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Jesse Helms: In His Own Words and Deeds

tags: Jesse Helms, politics, rethuglicans Image: Orphaned (please contact me so I can properly attribute this image to its photographer). This morning, I learned that America is celebrating its independence from one of the politicians whose goal was to ensure that this country was a colder, meaner-spirited place for millions of its citizens to live; a former senator of North Carolina, Jesse Helms. A lot of people called him "Senator No", although I (and no doubt others) thought of him as "Senator Hate." How should we remember a right-wing religious control freak who has caused so much…

Clayton Cramer...Again

Clayton Cramer is also discussing the Polk County "free speech zone" situation, partially in response to my post on the subject. Along the way he manages to give a perfect demonstration of the kind of nasty, simplistic and unjustified rhetoric that he is so infamous for. After falsely claiming that the ACLU "had to file suit to prevent free speech on public property", he quotes an Orlando Sentinel article about the Polk County Commission voting to do away with the "free speech zone". Then he lets loose with this little gem of attempted demonization against Volokh and everyone else who defends…

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott (Review)

Somebody tipped over a bag full of a white powdery substance. Most of what fell out splayed across the dirty wooden table, but about a cup poured onto the dirt floor of the open-air Baraza at our research site in a remote part of the Congo’s Ituri Forest. Embarrassed about tipping onto the ground more of this valuable substance than most people living within 50 kilometers would ever see in one day, the tipper started to push loose dirt onto the powder to cover it up. But the spill had been noticed by two children lounging nearby; in what seemed like a fraction of a second, the boys were face…

More Dishonest Nonsense About the ACLU

The Worldnutdaily continues its campaign of outright dishonesty toward the ACLU with this ridiculous screed by William Simon. The lies begin in the very first sentence: Believe it or not, there was a time when the American Civil Liberties Union was a respected organization that fought to protect civil liberties for all Americans. But that time is long past. Nonsense, Mr. Simon. Your ideological predecessors were railing about the "godless and communist" ACLU at least as far back as the 1925 Scopes trial, and the ACLU was only formed in 1922. So please don't expect us to buy into this "I used…

Magical Night

As I mentioned yesterday, I got to see Vinx perform last night at an outdoor jazz festival. As always, it was a show that leaves you exhilirated. Vinx is one of those rarest of musicians whose work is completely unique. No one else sounds like him and his music is really impossible to describe or categorize. He usually performs with just percussion and voice, though last night he also had a guitarist with him on some of the songs. What makes it most incredible is that he has the ability to use percussion to create melody and harmony with his voice. I would never have thought that was possible…

“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less,” said Jonathan Wells

Correcting Jonathan Wells' misrepresentations is practically a full time job. He's been yammering away in the Yale Daily News lately, trying to defend his absurd disagreements with evolution, and he's just digging his hole deeper and deeper. In his latest, he's trying to argue for his abuse of the term "Darwinism", which has steadily become a term of art for the rantings of creationists in addition to its more specific meanings. Here's his most unpromising start to his letter: In a recent column ("Churches shouldn't buy into Darwinists' ploys," 1/29), I distinguished between "evolution" as…

AtC Reviewed in PSCF

I've recently had it called to my attention that Among the Creationists has been reviewed in Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith. That's the journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of Christian scientists. They are generally sympathetic to evolution and mostly have little patience for ID and creationism. On the other hand, they definitely like their evolution with a heavy theistic gloss. When I wrote the book, I was especially curious about how it would be received in quarters like this. So let's have a look. The reviewer is Robyn Pal Rylaarsdam of…

Meh. What's so special about HeLa cells?

On Friday, I wrote a post about the 20th anniversary of my PhD dissertation defense and my reverence for Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cervical cancer gave rise to the first immortalized human cell line and the primary system for my work. I also alluded to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the upcoming book by Rebecca Skloot that is already garnering extensive pre-release praise. I was, as readers have come to expect, quite a bit sentimental and reflective, with a call that we all do our part to somehow acknowledge those patients whose tissues make it possible for us scientists to do…

There's a (Shannon-entropy limited) map for that.

You probably haven't been able to avoid seeing the televised bombs AT&T and Verizon have been throwing at each other over the maps of their coverage. Both sets of commercials (to differing degrees) fail to make it especially clear just what their maps mean to the consumer. For instance: Verizon's commercial brags of overwhelming coverage while showing AT&T's comparatively sad little sparse map. AT&T fires back with a different map and a claim that they cover 97% of the US population. Both sets of claims are correct - if you pay close attention. Verizon's map indicates 3G…

Rule Number Two

I picked up my copy of this book when it came out last year. My wife read it - and loved it - immediately. It matched what she saw whenever she went to the CASH on her base in Afghanistan. I've picked up the book any number of times since then, but I could never quite bring myself to read it. I was absolutely positive that reading the book was going to hurt. I read the book today. It hurt as much as I thought it would. And now I feel forced to do something that's probably going to sound a little strange. I don't quite know how I'm going to do this, but I'm going to try to convince you to…

The Henry's - a 1st April Rant

This is one of the main works of art by a fellow known as Fred Dagg, whose oeuvre includes the discovery and commentating the sport of farnarkling, and who wrote the real New Zealand national anthem. In it, he explains the meaning of life, in 1977 to the presenter of the ABC's Science Show 100th episode, Robin Williams (no relation) who was choking in the background for most of it. I think that this is a particularly significant occasion for the program and it seems imminently suitable that we should ignore very briefly the peripheral areas however valuable, in the wonderful tapestry of…

The Political Mind, Part II (Chapter 1)

The first thing to say about Chapter 1 is that it's much better written than the Introduction. In fact, if you buy the book, I recommend skipping the introduction, and starting with Chapter 1. Chapter 1 is, in fact, the best chapter in the book. That's because it contains a pretty good discussion of scripts, schemas, frames, and the like, and how important they are in our thinking. The discussion is dotted with what I've taken to calling "gratuitous neuroscience" (I even mark "g.n." in the margins any time he uses it, and he uses it a lot throughout the book), but overall it's pretty good. If…

If you think it's just about mercury in vaccines, you're wrong

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on July 20, 2005. Today in Washington, there will be a march, called (with unintentional irony) the Power of Truth march. Its organizers claim that it will be to "…

Lott's fabrications about safe storage paper

In a paper claiming that safe-storage gun laws increase crime and do not decrease accidental deaths, Lott and Whitley: The Cummings et al., supra note 15, research provides evidence of a 23 percent drop in juvenile accidental gun deaths after the passage of safe-storage laws. Juvenile accidental gun deaths did decline after the passage of the law, but what Cummings et al. miss is that these accidental deaths declined even faster in the states without these laws. While the Cummings et al. piece examined national data, it did not use fixed year effects, which would have allowed them to test…

More trouble for Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski

It's a new year, but some topics remain the same. One of these is the case of the highly dubious cancer doctor named Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have discovered anticancer compounds in the blood known as antineoplastons, conducts "clinical trials" for which he charges patients and whose results he are largely unpublished, and of late has started marketing a do-it-yourself "personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy" that--surprise! surprise!--almost always involves antineoplastons. More importantly, contrary to Dr. Burzynski's claim that he doesn't use chemotherapy and that his therapy…

On the Positive Features of Drunken Idiots

I was invited to a dinner last night hosted by one of the umbrella organizations for fraternities on campus, with a stated goal of improving communication between faculty and frats. It ended up being kind of a weird crowd-- most of the non-students there were Deans of one sort or another; I think there was only one other regular faculty member there. I'm not sure quite how they drew up the invite list, but I suspect the two of us are probably among the most sympathetic faculty members-- I went to a school without frats, but the rugby club was functionally equivalent, and the other guy proudly…

"Invisible Cadaver Particles," behavior change, and the public health perspective

A recent Freakonomics podcast tells one of my favorite public health stories: how observant physician Ignaz Semmelweis figured out how to slash the incidence of childbed, or puerperal, fever, a disease that killed 10-15% of the women who gave birth in the doctor-staffed ward of the Vienna General Hospital in the mid-nineteenth century. (Death rates were similarly alarming elsewhere, since germ theory hadn't yet taken hold.) As the podcast explains, Semmelweis observed that the death rate from childbed fever was lower among women who delivered babies in the ward staffed by midwives compared to…

What I learned from ScienceOnline2010

Last weekend I attended the annual North Carolina sci-shindig (called ScienceOnline2010 this year), and it was the best iteration of the conference yet. I am still reeling from everything that happened during the three days I was there. Rather than post a session-by-session discussion of what happened there, though, I thought I would simply share a few of the main lessons I took away from the conference. Writers Help Other Writers Writing a book is no easy task. It involves much more than simply sitting down and hammering out an arbitrary number of words or chapters, and as someone who is…

Lots of Scientists Write a Letter About Infectious Disease Surveillance

One of the most important things in public health is surveillance. While it's not sexy, you can't solve health problems if you don't have good data. Recently, many professional societies sent a joint letter to several representatives asking their support for the National Integrated Public Health Surveillance Systems and Reportable Conditions Act which will be submitted to committee (the full text of the letter is at the end of the post). The primary goal of the NIPHSSRCA (try saying that ten times fast....) is to modernize our surveillance infrastructure. When I would argue for electronic…

Behavioral Economics: Not Everything Is Irrational

A recent column by Dan Arielly gives me a reason to discuss what I think are some of the problems with the recent emphasis on irrationality in economic theory. Before I get into that, I should note that I liked Arielly's book Predictably Irrational, and am impressed by Shiller's work. The idea that people behave non-optimally regarding economics--that is, we are not perfect economic calculators--is very important. For instance, understanding economic bubbles doesn't really make sense unless one accounts for irrationality (e.g., Shiller's work). Likewise, Arielly's Predictably Irrational…

The High Cost of Restaurant Culture

Don't get me wrong, I like to eat out. And what parent of many doesn't like the idea of food they don't have to cook and dishes they don't have to wash. At times restaurants and bakeries even may provide more energy efficiency than home cooking, especially in small households - one industrial walk in cooler is more efficient than six fridges. .Of course, that's in principle, in practice, the cooler *and* all six fridges are running! Household appliance energy usage has risen over time, even though we are eating at home less - while the efficiency of any given appliance has improved, we…

Scene III, wherein we move on to more important things

What could be more important than a good old-fashioned flame war? I'll get to that in a moment, so please stick with me. The recent imbroglio between some of our doctor bloggers and non-physician scientists got me thinking (so it couldn't be all bad). As a quick summary, PhysioProf of the DrugMonkey blog used an incident of a doctor committing battery on a patient as a generalization regarding surgeons, all doctors, and medical education. Many of us who are actually doctors and physician educators took issue with that. PhysioProf apologized, but made it clear that s/he still feels that…

Writing NIH grant proposals

by David Ozonoff  My new Pump Handle blog colleague, "Revere", has posted on NIH's proposal to limit the Research Plan section of Research Project Grant applications to 15 pages, down from the current 25. He/she/they (Revere's blog, Effect Measure, is ambiguous as to how many Reveres there are) also gives a peek into the NIH grant review process, something people are often curious about. As Revere says, it's a bit like seeing how sausages are made. You might not want to know. In any event, since Revere opened up the topic and since this site is more pitched to public health professionals…

Career pathways in biotechnology

Students in the United States take many convoluted and unnecessarily complicated paths when it comes to finding careers in biotechnology. If Universities and community colleges worked together, an alternative path could benefit all parties; students, schools, industry, and the community. The image below illustrates the current paths and the approximate time that each one takes. I was at two meetings recently, one in Arizona and the Bio-Link workshop in Berkeley, where we spent time discussing the paths to careers in the biotech industry. You might think, if you consider the number of years…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Intercept, Avi Asher-Schapiro reports on a new insurance plan that Uber is offering its drivers that could help them recoup wages and cover medical expenses if they’re injured on the job. Asher-Schapiro notes that while some have described the Uber insurance plan — which workers buy by setting aside 3.75 cents per mile — as a form of workers’ compensation, it hardly fits the bill. In fact, in documents obtained by the Intercept, Uber explicitly states that the insurance plan isn’t workers’ comp. He writes: Compared to traditional workers’ compensation insurance, Uber’s policy…

A Weak Defense of Reconstructionism

Christopher Ortiz, editor of the reconstructionist journal Faith for All of Life and communications director for the Chalcedon Foundation, has authored a weakly reasoned defense of reconstructionism. In it, he takes on critics like Chip Berlet and Frederick Clarkson. Ortiz seems to miss completely the real argument against reconstructionism by focusing on tactics rather than on outcome. For instance, he criticizes Clarkson thusly: The secularists are convinced that democracy itself is under siege by the dominionists. They proffer a false antithesis by suggesting that the theocracy advocated…

Electoral Vote, Popular Vote, Final Model Prediction, 2016 Clinton v Trump

The 2016 Electoral Vote Prediction I'm finished making predictions for the 2016 Presidential Election contest. According to my model, Hillary Clinton will win with 310 electoral votes to Donald Trump's 228 electoral votes. The map is shown above. Caveats and wrongosities: My model puts Iowa barely in Clinton's column. Polls say Iowa is for Trump. My model puts New Hampshire barely in Trump's column. Polls say it is for Clinton, barely. My model puts Ohio barely in Trump's column, but the polls put it in Clinton's column. Polls and other data are ambiguous about Florida, my model is…

Paul Douglas on Climate Change

Last night I attended a talk by meteorologist Paul Douglas, at the Eden Prairie High School. The talk was “Weird Weather: Minnesota’s New Normal? Our Changing Climate and What We Can Do About It,” and it was sponsored by Environment Minnesota, Cool Planet, and the Citizens Climate Lobby. I didn’t count the number of people in the audience but it was well attended (over 100, for sure). Extra chairs had to be brought in. You probably know of Paul Douglas either because of his own fame or because I often link to (or facebook-post) his blogs at Weather Nation or the Star Tribune, and I…

PNAS: Amy Young, Saponifier

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Amy Young, who runs her own soap-making business. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? The relevant part of my work is as partner and chief developer/producer at Foam on the Range, which makes and sells soaps, lotions, and other bath/cosmetic-type products. My business cards say "Saponifier in Chief". It'…

25 Years of Great Albums

It feels a little weird not to be doing a Short Story Club entry, so here's a different sort of pop culture item: Over at EphBlog, my classmate Derek Catsam has decided to break up the carnival of reactionary politics by commenting on great albums, jumping off from Spin's Top 125 of the Last 25 Years. Which is always a fun game, so let's roll with that. 25 years goes back to 1985, which is right around the time I started buying albums, so this covers most of my pop music lifetime. Which is convenient, because pretty much anything I can remember buying new is eligible... In making their list,…

Science Festivals, Science Books, and Science Funding

The World Science Festival happened while I was at DAMOP (I missed getting to talk to Bill Phillips, because he left shortly after his talk to go to NYC), and by all reports it was a success-- they claim 120,000 attendees on their web site, and sold more tickets than expected for several events, and favorably impressed journalists. Good news, all. Of course, at the same time on the opposite coast, the annual Book Expo America was going on, and as Jennifer Ouellete reports, science was shut out: Every conceivable genre was prominently represented -- sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, romance, foreign…

Diversity is Good: Anthropology, Economics and Human Freedom

Over the years anthropologists have had a good deal to say about notions of power and inequality. For example, the late CUNY anthropologist Eric R. Wolf took his early experiences working with peasants in Puerto Rico to explore these larger questions in the global system. In the opening to his book Envisioning Power he wrote: We stand at the end of a century marked by colonial expansion, world wars, revolutions, and conflicts over religion that have occasioned great social suffering and cost millions of lives. These upheavals have entailed massive plays and displays of power, but ideas…

When the budget needs cutting, who gets to bleed? (Illinois edition)

Via Kate Clancy on Twitter, a news story about how one Illinois legislator wants to save his state some money. As reported in The News-Gazette State law allows employees who have worked for one of the Illinois' public universities for seven or more years to receive a 50 percent waiver of their children's tuition costs. Employees would lose that benefit if legislation (HB 4706) introduced earlier this month by state Rep. Dave Winters, R-Rockford, is eventually signed into law. "I think a lot of the universities have been using this as part of their compensation package," said state Rep.…

Jew with a gun tries to make point, gets busted, is very creepy

Or at least, I think he was trying to make a point, but I'm not entirely sure. Joel Rosenberg, author of Everything You Need to Know About (Legally) Carrying a Handgun in Minnesota and proprietor of the web site "Jew with a gun," entered the Hennepin County Office Building to keep an appointment with Sgt. Bill Palmer, a Public Information Officer for the Minneapolis Police Department. Apparently, Sgt. Palmer noticed Joel's holster, hand gun, and a big knife. I presume that Joel being a white Jewish guy (though I don't quite get the "Jew" theme as he has developed it) was at first politely…

Responsible journalism

When Michael Moore tried to ask Roger Moore what responsibility he felt to Flint, Michigan, he got a simple answer. I'll get the same answer if I suggest that media companies like NBC ought to invest more heavily in public service programming (for instance by dropping Imus and his imitators), that major corporations ought to forego cheap foreign labor to keep Americans employed, that oil companies might legitimately be asked to pay some sort of windfall tax, or that Enron's real crime was not its financial chicanery but its abuse of California's energy supply. The answer is simple: business…

Solving Puzzles vs. Solving Problems [The ScienceBlogs Book Club]

Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes: Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…

Solving Puzzles vs. Solving Problems

Liz Borkowski writes: Mark Pendergrast wrote yesterday about how politics plays into the work of the EIS, and it's something that I kept noticing as I read Inside the Outbreaks. As he points out, my post last week highlighted the solution to the Reye's Syndrome puzzle - which was solved by Karen Starko, who's also one of the Book Club bloggers! - but didn't get into the larger issue: there can be a big difference between solving the puzzle and solving the problem. In yesterday's post, Mark writes: Although Karen's and subsequent CDC studies clearly demonstrated that giving children aspirin…

It's Not Fascism When They Do It

Yesterday, I raised the possible specter of violent intimidation breaking out at a health care townhall meeting. Turns out I was off by about twelve hours: Tampa, Florida-- Fireworks were expected, but organizers of a town hall meeting on health care reform were caught off guard Thursday night by just how explosive the issue became. Hundreds showed up for the 6:00 forum held at the Children's Board of Hillsborough County on Palm Avenue in Tampa. The auditorium which holds around 250 people, filled up so quickly eventually Tampa Police were ordered to begin turning people away. Inside, U.S.…

Reading Diary: On the Grid by Scott Huler

In his incredibly wonderful new book, On the Grid: A Plot of Land, An Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make Our World Work, Scott Huler gives us three essential take-aways: Thank God for engineers Get out your wallet Let's learn to love our infrastructure. (p. 217-225) In fact, not much more need really be said about the book. In essence it's a kind of tribute and salute to the women and men who keep our highly technoligized society functioning. The people we often forget about, whose glamour pales in comparison to movie stars, singers, politicians, even police and fire…

The future of nuclear power = [null set]

I'm almost weary of blogging about nuclear power. But others are still going strong. Take the Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders, who writes this week that we shouldn't even think of abandoning the technology. Such enthusiasm is particularly curious because he glosses over the Achilles heel of nukes -- the cost -- and Canada has one of the most expensive varieties of nuclear reactors around. I can only assume that Saunders hasn't done enough research, because if he had he would never come to conclusions such as this: It may be possible in Europe and North America to talk about reducing consumer…

Unruly Democracy: Science Blogs and the Public Sphere

On Friday, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and Chris Mooney presented "Unruly Democracy: Science Blogs and the Public Sphere," a conference that brought together Seed, Discover, The Boston Globe, ClimateProgress, and more. The ScienceBlogs contingent included Joy Moore, Seed Media Group's VP of Global Partnerships, and bloggers Jessica Palmer of Bioephemera and Dr. Isis of On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess. Our two esteemed bloggers did not always agree on matters of civility, so if you want a third perspective, MIT's professor of science writing Tom Levinson…

Masks and UV light

Several readers have pointed me to an online piece on face masks and ultraviolet light as influenza control measures just published in the American Journal of Public Health. Both are presented as a Plan B in the (lkely) event Plan A's vaccine and sufficient or sensitive antivirals are unavailable. The review by Weiss, Weiss Weiss and Weiss (I know a joke that goes like this, but this isn't a joke) is measured an informative. First, face masks. The authors point out that cloth surgical masks protect other people from you, not you from them. They discuss N95 and N100 respirators and provide…

My advice to the American Chemical Society

When three separate people send you an article in Nature it gets your attention. Since I have a paid subscription to Nature, my attention was ready to be grabbed anyway, but I hadn't yet read this story so a tip of the hat to my informants. I also have paid personal subscriptions to Science and a number of other journals. I am not opposed to subscriptions for journals. But the story is about how some big scientific publishing houses have gotten together and hired a notorious PR hit man to battle Open Access publishing, apparently by any means necessary, whether intellectually honest or not. I…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: when dinosaurs roamed the earth

There are creationists and creationists. One of those creationists (which one?) wants to be just a 72 year old's cardiac arrhythmia away from being President of the United States. It would be historic, although more historic for the rest of us than for the potentially almost President, Governor Sarah Palin, because her notion of the length of historical record is so much shorter. Like many Pentecostals, Governor Palin is said to be a Young Earth Creationist, someone who thinks the earth is only 7 thousand years old and that humans walked alongside dinosaurs. At least that's what one of her…

A Father's Day thought…

My father is gone. He died in 1993; I vividly remember how I felt when I got that phone call, the desperate search through my memory of every last moment I'd spent with him, the anguish over the missing details and lost days and years, the despair that there would be no more memories, ever. It's gotten worse over the years, too — it becomes harder and harder to recall the faces and voices of the dead as they recede into the past, no matter how important they were to us once, and while we might regularly resurrect fond remembrances, they aren't so pressing anymore, nor are they as vital as…

Lal the chicken-eating cow

People often send me links to stories of the Indian cow that took to eating baby chickens. The story isn't at all new: it appeared in the press in March 2007, and at least one of the cow's lapses into carnivory was filmed. It's shown here (though see below). As with the epic cat fight, do NOT watch this video if you are easily disturbed or upset by scenes of animal death and suffering. I will spoil the surprise by telling you that the cute little baby chicken gets eaten alive by the big nasty cow. The cow concerned - named Lal - lives in Chandpur, West Bengal (though: the cow in this video…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 7 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Re-Shuffling of Species with Climate Disruption: A No-Analog Future for California Birds?: By facilitating independent shifts in species' distributions, climate disruption may result in the rapid development…

New and Exciting in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine

Open Revolution: In 2001, Charles Vest, then President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced that MIT would make most of its course material freely available online. Browsing the Web site of MIT's Open Courseware (OCW) project (http://ocw.mit.edu), you feel the stirring of a "my God, it's full of stars" transformation: you can borrow material for your courses, study other teachers' teaching methods, maybe even retake college courses you regret having slept through! Remarkably, OCW is just one highly visible part of an "open education movement." The essays collected in…

Sorry for the Radio Silence...Update on Classes, Posts, Kids and More

Things have been a little nuts here. Two weeks ago Eric and I took an emergency placement of two children, six and 17 mos.  It turned out to be one of the most exhausting and stressful placements we've ever had, not because of the kids, who are delightful (although I had somehow forgotten what 17month olds are like - the "oh, yeah, I was hoping you'd pull all those books off the shelves and try and feed them to the cat" quality of that age toddler ;-)), but because of really complicated circumstances I can't talk about.  Let us just say it involves a lot of things we've never been buried in…

Bye-Bye Birdies: Global Avian Biodiversity Imperiled

tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate change, ornithology, birds, avian biodiversity, habitat destruction White-crested hornbill, Tropicranus albocristatus, also confined to African rainforests, may see more than half of its geographic range lost by 2100. Image: Walter Jetz, UCSD. [larger] Thanks to the combined effects of global warming and habitat destruction, bird populations will experience significant declines and extinctions over the next century, according to a study conducted by ecologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University. This…