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Flavor Workersâ Lung Disease: What Do We Know and What Should Be Done?

By David Michaels All of a sudden, America has become acutely aware of the terrible lung disease caused by workplace exposure to artificial butter flavor. Last week, the failure of OSHA to do anything in response to the outbreak of cases across the country was the subject of several powerful newspaper articles (including a front page story and editorial in the New York Times) and hearings in the House and Senate. In addition, the obstructive lung disease cases in the flavor industry were discussed in an alarming article in CDCâs Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The article reported that…

Feds Drop Conflicted Contractor

By David Michaels The National Toxicology Program (NTP) has fired Sciences International. Last month, Marla Cone wrote in the Los Angeles Times about allegations that the consulting firm, hired by the NTP to run the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR), had significant conflict of interest. The allegation was that Sciences International also worked for manufacturers of Bisphenol A, or BPA, a controversial endocrine-disrupting chemical that CECHR was evaluating. (Jennifer Sass and Sarah Janssen of the Natural Resources Defense Council have post on the BPA…

Judges See Through Industryâs Diesel Exhaust

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled today in favor of the United Steelworkers and MSHA in their efforts to protect underground miners from diesel particulate matter (DPM).  The mining industry plaintiffs have claimed for years that MSHAâs 2001 DPM health standard was neither scientifically valid nor feasible, but the three-judge panel denied the firmsâ request to review MSHAâs rule.  In a decision written by Judge David B. Sentelle, the court said âwe can find nothing in the administrative record that would justify second-guessing the agencyâs conclusions.â The court ruling…

Exxon Funds Litigation Research, Gets Reduced Damages

By Sheldon Krimsky ExxonMobil has already come under scrutiny for funding global warming deniers, but the company has also funded research that raises concerns about conflict of interest in litigation research. The company began funding litigation research after being hit with punitive damages for the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill, and then cited that research in an appeal that ultimately reduced those damages by $2 billion. A brief history of the case is as follows:  On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker left the terminal in Valdez, Alaska heading south through Prince William Sound…

Good News: National Academies Tell OMB to Junk Its Junk Science Proposal

by Robert Shull  With the Bush administrationâs war on science raging all around us, itâs nice to be able to report a win for the public. In January 2006, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) of the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a draft bulletin proposing to impose one-size-fits-all criteria for all agency risk assessments â and a good deal of other scientific and technical evaluations that arenât considered risk assessments. OIRAâs bulletin was expected to be the swansong of then-OIRA administrator John Graham, who had long advocated manipulations and…

Hotel Workers Rising! Part 2

Thousands of hotel workers in Boston are awaiting the results of contract negotiations between Unite Here! Local 26 and the cityâs major hotel operators.  Although their current contract expired on November 30, both sides agreed to extend it until February 1, 2007 while they continue to meet at the bargaining table.  Unite Here! Local 26 represents about 6,000 housekeepers, waitstaff, bellmen and other hotel workers in Boston, who are seeking a five-year contract with a wage increase, and larger contributions from their employers on healthcare and retirement plans.  Besides these bread…

A meeting with Dr Joy Reidenberg

You know me, I'm not one to brag. But... One of several interesting things I did over the weekend was attend a special cinema screening (in Clapham, London) of the giant squid special episode of Inside Nature's Giants. It was great, and the showing was followed by a Q&A session with David Dugan (ING writer/producer), presenter Mark Evans, and anatomist Joy Reidenberg. It was great to meet and chat with Joy - here's photographic proof. I gave her a copy of Tetrapod Zoology Book One*. * Or... should that be Tetrapood Zoology Book One? The publishers are aware of the mistake and will be…

The Mandelbrot Set

The most well-known of the fractals is the infamous Mandelbrot set. It's one of the first things that was really studied *as a fractal*. It was discovered by Benoit Mandelbrot during his early study of fractals in the context of the complex dynamics of quadratic polynomials the 1980s, and studied in greater detail by Douady and Hubbard in the early to mid-80s. It's a beautiful example of what makes fractals so attractive to us: it's got an extremely simple definition; an incredibly complex structure; and it's a rich source of amazing, beautiful images. It's also been glommed onto by an…

Casey Luskin Demonstrates Cluelessness. Surprised?

As usual, Casey Luskin over at DI's media complaints division is playing games, misrepresenting people's words in order to claim that that they're misrepresenting IDists words. Nothing like the pot calling the kettle black, eh? This time, he's accusing Ken Miller of misrepresenting Dembski in a BBC documentary. Let's first take a look at what Casey claims happened in the documentary: A reporter recently sent me an anti-intelligent design BBC documentary with the outlandish title "A War on Science." In it, Darwinian biologist Ken Miller is shown purporting to refute irreducible complexity…

Birdbooker Report 115

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I'll have a long beard by the time I read them. ~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books. 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…

Clock Tutorial #10: Entrainment

This is the second in a series of posts on the analysis of entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005. The natural, endogenous period of circadian rhythms, as measured in constant conditions, is almost never exactly 24 hours. In the real world, however, the light-dark cycle provided by the Earth's rotation around its axis is exactly 24 hours long. Utility of biological clocks is in retaining a constant phase between environmental cycles and activities of the organism (so the organism always "does" stuff at the same, most appropriate time of day). Thus, a mechanism must exist to…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 11 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. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Systems Biology of the Clock in Neurospora crassa: A model-driven discovery process, Computing Life, is used to identify an ensemble of genetic networks that describe the biological clock. A clock mechanism involving the genes white-collar-1 and white-collar-2 (wc-1 and wc-2) that encode a transcriptional activator (as well as a blue-light receptor) and…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Programmable Genetic Clock Made Of Blinking Florescent Proteins Inside Bacteria Cells: UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The clock's blink rate changes when the temperature, energy source or other environmental conditions change, a fact that could lead to new kinds of sensors that convey information about the environment through the blinking rate. Real Robinson Crusoe: Evidence Of Alexander Selkirk's Desert Island Campsite: Cast away on a desert…

Ships and Spaceships

Yes, this has been in the works for a long time, and a few hints have been planted here and there over the past months, but now it is official - NASA and The Beagle Project have signed a Space Act Agreement and will work together on a host of projects including scientific research and education. You can read the details on The Beagle Project Blog - space, oceans, biology, science education, history of science, exploration and adventure: all at once. How exciting! The text of the agreement is under the fold: NASA and the HMS Beagle Trust have signed a Space Act Agreement for cooperation…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Can Genetic Information Be Controlled By Light?: DNA, the molecule that acts as the carrier of genetic information in all forms of life, is highly resistant against alteration by ultraviolet light, but understanding the mechanism for its photostability presents some puzzling problems. A key aspect is the interaction between the four chemical bases that make up the DNA molecule. Researchers at Kiel University have succeeded in showing that DNA strands differ in their light sensitivity depending on their base sequences. Journey Toward The Center Of The Earth: One-of-a-kind Microorganism Lives…

What is science's rightful place?

In our heads, of course. All of our heads. But Seed is asking, so let me elaborate briefly. As I said before, science is not just active participation in research. Science is a mindset. We are all born scientists, exploring the world around us and experimenting with it. When we grow up, we continue being scientists in our day-to-day lives. If you walk into a room and flip a switch and the light does not come on, what do you do? I doubt that you throw yourself on the floor in fear, speaking in tongues, praying, blaming the Aliens or asking the Government to help you. You calmly go about…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Computer Game 'Tetris' May Help Reduce Flashbacks To Traumatic Events: Playing 'Tetris' after traumatic events could reduce the flashbacks experienced in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), preliminary research by Oxford University psychologists suggests. New Computer Program Enables Powerful Data Analysis On Small Computers: A powerful yet compact algorithm has been developed that can be used on laptop computers to extract features and patterns from huge and complex data sets. Digital Communication Technology Helps Clear Path To Personalized Therapies: Researchers at the Burnham Institute…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 22 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: Major Role of Microbes in Carbon Fluxes during Austral Winter in the Southern Drake Passage: Carbon cycling in Southern Ocean is a major issue in climate change, hence the need to understand the role of…

Journalism on Twitter?

Dave Winer called up Jay Rosen and interviewed him about the potential of twitter-like platforms to become a news/journalistic medium. Listen to the podcast here. Join the discussion here. Related: What does twitter mean for breaking news stories? On Thursday morning (US Pacific Time), March 12, 2009, a piece of debris came close enough the International Space Station to require the astronauts to take refuge in the Soyez module, just in case there was a collision. In the end, the debris passed by without incident. I experienced this event almost entirely through twitter. This essay is to…

Are solo authors less cited?

Daniel Lemire asks this question when observing a fallacy voiced in an editorial: .....only a small fraction of the top 100 papers ranked by the number of citations (17 of 100) were published by single authors.....a published paper resulting from collaborative work has a higher chance of attracting more citations. You can discuss the fallacy if you want, but I am much more interested in the next question that Daniel asks - are solo authors and groups of authors inherently attracted to different kinds of problems, or if solo vs. group dynamics make some projects more conducive for solo work…

Clocks and Immunity

This EurekAlert title got my attention this morning: Immunity stronger at night than during day: The immune system's battle against invading bacteria reaches its peak activity at night and is lowest during the day. Experiments with the laboratory model organism, Drosophila melanogaster, reveal that the specific immune response known as phagocytosis oscillates with the body's circadian rhythm, according to Stanford researchers who presented their findings at the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) 48th Annual Meeting, Dec. 13-17, 2008 in San Francisco. "These results suggest that immunity…

Bad joke, bad poll

This is an old, tired joke that has just been posted on the site of a right-wing moron's radio show. I have heard it quite a few times before, usually by smug nitwits who think they've delivered a knock-out themselves. A United States Marine was attending some college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the courses had a professor who was an avowed atheist and a member of the ACLU. One day the professor shocked the class when he came in, looked to the ceiling, and flatly stated, "God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this…

Blogrolling - Letter B

Continuing with asking for your help in fixing my Blogroll: Every couple of days or so, I will post here a list of blogs that start with a particular letter, and you add in the comments if you know of something that is missing from that list. See so far: Numbers and Symbols A Today brought to you by letter B. This is what is on the Blogroll right now. Check also the Housekeeeping posts for other B blogs I have discovered in the meantime. Check links. Tell me what to delete, what to add: BPR3 Bonnie J. M. Swoger Ben Off to Iraq Biology Blogs BIOLOGY & POLITICS B92 Blogs B and B Back off,…

Are scientists getting happier with science journalism?

Interactions with the Mass Media (pdf): Our analysis shows that interactions between scientists and journalists are more frequent and smooth than previously thought. This five-country survey also suggests that the scientists most involved in these interactions tend to be scientifically productive, have leadership roles, and--although they consider concerns as well as perceived benefits--that they perceive the interactions to have more positive than negative outcomes. Despite minor variations in the assessment of media contacts across the five countries, the basic patterns are surprisingly…

Clock Tutorial #10: Entrainment

This is the second in a series of posts on the analysis of entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005. The natural, endogenous period of circadian rhythms, as measured in constant conditions, is almost never exactly 24 hours. In the real world, however, the light-dark cycle provided by the Earth's rotation around its axis is exactly 24 hours long. Utility of biological clocks is in retaining a constant phase between environmental cycles and activities of the organism (so the organism always "does" stuff at the same, most appropriate time of day). Thus, a mechanism must exist to…

Clock Tutorial #10: Entrainment

This is the second in a series of posts on the analysis of entrainment, originally written on April 10, 2005. The natural, endogenous period of circadian rhythms, as measured in constant conditions, is almost never exactly 24 hours. In the real world, however, the light-dark cycle provided by the Earth's rotation around its axis is exactly 24 hours long. Utility of biological clocks is in retaining a constant phase between environmental cycles and activities of the organism (so the organism always "does" stuff at the same, most appropriate time of day). Thus, a mechanism must exist to…

Chronic vs. Acute Sleep Deprivation

In all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate alike, one of the defining features of sleep is the "rebound", i.e., the making up for sleep debt after an acute sleep deprivation event. However, the problem of modern society is a chronic sleep loss in humans - when you loos a couple of hours of needed sleep every day. Now, a team at Northwestern studied the effects of chronic sleep loss and, lo and behold - bad news! There is no rebound after chronic sleep deprivation. Chronically sleep deprived? You can't make up for lost sleep: ---------snip------------- In the study, the researchers kept…

Scienceblogs.com in Klingon? What's next?

Now that Seed scienceblogs are taking over the world, one language at a time, the overlords are asking: which language to conquer next? That's a poll which you should go and take. But my thoughts first: Some languages have few or no science blogs. Others have many but are a a closed community, only reading/linking/blogrolling each other. Others may have many, but they barely know each other and are not a community (yet). Others, though they share the language, stick to each other along national lines without much cross-over. Others crave international audience and write some or all of their…

My picks from ScienceDaily

How Poisonous Mushrooms Cook Up Toxins: Alpha-amanitin is the poison of the death cap mushroom, Amanita phalloides. The Michigan State University plant biology research associate was looking for a big gene that makes a big enzyme that produces alpha-amanitin, since that's how other fungi produce similar compounds. But after years of defeat, she and her team called in the big guns -- new technology that sequences DNA about as fast as a death cap mushroom can kill. The results: The discovery of remarkably small genes that produce the toxin -- a unique pathway previously unknown in fungi. Brain…

How to talk about Health Care

Rockridge Institute published a set of articles (and a video ad) that I found quite interesting about the way to frame health care. See for yourself: Introduction to Rockridge's Health Care Campaign: Framing for Rockridge is about the honest expression of the progressive moral view based upon empathy and responsibility for oneself and others. It is about recognizing government's role to protect and empower citizens. In other words, we want to communicate our moral view as directly as possible. We want to make sure the moral view is not lost in the fog of complex policy proposals. The Logic…

For European LifeScience Bloggers

It is high time a blogger wins this prize, don't you think? If you are in Europe or Israel, and you have a life-science blog, apply for this award: EMBO Award for Communication in the Life Sciences Call for entries 2007 DEADLINE 30 JUNE 2007 Description of the award The award is intended for scientists who have, while remaining active in laboratory research, risen to the challenge of communicating science to a non-scientific audience. The winners of the EMBO Award are nominated for the EU Descartes Prize for science communication. Prize The sum awarded is Euro 5.000, accompanied by a silver…

Washington state kook wants a law to discriminate against atheists

While Arkansas takes a small step forward, a few people in my home state of Washington want to take a great leap backwards. Some crank named Kimberlie Struiksma, who is apparently associated with education, has proposed to put a remarkably clueless measure onto the ballot. Behold Initiative Measure No. 1040: Ballot Title Initiative Measure No. 1040 concerns a supreme ruler of the universe. This measure would prohibit state use of public money or lands for anything that denies or attempts to refute the existence of a supreme ruler of the universe, including textbooks, instruction or research…

Flotsam

I don't have kids, but every so often, I am tempted by a children's book, and this year, I found myself fascinated by one special book, Flotsam, by David Wiesner (New York: Clarion Books, 2006). This book uses incredibly detailed watercolor paintings to depict the delightful story of a young boy who is hanging out on the New Jersey shore. The boy discovers an underwater camera and develops the film, and the resulting pictures send the child on an amazing journey through a fantastical undersea world. The story begins with the protagonist, a scientifically-minded young boy, busily examining…

Hello to the NutHouse

I know that some of you are reading specifically to see how I am doing now that I am out of the nuthut, so I will provide you with updates every so often. I will signify these personal updates with the bird icon that you see to the left, so if this sort of thing bores you, you are forwarned and can just yawn and click on to the next article. (Incidentally, that icon to the left depicts one of the bird species I keep and research, the yellow-bibbed lory, Lorius chlorocercus.) I had a bumpy transition from captivity to freedom. For example, even though no one lived in my apartment, it is…

I'm getting under Ken Ham's skin

He seems a bit peevish. He now has a blog post up complaining about me and my "inaccuracies". His complaints are amusingly petty. I object to the lies at the very heart of his "museum", and he thinks he is rebutting me by whining over petty details. For instance, he quotes me as regarding the idea of "Noah's ark being built to carry off members of every species on earth", and then he primly informs his readers that that isn't true: it only carried every kind of "land-dwelling, air-breathing animal". Oh, well, that fixes the logistical problems of the ark right up, doesn't it? Here we have a…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 26 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: The Usefulness of Peer Review for Selecting Manuscripts for Publication: A Utility Analysis Taking as an Example a High-Impact Journal: High predictive validity - that is, a strong association between the…

Good News: Especially For My European Readers!

tags: Seed Media Group, Hubert Burda Media, science literacy My European readers have been incredibly loyal and kind to me, and it has given me great pleasure and pride to know that, even though you live overseas, you take the time to read my blog. So my European readers especially will be excited about some news that promises to give ScienceBlogs a more prominent position in Europe. This news is hot off the wires, and I will be writing more about what this means for all of you and for us here at SB as things develop. Seed Media Group just announced that they recently formed a partnership…

NYC Crippled by Rainstorm

tags: NYC subways, NYC Life, MTA So I awoke this morning at 6am to the sounds of a deluge of biblical proportions. My windows are all wide open (no air conditioning), so this rainstorm was impossible to ignore. This deluge lasted approximately an hour and a half, and it flooded the sewers and the subways and it shut down most public transit. Well, all the subways, LIRR, and PATH trains were at a standstill (either shorting out or swimming with the fishes), so everyone instead used buses and cabs to get around, which resulted in gridlock. You can only cram so many cars into the streets of NYC…

An outing

A short while ago, the blogosphere was irate over the outing of the identity of a pseudonymous blogger, Publius. The outing followed the usual pattern: pseudonymous blogger annoys right-winger who can't cope, right-winger lashes out by revealing the name behind the pseudonym (as if that somehow addresses the criticisms), then right-winger sits back and starts defending himself: "he deserved it", "he shouldn't expect to be anonymous", "anonymity is bad, anyways". It's so damned stupid. I have no problem with people using pseudonyms, especially since, as in the case of Publius, there was a…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird A Blog Around The Clock: Evolutionary Medicine: Does reindeer have a circadian stop-watch instead of a clock? Anthropology in Practice: The Irish Diaspora: Why Even Trinidadians Are a Little Irish Back Re(action): To whom it may concern (poem) Bad Science:…

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: Spiny Mice Modulate Eumelanin to Pheomelanin Ratio to Achieve Cryptic Coloration in 'Evolution Canyon,' Israel: Coat coloration in mammals is an explicit adaptation through natural selection. Camouflaging…

Dirty rotten scammers

A reader wrote in to say his mother was being victimized by a putative religious organization called Elite Activity Resurrected. It has to be seen to be believed. It's all dressed up in egalitarian pieties about ending world poverty, but when you look at the actual operation, it's a remarkably blatant con game. The World's first Interdenominational Belief System on the Internet! Poverty is our Adversary! "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on…

What Our Remaining Oil Supplies Should Be For

It is pretty simple - if oil resources are finite, how do you gauge the value of different oil uses?  Ultimately, a use of oil should meet one of two simple criteria: 1. Does it reduce long term oil usage, as required by the reality of finite-ness? 2. Does it do something that nothing but oil can do? Robert Rapier takes President Obama's reference to using oil to get off oil and expands on it in a recent column, getting right to the point with a potentially viable compromise: So I propose a compromise where we open up some of the more promising areas to exploration, and then earmark some or…

basket case

Prof Foland of nuclear mangos forward an interesting pointer. The US Navy's TACAMO ("Take Charge And Move Out") went active this week, with a little flurry of messages (scroll down to comment #71 if you want to see more detail). This is the old Very Low Frequency communication system, from E-6s flying racetracks over random patches of big ocean. Primarily intended for communication with submarines on long term underwater patrol, it is also a survivable system, that can not be interfered with through E-M countermeasures, primarily intended for strategic communications during nuclear exchanges…

Economical with the Astronomical

Ok, here we go again... someone thinks it is funny to compare economics with astronomy... Worse, than that, it is Chad hisself, hovering near one of the antipodes of the blogosphere. It was of course Krugman who started it, but Sean had to go stir it up, didn't he? Then Dave's got to go Pontificate and all, so how can I not? Why, some of my best friends are economists... So, is economics really like astronomy? No! Well, except for our mutual affinity for unreasonably large numbers, mesoscale problems and models that are mostly too messy to actually solve for realistic situations.…

Jesusita Fire

it turns out that hot tubs and light ashfall are a bad mix so we had a fairly major fire here in the mountains; one of my colleagues here pretty much saw it start - the site is clearly visible outside the "fishbowl tower room" where we were having a research group meeting. He pointed it out to me a few minutes before 2, and the fire is thought to have started at 1:45 or so. Fire wasn't much tuesday, but threatened some homes and had the potential to be very serious. Wednesday we had a KITP picnic at the beach, with clear view of the fire. The winds picked up and the fire got bad, but was…

An account of the NKU mock trial

Greg Lloyd attended the Northern Kentucky University mock trial of evolution/creation, and sent back a report. The scenario was that a teacher tried to advocate creationist theories in a public high school classroom, was fired for it, and is trying to sue for reinstatement. Here's Greg's account of the event. Several Pharyngulites and I (ggab and his friend) attended last evenings mock trial at NKU. You can see pictures of the event here: http://gallery.me.com/gllopc#100069 The pictures include the question the audience/jury was asked, and the results. 36% Believe she should remain fired 2%…

Where are the curators? Why did they miss this? What is the responsibility of the community anway?

In a recent post, I wrote about an article that I read in Science magazine on the genetics of learning. One of things about the article that surprised me quite a bit was a mistake the authors made in placing the polymorphism in the wrong gene. I wrote about that yesterday. The other thing that surprised me was something that I found at the NCBI. The article that I wrote about definitely made a mistake and I don't understand why it wasn't caught by the reviewers. I found it pretty quickly by searching OMIM and I was only trying to find information about dopamine, not verify results.…

The Year of Living with High School Physics

The prevalent US system of offering a year of high school physics, late in high school, with some schools offering a second year of "advanced" physics, is disastrous. Some commenters in the "So, you want to be an astrophysicist? Part 0" thread felt I was too harsh in saying a year of High School Physics was NOT ENOUGH. In particular, they only had a year, and are now tenured professors. Sorry folks, but this is selection bias. There are people who could do no high school physics and get up to speed on university level physics in less than three months, though most of those would still need…

YorkWrites: Celebrating York Creators and Innovators

I don't usually talk about local York stuff here, but I'd like to make an exception for the event we had last week (Tuesday, November 3rd) here at my library, The Steacie Science & Engineering Library. The event is called YorkWrites and it's sponsored jointly by the Libraries and the Bookstore. Essentially, it's a big party in the library, with food, drink, music and speeches. In the past it was held at the Scott Library, the humanities & socials sciences library, but for 2009 we thought it would be nice to try a science and engineering focus. What's it about: YORKwrites is an…