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Jonathan Wells

Poor Jonathan Wells. He saw my new haircut on Facebook, got all excited for his vacation to Oklahoma to see me, and then I stood him up. Poor babby. Threw a massive tantrum on EN&V trying to get my attention. Poor poor babby. Well its a cold rainy Sunday, Arnies snoozing on the futon, so I dont mind taking a minute to indulge Johnnys attention-whorism. ... OU graduate student Abbie Smith, announced on her foul-mouthed blog... *clears throat* Spooge, balls, bloody vaginal belch. ... Sure, you want to go see the TARD [short for retard] parade... TARD is short for The Arguments Regarding…

Romney's Religion Speech

Mitt Romney gave his big religion speech yesterday. It is a standard piece of anti-atheist propaganda. America is a relgious nation, those darn secularists are trying to take God out of the public square, I'm as crazy religious as all those evangelicals I'm pandering to even though they regard my church as a cult, blah blah blah. Here are a few choice nuggets: Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone. It…

Biology's Next Revolution?

The current issue of Nature features this interesting essay by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese. The essay's point is that recent discoveries about genomic interactions among microbes, particularly the phenomenon of horizontal gene transfer (HGT), is forcing us to reevaluate certain basic concepts in biology. They write: One of the most fundamental patterns of scientific discovery is the revolution in thought that accompanies a new body of data. Satellite-based astronomy has, during the past decade, overthrown our most cherished ideas of cosmology, especially those relating to the size,…

The Copernicus Complex by Caleb Scharf

I enjoyed Caleb Scharf's previous book, Gravity's Engines a good deal, so I was happy to get email from a publicist offering me his latest. I'm a little afraid that my extreme distraction of late hasn't really treated it fairly, but then again, the fact that I finished it at all in my current state of frazzlement may be the best testament I can offer to its quality. This is a sweeping survey of what we've learned about our place in the universe over the last five hundred years or so. Now, a grandiose description like that often portends a bunch of wifty philosophizing that poses grand…

The Afghan Whigs at the Beacon Theater

Saturday afternoon, I drove down to the city to see the reunited Afghan Whigs play the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side. I saw them years and years ago in DC, around 1996 or so on the tour for Black Love, and that was a great show. They've always been one of my favorite bands, so it was great to get another chance to see them live again. Of course, the passage of 18 years has wrought some changes, most significantly a different lineup for the band. They never had much luck keeping drummers around, but this time they've also lost original guitarist Rick McCollum. This has both good and…

The Edge of the Sky by Roberto Trotta

I get a fair number of books to review, but I'm often pretty bad about writing them up in a timely manner. Of course, most of them are well over 70 pages long, which is why I've managed to turn around Roberto Trotta's The Edge of the Sky: All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is in the course of a weekend. As you can probably get from the title, this is a book about astronomy written in Up Goer Five style, using only the thousand most common English words (which are helpfully listed near the start of the book, in case you want to check whether he cheated...), plus proper names. And there'…

Over-Ruled

I'm a big fan of (American) football, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that I never played organized football. It was largely a matter of timing-- the coaches when I was in junior high were not people I'd've been interested in playing for, and when they hired a good guy to run the program when I was in high school, I was already playing soccer. And in college, I played rugby One of the lingering consequences of not having played organized football is that I really haven't internalized all the rules. Which means that, when I watch the game, the one major weakness I see is that it…

See You in Forty Days

I'm giving up reading blogs for Lent. The proximate cause of this is Bora's latest blame-the-media post, which is just deja vu all over again, because I'm pretty sure this exact conversation has gone on ten times before (the fact that scientists find other scientists compelling speakers does not mean that scientists are good at communicating to the general public). But this is really part of a larger disillusionment with the medium as a whole that's been growing for the past several months. More and more, I'm finding that reading blogs is pissing me off to no good end. This is a fairly…

Public Knowledge of Science: The More Things Change, the More They Don't

The NSF's Science and Engineering Indicators report came out not too long ago, and the bulk of it is, as usual, spent on quasi-quantitative measures of scientific productivity-- numbers of degrees granted, numbers of patent applications for various countries, etc. I find all of those things pretty deeply flawed, so I tend to skip past them and go straight to the stuff about public knowledge and understanding (chapter 7, available as a PDF at the link above). This doesn't get much press, probably because the results are depressing. They've asked a bunch of factual knowledge questions of people…

Physics Can Fix This

One of the NCAA pools I'm in has a copy of Obama's bracket entered, and the last I checked, I'm a couple of games up on him. This means I'm as qualified as anyone else to offer a plan to fix the financial crisis, and I have just the plan we need. On the question of the AIG bonuses, I'm pretty much in agreement with the people who say that it's not worth making too much fuss over less than a tenth of a percent of the total bailout funding they're received. Passing laws to punish specific individuals is a lousy precedent, and it's not worth corrupting our principles for such a pittance. Let the…

Framing Stem Cells

With the "Vox Day" business winding down (one way or another), it's time to unwind with something less contentious and controversial: Framing! No-- seriously. Most of the really loud opponents have publically washed their hands of the whole topic, so I expect this will be relatively non-controversial. What could possibly go wrong? Anyway, Janet is thinking about "framing" and the example of stem cells given in the Nisbet and Scheufele article in The Scientist (PDF here). She identifies three "core values" that framers on one side or the other might be trying to reach: cures for diseases are…

Training the Expert Mind, Part II: Medical Diagnosis

In Part I, I gave a brief review of an article in Scientific American, entitled href="http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945">The Expert Mind.  The article described the outcome of research into the mental processes of expert chess players.  The motivation for the research is to find out how expertise works, to see if there is a systematic way to develop expertise in a variety of fields. Perhaps the most important finding in this endeavor is that experts have developed, through a great deal of practice, an excellent capacity for pattern…

Ethanol and the Teenage Brain

There has been some blogosphere and mediasphere activity regarding the following article ( href="http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/160/7/739">Age at Drinking Onset and Alcohol Dependence) in Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.  The New York Times picked it up ( href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/health/04teen.html?ex=1309665600&en=64fcb20497217e6c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">permalink), and Jake href="http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/07/on_the_merits_of_postponing_yo.php#more">posted about it at Pure Pedantry.  There'…

Hercolubus or Red Planet

Hi, Ben! Ben is my neighbor, and I think he's on his way to being a good skeptic. He found this book at the library book sale and had to share it with me — although he had a hard time holding back the laughter as he tried to describe it, and now that I've read it, he's right…it's hilarious. We are doomed, according to V.M. Rabolú. There is a giant planet called Hercolubus, or the Red Planet, which is going to collide with Earth and destroy the human race entirely. Rabolú is warning us, not that there's much we can do about it. How does he know this? He's an astral traveler. You can trust him…

Sustained interest in K2 Spice, JWH-018, and related currently-legal cannabimimetic products

Just a quick post this morning as I am performing my professional responsibility to our nation's health research agency. In yesterday's issue of USA Today (which I only read on the iPhone app or when staying at a hotel that gives it to us free), Donna Leinwand wrote about a currently legal substitute for marijuana called by various names such as K2, Spice, Black Mamba. Nearly a dozen states and several cities are banning or debating bans on K2 -- a packet of herbs coated with a synthetic chemical that mimics a marijuana high when it's smoked -- amid fears that its use is spreading among young…

The seven signs of pseudoscience: testing climatology

Upon the advice of Roger Pielke Jr., who in a recent post at Prometheus praises the appearance of two new blogs, I checked out William M. Briggs, Statistician. Although the most recent post there, "Is climatology a pseudoscience?" begins with an intriguing premise, it eventually deteriorates into a sad self-parody by invoking the venerable Bob Parks' Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science. Here's how Briggs starts out: ...suppose, if you are able, that significant man-made climate change is false; further, that it cannot happen, and that all changes to the climate system are due to external…

Sunspots! It's all about sunspots!

The climate change denial gang is so predictable. Even when the science as written, and as covered by reputable science journalists, makes it clear that the new evidence bolsters the general consensus, there are those who will give the findings the opposite interpretation. Today's topic is sunspots. The title of the paper in question actually addresses the issue head on: "Solar-Cycle Warming at the Earth's Surface and an Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity." It's all about using that 11-year sunspot cycle -- the one that produces spectacular aurora and knocks out satellites --…

Framing Science or Dumbing it Down

Fellow SciBloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet have a short essay in this week's Science that says scientists need to adopt the "framing" strategy that right-wing propagandists have been so successful with over the past couple of decades -- if science is ever to trump the neo-conservative claptrap that infects global warming and evolution debates, among other important public policy issues. It's generating a lot of attention in these parts of the blogosphere and throughout the scientific community, I expect. Subscribers can read the whole thing but the publicly accessible one-line summary is…

Teaching our children well

If only we could teach our kids what science is really about before they get too old, then they'd be better equipped to deal with intelligent design and other anti-intellectual propaganda that poisons the noosphere. At least, that's a common theory, one that's taken up again this week by Jonathan Osborne, the chairman of science education at King's College in London. There's nothing particularly new about his argument, but it's important to be reminded that the problem transcends North America, and that the case is worth making, repeatedly, until school board trustees get it through their…

News, robot girlfriends, and robot assassins!

I dislike the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, and I haven't even seen it. Not for the usual reasons - for instance, I think Keanu Reeves is a good actor when used in the right roles, and "space alien" is certainly one of those roles. I dislike the premise. Some alien species comes down and declares that it likes the other earth species more than it likes the smart monkeys. Therefore it demands that the smart monkeys stop their tool use or it will kill them all. I suppose it would be too simple for the aliens just to drop the blueprints for some of their own snazzy tools so that…

Study reveals sexual tactics of male flies by shaving their genitals with a laser

If you looked at the penis of a Drosophila fly under a microscope (for reasons best known only to yourself), you'd see an array of wince-inducing hooks and spines. These spines are present in all Drosophila and they're so varied that a trained biologist could use them to identify the species of the owner. What's the purpose of these spines? Are they intended to actually wound the female during mating? Do they help the male fly to scrape out the sperm of his rivals? Do they actually pierce the walls of the female's genital tract, allowing the male to bypass any barriers to his sperm, as…

Monkey do, human do, monkey see, monkey like

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and it appears that capuchins believe it too. These very sociable monkeys gravitate towards humans that mimic their actions, spending more time in their company and even preferring to trade with them. Annika Paukner, who studied this monkey business, thinks that imitation is a type of social glue that binds groups of monkeys together. It says, "We are alike," and in doing so, it lays the foundation for acts of selflessness by providing a means for two individuals to form an empathic connection. Certainly, imitation is very much a…

My Christmas Card Letter (or: Again with the Busy)

Man, right now, I'm squelched under the chaos of the "end of the year," which includes the two fold attacks from academia (research, courses, marking, etc) and life in general (Hey, it's Xmas time folks). Anyway, the only readable writing I've done of late is my family's annual Christmas Card letter. Does it have science content? Not at all. Although, I think there is definitely a fine art (or maybe even a science) to this exercise. i.e. How do you write something that encapsulates your year without boring people to death or worse, making it sound like, you and your family had the "best/…

What makes 250,000,000 fish gather in the same place?

On the 3rd of October, 2006, Nicolas Makris watched a quarter of a billion fish gather in the same place. They were Atlantic herring, one of the most abundant fishes in the ocean and one prone to gathering in massive schools. This was the first time that anyone had watched the full scope of the event, much less capture it on video. The first signs of the amassing herring appeared around 5pm and by sunset, the gathering had begun in earnest. Once a critical level of fish was reached, the shoal expanded at a breakneck pace, suddenly growing to cover tens of kilometres within the hour. By…

Parasites can change the balance of entire communities

Conspiracy theories, TV thrillers and airport novels are full of the idea that the world is secretly run by a hidden society. We have come up with many names for this shadowy cabal of puppet-masters - the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and more. But a better name would be 'parasites'. Every animal and plant is afflicted by parasites. The vast majority are simple, degenerate creatures, small in size and limited in intelligence. They affect our health and development, and even our behaviour and culture. And by pulling the strings of key species, parasites can change the face of entire habitats.In…

Climate change responsible for decline of Costa Rican amphibians and reptiles

Miners used to take canaries into unfamiliar shafts to act as early warning systems for the presence of poisons. Today, climate scientists have their own canaries - amphibians. Amphibians - the frogs, toads and salamanders - are particularly susceptible to environmental changes because of their fondness for water, and their porous absorbent skins. They are usually the first to feel the impact of environmental changes. And feel it they have. They are one of the most threatened groups of animals and one in three species currently faces extinction. The beautiful golden toad (right) was one of…

Sunday Function

Here's an odd little bit of math for you this Sunday. It's defined in terms of recurrence. Recurrence happens when a function is defined in terms of itself. This happens more than you might think - one famous example is the Fibonacci sequence, which is informally defined by saying "To get the next term in the sequence, add the previous two terms together. The first two terms are 1 and 1." And so you can calculate that the sequence is {1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...} and so forth. That sequence turns out to show up in various odd places in math and science, and recursively defined sequences are…

Sunday Function

Again, apologies for the hideously scanty posting. Been in the lab doing some really interesting research which will with some luck get me in a really nice journal, as well as doing the various rounds of revision on the paper for some previous research. Also putting two talks together for a conference/school. That whole wedding planning ain't doing wonders for my spare time either. But hey, these are all good things so I'm not complaining. I can at least write up a Sunday Function for y'all. This is one we've mentioned before, but haven't actually derived. I think it's high time we did. As…

Sunday Function

This Sunday I was at an event that involved a number of drawings for door prizes. There were perhaps 30 couples there - it was, not to beat around the bush, a wedding registry shindig at Bed, Bath, & Beyond. (Did I mention I'm recently engaged? I am. It's the main reason for the endemic light posting, as I'm afraid the wedding bumps the blog down the priority list a bit. ;) ) There was something in the vicinity of 8 or so drawings from separate bowls, and each couple's number was placed in each bowl. The rules were such that a couple could only win once. One number was pulled twice…

Sunday Function

There's an interesting contrast between the laws of nature and the laws which constitute our legal system. The laws of nature are compact and precise; written in standard notation without accompanying explanation, the fundamental laws fit on a few pages. The laws of the legal system span thousands of volumes and are frequently ambiguous and ever-changing. On the other hand, we know what the laws of the land actually are. The laws of nature are not completely explored; there's large regions of the parameter space where we just don't know the laws at all. Still, in that sense physicists…

Sunday Function

Again I have to apologize for the sparseness of posting lately, but I've got two research projects going full blast and time has not been something I have a lot of. I'll still be writing at least a few times a week, and you can't beat the price. ;) In any case once things cool down just a little I should be back to a more regular schedule. Today's function isn't interesting because of the function itself, the interest comes from what we'll do with it. Let's say we have a function like this: If we want to see where the function is equal to zero, it's clear that 0 = x^2 - 2 is solved by x…

Snowy Decibels

There's a list of books a cultured person is supposed to have read. Its size and composition vary depending on who you ask, but roughly speaking there exists a Western canon containing works by authors with names like Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and Milton and Sophocles. There's something of a Nerd Canon too. The names of the authors of its works are more like Asimov and Feynman. It's a list that's certainly not all science and science fiction, though those are much more strongly represented than in most general lists. To me knowledge no one has ever written such a list up, but it exists…

Yglesias Satirizes Hysterionics over Bloggers

Matthew Yglesias has a great satire on the hysterionics in the MSM about blogging: The world, then, has recently been dangerously lacking in "-ofascist" (or perhaps O'Fascist, like in Ireland) threats. Thankfully, New Republic culture critic Lee Siegel has now uncovered the most insidious threat of all: Bloggers. "The blogosphere," he told us last week, "radiates democracy's dream of full participation" but is, in fact, "hard fascism with a Microsoft face." Some thought Siegel was engaging in a little ill-advised overstatement. But no. The bold truth-teller was all-too-serious, as he revealed…

SciRate Papers: 7/18 to 7/25

In attempt to keep my reading more current, I'm going to try to post the top rated arXiv papers on SciRate each week and hopefully add about the papers. Let's see how long I can keep it up (bets?) 0807.2668 (7 scites) "Mixing doubly stochastic quantum channels with the completely depolarizing channel" by John Watrous. QP says: A large variety of open quantum system evolutions are describable using the superoperator formalism. A superoperator is a linear map from a space of linear operators to another space of linear operators. The ones we care most about in quantum computing are the…

When Trucks Stop, Hospitals Stop

One of the more enlightening and worrisome articles I read recently was href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/11/24/081124ta_talk_surowiecki">The Perils of Efficiency, by James Surowiecki.  The article was a discussion of the practical effects of the mathematical concept, that you can only optimize one variable in an complex system.  So if you optimize for lowest cost per unit of production, you have to sacrifice something else.  One of the things you sacrifice, is resilience.  Most managers of systems with a supply chain have adopted what is called just-in-time supply. …

Tony Stark Could Use a Science Consulting Sidekick

Going to a party at Tony Stark's house would be awesomely fun, and Iron Man 2 has its fair share of highly enjoyable scenes, though not as many as Iron Man 1, but it definitely could have used some science consulting help. Despite Tony Stark's apparently scientifically flawless use of a soldering iron in #1, here in #2 he constructs what appears to be a cross between a laser and a small synchrotron (which shot light in the wrong direction, inward instead of outward - or possibly looked like it might have been diverting the whole beam, which wouldn't work for more than about a nanosecond -…

The Price of Exaggeration, Exhibit A: Anti-Smoking Groups

Revere has spoken out in support of Michael Siegel at The Rest of the Story. Dr. Siegel is a public health specialist that focuses on among other things the effects of second-hand smoke. Siegel took Action for Smoking and Health -- an anti-smoking group -- to task for the following statement: 3. Even for people without such respiratory conditions, breathing drifting tobacco smoke for even brief periods can be deadly. For example, the Centers for Disease Controls [CDC] has warned that breathing drifting tobacco smoke for as little as 30 minutes ( less than the time one might be exposed…

Gesticulation improves learning

Vindication at last. I catch a lot of hell because I tend to talk with my hands. However, Susan Wagner Cook for the University of Chicago has shown that when teaching math problems kids who repeat the hand gestures of the teacher are more likely to get the problem right. In other words, practicing gestures aids in retention: Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned. In today's issue of the journal Cognition, a University of Rochester scientist suggests it's possible to help children learn…

What to do with a belligerent drunk

Giancola and Corman wanted to know why drunks are more aggressive. The prevailing model to explain this effect is what is called the attentional allocation model wherein the alcohol inhibits an individual's ability to focus on a broad range of stimuli -- they become attentionally myopic. This means that when they focus on something that is provocative, they will become super-provoked. When they are focusing on something less provocative, they will become less provoked because they can more successfully ignore the provocative stimuli. It is in essence the horse-blinder theory of…

Small town movie theater tech

I was reading Roger Ebert's lament over the disgraceful decline of quality in theater projection (a function of theater owners who just don't care anymore and the corrupting influence of bad 3D), and then I remembered that last year I took some pictures of the funky old technology in our local movie house, the Morris Theatre. This is a classy old place, a bit run down now, but once it was the entertainment center for the whole community. It was built in the 1940s, and it's very old school: a single screen, so you don't get many choices here. What's playing this week is what's playing this…

The NeuroPop of "A Scanner Darkly"

Last night I went to go see "A Scanner Darkly," the dis-topia flick starring Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder based on the 1977 sci-fi novel by Philip Dick. Now, before you shout "Keanu Reeves!" and pan the movie, believe me, the acting issue was more than made up for by a phenomenal performance by Robert Downy Jr., among others. And even then, somehow Keanu was handed a role that was MEANT to be somewhat cardboard, somewhat jaded and stilted. "What does the scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly?" This is the line from whence the title…

At Seed, Mooney on Framing and Religious Messengers

Chris Mooney's latest Seed column is now available free at the magazine's web site. Chris spotlights several panels at this year's AAAS meetings that focused on how to better engage the public on complex science issues. Several panelists at AAAS echoed our Framing Science recommendations, pointing to research in areas such as political science to suggest that facts alone will not move public action on global warming, and that working together with religious and business leaders is one way to breakthrough to otherwise inattentive publics. Ethicist Stephen Gardiner of the University of…

Anniversary Trip, or How Not to Treat a Monkey

Mrs. Evil Monkey and I went to visit Fallingwater for our 8th anniversary, and got some interesting surprises along the way. Lots of photos involved. First off, we got this really swanky hotel called Log Cabin Motel. The accommodations were clean and the staff was friendly, and we got a room with a jacuzzi tub. The decor, on the other hand, was rather hilarious. Surprisingly, there was a walk-through outdoor animal park adjacent to the hotel. Even more amazing, it was relatively clean and the animals seemed to be in good health. And they had a rather interesting assortment of animals!…

The Magnetic Scrambler: TMS's effects on neurovascular coupling

A continuing challenge in cognitive neuroscience is determining which neural structures are actually responsible for certain thoughts and behaviors. For example, fMRI and other neuroimaging techniques cannot tell us if a certain region of visual cortex is necessary for perceiving motion, or if it is merely coactivated whenever motion is perceived. Such distinctions are both particularly important and particularly difficult to achieve in domains thought to be uniquely human: we cannot simply lesion human brains and observe the consequences as we can with animals trained to perform lower-…

Inhibition in the Stability-Flexibility Dilemma

Given a fixed amount of computational power in designing an intelligent system, there is a necessary tradeoff between how many resources are devoted solely to the current task, and how many resources are devoted to monitoring for information that may be important but is not necessarily relevant to the current task. If more resources are dedicated to the current task, it may be accomplished more quickly - but at the same time, this setting may make it more difficult to reorient and switch to a different task. On the other hand, if more resources are dedicated to monitoring or reorienting,…

ACC: Monitoring Conflict or Response Frequency?

According to some perspectives, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) may become activate in situations where the reward value of given representation or stimulus has decreased, resulting in more competition between representations. Activation of this region may help increase tonic norepinephrine, resulting in more exploratory behavior, and thus more variable responding. A different perspective on ACC is advocated in this 2001 article by Braver, Barch, Gray, Molfese and Snyder. They also suggest that ACC is important for resolving conflict between multiple responses - and would therefore be…

Exploration & Exploitation Balanced by Norepinephrine & Dopamine

Whereas yesteryear's artificial neural networks models were focused on achieving basic biological plausibility, today's cutting edge networks are modeling cognitive phenomena at the level of neurotransmitters. In a great example of this development, McClure, Gilzenrat & Cohen have an article in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems where they propose a role for both dopamine and norepinephrine in switching behavior between modes of "exploration" and "exploitation." First, a little background. In artificial intelligence circles, the "temporal difference" algorithm has been a…

Teaching Evolutionary History

As people who have been following the issue are well aware, there is a crisis of scientific literacy in the United States. Unscientific America may have had a poor explanation for why the problem exists, but it effectively announced the severity of the problem to a wide audience. To combat this problem it will take a a great diversity of tactics including education, popular culture, involved parenting, economics and political will. Everyone who cares about this issue should use the skills they have to both draw attention to the crisis of scientific literacy and seek positive solutions. One…

Time-Based Tropes

When our futures become the past, what will they prove to have been like? As mind-bending as this question is, it lies at the heart of every successful science fiction story. Good writers in this underappreciated genre can be so forward-thinking that instead of asking, "What will the future be like?" they are already devising an answer to, "How will the future become the past?" It's with this understanding of the malleability of time that good science fiction (which I have trouble feeling isn't the only relevant kind of writing) also manages to deftly place its reader in a chronological…

Another year, another theme

For a few years now, rather than making new year's resolutions, I've been doing new year's themes. I've found it more rewarding to go with the theme idea, which is more like a principle for living one's life and guiding one's actions overall, rather than choosing specific behaviors on which to focus. So, it's time to assess last year's theme and pick a new theme for 2009. The theme for 2008 was FEARLESS: When I look back on what really disappointed me about 2007, the thing that jumps out at me is that I often stand in my own way. .... In light of this introspection, the theme really named…