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South American Lifestyles: The Galapagos Islands Diet

 (Photo by Marina Komolova) As our readers may have noticed, Travis has been solely carrying the Obesity Panacea load, while I have been a bit absent since my PhD defense. As some of you may know, I am taking the summer off to travel through South America with my partner, Marina, who also just defended her PhD thesis. While you can follow our adventures on our travel blog, I am also keeping notes during the travels that may be of greater interest to the readers of Obesity Panacea. Here is the 1st in the series of posts on lifestyles throughout South America: Galapagos edition. We have just…

Age-Related Changes in Total and Regional Fat Distribution

The following post was originally published on Obesitypanacea.com on October 7, 2009. As many of our readers know, I performed my MSc under the direction of Dr Bob Ross at Queen's University (Peter recently completed his PhD in the same lab).  Dr Ross is a world leader in the measurement of body fat and body fat distribution, which is why many of our publications focus on the associations of various body fat depots with markers of metabolic risk.  During my time at Queen's I was also fortunate to work with Drs Jen Kuk and Lance Davidson (now at York and Columbia respectively), who were…

Exercise is *NOT* Associated With Injury Risk in Overweight Individuals

 Image by Jespahjoy. Just before moving to our new home here on Scienceblogs, I asked our readers for ideas on what types of content they would like to see here on Obesity Panacea.  One topic that came up several times was the issue of injuries.  I'm not sure why we haven't discussed injuries in the past (aside from the fact that it's not the focus of our research), but it was a great idea, and I've come across a study on the topic that I think will be of real interest.  The study is titled "The influence of exercise and BMI on injuries and illnesses in overweight and obese individuals: a…

Edgar Suter's bogus claims

Dan Day writes: See Suter, Edgar, M.D., "Guns in the Medical Literature--A Failure of Peer Review", Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, March, 1994. And note those 81 references at the end. This, Buddy, is what actual support for ones claims looks like. No, it's what a pack of lies looks like. There are dozens of falsehoods, and dozens of claims that are extremely dubious. Chris BeHanna writes: Please do take the time to point each and every one of them out, and why you think they are false. Go ahead---we'll wait. There are so many that I am going to have to put them out a few…

You might not be ready for college if...

You attended 5 classes of your Brain and Behavior course out of an 8 week summer session that meets daily, and stop going after the first exam. Which you failed. Repeating the exact same pattern from the previous semester when you were in my class. And then.... your MOM shows up at my class to fight your grade battles for you, without you even being aware of it. Yesterday, I had a student's mom show up at my classroom right before class. Apparently Precious Daughter was going to fail out while on academic probation. Mom just couldn't let that happen, and wanted to know if there was any…

Some heavyweights vote Yes on cognitive-enhancing drugs for the healthy

This time had to come: A group that includes some serious neuro-heavyweights, such as neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Ronald Kessler and the highly prominent and influential neuroethicists Hank Greely and Martha Farah, has published in Nature an essay "Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy." In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and…

A fresh take on how to answer the "partisan takeover of biology"

The Public Library of Science — the wonderful open-access journal — features a fine, thought-provoking piece by staffer Lisa Gross on Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology. Gross takes a sobering look at how the fast pace of today's science and the public's lack of understanding of scientific basics and principles (like the nature of empiricism) are exploited by some who seek to "[turn] scientific matters like stem cells and evolution into political issues." But it's not a despairing story. She spends a lot of time describing how Jon Miller, director of the Center for…

Can we overfish the lionfish?

Lionfish are one of my favorite animals (I study them, after all). They're stunningly beautiful. Of course, they're also a devastating invasive species. Though they've only been in the Atlantic Ocean for some 15 years or so, they've taken over reefs, eating everything in their path. They've been found to reduce the recruitment of native fish by 79% on average, and are occurring in densities 8 times higher than in their native range. To say they're bad is an understatement. The damage is so severe that they were listed as one of the top 15 threats to global biodiversity in 2010. There's little…

Bonobo Handshake a must-read. Period.

I have spent about a week trying to figure out how to start this review. You see, I've had a lot more time than I thought to write it. I brought Vanessa Wood's Bonobo Handshake with me on my vacation assuming that it would give me something to read during the long hours I've spent traveling between my various family members in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and California. I planned on writing this review next week sometime, once I'd finally managed to finish it on my long flight back to Hawaii. The problem is, I started reading Bonobo Handshake the first night I arrived in New…

Does Money Lessen Pain?

While reading through the science news headlines today, I came across a very interesting one from the Telegraph: "Handling cash 'better at killing pain than aspirin', study claims." Intrigued, I sought out the paper mentioned in the article. It turns out it wasn't published recently at all - it was published last year in June. Of course, they were probably fooled by the fact that the University of Minnesota just published a press release on it. Regardless, the real question is whether money was truly more effective than painkillers at preventing pain. So what did the researchers find? The…

A story about government run health care.

Yesterday, I took the kids to the doctor for their school physicals. I wouldn't normally subject you to an account of the day-to-day minutia of my personal life, but given the current debate about how we should handle health care in the United States, the details might be of interest. We arrived - without an appointment - at a medical facility that we had not been to before. We did not have medical records with us, and the only paperwork of any kind that we had brought were the forms that needed to be filled out to enroll the kids in sports programs. When we checked in, the only thing I…

Anti-Vaccination Stupidity, Expertise, and Feeling "Empowered" by Risking Kids Lives

Your sink is leaking all over your bathroom floor. Whose advice do you take on how to fix it - your plumber's or your accountant's? I suspect that the sane among us would typically go to the plumber. If we were suspicious about the first plumber's advice, we'd probably call another plumber. Similarly, the rational among us would not look to a plumber as a source for informed commentary on the economy, foreign affairs, or journalism. We understand that expertise matters. We don't consider experts to be infallible, we don't bow down and worship at their feet, or uncritically accept…

Why There Are No Great Women Science Bloggers

The Scientist wants you to vote for your favorite life science blogs. To get the party started, they asked seven prominent science bloggers to recommend their favorite science blogs. I mean, they asked seven prominent male science bloggers for their recommendations. This is science, after all, and we need to be precise. So, they didn't ask any women - big deal, whine whine. Right? Yeah, well, in the grand scheme of things, who gives a rat's ass? It's just some dumb article in one magazine. But in the grand scheme of things, this is just one more example of how women get overlooked…

The Big Difference Between Creationism and Intelligent Design

Denyse O'Leary notes some of the differences between creationists and Intelligent Design proponents: Then the creationists in turn help the ID theorists by making clear what creationism is and what it is not. Creationism is about the BIBLE, see? It's not about intelligent design theories like Behe's* Edge of Evolution or Dembski's design inference. It's extremely uncommon for me to find myself in agreement with Denyse on anything (and it's not a comfortable feeling), but in this case I do think she's got a good point. Creationism is certainly explicitly based on the Bible, and…

Now all he needs is the black suit, hat, sunglasses, and a soul.

Tom DeLay is on a Mission from God. Apparently, God talked to Tom. Surprisingly, it wasn't about the massive misuses of his (former) power, the rampant corruption charges, the criminal indictment he's under, being a Mean Person, acting like evil personified, or selling his soul to the devil. No, it seems that God is not concerned about those things. Instead, he's chosen DeLay to spearhead a new conservative movement: "God has spoken to me," DeLay said. "I listen to God, and what I've heard is that I'm supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of the Republican party,…

A rare instance where it's not better to be bilingual

I've always been amazed by people who are truly bilingual. While I've studied languages in school, I've never been able to seamlessly switch between languages, and even my best non-English language, French, is choppy at best. Compare this to the people I see in restaurants or on the subway, who can have conversations in two languages at once, speaking each language with equal fluency. They might tell a story in English, but save the punch line for Spanish. If a monolingual person talks to them, they instantly respond in the proper language, with hardly a second thought. There are enough…

The library of the mind

In a famous essay Borges wrote of an infinite library that contained all possible books (and most of it nonsense at that). The mind is not like that. It has only a few books in it. In the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, there are competing views of the nature of the mind. One school, the evolutionary psychologists, hold that the mind is composed of a large number of special purpose modules, each designed by natural selection to do one thing well (enough) and no more. Another school, represented by Jerry Fodor, holds that the central part of the mind (excepting the sensorimotor parts…

People or classes?

It seems that almost nobody can mention Jews without making an inadvertent or deliberate ass of themselves. Most recently, Richard Dawkins put his foot in it in this Guardian article. He said: When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place. Now, I know what he's trying to say here…

How to fix Iraq, and not invade Iran

There's been a lot of media spin and unthinking objections to the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the US. He was called the "modern Hitler", for example. This strikes me as both unthinking and dangerous. Ahmadinejad is his own kind of threat and problem, and comparisons to past dangerous individuals don't resolve or enlighten anything. As Time Magazine clearly noted, he has no power over the things that he is being demonised for, and is incompetent and hated internally for the things he does. But it seems to me there is a wider issue here than the internecine politics of an…

Did some dinosaurs survive the K-T boundary

A new paper in New Mexico Geology has the following rather tendentious title: Fassett, J.E. 2007. The documentation of in-place dinosaur fossils in the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and Animas Formation in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico and Colorado mandates a paradigm shift: dinosaurs can no longer be thought of as absolute index fossils for end-Cretaceous strata in the Western Interior of North America. New Mexico Geology 29(2):56. Ack! He mentioned the p-word! Now I have to find him and extract his teeth without anesthetic. So here's the abstract: Extensive geochronologic…

Ben Barres, Larry Summers, and Reasonable Standards

We have all been talking about this to death, but I figured I would add my two cents. Ben Barres wrote an editorial in the most recent issue of Nature about the issue of gender disparity in science. He mentions the comments of Larry Summers among others things and that he felt that those comments were out of line. What happens at Harvard and other universities serves as a model for many other institutions, so it would be good to get it right. To anyone who is upset at the thought that free speech is not fully protected on university campuses, I would like to ask, as did third-year Harvard…

BBC 100 Book Meme

I can't not do this, because I want to display to the world how nerdish and little of a life I have... Later note: The link above is crap. Instead I'm replacing it with the actual BBC Book list. Instructions: 1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. 2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE. 3) Star (*) those you plan on reading. 4) Tally your total. 1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien x+ 2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen x 3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman x 4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams x+ 5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling x 6…

The "Get a life" meme

Oh dear. I have a bad feeling about this. Via Greg Laden's blog comes a list of 219 movies and supposedly if you have seen more than 85 you have no life... Prepare yourself (x) Rocky Horror Picture Show (x) Grease (x) Pirates of the Caribbean (x) Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest ( ) Boondock Saints (x) Fight Club (x) Starsky and Hutch (x) Neverending Story (x) Blazing Saddles (x) Universal Soldier (x) Lemony Snicket: A Series Of Unfortunate Events ( ) Along Came Polly ( ) Joe Dirt (x) KING KONG which version? All three ( ) A Cinderella Story ( ) The Terminal ( ) The Lizzie McGuire…

Colbert, spiders and cohesion species

I was going to write a killer piece on the naming of a species of spider for Stephen Colbert, but that rat bastard Carl Zimmer, who I am convinced never actually sleeps, beat me to it. So instead I will ignore the layers of irony that the naming of a spider for a fictional conservative offers to semantic strip mining, and discuss the species concept that Jason Bond ("Bond. Jason Bond") and his collaborator Amy Stockman used to identify and discriminate these species. But first, here's the interview (or "sketch", as the Colbert writers call it) between Colbert and Bond (which I can't access…

Multitasking and stress: What happens when we mix them together?

Imagine you're taking a test--just for fun--to see how fast you can add numbers and alphabetize letters. Would it help you complete the test faster if you had a warning before each item indicating whether you'd be adding or alphabetizing? Now imagine you're taking the same test--only this time the test will be used to determine whether you qualify for a promotion at work. In this, more stressful situation, do you think the warnings would help? Would you change your strategy on the test? There is considerable evidence that cognitive performance changes when we are under stress. For example,…

High IQ: Not as good for you as you thought

A continuation of our "greatest hits" from past Cognitive Daily postings: [originally posted on December 14, 2005] IQ has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands of research studies. Scholars have studied the link between IQ and race, gender, socioeconomic status, even music. Discussions about the relationship between IQ and race and the heritability of IQ (perhaps most notably Steven Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man) often rise to a fever pitch. Yet for all the interest in the study of IQ, there has been comparatively little research on other influences on performance in school. Angela…

The traveler's dilemma and subway seats

With the preparations for Europe going on at full steam, I find myself drawn toward psychology articles about traveling. Take, for example, this article in Scientific American. Kaushik Basu explains the "traveler's dilemma," a scenario in which identical items purchased by two travelers are both damaged in transit. The airline agent is worried that they'll claim the price of the item is higher than what they actually paid, so he devises the following scheme: He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both…

When the color of your vehicle can mean life or death

"I just didn't see him" is a claim that's repeated over and over in accident reports. Drivers earnestly claim that they simply didn't notice the bicycle/pedestrian/motorcycle they crashed into. The claim is made so frequently that certainly there must be a grain of truth to it. Yet it certainly isn't the case that car drivers can't see such obstacles -- after all, they can see traffic signals that are much smaller than a bike or a motorcycle. What they mean to say is that their attention was otherwise engaged -- perhaps by a phone conversation, perhaps by other traffic, or perhaps because…

Keeping track of multiple objects: How and when is it learned?

How many moving objects can you keep track of at once? Clicking on the image below will take you to Lana M. Trick's web site, where she has a nifty demo of a multi-object tracking task. You're asked to keep track one to four of the smiley-faces as they move randomly around the screen. Then when the faces stop moving, you click on the ones you were supposed to follow. Go ahead, give it a try! You'll notice there are four levels of difficulty. Most adults can, with a little practice, track four out of ten randomly moving objects for ten seconds -- they fall apart when there are more than…

Adler, Round II?

Jonathan Adler replies to my reply, and I am now replying. Or something. Because Adler is keeping things civil, I am going to strive to do so also--but I still don't get his take on the stem cell issue. Adler says he stands by his statment that I claim "the number of cell lines, rather than ideological opposition to the destruction of embryos, drove Bush policy." For goodness sakes, no. With the stem cell example, I'm trying to show how cynical the Bushies are with scientific information, whatever the issue. In my reading, the impetus behind the Bush policy was actually to find a compromise…

New discovery fuels hominin hype

According to multiple reports released yesterday, scientists will announce the discovery of a new species of two-million-year-old hominin this week. Do you know what that means? That's right; writers are breaking out the pop-sci boilerplate to tell us all about the new "missing link." To paraphrase what I have seen in the headlines alone, the find is the "missing link which will shed new light on human evolution and rewrite what we thought we knew about our history." I don't believe the hype, but I can only speculate on the actual significance of the specimens in question. According to the…

Does fighting against a common enemy promote trust?

The Prisoner's Dilemma is an ethical conundrum that's been used for years by psychologists, economists, and philosophers to explore human behavior. The basic scenario is this: two criminals have been captured and placed in separate cells. Neither prisoner is allowed to talk to the other, and the interrogators don't have enough evidence to prosecute either one. If prisoner A confesses and prisoner B doesn't, then prisoner A is released and prisoner B gets punished. If both confess, then both will get a lighter sentence. If neither confesses, then both will be released. For each prisoner,…

What does it take to empathize with someone you hate?

The TV movie Flight 93, which re-enacted the hijacking of a United Airlines flight on September 11, 2001, was criticized because it "humanized" the hijackers (despite this apparent humanity of their captors, the movie did portray the passengers and crew on that flight fighting back and eventually causing the plane to crash in a sparse Pennsylvania woodland instead of a crowded city). The critics' argument was simple: why portray the hijackers, clearly bent on destroying as much life as possible, as anything but vile murderers? The obvious reply: can't we, as thinking human beings, overcome…

How we remember objects in the real world

The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, is a full-scale reconstruction of the rather more famous monument atop the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. We visited it with our daughter Nora a few years back: As you can see, it's a dramatic building, dominating the landscape of the otherwise ordinary city park in which it sits. So, when we're confronted with such a massive landmark, do we use it to organize the surrounding area as well? Several studies have shown that we do pay attention to the surroundings of objects in order to remember their location. If we memorize the locations of a number of…

Why some of us choke under pressure

Some people—even people who really know their stuff—just don't "test well." You can talk to them face to face, and they seem perfectly well informed and intelligent, but when the money's on the line, when they've sharpened their number 2 pencils and it's time to sit down for the big exam, they just crumble. Of course, others simply use "not testing well" as an excuse for true slackerdom, but mere laziness can't explain the fact that many otherwise well-prepared students don't perform well under pressure. They score well on the practice SAT, but not on the official test that determines their…

What makes a wine expert?

Wine expert Robert Parker claims to be able to distinguish every wine he has ever tasted—10,000 different wines a year—by taste alone. Winemakers can use their sense of smell to detect slight imbalances early in the wine production process that might lead to a spoiled batch. Meanwhile, novices walk the aisles of the typical wine store in a daze, uncertain of which wine to select and unsure whether paying a premium for a "better" vintage is worth the cost. During the German occupation of France, when winemakers were forced to ship their best wines to Hitler's henchmen in Berlin, they poured…

Science And Storytelling: How I Accidentally Framed Carbon

by Eric Roston I've observed with great interest the discussions about framing science, here, at Matt Nisbet's blog, and elsewhere. For two reasons, I've not weighed in on the topic directly. First, I defer to Matt, Chris, Sheril and others, as far as ownership and proper deployment of the phrase "framing science" go. On a logistical level, I was too buried in the manuscript of my new book, The Carbon Age, to duck out for even routine blogging. It's really only in the last couple of weeks that I've come back to life. The other reason has something to do with this. At the heart of the framing…

A Dialogue on Framing, the F-Word, and the Future of ScienceBlogs, Part I: Framer Culpa

After taking some time to mull over the events of last week--when I saw a side of Scienceblogs.com I've not seen before, and that troubled me a great deal--I felt a strong need to clear the air. So let me say, at the outset of this first post in a series, that I speak for myself alone. There has been plenty of confusion of late about what Sheril thinks, what I think, and whether either is the same as what Matt Nisbet thinks, but at least with this post there can be no mistake. It is by its author and no others. Reading over all the comments we managed to generate here last week--in which we…

Why intelligent design fails

Is intelligent design science, or not? Think carefully before you answer. The modern intelligent design (ID) movement is motivated by theological concerns and trades in on religious authority to meet its aims, but stripped of this background, can ID be relegated to the "junk science" bin? While the answer to this latter question is "Yes", in a new paper ("The science question in intelligent design") Sahotra Sarkar argues that proclaiming ID to be non-science without careful consideration does little good. As Sarkar notes, there is no easily definable demarcation criteria to deem ID science…

Book Review: Dry Storeroom No. 1

I don't quite know what to make of Richard Fortey's latest book Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret life of the Natural History Museum. When I opened my copy to the first chapter I was expecting something like Douglas Preston's written tour of the American Museum of Natural History, Dinosaurs in the Attic, but Fortey's book turned out to be something entirely different. I enjoyed Preston's book because it used a motley collection of artifacts, both on display and behind closed doors, to tell stories about the AMNH and the people who worked there. It was not comprehensive or even representative,…

Framing Science: Many More Posts, a Few Replies

Our piece in Science has prompted many responses; my colleague Matt Nisbet has a pretty comprehensive rundown of what we'd heard as of yesterday, with some inline replies. Of course, a lot more has cropped up since then, including from Bora, James Hrynyshyn, and Mike the Mad Biologist, among others. Bora and Mike are in general agreement with us, so I direct you there for great discussions that amplify what's already been said. As for those who are in disagreement, after the jump I'll elaborate on a few responses by Matt, and add a few points of my own, by replying to Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers,…

How distractible are you? The answer may lie in your working memory capacity

When I'm writing a post for Cognitive Daily (or doing almost any kind of writing, for that matter), I try to keep outside distractions to an absolute minimum. I even have an application on my computer that shuts off all access to the internet for a specified period of time. I find most music distracting, but sometimes I'll play a Mozart piano concerto, which seems to help focus my attention (see here for a possible explanation). Some people, however, seem to be able to be incredibly productive despite a huge number of distractions -- Twitter status updates, email, crying babies, you name it.…

Child molesters and attentional blink

How do you decide how dangerous a sex-offender is? Certainly all cases of sexual assault are appalling, but clearly some incidents are worse than others. In some places, teenagers who photograph themselves naked and send the pictures to their friends can be prosecuted as purveyors of child-pornography. While we may want to intervene in these cases, surely the action shouldn't be as drastic as when we're dealing with an adult who's a serial child rapist. There are miles of gray area between these two extremes, and psychologists are often called on to make the tough judgment of how dangerous a…

Are funny ads worth the money? What makes ads memorable, and why

Every year about this time, we start thinking about an exciting television event: the Super Bowl. I'm excited because it's the biggest football game of the year. The rest of the family just likes to watch the commercials. No doubt, some of those commercials are hilarious, and there's often more conversation about the commercials than the game itself. Companies spend millions buying advertising time, and millions more developing commercials that will stand out from the pack on Super Bowl Sunday. Other than watching your favorite team lose, there's nothing more disappointing than seeing an old…

When the color of your vehicle can mean life or death

[Originally posted in May, 2007] "I just didn't see him" is a claim that's repeated over and over in accident reports. Drivers earnestly claim that they simply didn't notice the bicycle/pedestrian/motorcycle they crashed into. The claim is made so frequently that certainly there must be a grain of truth to it. Yet it certainly isn't the case that car drivers can't see such obstacles -- after all, they can see traffic signals that are much smaller than a bike or a motorcycle. What they mean to say is that their attention was otherwise engaged -- perhaps by a phone conversation, perhaps by…

How do you make a reputation for yourself?

My high school experience, like that of nearly everyone who attended my school, was a perplexing one. It seemed there were only a few "popular" people -- those that everyone knew and liked -- and wanted to be like. Everyone else was much like me: they struggled to become more popular, with little success. Everyone had a few friends, but somehow these friends were never as good as the popular people would be, or so it seemed. One of the things that I believed was preventing me from becoming popular was my reputation. Those who knew me saw me in a certain way -- a non-popular way. Maybe if I…

The New Prep: An Upper Level Course with Lab

Having previously taught (and described) my intro class, my other course this semester has been occupy most of my mental and physical energy of late. To compound the amount of work required, I am also teaching the labs for the course. The course is taught every year at Mystery U, and from here on out, it will be my course every other year, alternating with another faculty member. For both of us teaching the course, the topic represents a secondary area of research. The other faculty member provided me with copies of his labs and a >10 year old syllabus. Since the textbook, and the field in…

Axon guidance: New directions

[Introduction|Part 2|Part 3] The three studies discussed here make important contributions to our understanding of axon guidance. Lopez-Bendito et al describe a novel guidance mechanism involving tangentially migrating GABAergic interneurons. These cells migrate ventrally from the LGE to form a permissive corridor through the MGE, a region that is otherwise non-permissive for TCAs. The corridor is fully formed by the time TCAs reach the ventral aspect of the MGE. This is therefore a means by which the presentation of guidance cues can be regulated both spatially and temporally. This may be…

My position on communicating skepticism

Yesterday, I listened to the talks by Sadie Crabtree and Carol Tavris on the art of persuasion, and how we can further our cause by applying the science of psychology. Today, I sat on a panel with Sadie and Carol, and also Phil Plait and Eugenie Scott and Jamy Ian Swiss, discussing communicating skepticism. I didn't go in with any notes — it was a panel! — but I thought I'd try to articulate in text the points I tried to make. So some of this is stuff I said on the panel, and some it is stuff I just wish I'd said. Sure, there is irrational, unbreakable core to the opposition, but there are…

Concert Highlights Climate Change As Politically, If Not Scientifically, Controversial

Poor Al Gore, no good deed goes unpunished in his quest for climate change awareness. Only a few days ago he went before the Senate on a hearing on global warming. During which, climate change's biggest political foe, Senator James Inhofe and Gore argued heatedly. Now, the Republicans are moving to block his 'Live Earth' rock concert venue, planned to take place on the steps of the Capitol July 7th. One outspoken opponent of the concert is Senator James Inhofe, a longtime "debunker" of cataclysmic climate change, which he has derided as a "hoax." "Senator Inhofe objects to having any events…