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Ready for the Koufaxes yet?

Now that the 2006 Weblog Awards are over (and congratulations to all of my favourites for wins or good showing), we are all warmed up and ready for the Real Deal - the Koufaxes! First, and most importantly, go over to Wampum and hit their PayPal button (on the left top side-bar), or their Amazon.com donation button, and hit it with as much as you can. The way Koufaxes are done is real - no paperless voting machines there! And that costs. And it helps the community if the good folks of Wampum have enough money for the generator (yes, they make their own power!), servers, new hard-drives and…

New York Times Gets It Right, Just To Screw Up At The End In Blind Adherence To The He Said/She Said Journalism

Now behind the Wall, but plenty of excerpts available in this March 26, 2005 post... ------------------------------------------------------------------ Ha! The New York Times has this neat article, that is almost half as good as my early (and so far most frequently linked) post "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep". Here are some excerpts, go read the rest: The Crow of the Early Bird THERE was a time when to project an image of industriousness and responsibility, all a person had to do was wake at the crack of dawn. But in a culture obsessed with status--in which every…

One black coffee, no asbestos

There's a lot to like about Canada (their health care system, for starters) but there are some things that are less than praiseworthy (I understate), and towards the top of that list would have to be a hundred years of peddling, with government support, protection and outright lying, a product that brought the world one of the 20th century's greatest public health catastrophes: asbestos. Asbestos is a fibrous mineral that exists in two main categories, the serpentine minerals and amphibole group. Asbestos saw myriad uses and 90% of those used the serpentine form whose main representative is…

If you want a real downer, agribusiness will be glad to provide you with one

I got an email yesterday about "a disturbing undercover video showing sick and injured pigs being dragged, beaten, pushed with forklifts and shocked with electric prods by workers to get them onto slaughterhouse kill floors." I'm glad I didn't see it as the whole thing disturbs me enough. I'm not a vegetarian, although for about a year and half Mrs. R. and I decided the only meat we would eat was fish (that's when I discovered I liked fish; for most of my life I thought I didn't and never ate it). The occasion for that meatless except for fish interlude was reading a long New York Times…

Study: Full-day preschool can set kids up for academic success, better health

Children who have the opportunity to attend full-day preschool programs, versus part-day programs, tend to score higher on school readiness measures such as language, math, socio-emotional development and physical health, according to a recent study. So, why is this finding important to public health? Because education has literally been described as an “elixir” for lifelong health and wellbeing. When it comes to the upstream factors that can put people on a lifelong trajectory toward longer life expectancy, greater health and less chance of disability and disease, educational achievement is…

New study finds the greener the neighborhood, the healthier the baby

Forget pink or blue. It turns out that the best color for baby may be green. In a study recently published in Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers found that mothers living in neighborhoods with plenty of greenness — grass, trees and other types of lush vegetation — were more likely to carry their pregnancies to full term and deliver babies at healthier weights. Specifically, the study found that very pre-term births were 20 percent lower and moderate pre-term births were 13 percent lower among mothers living in greener neighborhoods. Also, babies from greener neighborhoods were…

Obama and ‘faith-based’ initiatives

First, there was this awful news about Obama's support of "faith-based programs": Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and -- in a move sure to cause controversy -- support some ability to hire and fire based on faith. Gak. If that were true, he'd be at some risk of losing my vote, and would definitely be on the road to losing my campaign support. That was Fox News, though, so I held off until I heard more…although reporting that…

Do Corporations Have a Right to Profit From Endangering Our Health?

by Jonathan Heller In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the growing power of the military-industrial complex. More than 50 years later, Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of Public Health at City University of New York, has issued a warning no less grave about "the corporate consumption complex" – the interconnected web of corporations, financial institutions and marketers that, in the name of individual rights, promote and profit from our unhealthy habits. In Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public…

Study: Mental health impact of foreclosure ripples throughout communities

It’s probably no surprise that people who experienced foreclosures during the Great Recession may have also experienced symptoms of depression. However, researchers have found that the mental health effects of foreclosure go beyond the individual to the community at-large. “For the most part, discussion of foreclosure has focused on the individual experience, the people who are in this circumstance, who are at risk of losing their homes, of losing that nest egg,” said Kathleen Cagney, a professor within the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. “But we wanted to think about…

The Supreme Court, Medicaid, and marriage equality: Patterns in state decisions

When the Supreme Court released its United States v. Windsor decision striking the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act yesterday, supporters of marriage equality felt joy akin to what Affordable Care Act supporters felt a year ago when the Court released its decision upholding the healthcare law. Because the Justices dismissed Hollingsworth v. Perry, the case regarding California's Proposition 8, based on lack of standing rather than ruling on the constiutionality of state bans of same-sex marriage, the Court has effectively decided that states get to decide for themselves whether to allow same-sex…

Sometimes The Onion Isn't All that Funny

This essay hits the nail on the head, and could pretty much have appeared in the New York Times, minus some vocabulary: “I was just watching a CNN news story about how much damage Sandy has caused in comparison to Katrina, Ike, or last year’s storm that ravaged the Northeast, and it dawned on me: ‘Ah, okay, being a human being on Planet Earth, pretty much no matter where you are, now involves the threat of one day having your home, city, or country decimated in a matter of hours by a severe weather event,’” Detroit resident Stacy Hillman said. “Looking at images of cities—actual American…

Thinking Thanksgiving I:Turkey in the Straw

The centerpiece of any homegrown Thanksgiving meal, assuming you are not a vegetarian, is inevitably the homegrown turkey. And there are a lot of good reasons to get a local turkey or raise your own - there's the flavor which is richer and deeper, an essence of turkey thing, there's the fact that you know what went into it. And there's the fact that by raising older breeds of turkeys, you actually preserve their future by eating them - honestly, there is no retirement home for elderly turkeys, and no one keeps them as pets. The future of the Blue Slate and the Standard Bronze depends…

Let's Stay Together?

Sometimes you read a study and say "duh!" That was pretty much my reaction to a British Study just released that suggests that when men help with the childcare and housework, couples are less likely to get divorced. Gee, that's a shock. You mean women don't love soloing on the toilet cleaning? Meanwhile the divorce rate in the US and Canada has fallen, due to the recession. Tough times simultaneously put a lot of pressure on a marriage and also create economic incentives to stay together. This can be both good and bad - no one wants to see people in violent, abusive or destructive…

Who or What Got the Glyptodons?

Ok, part of this is just that I really like the word "Glyptodon" and am trying to find more uses for it ;-). But there is a point here, I'm pretty sure. A while back I was teaching a class, and the gentleman teaching before me, an Algonquin Native Descendent, who was talking about the history of the ways that waterways in the Northern US had impacted patterns of settlement and development, became quite passionate at the sight of Eric's t-shirt, which had an mastodon on it. The gentleman launched into a staunch defense of his ancestors, who for a long time were typically considered to be…

More deregulation by Trump: Ditching mine safety requirements

The Trump Administration is proposing to scrap a requirement for mine operators to conduct safety checks before miners begin their work. Identifying hazards and fixing them is key to preventing work-related injuries and deaths. The requirement on Trump's chopping block applies to more than 11,000 mining operations that extract metals and aggregates, such as underground gold and salt mines and rock quarries. Similar requirements for coal mines are not part of the administration’s announcement, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see this proposal lead to similar changes at coal mines. The rule “…

Four dead, seven injured in Houston crane collapse

The Houston Chronicle has reporters covering the devastating crane collapse which occurred on Friday, July 18 at 1:20 pm local time.  The crane was owned and operated by Deep South Crane & Rigging which has official statements posted on the company website.  The Chronicle reports that the four deceased and the seven injured workers were contractor-employees at the LyondellBasell refinery.  The fatally injured workers were  Marion "Scooter" Hubert Odom III, 41; John D. Henry, 33; Daniel "DJ" Lee Johnson, 30; and Rocky Dale Strength, 30.  A related story in the Chronicle…

Small Victory for OHS Whistleblower

OSHA's Regional Office in New York announced the successful resolution of a retaliation case filed by a worker who was discharged by his employer after he expressed concerns about entering a workspace which had just been "bombed" with an insecticide.  The case began more than two years ago at a residential housing complex in Flushing, NY, called Second Housing Co. Inc., and was resolved under a consent order in which the employer agreed to pay more than $66,000 in back wages to the worker. Under Section 11(c) of the OSH Act: "No person shall discharge or in any manner discriminate…

Protecting Workers on the Job: an Agenda for 2009

What do the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, the Migrant Clinicians Network, Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, and 65 other organizations have in common?  They've all endorsed the "Protecting Workers on the Job Agenda", a collaborative product of the American Public Health Association's Occupational Health and Safety Section and the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.  The platform, released just in time for Labor Secretary-Designee Hilda Solis' confirmation hearing on Friday, outlines seven goals for improving our nationâs programs for preventing work-…

Secretary Chao's legacy, according to her

Like her boss President G.W. Bush, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao is offering her version of Labor Department history over the last 8 years.  She posts prominently on the Department's homepage her  "accomplishing milestones for American workers" including the claim:  "the current workplace injury and illness rate is at its lowest level in history having dropped 21% since 2002." I suppose she and those at OSHA who drank the Kool-Aid choose to ignore the empirical evidence that suggests that this substantial decline "corresponds directly with changes in OSHA recordkeeping rules."  […

Involving the Public in Scientific Decisions

By Olga Naidenko Maybe our government should listen to what the people have to say? I mean, not all the time, not every day â surely, that would be too much to ask for â but at least every once in a while? Occasionally? And even consider those public opinions with a modicum of respect? Ah, what a dream that would be! On Tuesday September 16 Erica Engelhaupt reported in Environmental Science and Technology  on the findings of the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) Panel on Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making. The opening phrase of the NRC report is incisive…

"Efficiency" at EPA

When the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) introduced its Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) in 2003, it had what sounded like a worthwhile goal: get federal agencies to evaluate how well they do their jobs, in order to assure that taxpayer money is used efficiently. Like so much that comes out of the Bush White House, though, PART consumes too much agency time to produce something of questionable utility. An âineffectiveâ rating can have serious adverse consequences for agencies and programs, so when the Environmental Protection Agency had particular difficulty…

The Food Safety Movement is Here

By Kristen Perosino Spinach.  Peanut butter.  Hamburgers.  Pet food.  No, Iâm not preparing for a trip to the grocery store (but if I were, I might unknowingly be adding salmonella, E. coli, and aflatoxin to my grocery list).  Iâm talking about food safety. Americans have been made more aware lately of the flaws in our current food safety system, and many lawmakers agree that reform is necessary.  However, they donât agree (yet) on the most effective way to address this issue.  Letâs look at some of the food safety problems. The U.S. food safety system is over 100 years old.  It was…

Bittman changes his tune on Sugar Study, while Mother Jones Doubles Down

There's been an interesting edit in Marc Bittman's sugar post, as he has now changed his tune on the PLoS one sugar study, now Bittman acknowledges obesity too is important. That was big of him, it is after all, the most important factor. Maybe my angry letter to the editor had an effect, but he's grudgingly changed this statement: In other words, according to this study, obesity doesn’t cause diabetes: sugar does. To: In other words, according to this study, it’s not just obesity that can cause diabetes: sugar can cause it, too, irrespective of obesity. And obesity does not always lead to…

Abdominal adiposity and risk of death, or "belly fat'll kill ya'"

Last week's New England Journal of Medicine gave us some remarkable news, via the JUPITER Trial, adding additional evidence to the pile of articles on the cardioprotective effects of statins. This article is getting lots of press, which is great, but I'd hate to see this week's edition of the Journal get lost. Specifically, there's a huge population-based study on obesity and mortality. We've explored previously the dangers of obesity, and we've been fought the whole way by various denialists. Earlier studies have shown associations between excess body weight (as measured by body mass…

Diarrhea!

This topic has been running through my mind quite a bit lately. Infectious diarrhea is one of the world's most vicious killers, but is susceptible to basic public health measures such as clean water and good sanitation, which is why cholera-ridden Americans aren't dropping dead in pools of their own feces. (Citizens of other countries aren't quite so lucky.) There are many causes to this common problem---various bacteria, viruses, parasites, and a host of non-infectious causes. Even in here in the U.S., public health measures sometimes fail us, as seen in the ongoing Salmonella outbreak…

A study in contrasts

Two recent stories highlight the good and the bad when it comes to infectious disease prevention. The good Death rates for vaccine-preventable diseases are at an all-time low: The study, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (link), is the first time that the agency has searched historical records going back to 1900 to compile estimates of cases, hospitalizations and deaths for all the diseases children are routinely vaccinated against. In nine of the diseases, rates of death or hospitalization…

Women are still chattel. Film at 11.

I don't even have to comment on this article from the LA Times about a new major in homemaking (for women only, of course) at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. So much in the article speaks for itself. Painful excerpts below: Seminary President Paige Patterson and his wife, Dorothy -- who goes by Mrs. Paige Patterson -- view the homemaking curriculum as a way to spread the Christian faith. In their vision, graduates will create such gracious homes that strangers will take note. Their marriages will be so harmonious, other women will ask how they manage. By modeling traditional…

NY Times on women and science

After the discussion here and elsewhere in yonder blogosphere about women and stereotyping, Cornelia Dean in the New York Times writes about recent meeting aimed at helping women advance in science, where bias still rages. This fall, female scientists at Rice University here gathered promising women who are graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to help them learn skills that they will need to deal with the perils of job hunting, promotion and tenure in high-stakes academic science. "The reality is there are barriers that women face," said Kathleen S. Matthews, the dean of natural…

Science, intelligence, and teh pretty

So, razib relates a recent observation of the apparently rare species hottus chicas scientificas at a local wine bar. Shelley's ticked: Not sure whether to be more irked that Razib suggests that smart women aren't hot (and vice versa), that hot women don't like sci fi, or than sci fi somehow denotes intelligence. Booooooooo. While razib tells her to "focus on the science fiction part. not the intelligence," I agree with Shelley's later comment that who cares exactly whether he was talking about SciFi or intelligence--the idea that, because one is female and "hot," one therefore cannot be…

The Impact of OSHA Recordkeeping Regulation Changes on Occupational Injury And Illness Trends

By Lee Friedman The Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII), based on OSHA logs, indicates that occupational injuries and illnesses in the U.S. have steadily declined by 35.8% between 1992-2003. However, major changes to the OSHA recordkeeping standard occurred in 1995 and 2001. A recent study we published illustrates that the steep decline in reported occupational injuries and illnesses during the past 10 years in the U.S. workforce is an artifact resulting from changes to the recordkeeping rules and regulations rather than an improvement in workplace safety. In February…

FDA legislative action, now with commentary from the New England Journal of Medicine

By Susan Wood Next week both the Senate and House are moving forward on legislation to reauthorize the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA), along with other key FDA legislation.  The Senate will be âmarking upâ a large omnibus piece of legislation that combines PDUFA with drug safety legislation, pediatric legislation, and medical device legislation.  The version of the bill that has been released is nearly 300 pages long, and so far only takes small steps toward strengthening the Kennedy-Enzi drug safety bill introduced earlier this year. If you want to learn some of the basics linking…

Regulation by Shaming

By David Michaels Last week, public scorn forced Rupert Murdock, powerful chief executive of the News Corp, to cancel âIf I Did It,â OJ Simpsonâs book and Fox TV tie-in. While shaming has fallen out of favor in the field of criminal justice, the heaping of public scorn and anger - dating back to putting criminals in public stocks and labeling adulterers with a scarlet letter -- has long been recognized as a deterrent to unacceptable behavior Shaming works on corporations as well as individuals. As a mechanism for restricting undesirable behavior, or promoting desirable behavior, shaming is…

Another mumps post--isn't the vaccine working?

Orac highlighted here a post over at Vox Populi which doubted the effectiveness of the mumps vaccine, in light of the recent epidemic in Iowa. I was prepared to write a whole post on the math of it, but Mark at Good Math, Bad Math saved me some work. Nevertheless, I have a few things to add after the jump. As has been mentioned, the given efficacy rate for the mumps vaccine is 95%. This is actually likely a bit high; previous outbreaks have suggested it's more like 85-90% effective, so that as many as 15% of the vaccinated population won't actually be immune. The key to telling whether…

The bearded pigs

One of the most remarkable pigs has to be the Bornean bearded pig Sus barbatus, one of two currently recognised bearded pig species. The other is the much smaller, shorter-faced Palawan bearded pig S. ahoenobarbus of the Philippines: genetic work suggests that S. ahoenobarbus is not a close relative of S. barbatus, but actually closer to the Celebes warty pig S. celebensis and other Philippines pigs (Lucchini et al. 2005). S. barbatus occurs on Sumatra, Bangka, the Riau archipelago and the Malay Peninsula as well as Borneo. There are two subspecies: S. b. barbatus has long cheek beards…

Numbers Using Processes and Messages: Part 1, Addition

Given a calculus, one of the things that I always want to see is how it can do some kind of meaningful computation. The easiest way to do that is to start building numbers and basic arithmetic. To be able to do this, we're going to need one more bit of syntax. What we want to do is specify a condition. There is, of course, a way to do that in π-calculus, but I don't want to go into detail about how to do that yet. So what I'm going to do is allow, is a message receive operation, to specify a specific value for the received message; and say that in the reduction rules, a message send will…

The Surreal Reals

The Surreal Reals I was reading Conway's Book, book on the train this morning, and found something I'd heard people talk about, but that I'd never had time to read or consider in detail. You can use a constrained subset of the surreal numbers to define the real numbers. And the resulting formulation of the reals is arguably superior to the more traditional formulations of the reals via Dedekind cuts or Cauchy sequences. First, let's look at how we can create a set of just the real numbers using the surreal construction. What we want to do is get a notion of the simplest surreal number that…

Today's Mystery Bird for you to Identify

tags: birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] feet [I will identify this bird for you in 48 hours] Image: [larger view]. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. I have some questions about each foot depicted above. Can you tell me; what each foot is used for? for each foot type, can you tell me if its possessor walks or hops when on land? one foot type is found only in one genus worldwide, can you tell me which foot that is and the species that has that foot? This foot has a special character that it shares with another (much larger) taxonomic…

Birdbooker Report 112

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My piles 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…

Idiot America, new and expanded

Charles Pierce has expanded an essay into a full blown book on Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), soon available in fine bookstores everywhere, and I recommend it highly. You might be wondering what Idiot America is, and he explains it well. The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It's not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

Since the last big site upgrade, the Trackbacks on PLoS ONE articles have been invisible. But our system saved them all and today, after another upgrade, they are visible again. So, if you have sent trackbacks from your blog recently, please check if they are on the paper (look under the "Related Content" tab). If not, re-send them (instructions are here). Trackbacks are an important link in the ecosystem of science publishing, connecting the inner world of the paper to the outer world of the commentary, with on-site user feedback tools forming the intermediate layer. There are 12 new…

PLoS ONE Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition - final list of entries

The deadline for the PLoS ONE Second Birthday Synchroblogging Competition is now officially over. Here are all the posts written for the competition - 18 posts, written by 17 people, covering 22 PLoS ONE articles. Liz, Dave, Jason and I will be reading them today and will announce the winner as soon as we can: Barn Owl of Guadalupe Storm-Petrel: DNA Repair During Spermatogenesis: Gimme a Break! about the article: Deletion of Genes Implicated in Protecting the Integrity of Male Germ Cells Has Differential Effects on the Incidence of DNA Breaks and Germ Cell Loss Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket…

Domestication - it's a matter of time (always is for me, that's my 'hammer' for all nails)

Since this article came out in The American Scientist (the only pop-sci magazine that IMHO has not gone downhill in quality over the past decade) in early 1999 (you can read the entire thing here (pdf)) I have read it many times, I used it in teaching, I discussed it in Journal Clubs, and it is a never-ending fascination for me. Now Andrew and Greg point out there is YouTube video about the fox domestication project: Back in the 1950s, Dmitri Konstantinovich Belyaev started an experiment in which he selectively bred Silver Foxes, very carefully, ONLY for their tameness (and "tameness" was…

New and Exciting in PLoS Community Journals

Friday - time to take a look at the new articles in PLoS Computational Biology, Genetics and Pathogens - check them all out, but here are a couple of picks: Exploration of Small RNAs: There is substantial interest in noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs), which play an essential role in complex biological systems without encoding for proteins. Only a limited number of ncRNAs, such as ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and transfer RNA (tRNA), have previously been characterized in any depth. Recent studies revealed many novel ncRNAs, covering a wide range of sizes [1]. RNA molecules have several functions including…

Wild night on the town for a godless nerd

I may be getting too old for this. Yesterday, I finished up teaching at 1 in the afternoon, then had to leap into the Pharyngulamobile and drive, drive, drive to Minneapolis. I got together with Lynn Fellman and Greg Laden for a hasty dinner before I had to go move my car and park prior to Richard Dawkins' talk. This was almost a disaster; it turns out that last night, at the same time as the talk, there was a basketball game scheduled. The streets were packed, parking was a nightmare, and I only got to Northrop Auditorium with a whisker of time to spare. Many of the attendees seem to have…

Now We Are Six*

Is there any kid who does not love giraffes? They are just so amazing: tall, leggy, fast and graceful, with prehensile tongues and a need to go through complex calistehnics in order to drink. The favourites at zoos, in natural history museums and on TV nature shows. Giraffes were also important players in the history of evolutionary thought and I bet you have all seen, and heard the criticisms of, the iconic comparison between Lamarck's and Darwin's notions of evolution using a comic strip featuring giraffes and how they got their long necks. Giraffes sleep very little and mostly standing…

Human Interference Causes Evolutionary Changes

Today, I read a story in the latest issue of New Scientist that discussed how human activities are driving evolution of animals in dramatic and often unexpected ways. In effect, we have turned earth into a large uncontrolled evolutionary laboratory. Biologists are struggling to understand what is happening although there is no shortage of species that are evolving in response to human interference. For example, chinook salmon in the Snake River are growing smaller and smaller, possibly as the result of dam construction. Additionally, the fish are apparently putting off migration out to sea so…

The Path of Reason

If you are like most people, you wonder about the existence of god, if there is an afterlife and whether there is any meaning to life. Certainly, our thoughts regarding these matters profoundly influence our behavior and our lives. But when there are so many conflicting faiths, how can any person know which one is the best? To work through these questions, you will be interested to read The Path of Reason: A Philosophy of Nonbelief by Bruce Smith (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse 2006), which tells the personal story of the author's intellectual journey from the Bible Belt to atheism. In this well-…

City Birds are Tougher Than Country Birds

tags: researchblogging.org, conservation, birds, ornithology, ecology, environment, endangered species Image: Robert Linder. I suppose this seems obvious to you city dwellers, but recently published research demonstrates that urban birds are better overall survivors than their country-dwelling cousins. Apparently, this is because city-dwelling birds are less specialized in their requirements, and thus, are more broadly adaptable to a variety of microenvironments, such as those found in large cities. While this might seem to be a mere conversational topic to many of you, this observation…

My Quest: To Visit all the Harry Potter Film Sites in London, Part 1

tags: London England, Harry Potter film sites London, Harry Potter, photography, photoessay Classic telephone box in London. These are an endangered species. Telephone boxes appear throughout the Harry Potter films, particularly as an entrance into the Ministry of Magic in the fifth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. When the telephone in the box is dialed (62442, the word M-A-G-I-C). Image: GrrlScientist 4 September 2008 [larger view]. I am disappointed with the slowness and instability of the wifi connection I am using to post this and other entries, so I…

But What About My Pets?

tags: emergency pet care, hospitals, companion pet issues Elektra is one of the survivors. My companion female Solomon Islands eclectus parrot, Eclectus roratus solomonensis. Image: GrrlScientist, 2 April 2008 [larger view]. I want to talk about something that has bothered me ever since I spent nearly five months in the hospital: what happens to your companion animals when you are suddenly not there to take care of them? If you live alone and don't have a local support system, as is true for me, then this is a very real problem, as I became painfully aware of nearly two years ago.…