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GVP Weekly Volcanic Activity Report for July 28-August 3, 2010

A new Weekly Volcanic Activity Report from the Smithsonian and USGS Global Volcanism Program! Highlights from this week's report include: Things are getting a little noisy in Colombia. I mentioned a few weeks ago about a possible explosion at Nevado del Ruiz. Now we have reports of increased seismicity under nearby Cerro MachÃn and ash plumes from Nevado del Huila. After a few centuries of relative quiet, it looks like the volcanoes of the Colombian Andes are looking more lively. Also in South America, a gas plume was spotted at Chile's Planchon-Peteroa. This is the second time this year…

Poetry from the front lines

Kareem Fahim reports from a rebel checkpoint outside of Tripoli: The people fleeing Tripoli on Thursday said that several neighborhoods filled with the sound of gunfire every night. At checkpoints throughout the capital, they said, paramilitaries from the dreaded Peopleâs Guard carried long lists of wanted men. The gas lines were five days long. The refugees say that Tripoliâs rebels defiantly paint their flags on anything that will spread their message, including pigeons, cats and balloons. That's an image I'd have expected more from a China Mieville novel than from war reportage, but it's…

Comments of the Week #63: From the heat death to black hole infall

"Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details." -Heraclitus This past week at Starts With A Bang put on quite a show, and you -- as always -- didn't disappoint. If you missed anything, here's what went on: Learning to chill (a guest post from Paul Halpern), Does a black hole have a shape? (a fascinating Astroquizzical from Jillian Scudder), Muons, relativity & a new record? (for Ask Ethan), Keep the Universe going (introducing our Patreon, for our Weekend Diversion), Sunsets from space (for Mostly Mute Monday), Pluto's unique moons, and What would…

Quote of the Day - the Opening Day Edition

Another gem from the West Wing - this time from the season finale from Season 3: TOBY: He's at the Yankee game right now? SAM: Local news covered it. He said this was how ordinary Americans got their entertainment. TOBY: I've been to 441 baseball games in Yankee Stadium. There's not a single person there who's ordinary.

Open Source College

Are there really open source colleges? Not really, but there are regular colleges that offer some degree of OpenSource learning. For instance, you can take a LOT of science courses from MIT, or Physics from Tufts, or Molecular Computing from Tokyo. Here is a list of OpenSource college opportunities. And if you want to brush up on your math, go here.

Read Happiness, Hear Happiness

Well I've been engrossed in reading books on happiness, now apparently Bob McDonald from CBC's Quirks & Quarks interviews leading researchers in the field, including Dan Gilbert. (from Daily Zeitgeist) Previously: Last happiness entry. NY Times review of Stumbling On Happiness. Dan Gilbert on Belief and Proof. Notes from a Seed Dinner (attended by Dan Gilbert). + photos on Stochastic.

Factoids of the Day

From the latest National Geographic cover story on malaria: "Some scientists estimate that one out of every two people who have ever lived have died of malaria." From the Times: "Last year, UPS cut 28 million miles from truck routes - saving roughly three million gallons of fuel - in good part by mapping routes that minimize left turns."

The 'Great bubalus' in ancient African rock art

While chasing up sivathere stuff, I got distracted. Sorry. Among the most spectacular of extinct bovids is the Plio-Pleistocene African form Pelorovis, famous for its gigantic curved horns. These can span 3 m in fossil skulls, and were certainly even longer in the living animal. Pelorovis was built rather like a gigantic, long-horned version of the living Cape buffalo Syncerus caffer, but differed from it in horn shape, in lacking the massive boss that Syncerus exhibits on its virtually conjoined horn bases, and in having a longer, lower, more antelope-like face. The type species for the…

Australasian big-eared bats, and how to (perhaps) single-handedly wipe out an entire species, 1890s-style (vesper bats part X)

About 12 species of big-eared Australasian bats are known as the, err, Australian big-eared bats and New Guinean bats. More formally, they are the Nyctophilus species. They're also known from some of the islands that surround New Guinea (like the Lesser Sundas), and also from New Caledonia (an endemic New Caledonian species, N. nebulosus, was named in 2002). Their presence has also been claimed for Fiji, but the evidence for this (based on specimens stored at the Natural History Museum in London) is inconclusive (J. E. Hill, in Parnaby 2002). Together with the New Guinea big-eared bat or…

Another "big" H5N1 science paper

Another "big" science story on the mutations in H5N1 that will a make it a pandemic strain. Same ending as the other stories. Not exactly. Some of the blame for this rests with the scientists who can't resist going beyond what's in the paper when talking to reporters. I understand. I've done it myself, probably, although I try not to. On the one hand there are scientific conventions that suppress over interpretation in the published report, even when there are plausible speculations about larger meanings. On the other hand, there is the natural tendency to please the reporter, who is not…

Vagrant birds and bird flu

I have professional colleagues who are dedicated birders but it has never interested me, and their interests are mainly independent of their lives as epidemiologists, toxicologists or whatever else they do at work. But the biosphere is truly interconnected in strange ways and sometimes what seems an unrelated realm intrudes itself front and center in a different context. Bird migration is a good example. How is bird flu spread? Is it human enabled movements of infected poultry or the rare bird trade? Or is it the "natural" movements of wild, migratory birds, the natural reservoir for the…

The Origin of HIV in the Americas

The mainstream media has been reporting on this paper (open access at PNAS) on the hunt for the origin of HIV in the Americas. The surprising result was the finding that HIV first came to the United States from Haiti (rather than the previous origin which was thought to be a flight attendant from Canada) between 1966 and 1972, and flew under the radar of public health authorities for over a decade. The infection, spread initially by heterosexuals from Haiti, went undetected from as early as 1966 until 1981 and then only because it had jumped into a highly susceptible population. This…

Three-layered shell of deep-sea snail could inspire next-gen body armour

Deep beneath the ocean's surface lie the "black smokers", undersea chimneys channelling superheated water from below the Earth's crust. Completely devoid of sunlight, they are some of the most extreme environments on the planet. Any creature that can survive their highly acidic water, scorching temperatures and crushing pressures still has to contend with assaults from predatory crabs. What better place, then, to look for the next generation of body armour technology? The scaly-foot gastropod (Crysomalion squamiferum) was discovered just 9 years ago at an Indian black smoker and it may have…

British birdfeeders split blackcaps into two genetically distinct groups

In the forests of Germany live large numbers of blackcaps, a small species of songbird. They all look very similar, but they actually belong to two genetically distinct groups that are becoming more disparate with time. For the moment, the best way to tell them apart is to wait for winter. As the cold sets in, one group of blackcaps flies southwest to Spain, while a smaller group heads northwest towards Britain. If the prospect of spending winter in Britain rather than Spain seems odd to you, you're not alone. Indeed, blackcaps were hardly ever ventured across these shores before the 1950s.…

One jump from chimps to humans - the origin of malaria

Swine flu has made the world all too aware of the possibility of diseases making the leap from animal hosts to human ones. Now, we know that another disease made a similar transition from chimpanzees to humans, several thousand years ago. This particular infection is caused by a parasite, and a very familiar and dangerous one - Plasmodium falciparum, the agent responsible for malaria.  Transmitted by the bite of mosquitoes, P.falciparum infects over 500 million people every year. Its closest relative is a related parasite, Plasmodium reichenowi, which infects chimpanzees. Leading an…

Retrocyclins: a defence against HIV, reawakened after 7 million years

HIV is an elusive adversary. The virus is so good at fooling the immune system that the quest for an HIV vaccine, or even a countermeasure to resist infections, has spanned two fruitless decades. But maybe a defence has been lurking in our genomes all this time. Nitya Venkataraman from the University of Central Florida has managed to reawaken a guardian gene that has been lying dormant in our genomes for 7 million years. These genes, known as retrocyclins, protect monkeys from HIV-like viruses. The hope is that by rousing them from their slumber, they could do the same for us. The technique…

Tree Climbing

Readers were busy this weekend, posting over fifty comments to my last post about HIV. Much of the discussion was sparked by the comments of a young-Earth creationist who claims that the evolutionary tree I presented was merely an example of microevolution, which--apparently--creationists have no trouble with. This claim, which has been around for a long time, holds that God created different "kinds" of plants and animals (and viruses, I guess), and since then these kinds have undergone minor changes, but have never become another "kind." Some readers expressed frustration that the comments…

Ancient shark was a shell-crushing giant

A restoration of the giant, durophagous shark Ptychodus, courtesy paleo-artist Matt Celeskey. The study of prehistoric sharks is no easy task. Specialists in other branches of vertebrate paleontology at least have the reasonable hope of discovering complete skeletons of their subjects; except in instances of exceptional preservation the scientists who study sharks typically only have teeth and a few vertebrae to work with. Still, you can tell a lot about a shark by its teeth, and a new study published in Cretaceous Research suggests that one peculiar form was a shell-crushing giant.…

Statistically Improbable Phrases in the Debate

From the href="http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/02/debate.transcript/">vice-Presidential debate. "building our embassy, also, in Jerusalem" "That world view that says that America is a nation of exceptionalism. And we are to be that shining city on a hill, as President Reagan so beautifully said, that we are a beacon of hope and that we are unapologetic here." "freedom is always just one generation away from extinction" All of these seemed just slightly out of place, as though part of a subtext that could be woven -- artfully, but not quite seamlessly -- into the main text…

A new species of Velociraptor

The type skull of Velociraptor mongoliensis. From Osborn, et al. 1924. By the summer of 1993 Velociraptor had become a household name. Although Deinonychus had long been my fleet-footed favorite the olive-green "clever girls" of Speilberg's film soon outshone all of their relatives and gave Tyrannosaurus a run for it's money.* Velocriaptor is hardly a new dinosaur, however. It was discovered during the famous expeditions to Mongolia made by the AMNH in the 1920's, the team setting out to find the "birthplace" of all mammals and coming back with loads of new dinosaurs. Velociraptor…

Details on "Nichollsia" borealis

The skeleton of "Nichollsia" borealis. The left forelimb and scapula were accidentally destroyed during excavation, but otherwise the skeleton was kept intact. From Druckenmiller & Russell 2008. Last week I mentioned that a very well-preserved Early Cretaceous plesiosaur named "Nichollsia" borealis* was recently described in the journal Palaeontographica Abteilung A, and one of the authors was kind enough to send a scan of the paper to me. What follows is a brief summary of the significance of the find. *I put the genus name in quotes as Nichollsia is occupied by an isopod, and a new…

Comments of the Week #138: from the time dimension to going beyond the Standard Model

“A thing may be of deeper impossibility than another, in the sense that you can be more deeply underwater–but whether you are five feet or five fathoms from the surface you are still all wet.” -Brian McGreevy It's been a spectacular week of investigating the Universe and our knowledge about it here at Starts With A Bang! There were a great many of you wondering about parallel Universes over the past month, and that's exactly -- in the context of quantum physics and cosmic inflation -- what this past month's Starts With A Bang podcast was on. Check it out! This past week also saw a fantastic…

Comments of the Week #125: from the Universe's age to impossible engines

"We meet aliens every day who have something to give us. They come in the form of people with different opinions." -William Shatner It’s been another big week here at Starts With A Bang, with stories covering the Universe near and far. Although the biggest announcements seemed to shatter our picture of how things are, this week was all about keeping it in perspective. There are lots of ideas -- good and bad -- floating around, but in the end, data and experiments will be the ultimate arbiter. Here’s what we've covered over the past week: How do we know the Universe is 13.8 billion years old…

Even more recently extinct, island dwelling crocodilians

In the previous post we looked at the small, island dwelling crocodilians of the south-west Pacific. I personally find it exciting that such animals were (in the case of at least some of the species) alive until just a few thousand years ago, that they were encountered by people, and that their remains have eluded detection until recent decades. The odds are high that further species await discovery. Here's another article that originally appeared at Tet Zoo ver 1. Before we get to the new stuff, here's something relevant to the mekosuchine article: a never-before-seen skull reconstruction…

Mesonychians part III: Andrewsarchus and the triisodontines

We saw in the previous article that Andrewsarchus, most 'famous' of mesonychians (even though it may well not be a member of this group), is not just a scaled-up Eocene wolf, but really something quite unusual. Indeed, it's so unusual that Szalay & Gould (1966) decided that it's worthy of its own group, Andrewsarchinae. In modern phylogenetic parlance, Andrewsarchinae is redundant, given that it's monotypic. However... here's where things become a bit more complicated... There's more than one species of Andrewsarchus, and what of Paratriisodon? In 1959, Chow described the new species…

How Facebook got us together

A year ago, almost none of my old school friends were on Facebook. Today, many are. Facebook statistics show that this past year has seen a huge influx of people, globally, of roughly my age who are not techies or bloggers, just normal people. Over the past 5-6 years, Facebook has evolved and changed quite a lot. Some of the best and most liked functionalities on Facebook right now are blatant copies of the best aspects of FriendFeed and Twitter and Flickr and YouTube and Dopplr and LinkedIn and other services (some of which are now already dead). As us oldsters are joining in great numbers…

Tyrannosaurus rex Protein Reveals Dinosaurs' Closest Relative: Birds

tags: researchblogging.org, Tyrannosaurus rex, dinosaurs, birds, fossils Repeated analysis of proteins from a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex reveal new evidence of a link between dinosaurs and birds: Of the seven reconstructed protein sequences, three were closely related to chickens. Image: NYTimes It was once thought impossible to obtain actual soft tissue, such as proteins, from fossils, but the impossible has happened and now, two research teams who published reports in this week's Science describe their findings: the closest relative to the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex is .. a chicken.…

Counting work-related injuries, disease and death among U.S. workers: Part 2

Les Skramstad was a good, decent man who died in January 2007 from mesothelioma at 70 years young. Mesothelioma is a rare cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Mr. Skramstad was a miner and laborer at the infamous vermiculite mine at Zonolite Mountain in Libby, Montana. Mr. Skramstad's death was clearly work-related, but when the Labor Department's annual census of work-related deaths was published the following year, reporting 5,488 fatal work injuries, his death was not included. As noted in Part 1 of this series, our nation's official count of work-related deaths is a census of fatal…

Discovering the Earth from Space: Top 10 Pictures from the ISS

"We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." -Bill Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut From hundreds of miles up, the International Space Station speeds around the Earth, completing 18 orbits a day, looking down on us and returning some absolutely fabulous images. Image credit: Fyodor Yurchikhin and the Russian Space Agency Press Services, of Greenland from the ISS. But what you may not appreciate is that my favorite images taken from the ISS weren't taken by American Astronaut Don Pettit (better known as @astro_Pettit), but rather by a…

Too Many Tornadoes

.. and another repost apropos our recent tornado activity: Marilee Thomas of Beaver City, Nebraska. And a tornado. [source] Mid-Americans ... Minnesotans, Texans, Nebraskans and denizens of Arkansas, and everyone in between, understand tornadoes, but to varying degrees. There are differences by region in how we deal with them. In Arkansas, I've seen foolish bravado. The tornado shelter there is known as the "fraidy hole" and having one or not in your back yard may be linked to one's sense of machismo. People from Missouri that I have known have a deep respect for tornadoes. An…

Dogs and devils - the rise of the contagious cancers

I'm away for the weekend so I thought that I'd repost an article from the old Wordpress blog. This is actually the first ever article I wrote for Not Exactly Rocket Science and I've updated it slightly to take more recent findings into account. I'm considering doing these reposts every Saturday, but let me know whether you're keen on the idea. Cancer cells are, for all intents and purposes, immortal. Having broken free of the rules and strictures that govern other cells, they are free to grow and divide as they please. In a short space of time, a lone cancer cell can form a mass of…

Single gene allows glowing bacteria to switch from fish to squid

The Japanese pinecone fish searches for food with living headlights. This ÂÂhand-sized fish harbours colonies of light-producing bacteria in two organs on its lower jaw. The beams from these organs shine forward, and when night falls and the fish goes searching for food, its jaw-lamps light the way. Elsewhere in the Pacific Ocean, the Hawaiian bobtail squid also uses luminous bacteria, but theirs act as a cloaking device. They produce a dim glow that matches the strength of moonlight from above, hiding the squid's silhouette from hungry fish below. It's a mutual relationship; the squid gets…

The Fearsome Short-Faced Bear Gets a Makeover

A grizzly bear (the black dot in the middle of the photo) walking near the treeline in Yellowstone's Hayden Valley. The quiet of my evening wildlife watching was suddenly broken by a thick Boston accent. "Oh my gawd! Look! It's a grizz! That's the last animal I needed to see! It's a grizz!" He was right. Lumbering across the valley was a big dark shape that could only be a bear. It was not very close, being little more than a dot moving along the distant treeline, but through the zoom lens of my camera it was just possible to make out the hump that distinguishes black bears from grizzly…

Too Many Tornadoes

Marilee Thomas of Beaver City, Nebraska. And a tornado. [source] Mid-Americans ... Minnesotans, Texans, Nebraskans and denizens of Arkansas, and everyone in between, understand tornadoes, but to varying degrees. There are differences by region in how we deal with them. In Arkansas, I've seen foolish bravado. The tornado shelter there is known as the "fraidy hole" and having one or not in your back yard may be linked to one's sense of machismo. People from Missouri that I have known have a deep respect for tornadoes. An example: A few years back there was a talk being given at The U…

Eyjafjallajokull Update for 3/22/2010

The steam-and-ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland, March 22, 2010. Overnight, the Eyjafjallajokull eruption in Iceland added to its oeuvre, producing what is being reported to be a 8-km plume. Images of the plume (above) suggest (to me) that it is very water-rich, so likely this is the expanding(?) fissure interacting with snow, ice or groundwater, producing steam explosions. These explosions have some minor ash component to them, mostly from the shattering of rapidly cooled lava, but are dominated by steam. The eruption appears to be continuing into its third day unabated. Flights…

The Heart(land) of the Denial Campaign

Someone has leaked a treasure trove of insider documents from the Heartland Institute, which until now has been a major source of climate change obfuscation in the U.S. There's plenty of illuminating information to chew on, including detailed budgets and an IRS 990 form. Shades of "climategate" reversed? Much is being made of one line from a strategy document, a line that could easily be the result of sloppy editing, or at perhaps a Freudian slip. Or maybe not. Here's the entire paragraph, with the offending phrase in bold: Development of our "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms"…

Does H5N1 spread from cats to dogs and vice versa?

The host range of H5N1 is impressive: birds, of course; but also many mammals, including dogs, cats, stone martens, ferrets, mice, rats, humans. There are undoubtedly others. Cats are probably infected when they eat infected birds. Dogs? Not clear. Humans? Birds, other people on rare occasions. What else? In fact we know incredibly little about how various hosts are infected. Do cats spread it from cat to cat and dogs, dog to dog? How about cats spreading it to dogs and vice versa? Of course dogs to humans or cats to humans is an important topic. So it's good to see some studies looking at…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Evolution Of Symbiosis: The aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum depends on a bacterial symbiont, Buchnera aphidicola, for amino acids it can't get from plants. The aphid, in turn, provides the bacterium with energy and carbon as well as shelter inside specialized cells. Such interdependent relationships are not unusual in the natural world. What is unusual, report Helen Dunbar, Nancy Moran, and colleagues in a new study published this week in the open access journal PLoS Biology, is that a single point mutation in Buchnera's genome can have consequences for its aphid partner that are sometimes…

Explosion at NC ConAgra meat plant

Updated below (6/13/09) The Associated Press and other news sources are reporting on an explosion today at a meat processing facility in Garner, NC.  Four workers are missing, at least 41 are injured, including several with very severe burns.  One worker reports: "I was picking up a piece of meat off the line and I felt it, the percussion [force of explosion] in my chest.  One of the guys I was working with got blown back, he flew backwards." A local news source WRAL.com reports the explosion: "...caved in parts of the roof, sparked fires and caused an ammonia leak.  ...Many [workers]…

lonely black holes of the cosmos

There have been several interesting candidates for binary supermassive black holes found recently. New data suggests one of the recently announced candidates is probably not a binary. A recent press release from NOAO suggested that SDSS J153636.22+044127.0 might be a close binary supermassive black hole. (Nature paper here, subscription required). The object was picked from the Sload Digital Sky Survey catalog of active galactic nuclei based on its extreme spectral properties. click to embiggen The observation was of a double peaked broad emission line spectrum, and Todd and Tod suggested…

House Republican Appropriators don't think coal miners need protection from black lung disease

Congressman Denny Rehberg (R-MT) and his Republican members of the House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Labor Department don't think coal miner deserve better protection from black lung disease. In their FY 2012 appopriations bill they would prohibit the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) from using any funds to develop, promulgate, enforce or otherwise implement a new rule to protect miners from exposure respirable coal dust. (See page 36 in the bill.) This is a rule that has been in the works since at least 1996 when a federal advisory committee made…

Balko on the Encroaching Nanny State

Here are three items, all found via Radley Balko's blog and all dealing with government overreach. The first is from Chicago, where a group of chefs is suing the city council to reverse a city-wide ban on serving foie gras at restaurants. I don't know that they'll win the lawsuit. The grounds on which they're arguing it don't seem terribly compelling, at least if this report is accurate (it says they're claiming that since the foie gras is produced in France or Canada, it's not up to Chicago to regulate it - that's a pretty weak argument). But I'm glad to see someone standing up to the city…

The Pip: Future Comic-Book Movie Screenwriter

The Pip is in a big superhero phase at the moment, and all of his games revolve around being a superhero of some sort. He has also basically memorized a couple of 30-page Justice League books, after demanding them over and over at bedtime. As I did with SteelyKid, I make a game out of reading the wrong words from time to time, and as a result, he can now "read" at least two books all the way through, as you can see from this cell-phone video shot at bedtime: His superhero pretend games have the bizarre inventiveness you expect from a pre-schooler, mixing and matching from all the various…

Five Questions for Private Astronauts!

Homer: Hello, is this NASA? Scientist: Yes? Homer: Good! Listen, I'm sick of your boring space launches. Now I'm just an ordinary, blue-collar slob, but I know what I likes on TV. Scientist: How did you get this number? Homer: Shut up! And another thing, how come I can't get no Tang 'round here? -The Simpsons, Episode Deep Space Homer Last week, I told you that Starts With A Bang has been put into the lucky position to ask the first group of private/commercial astronauts anything! And the response I got was absolutely wonderful! I think this is a big deal, because NASA isn't going to be the…

How to Lie With Statistics

Did you watch the big hearing in Congress the other day? Congressional Republicans, having failed completely with their plan of holding their breath until the Democrats and Obama agreed to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood, had to settle for the consolation prize. They hauled up Cecile Richards, PP's president, so they could browbeat her for five hours. If you watch any five minute segment of it you will have seen the whole thing. The Republicans asked one stupid, mendacious question after another, and then cut Richards off the second she tried to answer. I'm sure the crazies loved…

lol, WUT?

This is, quite possibly, the biggest science journalism fail in the history of ever. IN THE HISTORY OF EVER. *heavy sigh* OKAY, when we discover new drugs and antivirals and such, we usually dont build these pharmaceuticals from scratch. We steal them from evolution, and try to make them *better* for *our* purposes in the lab-- modify them, concentrate them, purify them, until we have a new drug. You dont go suck on a tree if you have a headache-- you pop a couple aspirin. You dont get a prescription for moldy bread when you have a sinus infection-- you pop a couple antibiotics. We are…

Lott cooks some more statistics

A while ago I wrote how Lott had seriously misrepresented NCVS data and given dangerous advice when he claimed that in robberies and assaults passive behaviour "is by far the most likely to result in injury". Lott has now posted a response where he falsifies a table in an attempt to prove his point. Here's the table Lott posted to support his claim: Percent Injured after Self Protection Action   Robbery Assault Any SP with gun 7.7% 3.6% Chased, tried to catch O 9.6% 9.0% Ran/drove away; tried to 4.9% 5.4% Screamed from pain, fear 22.0% 12.6% Threatened O without…

The climate change boycott gambit

What's better for a book and its author: good reviews or a threat of a boycott of the publisher? Today I received an email from one Gavin Bower of Quartet Books of London, a publisher with a respectable history of daring to handle works that no one else was willing to touch. The Joy of Sex in 1973, for example. I've never heard from Bower or Quartet before, but for some reason I'm on their media contact list. The subject: a blog post from Quartet's publisher decrying an alleged "orchestrated boycott" from environmental fundamentalists upset that Quartet has published climate change…

Isle Royale Travelogue Day 4: Rock Harbour to Lookout Louise, and return

This is another excerpt from our travel journal to Isle Royale. The first day is here; second day here; third day is here. Photos by me, text by my husband. Wednesday May 28 Rock Harbour to Lookout Louise, and return So let me digress to the future again. [What was going on again? Oh yeah.] I write today from the point of Raspberry Island, looking out over the big lake, having just practiced Alice and my Rule #1: everything tastes better outside. The writing is better outside too - a good view, a comfortable rock, and a warm sun to heat my toes, still a bit chilled from wading in the…

Who Will Win Control of Congress In November? Statisticians Make a Prediction

If you're not reading the Columbia University stats blog, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, you're missing a lot of great stuff. For example, today's post by Andrew Gelman discusses the paper "Forecasting House Seats from Generic Congressional Polls" by Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezian. From the paper: This paper is intended to provide some guidance for translating the results of generic congressional polls into the election outcome.1 Via computer simulation based on statistical analysis of historical data, we show how generic vote polls can be used to forecast the…