watch the first four DVDs and re-read the first six books only so many times before I start to feel guilty about not indulging…

I am my Booboo: an Update

I visited the orthopedic surgeons at the hospital this morning just before the crosstown traffic in NYC became unbearable due to the evil influence of yet another holiday parade, this time, the annual Saint Patrick Day's Parade. While there, I was known as "proximal humerus"; as in "here's the proximal humerus's x-rays" and "the proximal humerus thinks she has a proximal ulnar fracture, can you check that out while you are at it?" The bad news; after some very painful moving of my lower arm to maneuver it into a small portable x-ray machine, the docs did find a second fracture, at the…

Top Fifty Atheist T-Shirt and Bumper Sticker Aphorisms

tags: atheism, religion, science, evolution, humor A reader sent me this list of atheist-positive anecdotes that have been seen either on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt. Of course, they are accurate as well as hilarious. Which ones are your favorites? Top Fifty Atheist T-Shirt and Bumper Sticker Aphorisms Abstinence Makes the Church Grow Fondlers Honk If Your Religious Beliefs Make You An Asshole Intelligent Design Makes My Monkey Cry Too Stupid to Understand Science? Try Religion. *There's A REASON Why Atheists Don't Fly Planes Into Buildings "Worship Me or I Will Torture You…

Harry Potter ja Puoliverinen Prinssi [Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince]

tags: Finland, Harry Potter films, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, HP6, film, trailer, streaming video, photographs [0300 Helsinki time, after the film ended] The entrance to the theatre showing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (HP6) in Helsinki, Finland at 6 minutes after midnight. [Harry Potter ja Puoliverinen Prinssi]. There are three theatres at Finnkino showing the film this night. The doors open and we get ready to enter the theatre! Yeowza! The movie screen is the largest I've ever seen -- 184.8 square metres (8.8 x 21 m -- or 29 x 69 ft) -- and this particular…

Occupational Health News Roundup

With the help of a University of Missouri School of Journalism fellowship and Investigative Reporters and Editors, The Oregonian's Anthony Schick spent the summer investigating child labor in Oregon, where agriculture plays a major role in the economy. After visiting fields and interviewing farmworkers, he reports that child labor is "far more widespread than statistics show." He describes Diana and Elvin Mendoza Sanchez, ages 12 and 9, whose typical summer days involve picking fruit from 6 or 7am until 5pm, and submitting their buckets under their father's name. Schick writes: Nearly…

Still more SCOTUS coverage, especially on Medicaid

Joe Paduda at Managed Care Matters has posted the second of two parts in the special edition of Health Wonk Review responding to the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act: Part I is here, and Part II is here. I'm delighted with the Court's decision to uphold the law as a whole, but concerned about its making the Medicaid expansion optional. One Slate article and two posts on the Health Affairs Blog (one of which was included in Part I of the special-edition HWR) are especially helpful in thinking about the Medicaid aspect of the decision: Darshak Sanghavi explains in Slate that…

Don't just sit there! The benefits of breaking up sedentary time

I've written before (here and here) about some of the research that's been demonstrating the importance of avoiding long stretches of sedentary time. (The Sedentary Behavior Research Network has proposed that "sedentary" refer to waking time spent sitting or lying down and expending little energy, while "inactive" refer to people with low levels of overall activity, and I'm using those definitions.) Some of us may feel virtuous for meeting CDC's physical activity guidelines through regular workout sessions, but bouts of aerobic exercise can't completely offset the toll of too much time spent…

Word salad, with math

I guess most of us missed a bizarre poster at the Evolution 2008 meetings tonight. It was basically a paper titled The Evidently Imminent Phyletic Transition of Homo sapiens into Homo militarensis (the military hominid), by Richard H. Lambertsen. It's garbage from the first page, I'm afraid, in which the author tries to demonstrate that there must be direction and intent in the evolution of life, and that "Earth's largest blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) swimming at peak velocity most precisely represents the central tendency of evolution." This is followed by many pages of oddball math in…

Remembering Paul Epstein, a Physician for the Planet

by Dick Clapp, DSc, MPH My friend Dr. Paul Epstein succumbed to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma on Sunday, Nov. 13, three days short of his 68th birthday. Here are some thoughts about him that I wanted to share with TPH readers. First, he was a compassionate physician who worked in low income communities early in his career. He went overseas with his wife Andy, a nurse, in 1978-80 as a "cooperante" in newly independent Mozambique. When he came back to Boston, he continued to practice family medicine while he enrolled in a master's program in tropical public health at Harvard. During this phase, he…

Upper Big Branch disaster called industrial homicide by United Mine Workers

In big bold orange letters, the cover of the United Mine Workers of America's (UMWA) report on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster reads "Industrial Homicide." The union's 154-page report says: "Massey Energy must be held accountable for the death of each of the 29 miners. Theirs is not a guilt of omission but rather, based on the facts publicly available, the Union believes that Massey Energy and its management were on notice of and recklessly tolerated mining conditions that were so egregious that the resulting disaster constituted a massive slaughter in the nature of an industrial homicide…

Occupational health and safety leaders recognized by American Public Health Association

The winners of this year's American Public Health Association's (APHA) recognition awards for achievement in occupational health and safety illustrate the diversity of talent among those committed to ensuring workers' rights to a safe workplace. Martin Cherniak, MD is a clinician and researcher at the University of Connecticut; Amy Liebman is with the Migrant Clinicians Network; Dr. Salvador Moncada i LluÃs is with Spain's Union Institute of Work Environment and Health; LaMont Byrd is Director of Safety and Health for the Teamsters; and Barbara Rahke, a grassroots leader in Philadelphia's…

HHS Issues Rule on Coverage of Contraception and Other Women's Health Services

I wrote last month about the Institute of Medicine recommendations regarding preventive health services for women that should be covered by all new health plans without requiring co-payments or other cost sharing. Like many other supporters of women's health, I was especially interested in the proposal that contraceptives be covered at no charge to women. So, I was happy to hear that the Department of Health and Human Services has released a rule that accepts all of the IOM's recommendations. Here's the list of preventive services that private health plans will have to start covering without…

More Misguided Budget-Cutting: WIC Nutrition Assistance

Sharon Astyk at Casaubon's Book has a great post up about the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, or WIC, which is now on the budgetary chopping block. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that an appropriations bill approved by the House would result in WIC turning away 300,000 - 450,000 low-income women and children eligible for its assistance next year. WIC serves groups that are at nutritional risk and at a stage when proper nutrition is especially important: children up to age five and women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum.…

Grim trend in fatal injuries to U.S. coal miners

The first six months of the Trump administration has been particularly deadly for coal miners. Nine workers at U.S. coal mines have been fatally injured in the first six months of 2017. Five of the nine deaths occurred in West Virginia. In all of 2016, eight workers were killed on the job at U.S. coal mines. Some might want to attribute the increased number of coal mine deaths to President Trump's anti-regulatory agenda and more business friendly policies particularly for the coal industry. I don't know that to be the case. As far as I know, there are not any Trump officials micromanaging the…

Call to action on worker safety for future Labor Secretary

Labor Secretary nominee Alex Acosta is schedule to appear next week before a Senate Committee for his confirmation hearing. Senators should formulate their questions for him by reviewing a just released platform on worker safety. Protecting Workers' Lives & Limbs: An Agenda for Action makes dozens of recommendations to improve occupational health and safety policies and practices, including many for the future Labor Secretary. They include: Commit to protecting workers’ health and safety on the job with strong and fair enforcement, promulgation of common sense standards, and outreach and…

Hospital lab technicians' breast cancer deemed work-related

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled this month that breast cancer can be considered work-related under the country’s workers’ compensation law. The 7-1 ruling supported the case of three women who were employed as lab technicians at a hospital in British Columbia. Over a 20 year period, exposures in their work environment included solvents known to be carcinogenic and emissions from incinerated medical waste. Four other workers in the hospital lab also develop breast cancer. The women filed claims for workers’ compensation arguing that their exposure to carcinogens on-the-job was a factor in…

“Practical, respective resources” for workers to achieve safety at work

"People want to give us clothes, and that is nice, but your books give us knowledge which is true power." Those are the sentiments of Samuel Watulatsu about Hesperian’s publications on community health and prevention. He’s the founder of the Foundation for Development of Needy Communities in Mbale, Uganda. Watulatsu’s endorsement appears on a new Hesperian publication: Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety. The Workers’ Guide to Health and Safety is grounded on the principle that providing practical and comprehensive information to a community can persuade them to take action on issues…

Swedish Cabinet Opens Door to New Metal Detector Legislation

In October, I wrote about a ruling of the European Commission against Sweden's restrictions on metal-detector use. The angle, kind of irrelevantly one may think, was that our rules counteract the free mobility of goods, which is of course a central concern of the EU. On 30 November Sweden's Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied to the European Commission. The gist of the reply is that "We think protection of the cultural heritage, which is also central concern of the EU, should trump the free mobility of goods in this case". Up until §27 there is little new here. But then we get this (and I…

Dorrik Stow's Vanished Ocean

In his fine new book Vanished Ocean, geologist Dorrik Stow uses the biography of one of our planet's vanished oceans to teach the reader a wide range of veeery long-term perspectives on geological history. The ocean that geologists call the Tethys came into being when the Pangaea supercontinent coalesced in the Late Permian, 260 million years ago. Its last vestige finally disappeared when one of the Mediterranean sea's forerunners dried up 6.5 million years ago. Along the way, Stow explains plate tectonics, the birth and death of seas, deep-sea sedimentation (his research speciality) and a…

LinCon 2010 Gaming Convention

My two days with Junior at the LinCon gaming convention in Linköping turned out even better than I'd hoped for. I had lots of fun myself, and as a geek dad I was extra happy that Junior took to the whole thing with such gusto. On Thursday evening, for instance, he was play-testing a convoluted unpublished sci-fi board game with some guys in their 20s and 30s while I sat at another table some ways off and played simpler games with my friend Hans and others. Dad proud. Everybody at the convention was uncommonly friendly and open, as gamers often are. Most of us looked pretty geeky, but not…

New DI Spin

In the wake of Bruce Chapman's public statement about the double secret probation research allegedly going on at a secret lair on a south pacific island comes this DI press release claiming to have funded millions of dollars worth of research. But notice how vague the wording is: "So we started the Center, and now, just ten years later, we've put over $4 million directly into scientific and scholarly research on intelligent design and evolution." "Scientific and scholarly research." Interesting combination of words. The latter category undoubtedly includes the salaries of all the DI fellows,…

WSOP Main Event Update

Minor spoilers to be found here. The event is far from over, but I do mention some of the players who are still alive and some chip counts. Read at your own peril The split field days are done at the WSOP main event and today is a day off for all the players. On Friday, all of the players remaining will begin play at noon, all together for the first time. There are somewhere between 1200 and 1300 players left, a bit below the goal of starting tomorrow with 1400 players. Now is when the real tournament begins. 873 players will cash out, so at this point the players will be focused on making…

Ralph Reed Bilking Black Churches?

Wow, this is an explosive story. GQ has a story on Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition director now running for Lt. Governor in Georgia, that contains new allegations that will shock even the cynical. Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed were, according to email exchanged between the two of them in July of 2003, working on a program to get elderly black church leaders to take out life insurance policies payable to non-profit groups that Jack controlled. TPMmuckraker picked up on it and explains how it worked: We know how this scheme would have gone, because Abramoff pitched something similar to a…

A College President Who Supports Free Speech

Via David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy comes this story about a college president who really gets it when it comes to free speech. A student group at Northern Kentucky University put up a display of hundreds of crosses on campus as a way to protest abortion, which they oppose. A professor at the school, British literature teacher Sally Jacobsen, actually encourages one of her classes to go out and destroy the display and they go and dump 400 crosses in the garbage. The professor, to say the least, is a bit confused about the meaning of free speech: During a break in class, Jacobsen said…

Interview with Anthony Zinni

Tim Russert interviewed General Anthony Zinni last night. In the early stages of the Iraq war, I wrote about Zinni a lot. He was the head of the US Central Command, the chief American military officer in the Middle East, until just before the war broke out. He was also one of the generals, along with Eric Shinseki, who spoke out publicly about the massive mistakes and ridiculously rosy scenarios being thrown out by the administration in the media. I said then that if we didn't listen to Zinni and Shinseki we were going to end up with a disaster on our hands in Iraq, and that has proven true.…

Audience Participation Friday: Rate Graduate Schools

As noted in a previous post, I'm teaching the senior seminar this fall, which means I'll be meeting weekly with our senior majors (13 of them!) to discuss topics of interest to them. Which will involve a fair amount of discussion of graduate school, because that's one of the options, whether people think it's a good idea or not. These days, it seems like everybody has their own college rankings (the Washington Monthly just came out with a new version of theirs, for example), but very few people provide what's really important: realistic ratings of physics graduate programs. So let's see what…

More sea ice and more methane

Arctic Methane Emergency Group? refers. Via GP I find this discussion on a "geoengineering" newsgroup (gosh how quaint - people still use newsgroups? Maybe retro is back). AJL finds my article "damming" but Ken C finds it "a little distasteful". But both are worried, quite rightly, about credibility if the AMEG's wilder claims (and people) aren't challenged. Ken C points to September Arctic sea ice predicted to disappear near 2oC global warming above present (JGR, doi:10.1029/2011JD016709) which is interesting, because that is very non-catastrophic and very non-nearterm: 2 oC puts it at ~2070…

Broon oot

Broon has gone, for good this time, unlike yesterday's fake resignation. He appears to have achieved one thing: yesterday's last-gasp offer to the LD appears to have forced the Tories to offer a referendum on AV. However, it wasn't enough to tempt the LD's to him, and his own party was iffy, and it wouldn't have been a majority. So today he said "bugger this for a game of soldiers" and pissed off. Only he wrapped it up in a dignified speech. My own keyinsight (hexapodia!) is so-far unarticulated by anyone else, and is hidden over the fold. OK, so I think that this is Broon's last piece of…

UEA circus, continued

The HoC inquiry into the CRU hack has reported. Judging from BBC radio 4 this morning (which interviewed Acton and then Lawson, no, not the wobbly one) the results are good: I say this because Lawson showed a distinct disinclination to talk about what the report actually said :-). I'll expand this post later with more, so don't complain if it changes. My initial impression is that is is fairly good, and certainly provides the right headlines, but I can't yet endorse it whole-heartedly - it looks like they have made some errors (in the matter of blaming Jones for the data sharing). But I need…

Communicating Science

PD has an article about Communicating Science whose title I've shamelessly stolen, and a follow up imaginatively titled Communicating Science 2. Since he sideswipes Mooney, I'm all for it :-) I wrote an exciting and insightful comment there, which like everything I write anywhere got misinterpreted. So I've cleaned it up and put it here: "Scientists should talk more" is (I think) just excuse making. In much the same way that you can be sure that when GW really starts causing trouble [see folks, I do believe really, I haven't quite gone over to the Dark Side yet, and I still don't understand…

Is Steve McIntyre an expert statistician?

I am not afraid of admitting my own areas of ignorance.  The human body of knowledge is enormous and no one can possess all of it, or even be moderately familiar with all of it.  The only shame is in pretending otherwise. This admission fundamentally shapes my personal approach to the whole Hockeystick/Dendrochronology/Michael Mann brouhaha, which continues to this day despite MBH98 having receded into the rather distant past, in scientific research terms. I have to rely more on networks of trust and take a more removed view of it all and generally park that paper and that famous graph in the…

The Decline of Conservative Judaism

Have a look at this interesting article, by Samantha Shapiro at Slate, about the decline of conservative Judaism. She writes: Since 1886, the Jewish Theological Seminary has sought to negotiate a middle ground between Orthodox Judaism, which (to vastly oversimplify) teaches that the Torah and Rabbinic law were authored by God, and Reform Judaism, which sees obedience of Jewish law, or Halakha, as a choice, not a divine mandate. Conservative Judaism, which began as a congregational movement in 1913, attempts to bridge the gap--to affirm the divinity of ancient Jewish law but also to allow…

O'Leary's Problem

A few weeks ago, Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary joined the team over at William Dembski's blog Uncommon Descent. This presented her with a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, she is surely aware that she knows nothing at all about science. But here she was expected to write regularly on the subject. How would she handle that state of affairs? Well, she has now posted enough to give us a partial answer: By relying on childish, above-it-all arguments that will allow her to sound savvy and street-wise to UD's sycophantic admirers, without actually having to engage any science. For…

Are Creationists Anti-Science?

An interview with historian of science Ronald Numbers has been posted. It has already attracted some blog attention. P. Z. Myers rightly criticizes Numbers for some rather bizarre statements about the relationship between science and religion. Over at Telic Thoughts, Krauze offers this typically dopey reply. The interview contains a lot of bloggable items, but I will focus on just one: QUESTION: So, in a certain sense, doesn't this represent some sort of divide between religion and science? MR. NUMBERS: To me, the struggle in the late 20th Century between creationists and evolutionists…

Kid Growth Update

At SteelyKid's softball game today, the Pip provided an ideal cute-kid photo to use as a springboard to some SCIENCE! Or at least, a graph... Anyway, here's the Little Dude showing off how tall he's gotten: The Pip under Kate's coat. OK, really he's hiding under Kate's raincoat (after two beautiful sunny days in a row, we're back to dreary rain today), but as a side effect of that process he's demonstrating that he's pretty tall. But exactly how tall? We're having an addition put on the back of Chateau Steelypips, and our kitchen gutted and rebuilt, so we've been moving a lot of stuff…

125/366: Flash! (Aaah-aaaaaahhhhh!)

One of my Christmas gifts this year was an external flash unit for my DSLR, replacing one that broke a while back. Given that the camera has a built-in flash, you might wonder why I need this extra bulky gadget, so to answer that question, here's a composite of five pictures I took today: Composite image showing various flash settings. The top is the intentionally underexposed case with no flash. Top left is the direct flash, bottom left direct flash with the diffuser. Top right is indirect flash at a 45 degree angle, bottom right is indirect flash straight up. I put the camera in full…

Way Less Scary Than Death

This week has been a particularly good one for highlighting how weird my career is. On Thursday, I gave a lecture for the Union College Academy of Lifelong Learning, talking for nearly two hours about Einstein (in Memorial Chapel, shown in the "featured image" above). On Friday, I drove clean across New York State (which is really big, for the record) so I could give my talking-dog quantum physics talk as the after-dinner lecture at the New York State Section meeting of the American Physical Society. If you told me in 1985 that I would go into a line of work that involved a lot of public…

Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community

The title of this post is also the title of a new peer reviewed paper by Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Orskes, James Risbey, Ben Newell and Michael Smithson, published in Global Environmental Change. The article is Open Access, available here. Stephan Lewandosky has a blog post on it, in which he notes, ... we examine the effect of contrarian talking points that arise out of uncertainty on the scientific community itself. We show that although scientists are trained in dealing with uncertainty, there are several psychological and cognitive reasons why scientists may nevertheless be susceptible…

An Open Letter to the Industrial Capitalists and Members of the %0.01

The following is a letter from John Irving, posted originally on his Facebook page and reprinted here as a guest post: NOTE: JOHN NOW HAS HIS OWN WEB SITE AND HAS POSTED HIS LETTER THERE. So do note that there are comments, including by John, below, but also go and visit his site! John Irving Dear Industrial Capitalists and members of the %0.01, I feel obliged to inform you that you’ve made a huge strategic blunder and things aren’t probably going to work out very well for you soon. You recall that way back in 1965 - 50 years ago this year - President Lyndon B. Johnson was warned about…

Ten Thousand Birds

There are over 10,000 species of bird on the Earth today. There is one blog called "10,000 Birds" for which I write a monthly article, in case you did not know. But this post is about Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin, a book by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Monegomerie. Birds and various studies of birds are central to evolutionary theory and the development of all of the surrounding biology and science. Here's a short list of key roles birds have played in evolutionary biology: Darwin's study of pigeon breeding was central to On the Origin of Species and later works. The…

Larry Clifton on Michael Mann's Suit: Nope, wrong, sorry.

Larry Clifton has suggested that Michael Mann’s law suit against the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Review, Mark Steyn, and Rand Simberg is ruining it for everyone, and a lot of his right wing conservative friends agree. But they are all wrong, so wrong that one wonders how they could be so wrong. It smells to me like willful ignorance. This is Michael Moore. For a while, Clifton had a picture of Michael Moore instead of Michael Mann on his Digital Journal post. Made me laugh. For people who spend most of their time whinging about how other people are ruining the…

What order should you watch Star Wars in?

With the imminent release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you might want to refresh your memory by watching the earlier Star Wars films, or even the films and other related productions. There are two or three philosophies on this. The most obvious is to watch the films in chronological order, or story order, so you are seeing the historical development of the things that happened. This is simple. Watch Episode I first, and work your way in order through Episode VI. There are objections to this method, however, because the way the story was told, out of historical sequence, involves…

NASA Reports Astonishing Uptick In Surface Temperature

We knew October was going to be hot. Only hours ago the Japanese Meteorological Agency came out with their data showing October 2015 to be the hottest October in their database. I've not checked yet to see if it was the hottest month in their database. October 2015 was the hottest month in that entire database, which goes back to 1891. October 2015 was the Warmest Month in the Entire NASA Dabase Now, NASA GISS, which also keeps track of these things, has come out with their numbers. The predictions from experts like John Abraham indicated that October 2015 might be in the 90s (that's the…

Tales of the Ex-Apes

Jonathan Marks' new book is called "Tales of the Ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution" I've got to tell you that when I first saw the title of this book, the letters played in my head a bit. Tails of the Ex-Apes. That would be funny because apes don't have tails. Or Tales of the Exapes. Pronounced as you wish. Perhaps in an Aztec accent. Anyway... Jon Marks is a colleague and a friend from way back. He is a biological anthropologist who has engaged in critical study of central biological themes, such as genetics, and he's said a few things about race. He wears black, often does…

Weekend Diversion: A Planetary Special for the Morning People

"If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late." -Henny Youngman Normally, the best wonders of the night sky -- stars, planets and beyond -- happen, well, late at night. But every once in a while, it's actually the very early morning sky that holds the greatest sights. Just make sure you get up before -- as David Grisman and Tony Rice might tell you -- your sky is ruined by the Morning Sun.Why's that? Well, if you look to the East, just before sunrise, you might see a sight like this: Image credit: Luis Argerich. Well, what do we have here?…