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RP 6: Throwing a fooball, Part II

In part I of this post, I talked about the basics of projectile motion with no air resistance. Also in that post, I showed that (without air resistance) the angle to throw a ball for maximum range is 45 degrees. When throwing a football, there is some air resistance this means that 45 degree is not necessarily the angle for the greatest range. Well, can't I just do the same thing as before? It turns out that it is a significantly different problem when air resistance is added. Without air resistance, the acceleration was constant. Not so now, my friend. The problem is that air…

Physics of the Water Rocket

I said I would come back to this, and I am. I am a man of my word. Yesterday, I posted a link to a video of this really cool water rocket thingy. How does this work? What is the physics going on here? I think this can be best explained with the momentum principle. Let me start by pretending like I have some object that shoots out a piece of water (or really it could be anything). Also, let me pretend like this is in space ore something where there are no external forces. Above is a before and after picture. Initially, there is something (the box) with water inside. Through some process…

Throwing a football, Part II

In part I of this post, I talked about the basics of projectile motion with no air resistance. Also in that post, I showed that (without air resistance) the angle to throw a ball for maximum range is 45 degrees. When throwing a football, there is some air resistance this means that 45 degree is not necessarily the angle for the greatest range. Well, can't I just do the same thing as before? It turns out that it is a significantly different problem when air resistance is added. Without air resistance, the acceleration was constant. Not so now, my friend. The problem is that air…

Smart Babies

Over at Sciam's Mind Matters, Melody Dye has a great post on the surprising advantages of thinking like a baby. At first glance, this might seem like a ridiculous conjecture: A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason or focus. Rene Descartes argued that the young child was entirely bound by sensation, hopelessly trapped in the confusing rush of the here and now. A newborn, in this sense, is just a lump of need, a bundle of reflexes that can only eat and cry. To think like a baby is to not think at all. And yet…

Effect Measure's second blogiversary: still crazy after all these years

This weekend is Effect Measure's Second Blogiversary and it coincides with two other events: the new Flu Wiki Forum and the incipient debut of a new progressive public health blog, The Pump Handle, to which The Reveres will be occasional contributors (some original posts, some cross posts). We are semi-thrilled to still be around after two years. Semi-thrilled, because two years is a long-time in the blogosphere, especially if you blogged all 730 days of it. Just a few under 1500 posts all told. We know there are a lot of blogs more prolific than ours and older. Our hats are off to them,…

Isis the Scientist Says... [The Rightful Place Project]

If you've been browsing the new, redesigned, fancy-pants ScienceBlogs front page lately, you may have noticed the announcement for The Rightful Place Project. In his inaugural address, President Obama vowed to restore "science to its rightful place." In response, The Seed Media Group, through SeedMagazine and ScienceBlogs, are looking to begin a dialog about how to do this by asking for responses to the following question: What is science's rightful place? Earlier in the week, Dr. Isis and the rest of the Sciencebloggers received an email from the highest of high overlordz telling us…

Great Short Stories III: “The Nine Mile Walk” by Harry Kemelman

Time now for the third installment in my series about great short stories. (Previous installments can be found here: Part One and Part Two.) Today we focus on “The Nine Mile Walk,” by Harry Kemelman. If you are familiar with Kemelman it is probably because of his series of detective novels featuring Rabbi David Small. Kemelman originally wanted to write books about Judaism, but found it too difficult to get such things published. So he embedded discussions of Jewish thought into his mystery novels. The Rabbi novels were also memorable for their subplots, which typically involved the…

Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I'd already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I read it this afternoon, partly at lunch with SteelyKid (who, alas, was woken up by somebody else's ill-mannered child), but mostly in the back yard on a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. It's a quick read-- only 132 pages of text, plus 65 pages of (unmarked)…

Why blog? The Meme returns...

For some reason, I've only just discovered the navel-gazing blogger meme that started at Nature Network a few weeks ago. But I've written up a shed-load of science this week and I'm feeling lazy and introspective. So better late than never... 1. What is your blog about? Not Exactly Rocket Science is a news site crossed with a popular science book crossed with an excitable, precocious and eloquent child jumping up and down and pointing at things that are cool. I care about making science understandable and interesting to non-scientists and about good writing. Any topic is fair game, but…

Remarks at AAAS Conference on Climate Change Literacy

Last week I presented at a workshop hosted by AAAS on "Promoting Climate Literacy Through Informal Science." There were a number of outstanding presentations and themes discussed including a plenary talk by historian Naomi Oreskes detailing the central arguments of her forthcoming book on the origins of the climate skeptic movement. There are plans to make available online the various presentation materials, so I will post again when those are ready. In the meantime, I have pasted below the text from remarks I gave as part of a panel on framing. These remarks also follow closely some of…

Synapse proteomics & brain evolution

When it comes to human brain evolution, it is often said that size matters. The human cerebral cortex is much larger than that of other primates, and therefore its expansion must have been a vital feature of human evolution. Researchers have therefore emphasized the importance of encephalization, the process by which brain mass increased dramatically in relation to total body mass that occurred in the human lineage. However, a new study which used bioinformatics to compare the synapses of distantly related species suggests that size may not be the most important factor in human brain…

Grand Rounds

At about this time last week, I asked for bloggers' thoughts on the interface of scientific evidence with health and health care. In an unscientific poll of the blogosphere, about 40% of you gave this theme the finger, while about 60% of you found it interesting to the point of arousal. To the first group, I say, I hope we can still be friends. Meanwhile, the second group should sit quietly and think about what it has done. I sure have. There's great variety, great thought, and great effort evident (heh) among the entries in this week's collection. I hope you will find it as thought-provoking…

Adding to my teaching toolbox: the gallery walk

While I was teaching my reworked upper division gen ed class earlier this summer, I decided to use a discussion technique that I hadn't used before: the "http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/gallerywalk/index.html">gallery walk. It worked so well that I'm trying to figure out where else it might be useful. The idea behind the gallery walk is pretty simple: students are divided into several groups, and work their way around a series of stations at which they add to a list of answers to a question (or whatever the task at each station involves). I had used the technique as a participant in a…

Oekologie #5: Looking Back at Ancient Arabic Ecological Writings

Welcome to the 5th edition of Oekologie, the 'sphere's only blog carnival focusing on ecology and environmental science. We are always looking for hosts (especially for October) and contributors, so please check out those tabs if you're interested in either. Some of you may know that I have a tendency to mix in some history when hosting science carnivals. So, for the first themed edition of Oekologie, we will be using ancient and medieval Arabic nature writing to frame our moving monthly mag of biological interactions in the environment. Zoology One of the most famous Arabic zoological…

Isis the Scientist Says...

If you've been browsing the new, redesigned, fancy-pants ScienceBlogs front page lately, you may have noticed the announcement for The Rightful Place Project. In his inaugural address, President Obama vowed to restore "science to its rightful place." In response, The Seed Media Group, through SeedMagazine and ScienceBlogs, are looking to begin a dialog about how to do this by asking for responses to the following question: What is science's rightful place? Earlier in the week, Dr. Isis and the rest of the Sciencebloggers received an email from the highest of high overlordz telling us…

Jindal's genetics professor speaks out

In a press release from the Louisiana Coalition for Science, Governor Bobby Jindal's college genetics professor asks him not to "hold back the next generation of Louisiana's doctors." The press release introduces an open letter from the group calling for Jindal to veto SB 733, a bill which opens the door to creationism in the classroom, Professor Arthur Landy, University Professor at Brown University who teaches in the medical school, taught the then-premed. Landy says "Without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn't make sense. In order for today's…

Our patients don't practice evidence-based medicine? That doesn't justify doctors embracing quackery!

One of the most annoying phenomena when it comes to “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), which its advocates are more and more insistent on calling “integrative medicine” is how little the average doctor cares that pseudoscience is infiltrating medicine. The reason, of course, is that CAM advocates don’t like the “alternative” part of the term CAM. Come to think of it, they don’t like the “complementary” part, either, because it implies that conventional science-based medicine (what I like to refer to as “real” medicine) is the main treatment and what they do is just “…

Ann Coulter: No evidence for evolution?

I've now read all of the science-related (that's applying the term "related" very generously) stuff in Ann Coulter's awful, ghastly, ignorant book, Godless, and it's a bit overwhelming. This far right-wing political pundit with no knowledge of science at all has written a lengthy tract that is wall-to-wall error: To cover it all would require a sentence-by-sentence dissection that would generate another book, ten times longer than Coulter's, all merely to point out that her book is pure garbage. So I'm stumped. I'm not interested in writing such a lengthy rebuttal, and I'm sure this is…

Charles Darwin - Notebooks

Darwin published hundreds of pages of text, but he also kept notebooks many of which come down to us today. They can be roughly divided into two aspects, the Beagle field notebooks of 1831 - 1836, and his later notes. Sometimes these notes are found in a single book, and one way they are told apart (when otherwise undated) is by the orientation of the notes themselves. Darwin wrote "portrait" style in the field, but "landscape" style in the lab. repost from gregladen.com Many of the notebooks are preserved at Down House, Darwin's residence. Down House has 14 Beagle notebooks, one…

Yeah, me too. [Christina's LIS Rant]

I'm also leaving ScienceBlogs, but it's not for the reasons some others have given. I don't think Pepsi's blog will hurt my real life reputation and besides, it's been pulled, there have been apologies - it's time to forgive. July was the first month I've gotten enough hits to get a paycheck - and that's completely due to the BYU video - no one is more shocked than I about that. It's also not about the technical support - I mean, look at my old blog. Does it look like I use fancy tricks? Some of the tech support things are related to getting thousands of comments, which I don't. Of course I…

Popular Science Returns as Festival Media Partner, Bringing Famed DIYer and Zombie Hunter Chris Hackett!

Popular Science  magazine -- one of the leading sources of news in technology, science, gadgets, space, green tech and more -- is returning as a key Media Partner with the Festival, bringing to the event not only a vast array of science media expertise, but also a special surprise: famed DIYer-at-large and zombie hunter, Chris Hackett, who is a contributing editor of Popular Science and who also hosted the Science Channel's avant garde DIY show, "Stuck With Hackett"! Popular Science has been a major source of science and technology news since this award-winning publication was founded back in…

Mac McCorkle, Political Consultant for Lt. Governor Beverly Perdue, to speak at Town Hall Grill's 'Village Voice'

Chapel Hill, NC - September 24, 2008 - Mac McCorkle, Political Consultant for Lt. Governor Beverly Perdue and 2008 Democratic Nominee for Governor, will be speaking on behalf of the Lt. Governor on October 6, 2008 at Town Hall Grill in Chapel Hill as part of the Village Voice political forum. Town Hall Grill, located in Southern Village in Chapel Hill, N.C., launched the bipartisan community issues forum, "The Village Voice," in June and has featured political candidates William (BJ) Lawson, Republican candidate for U.S. House District 4 and Ellie Kinnaird, six-term NC State Senator,…

Family hating godlings want to desecrate your Holy Genome!

Pope Ratzi was in charge of a parade yesterday, where everyone pretends to know every footfall of poorly documented Jewish rabbi's execution, so they can re-enact it and make portentous comments at every step. The whole thing is online, if you want to read it. The Seventh Station is the interesting one. But what is it that today, in particular, strikes at Christ's holy body? Surely God is deeply pained by the attack on the family. Today we seem to be witnessing a kind of anti-Genesis, a counter-plan, a diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family. There is a move to reinvent mankind,…

Temperature and sex determination

Some interesting new research. The paper is, unfortunately, behind a paywall but they made a video, so it is worth posting. Here's the press release for the paper: Scientists know that temperature determines sex in certain reptiles—alligators, lizards, turtles, and possibly dinosaurs. In many turtles, warm temperatures during incubation create females. Cold temperatures, males. But no one understands why. A recent study sheds further light on this question. The findings of researchers Kayla Bieser, assistant professor at Northland College, and Thane Wibbels, professor of reproductive biology…

The Secular Coalition of America's Big Goof

The Secular Coalition of America is a lobbying group that represents several groups, including American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, Camp Quest, the Secular Student Alliance and so on. A few months ago the SCA made news, in a bad way, by appointing a former Bush White House Staffer, Edwina Rogers, as Executive Director. Many of us did not like that and we complained, and we were essentially told a) the decision is final and b) don't worry, everything will be OK. But it is not. Much more recently, the SCA appointed as a co-director for one of its state groups a guy who has…

Ill take "Tired Atheist Cliches" for $200, Alex.

For some reason, our local FOX affiliate decided to cover a blog post by Sanjay Gupta: Anger at God common, even among atheists Technically they were covering some study by Julie Exline, but considering the fact no one has linked to it, and I cant find it anywhere online, lets be honest. It was opinions on second hand opinions using third hand opinions. High-five there, traditional media! Anyway, the gist of it is that atheists are 'mad' at a god-like creature Christians imagine as their choice of deity. OKC Atheist president Nick Singer rightly noted that that is stupid. Atheists cant be…

links for 2009-05-06

Why Canât You? « Easily Distracted "I had a fun conversation with a student this week who had a number of challenging questions about issues to pose to me. The question Iâm still knocking around: if academic cultural critics understand expressive culture so expertly, why canât they create it? Wouldnât it be better to always have experience in creating the cultural forms that you study? I noted that this is an old and familiar (if legitimate) challenge. It popped up recently in Ratatouille, for example, but this is an old battle littered with bon mots and bitter denunciations. Thinking…

Free DSCOVR

In 1969, after yet another arrest, Flint native href="http://www.umich.edu/%7Ebhl/bhl/refhome/jls/John.htm">John Sinclair was sentenced to 9.5 yrs in prison.  The egregious disproportionality of the sentence led to rallying cries of FREE JOHN SINCLAIR! Last December, I went to a pub in Ypsilanti, to see the guy play his music.  Outside, there were these free-newsletter dispensers.  I saw the juxtaposition, felt moved by the irony, and snapped a picture. Seed Magazine is cool.  The most recent issue (September 2006; not online yet) has a one-pager on a topic similar to the FREE…

First anniversary of Scientiae blog carnival!

It's my great pleasure to congratulate Skookumchick (Rants of a Feminist Engineer) and the world of women bloggers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) on the first anniversary of their blog carnival, Scientiae. With the theme of "renewal," I'll leave it to Skookum to explain how and why she started the carnival: I decided to start the thing-that-would-turn-into-Scientiae (name by Theo Bromine) because I had found it to be meaningful to read all these amazing blogs being written by women in science, engineering and math. I found it helpful to hear their stories, to…

Yeah, me too.

I'm also leaving ScienceBlogs, but it's not for the reasons some others have given. I don't think Pepsi's blog will hurt my real life reputation and besides, it's been pulled, there have been apologies - it's time to forgive. July was the first month I've gotten enough hits to get a paycheck - and that's completely due to the BYU video - no one is more shocked than I about that. It's also not about the technical support - I mean, look at my old blog. Does it look like I use fancy tricks? Some of the tech support things are related to getting thousands of comments, which I don't. Of course I…

The People Want Their Phones Green

There's a discussion I was clued into recently, taking place over at a spiked, a reporting website, which describes it self thusly: spiked is an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. spiked is endorsed by free-thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and hated by the narrow-minded such as Torquemada and Stalin. Or it would be, if they were lucky enough to be around to read it. I'm not quite…

Geologic causes vs geologic triggers

There's a great, new online news article by Science's Richard Kerr about the role of the Zipingpu Dam in last year's Wenchuan earthquake. A new article in Geophysical Research Letters (which I haven't read - my library doesn't have access to GRL) tests the plausibility of water as a trigger for the Wenchuan quake, and concludes that the weight of the water, combined with its penetration into the fault zone, might have made the difference. There have been a number of studies in the past decade or so that suggest that earthquakes can be triggered by little things, such as the passage of…

Enough about dogs...who wouldn't like to own a pygmy hippopotamus? They are pig-like and hippo-like with really cute offspring

OK, Pygmy Hippos are really cute. Well, baby pygmy hippos are really cute. And that's kind of strange considering it looks like the morph of a pig and a hippo. I mean, piglets are cute, but grown pigs are certainly not the easiest thing on the eyes. And hippos, well, they're just odd looking. But the pygmy hippo got the best of both worlds, and they are really interesting creatures when you take a look at their adaptations. Just take a look at the photo above of a pygmy hippo that was born just last month at Zoo Miami. She doesn't have a name yet, but zookeepers are doing an online poll to…

Judeo-Christian, an abuse of language?

I've always been ill at ease with the term "Judeo-Christian." As someone from a Muslim cultural background I was minimally familiar with the tenets and principles of the Islamic religion. As someone who was socialized with both Jews and Christians I was reasonably familiar with the outlines of both faiths. When my teachers wouldrefer to the "Judeo-Christian" tradition I simply felt that something was off. Talking to Jews about their religion it seemed, to me, to resemble Islam more than what the Christian children described. Additionally, on occasion my family would purchase kosher food…

Resources and readmissions: a challenging policy for hospitals

Monday was the start date for an Affordable Care Act provision aimed at reducing high rates of hospital readmission among Medicare patients. This year, hospitals determined to have excess readmissions for patients with acute myocardial infarctions, heart failure, and pneumonia can lose up to one percent of their Medicare reimbursements for the year -- and in future years, the list of applicable conditions will get longer and the percentage of payments at risk will rise to three percent. But to what extent are readmissions under hospitals' control? First, a bit of background: Readmissions are…

Classic Edition: The Moon is a Harsh Wossname

Yet another in today's series of reposts of articles about space policy. This is another old blog post from 2004, back when the Moon-and-Mars plan was first announced. As with the previous posts, any numbers or links in the post may be badly out of date, and there are some good comments at the original post that are worth reading. This installment contains my attempt at finding reasons why it wouldn't be completely idiotic to try to put a permanent base on the Moon. I'm not sure this was entirely successful, but it's worth a shot: It's a little foolish to attempt to comment on the merits of…

Attendance at religious services, but not religious devotion, predicts support for suicide attacks

When it comes to discussing suicide bombers, the controversial topic of religion is never far behind. Scholars and pundits have proposed several theories to explain why people would sacrifice their lives to take those of others, and conjectures about religious views seem easy to defend. After all, anthropologist Scott Atran estimated that since 2000, 70% of suicide attacks have been carried out by religious groups, and Islamic ones in particular. But for all the speculation, very few people have examined the supposed link between religion and suicide attacks with an objective scientific eye…

Lacking control drives false conclusions, conspiracy theories and superstitions

"Control - you must learn control!" These wise words were uttered by no less a sage than Yoda, and while he was talking about telekinetically hoisting spacecraft, having control has another important benefit. It protects a person from spotting false patterns that aren't there, from believing in conspiracies and from developing superstitions. Control and security are vital parts of our psychological well-being and it goes without saying that losing them can feel depressing or scary. As such, people have strategies for trying to regain a sense control even if it's a tenuous one. Jennifer…

What is the nonbeliever to make of death?

...the times have been, That, when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end; but now they rise again, --William Shakespeare Macbeth Act 3, Scene 4 PZ just drew my attention - again - to Dinesh D'Souza. Both PZ and I were a bit annoyed by his diatribe against atheists a couple of days ago. Unfortunately, D'Souza is not a man content to drink only once from that bottomless well of stupidity - he just keeps going back for more. Paul already took a few good shots at some of the more ethically impaired aspects of Dinesh's diatribe (for someone who is savaging atheism on behalf…

Another kind of agnosticism

I have delivered myself of all kinds of opinions about agnosticism in the past. One common refrain from (in this case, god) deniers is "Are you agnostic about X?", where X is some obviously non-existent object like Thor, fairies, or Republican environmental policies. And the answer to that is not simple. Why is it not simple? The answer comes in a recent book by Peter van Inwagen, a philosopher, which includes a chapter on "Philosophical Failures" (available from here as a PDF). van Inwagen suggests that philosophical argument is not between two disputants each of which holds an opposing…

Carmona, Former Surgeon General, Too Political?

href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/Carmona-CTAGlobalHealthdraft.pdf">This report (PDF 260KB file) is what set off the controversy over the former Surgeon General of the United States.  It is a draft report, entitled The Surgeon General’s Call to Action on Global Health 2006.  It was written by the former Surgeon General, Dr. href="http://www.hhs.gov/about/bios/sg.html">Richard Carmona. In this post, I will review the history of Dr. Carmona's service as Surgeon General, outline the controversy, and end with a discussion of of some recent criticism of the controversy…

Mystery pigs of tropical Asia, and capturing them on film

The increasing availability of automatic cameras (cameras set up to take photos on their own are known in the trade as camera traps) has been a great boon to field biologists, and to people interested generally in the documentation of obscure and elusive creatures. Many animals hardly ever photographed in living state have been documented by these tools, and quite a few taxa never photographed in living state at all have been captured by them too. A few examples of the latter include Lowe's servaline genet Genetta servalina lowei (camera-trapped in 2002, shown at the top of the adjacent…

Science Kids, Fictitious Forces, and Frictionless Surfaces

SteelyKid has started to demand Sid the Science Kid videos, which of course we are implacably opposed to around here. One of the recent episodes available online was "Slide to the Side," talking about friction. While this partakes a bit of the Feynman "Energy makes it go" problem, it was generally pretty good, and prompted a question from Kate that (combined with Rhett's latest. Kate and SteelyKid were talking about how friction keeps things from sliding, then Kate asked me whether it would be possible to keep anything at rest on a truly frictionless surface, due to the rotation of the Earth…

Suminia: Life in the Trees 260 Million Years Ago

Color-coded diagram of a small bone bed containing at least twelve individuals of the Permian synapsid Suminia. From Frobisch and Reisz (2009) When I hear the phrase "early human relative" I cannot help but think of an ape-like creature. Something like Sahelanthropus fits the bill nicely; it may not be a hominin but it is still a close relative from around the time that the first hominins evolved. That is why I was a bit puzzled to see MSNBC.com parroting a story written by the Discovery Channel which proclaimed "Early human relative predates even dinosaurs"! Was this another fossil that…

'Bloggers' vs 'Audience' is over? or, Will the word 'blogger' disappear?

The New Scientist, The Open Laboratory, the journos who just don't get it....those things make me want to write something on this blog! Slow blogging...like slow food. These days, if something cannot wait, I put it on Twitter - from which it automatically goes to FriendFeed and Facebook where I may or may not get feedback. But blog posts - those take some thinking. It may take days, or weeks (or never) for the idea to crystallize enough to deserve a blog post (and for me to find time to sit down and write it). So, I am coming back to this discussion now although all the other players have…

Mark Steyn can get fooled again

Last week the gullible Mark Steyn was busted by Media Watch for basing a column on Johnelle Bryant's crazy story about being visited by Mohammed Atta in early May 2000. She said that Atta threatened to cut her throat and wanted a loan to buy a crop duster. Unfortunately for her story, Atta wasn't in the country until June. And, as I wrote then: Strangely enough, Bryant did not tell anyone else at the time about Atta threatening to cut her throat. A normal person might guess that this was because she made the story up, but Steyn triumphantly concludes that the evilness that is multiculturalism…

Ontogenetic depth

One of the serious shortcomings of Intelligent Design is that it does nothing to provide any new or productive insights into the workings of biology. ID proponents seem to be at least vaguely aware of this failure, in that they do frequently claim to be thinking about working on a preliminary, tentative approach towards the beginnings of a potential research program (my paraphrase), but most of the effort has been directed towards political and legal enforcement of their ideas, rather than actually testing those ideas. One advantage of pursuing only legalisms is that they don't give…

Japan Nuclear Disaster Update 32: "Biggest Industrial Catastrophe in History"

In the old days this was easy. The power plants were melting down but no one knew what was going on inside them; Water was being poured in and cooking off as steam, and every now and then the way they were getting the water in or the way they were powering the pumps would change, or one of the containment buildings would blow up, or whatever. If you've been reading the last few Fukushima Updates, however, you'll know that things related to the crippled nuclear power plant have gotten more, not less complicated, which at first is counter-intuitive, but on reflection, expected. After all,…

The Revolution Will Not be Blogged, Either

There are a lot of inherent contradictions in my life - and for the most part, I stand with Emerson and his claim that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Periodically someone throws at my claims that we're going to have to radically reduce our fossil fuel usage "but you are writing this on a computer" as though the fact that there's an underlying hypocrisy to this that undermines my claims. And there is a kind of hypocrisy, in the adolescent sense of the term - but the reality is that it is impossible to live in this world and the one that is coming without being a…

Birds in the News 113

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Clark's Grebe, Aechmorphus clarkii, in the foreground with a Western Grebe, Aechmorphus occidentalis, behind. Both were photographed on the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge (north end of the Great Salt Lake) in the spring of 2005. Similar birds, but the field marks are straw-yellow bill (Clark's) cf. greenish-yellow bill (Western); white feathering around the eye (Clark's) cf black (Western), and whiter flanks on the Clark's Grebe. This pair of birds was hanging out together, and that was not unusual, making one wonder…