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House Republicans resurrect GOPcare and make it even worse

Back in March, House Republicans pulled the unpopular and highly problematic American Health Care Act from consideration, and House Minority Leader Paul Ryan declared “Obamacare is the law of the land.” Now, however House Republicans are trying again to undo the Affordable Care Act. Last week, Representative Tom MacArthur (R-NJ) introduced an amendment designed to win over the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, who opposed the original AHCA because it didn’t do enough to roll back existing law. As the New York Times’ Margot Sanger-Katz summarizes, the amendment would allow states to receive…

Our Broken Health Care System, Aleph-Nought in a Series

One of the standard conservatarian responses to anyone suggesting government-funded universal health care is to start talking about how universal health care will inevitably lead to faceless, heartless bureaucrats denying or delaying treatment for stupid reasons. My response to these stories is "Who's supplying your health insurance? And how do I get on that plan?" Through my employer, I have a pretty generous health plan, administered by one of the most highly-regarded health insurance companies in the region. And this week, for the second time in two weeks, they refused to cover my…

The Cult of Theory

Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne (not JoAnne, as I originally typed) has a very nice post about the cult of genius in physics, and its relationship to research on the problems caused by excessive praise. Doug Natelson also has some comments. There's some fascinating stuff in the articles about praise, with some likely relevance to once and future education arguments, but I need to think about it more before I comment. My reason for posting, though, is found in the comments. Specifically, comment #10, by "mclaren", which reads in part: Sure, I've got a degree in physics, but basically I'm…

The simplest way to address the climate crisis

Towards the tail end of Michael Specter's rambling feature on carbon footprint accounting in the latest issue of New Yorker, we are reminded that the single most effective and cheapest way to bring down atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels is preserving and restoring tropical rainforests. We're hearing that a lot these days, and with good reason. Specter's article deals mostly with the challenges of assigning "carbon footprint" numbers to consumer goods, as the U.K's Tesco supermarkets are trying to do. The problem is, as usual, in the myriad details. But as becomes clear later in the article,…

He's back. And Bjorn Lomborg still doesn't get it

PZ Myers suggested I might have something to say in response to Bjorn "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Lomborg's resurfacing. Indeed I do. The Danish boy wonder is back with a new book, Cool It, in which he makes his case, yet again, that climate change isn't all that bad. He was wrong with his first book, which was savaged by everyone who actually knew the subject matter, and he's even more wrong now. Salon has an aggressive interview and an excellent book review, and it is on the former that I will base my analysis of Lomborg's major cognitive failure, in lieu of wasting precious time and…

Zogby and Moore on the Failed NH Primary Poll Predictions

Remember the Democratic New Hampshire primary? According to news organizations and many pollsters, the NH primary was supposed to be the loss that put Hillary Clinton out of contention and sealed an early nomination for Obama. Yet Clinton staged a surprise victory. At the time, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz pulled no punches in criticizing the horse race coverage that defined the primary races: "The series of blown calls amount to the shakiest campaign performance yet by a profession seemingly addicted to snap judgments and crystal-ball pronouncements. Not since the networks…

Physical Activity Reduces the Risk of Childhood Fat Gain

Over the next few months, Peter and I will be re-posting some of our favourite posts from our Obesity Panacea archives.  The following article was originally posted on December 2, 2009. Image by Mike Baird. There is a surprising amount of controversy about the ability of physical activity to prevent the development of obesity. Sure, obese individuals tend to perform less physical activity than their lean counterparts, but that doesn't prove causation. And almost every week it seems that there is a news story reporting that the obesity epidemic is caused by diet. Period. If you believe…

Simpler is better: How kids identify ambiguous objects

When we first moved to the small suburban town we still live in, we quickly realized we needed to buy a second car. Nora and Jim were just one and two and a half years old, only barely beginning to understand language. After we made our purchase, sometimes we drove in the old car (a Subaru station wagon), and sometimes in the new car (a Plymouth minivan). Since neither child could pronounce words as complicated as "minivan," they had to come up with their own way to refer to the vehicles. They called the Subaru the "red car" and the van the "blue car." But there were many other ways they…

Mommy Monday: A taste of a different life (the back story)

Long-time readers will remember that Minnow has sleep issues. At nine months old, she is still waking up between 4 and 8 times per 11 hour night. But things now are a hell of a lot better than they used to be, because now I can cuddle or nurse her right back to sleep in most cases. It wasn't that way a few months ago. Back then, Minnow would wake up screaming and only begin to calm down when Fish or I got up, held her upright, massaged her tummy, and helped her pass prodigious quantities of gas. If we sat in the rocking chair with her and held her at an angle, she could sleep fairly well, but…

Friday Sprog Blogging: ferrets.

The elder Free-Ride offspring, always a fan of mustelids, has lately taken a particular interest in ferrets. Given that Casa Free-Ride is located in the great state of California, this interest in ferrets has also spurred an interest in state law. In California, it's illegal to keep ferrets as pets. According to the elder Free-Ride offspring, there is much to appreciate about ferrets: Elder Free-Ride offspring: They're slinky! Dr. Free-Ride: OK. Elder Free-Ride offspring: They're cute! Dr. Free-Ride: Sure. Elder Free-Ride offspring:They're stinky. Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, that I can vouch…

Everything I needed to know about science I didn't learn in high school

Reflecting upon my high school science education, there isn't very much I can remember. Physics and chemistry are largely a blur (vague recollections of Avogadro's number and the time when my experiment exploded are all that remain) and the hours I spent in biology were largely a waste. For all the pressure put on us students to excel, taking the college-level AP classes early, I graduated high school with a passion for science but almost no real knowledge of it. I was not served well by the textbook procedures and had I not already resolved to be a scientist I probably would not have…

The Wall Street Journal

I've got a short column in the Wall Street Journal today where I recommend five books on human irrationality. I wanted to work in a novel too, but I soon realized that every novel is about irrational people. 1. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds By Charles Mackay 1841 There is nothing modern about financial bubbles. In this classic work, Charles Mackay compiled an exhaustive list of the "schemes, projects and phantasies" that are a recurring theme of economic history. From the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland, in which 12 acres of valuable land were offered for a…

Amanda and Shakes rock!

[Placed on top for updates...] I think that the whole brouhaha that the extreme wingers are raising about new Edwards bloggers will have a) no effect on Democratic primary voters a year from now, b) no effect on national voters two years from now, and c) negative effect on the wingnutosphere as they are getting more and more obviously unhinged, and thus marginalized. Edwards did a fantastic scoop with these hires and the outcry from the extreme Right was surely expected. He has now positioned himself as more woman-friendly and more netroots-friendly than Hillary and Obama combined. And the…

Stuffed megamammal week, day 5: of elephants and gorillas

How do you stuff an elephant? The - ha ha - obvious answer is 'with great difficulty'. As for the actual answer: funnily enough, the preparation and mounting of elephants for museums is quite well recorded. These African bush elephants Loxodonta africana are on display at the Field Museum in Chicago (thanks to Matt Wedel for the photo). Just look at their size, and wonder... how do these dead animals get to look so alive? All too few people realise that, when you look at a 'stuffed' animal, you're looking at a tanned skin that's been skillfully fitted over a postured mannequin* or replica of…

William elsewhere: planet3.0

In Memoriam, John McCarthy. Eeee, those were the days. [Late update: I've just gone through and re-read that P3 post. To anyone who knows my style and mt's, its pretty obvious who wrote which bits. But anyway, I've found my original email so this was my version: An appreciation of John McCarthy from sci.environment Recently two major figures from computing have died: Dennis Ritchie (C) and John McCarthy (LISP). As far as I know, DR had nothing special to do with the environment, but John McCarthy was a denizen of the usenet group sci.environment in the days when usenet was the premier online…

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

Every week, the New York Times Magazine features some sort of profile article about a person or group of people who are supposed to represent some sort of trend. Every week, the people they choose to write up come off as vaguely horrible, usually in some sort of entitled-suburbanite fashion. I'm not sure if this is an editorial mandate, but if it is, this week's feature article takes it to the logical conclusion of just profiling people who are irredeemably awful, and unapologetic about it. This week, they take a look at the culture of Internet trolls: Jason Fortuny might be the closest thing…

WISE Mission Assembled and Preparing for Launch

The Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has been all snapped together and stuff and is ready to be launched into outer space from Vandenberg in November. This will be a major eye in the sky for cosmology, since it will be able to see things that heretofore only space insects could see.... Details in the following NASA press release: PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has been assembled and is undergoing final preparations for a planned Nov. 1 launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The mission will survey the entire sky at infrared…

On Exclusivity

Yesterday's frat boy post prompted some interesting discussion, one piece of which is a response from Matt "Dean Dad" Reed (also at Inside Higher Ed), who overlapped with me at Williams for a year, but had a very different reaction to the social scene there. His take mirrors mine from the other side, though, which suggests I'm not wildly off base. The other chunk is a comment exchange on Facebook where some colleagues mentioned the problem of social exclusivity as an issue that I didn't address. And that's true-- as I was at a school without fraternities, where all organizations were formally…

From tropical forests to peer mentoring, Erika Marin-Spiotta is an emerging force in Earth Science

After tropical forests are cleared for agriculture and then abandoned, secondary forests regrow on the site. But how do plant species composition, biomass and soil organic matter differ through this succession of primary forest, pasture, and secondary forest? Employing tools of biogeochemistry, ecosystem ecology, and land-use/land-cover change to examine those and related questions, Erika Marin-Spiotta earned a Ph.D. in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California at Berkeley, a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and…

Social exclusion literally feels cold

Our languages are replete with phrases that unite words evoking a sense of cold with concepts of loneliness, social exclusion or misanthropy. When we speak of icy stares, frosty receptions and cold shoulders, we invoke feelings of isolation and unfriendliness.  But cold and solitude are more than just metaphorical bedfellows; a new study shows that social exclusion can literally make people feel cold. Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto recruited 65 students and were asked to recall a situation where they either felt included within a group or left out of…

Anatomy of a 300 million year-old brain

Nervous tissue is extremely fragile, and so is very well protected. The brain, which has a jelly-like consistency, is encased in the skull, and is surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid, which acts to cushion it against blows that might cause it to come into contact with the inside of its bony case. Likewise, the spinal cord is surrounded by the vertebrae, the series of bones which runs down from the base of the skull.   Being so soft, the brain and spinal cord decompose quickly. When an animal dies, the nervous system begins to disintegrate immediately, until the armour in which it was…

Encephalon 54

Welcome to the 54th edition of Encephalon, the neuroscience and psychology blog carnival. This edition has everything from the perception of colour and shapes to behavioural economics, the neuroscience of sports and squabbling psychologists. First up is the editor's choice: an in-depth review of the evolution of modularity in the brain by Caio Maximino. A brain module is a functionally and cytoarchitectonically distinct region of the brain. In his post, Caio begins with how the concept of modularity arose historically. He then explains how the developing neural tube becomes segmented and…

Are faces immune from attentional blink? If so, why?

Attentional blink is a fascinating phenomenon that occurs when we see images, words, or numbers presented in a rapid sequence. As images flash by at about one every tenth of a second, you're asked to look for two in particular. If you were looking for numbers in a sequence of letters, the sequence might be SDLX3DJ9WVNBDR. The number 3 would be easy to spot, but 9, which follows 3/10 of a second later, is spotted much less frequently. The effect works for images as well. You might be asked to look for flowers in a sequence of furniture pictures. Again, flowers that follow between 2/10 and 4/10…

Course redesign cont: thinking through the context

I'm working on re-designing an upper level general education course called "The Control of Nature. Yesterday, I talked about the problems I've had in the past. Today, I'm going to start thinking about the context of the course, and what that means for improving it. One of my commenters yesterday made exactly the same suggestion as the course design tutorial that I'm working through. Yes, I've been doing it all backwards, deciding what I want my students to read and discuss and write about before I've defined my goals. The first step is recognizing that things aren't working. The next step is…

Moving on to cancer quackery...Zeolite and other oddities

Over the last few days, it seems to me, I've been blogging so much about antivaccine lunacy that I was beginning to wonder whether I should rename the blog "Respectfully Insolent Antivaccine Slapdowns." As good as it's been to dwell on seeing the antivaccine movement suffer two major setbacks in 2009 even before we've reached the end of February, it's time to move on for a while; that is, unless the antivaccine movement does or writes something stupid enough to tempt my attention back. In the meantime, as I get back into the swing of blogging again, I haven't yet gone through my pile of…

Individual vs. Group Learning Redux

So, this post is almost ten days old, but I just now found some time to actually read the 35 comments on it as well as what others wrote about it on their blogs. I guess it is time to continue that conversation now. First, let me be clear about the origin of that rant: I've been teaching for quite a long time now and always graded individuals without ever thinking about that assumption. The Facebook scandal triggered the new thought that perhaps all grades should be group grades. As a blogger, I put up a rant, spiced it up with strong language to elicit commentary (which bland stuff cannot…

What Does It Cost to Run a Small College Lab?

Over at io9, they have a post on the finances of running a research lab at a major university. It's reasonably good as such things go, but very specific to the top level of research universities. As I am not at such an institution, I thought it might be worthwhile to post something about the finances of the sort of place I am at: a private small liberal arts college. I'll follow the io9 article's format, but first, one important clarification: Do you really do research at a small college? Yes, absolutely. At the upper level private liberal arts colleges, faculty are expected to be active…

Life for faculty at primarily undergraduate institutions (Guest Post by Kim Hannula)

Sciencewoman says: Some of readers have been wondering about what life is like for those jobs at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). Alice and I are indubitably unqualified to answer that question, so Kim Hannula of "All of my faults are stress related..." graciously offered to provide some perspective. Kim is an incredibly thoughtful blogger about teaching and about geology, so you should all be reading her. In the comments on Alice's post about grad students and balanced careers, there was some discussion about working at a primarily undergraduate institution, and questions about…

The Australian's War on Science 65: Stuart Rintoul misrepresents a scientific paper

Phil Watson, Team Leader of the Coastal Unit in the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water was probably pleased when The Australian's Stuart Rintoul asked to interview him about his work. Watson was the man who organised A snapshot of future sea levels: photographing the king tide. The photographs of the king tide in 12 January 2009 are intended to help prepare NSW to adapt to a possible 90cm of sea level rise this century. So I'm guessing he wasn't too pleased when Rintoul's front page story about his work claimed that "Watson has written a report stating that global…

Reading Diary: The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

I am not trying to deny the transformative nature of the Internet, but rather that we've lived with it long enough to ask tough questions. ... I've tried to avoid the Manichean view of technology, which assumes either that the Internet will save us or that it is leading us astray, that it is making us stupid or making us smart, that things are black or white. The truth is subtler: technology alone cannot deliver the cultural transformation we have been waiting for; instead, we need to first understand and then address the underlying social and economic forces that shape it. Only then can we…

Dear Dad, With Love (repost)

This is a repost of my reflections on my father who passed away 13 years today. It took me 12 years to write the following eulogy and remembrance. While quite personal, I posted it here last year because I felt that my experiences were quite universal, shared by the families of the ten or twenty million alcoholics in the US and the hundreds of millions worldwide. Moreover, I wanted to provide a face for my colleagues who work in the area of substance abuse and a reminder for my clinical colleagues of the people behind those they may dismiss as drunks and junkies. In becoming one my most most…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Over the past week or so, PLoS IT/Web team made some serious upgrades to the site, including a much better, faster search - go and test it! Friday is also the time to point out cool new papers from four out of seven PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Shearwater Foraging…

Liveblogging From London

I'm sitting in the Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution right now, at the Nature Network's Science Blogging 2008 conference. There are about 100 people in the room, 90% of whom I don't recognize at all. 90% of the people I do recognize are people I've met for the first time somewhere in the last two days. There's a list of the attendees and their blogs on the conference website. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't had the chance to read all of those blogs yet. At the same time, it's also great (in a way) that I don't know who most of the people are or where they blog. If nothing else…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Scott Huler

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Scott Huler to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?…

Fuk-D: what happened to the reactors?

It will probably be some years before we get the full story of what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex after the earthquake. Information has not exactly been put out coherently or comprehensively, but we can make some inferences from the data that is out there. It is likely that one or two reactor vessels were breached with release of fuel and radioactive ash into the containment vessel. There are a lot of nuclear agencies in Japan: the JAEA - Japan Atomic Energy Agency - whose online environmental radiation monitors are now online (Oarai is the interesting one, between…

Thoughts on the LHC and ILC

Back in late July, I got email from a writer for Physics World magazine (which is sort of the UK equivalent of Physics Today), asking my opinion on a few questions relating to particle physics funding. The basis for asking me (as opposed to, you know, a particle physicist) was presumably a post from April in which I ranted a bit about the justification of Big Science projects. The article is now out, but not available on-line, so I haven't read it. I spent a fair amount of time typing up my response, though, so I'm going to recycle it into a blog post, because I can do that. The original…

Multiverses

The current issue of Scientific American has an article, by George F. R. Ellis, expressing some skepticism about the multiverse. Sadly, it seems that only the beginning of the article is freely available online. However, replies to the article by Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark are available online. And since Tegmark so perfectly summarizes my own views about multiverses, I'd like to take a look at his remarks. After a brief introduction Tegmark gets down to business: By our universe, I mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us during the 13.7 billion…

The Friday Fermentable: Some Old World vs. New

Another Wine Escapade - "Some Old World vs. New" by Erleichda Our wine and dinner group known as Jim's Disciples met recently at a BYOB neighborhood Italian-American restaurant. It wasn't my neighborhood, as there is nothing close by to the woods where we reside, but the sort of place a neighborhood would be proud to call its own, a gem of a place, tucked away on a darkened side street. The organizer for this evening's entertainment thought we might scrutinize old world versus new, of whatever grape varieties we felt like comparing. And, to make it interesting, each pair of wines brought…

Chris beat cancer? He did indeed, but it wasn't quackery that cured him

I like to think that one of the more important public services I provide is my deconstructions of alternative cancer cure testimonials. After all, one of the most powerful marketing tools cancer quacks have in their arsenal is a collection of stories of "real patients" with cancer who used their nostrums and are still alive and well. These sorts of analyses of alternative cancer cure testimonials began right near the very beginning, way back in 2004 and have continued intermittently to this very day, most recently with a bevy of posts showing why the testimonials of Stanislaw Burzynski's…

Rudeness required

The concern trolls are very concerned. They are responding to my posting of Sonia/Tanja/Rosa/Whoevera Jensen's crazy email — she's disabled! She's mentally ill! It's cruel to post her wacky screeds publicly where people will point and laugh! You're picking on her! <ChrisCrocker>LEAVE SONIA ALONE!!!</ChrisCrocker> No. Crazy people — and I don't mean clinically ill people who need medical/psychiatric help — are everywhere, and they are saying and doing stupid things, and they are sending their nonsense to me, and they are engaging in their foolishness in public places where they…

Advice for atheists?

We're getting advice from Christians now! Look and laugh at this list: Five things that would make atheists seem nicer. It's gone awry even with the title. I especially appreciate the word "seem," because Lord knows there's nothing that could make us actually nice, and obviously we need the suggestions of a Christian, since we're all such not-nice people. I should make a counter-list of "five things that would make Christians seem intelligent" — maybe then one of them would notice the nasty implications of this clown's title. But I'm the wrong guy to do it. You see, I'm not nice, and proud of…

Getting scansoriopterygids, terrestrial-stalking azhdarchids, sauropod pneumaticity and the word palaeontography into a kid's book

Another book with my name on it has just appeared. Again it's a kid's book: Dorling Kindersley's Know It All (Baines 2010) - a fantastically well illustrated, fact-packed encylopedia of everything science (and the successor to the highly successful 2009 Ask Me Anything). It's a multi-authored book (authors: Simone Bos, Julie Ferris, Ian Graham, Susan Kennedy, Darren Naish, Jim Pipe, Carole Stott and John Woodward). My section - titled 'Dinosaurs' - isn't just on dinosaurs; it also includes spreads on Palaeozoic tetrapods, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, Pleistocene mammals, and hominids. Does it…

I get email

I'm getting a sudden surge of hate mail, and most of it seems to revolve around the Daniel Hauser case. I assume something I wrote has been reposted somewhere frequented by morons. Anyway, these are a bit weird. Some people really hate chemotherapy, I think, because it has them extremely upset. So upset that I've put some examples below the fold, because they use very naughty language. Bonnie Howard doesn't use bad language, she just hates Big Pharma, to the point where she even thinks insulin is a conspiracy. Chemotherapy KILLS We have epidemics of heart, cancer and diabetes. Ever asked…

Don Feder on Katrina

One of my favorite nutballs, Don Feder, has now chimed in with his divine conspiracy theory of Katrina and he's firmly on the side of the Christian whackos and the Jewish whackos. Katrina, you see, was God's punishment for sodomy and for Israel pulling out of Gaza. He lists all of those "coincidences" between the pullout from Gaza and the hurricane aftermath in New Orleans that were cited in the Worldnutdaily last week, including mystical numerology: Numerology is important in traditional Judaism. Each Hebrew letter is assigned a number value. Many scholars believe the Bible has hidden codes…

Framing and Coordination

I haven't been following the discussion of the Mooney/ Nisbet "framing" article in Science all that closely, because most of the commentary has tended to be uninteresting in predictable ways. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of links from Bora (who else?), and Matt and Chris respond to most of it. There was one response that struck me as worth highlighting, though, from James Hrynyshyn of the Island of Doubt: Essentially, my response is that it is neither realistic nor fair to ask scientists to ditch their penchant for the facts and wander into territory more familiar to the…

Testosterone-fuelled traders make higher profits

Financial trading is really risky business for individuals and economies alike. Millions of pounds and dollars rest on the fast decisions of stressed people, working under extreme pressure. With such high stakes, it's worth remembering that traders, regardless of their intellect or experience, are as fallible as the rest of us and their brains and bodies are influenced by the same ensemble of hormones. Testosterone is one of these, and it's of particular importance to traders for it can influence a person's confidence and attitudes to risk during competitive encounters. While it seems…

Psychiatrists of old, never gave advice. But here's some advice:

Psychiatrists of old, never gave advice.  But here's some advice: And never trust with your money anyone making a potential bonus. From href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fa89be08-02aa-11de-b58b-000077b07658.html">Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Black Swan; HT: href="http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/02/february-25-2009-put-it-all-on-red.html">Automatic Earth. How bank bonuses let us all down By Nassim Nicholas Taleb Published: February 24 2009 19:53 One of the arguments one hears in the compensation debate is that the bonus system used by Wall Street - as John Thain,…

Different Thinking about Drinking on College Campuses

There is an interesting article by Brandon Busteed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about college drinking. Busteed argues that the problem is not the population that addiction specialists tend to focus on: the really heavy drinkers. Rather the problem is in the much more numerous group of moderate drinkers with infrequent binges: Despite conventional wisdom, the alcohol problem colleges face is not mainly about high-risk drinkers, and the solution is not about intervening with them alone. If it were, we'd have declared success long ago because we have invested so much time, money, and…

What's your favorite MTV memory? (redux)

Thanks to all for coming over and sharing your MTV memories earlier this week. Our SciBling editor and cat-herder, Katherine, came across with a very vivid list of great memories and Orac was able to bitch about being ever so slightly older than me. Then, Karmen surprised me by intimating that cable TV actually existed in Colorado in 1981, at least at her Grandma's house. I said I was going to tell you some of my general recollections of MTV, but I have very specific memories of this very week 25 years ago thanks to my personal archivist, number one fan, and all-around keeper of my life…

Federal Judge Orders Endangered Species Act Protections Reinstated for Grey Wolves - At Least For Now

Yesterday afternoon, Judge Donald Molloy of the Federal District court for Montana issued a preliminary injunction reinstating Endangered Species Act protections for grey wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. This is very good news for the wolves. Although a preliminary injunction will only protect the wolves until the lawsuit is resolved, a judge will only issue one if it appears likely that the party requesting the lawsuit is going to win at trial. A friend of mine emailed me a copy of the decision. It's forty pages long, and very little of it is kind to the Fish and Wildlife service.…