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Adam .... call me #SbSTRIKE

... or something. I'll be here, on strike. There appears to be a bit of a work action on Scienceblogs.com, and it appears that I'm going along with it. I'm doing this to make one point, and only one point. Before I make that point I want to make a few other comments. 1) Although I agree with many of the complaints of many of my colleagues regarding the Scienceblogs administrative responsiveness, especially when it comes to technical issues, I appear to be happier than the average Sbling in that I don't seem to be foaming at the mouth. I'm just ... interested in seeing things work better…

New Hominid Fossil from Tanzania

One of the most important evolutionary transitions in human prehistory was the rise of modern humans (Homo sapiens) from earlier hominids. A newly reported fossil from Tanzania provides an important new data point necessary to understand this transition. Homo erectus/ergaster probably gave rise to Homo sapiens (modern humans) somewhere in Africa. It is very likely that earlier hominids (H. erectus/ergaster) and later hominids (some sort of archaic H. sapiens) co-existed, and it is also the case that during this transitional period there would be individuals with either a mixture of traits…

Malnutrition in Iraq gets worse

UNICEF reports: Despite the laudable efforts of the Public Distribution System (PDS) of food baskets, many of Iraq's poorer households are still food insecure, according to a Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis launched today, based on the most recent data from 2005. ... Roger Wright, UNICEF's Special Representative for Iraq, lamented that children were confirmed as the major victims of food insecurity. "The chronic malnutrition rate of children in food insecure households was as high as 33 per cent, or one out of every three children malnourished," he stated. Chronic malnutrition…

The real truth about the Sasquatch

As a proud native of the great Pacific Northwest, when an article on one of our noblest creatures was mentioned to me, I had to read it. Here's the center of the story. In July 2005, nine residents of Teslin, Yukon, witnessed through a kitchen window a large bipedal animal moving through the brush. The next morning, they collected a tuft of coarse, dark hair and also observed a footprint measuring 43 cm in length and 11.5 cm in width. That's right: physical evidence, a footprint and hair, from…Bigfoot. The Sasquatch. A sample captured in the wild and brought into the lab. Pinned against the…

Joe Barton (R-Exxon) vs hockey stick

Chris Mooney reports on the latest attack on the hockey stick. Joe Barton, chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce has sent out a set of letters, supposedly "requesting information regarding global warming studies". However, if you look at the letters, you will find that the only study he is interested is Mann, Bradley and Hughes from way back in 1998 (the "hockey stick" study); and the questions are loaded ones of the form: "Can you explain why you made all the errors detailed in Mcintyre and McKitrick's Energy and Environment paper?" It is probably just a coincidence that Joe Barton…

Raw Story follows the money on Rachel Carson smears

The CEI has gone all out in its attacks on Rachel Carson. As well as their Rachel eats babies site, there have been pieces by CEI operatives John Berlau, Angela Logomasni, Jeremy Lott and Erin Wildermuth, and Iain Murray, all singing the same song about how Carson killed lots of people. Raw Story has been following the money: A Republican Senator who successfully prevented the US Senate from honoring the centennial of the birth of environmentalist and Silent Spring author Rachel Carson received campaign donations from a member of the board of directors of a group that sponsors pro-DDT…

John Tirman on Munro and Soros

John Tirman comments on Neil Munro's misconduct: One quick note about the Soros bugaboo. I commissioned L2. It was commissioned in Oct 2005, with internal funds from the Center for International Studies at MIT, of which I am executive director. The funds for public education (not the survey itself) came from the Open Society Institute in the following spring, long after things had started. Burnham did not know this (Roberts was not much involved at this point.) MIT was providing funds, that's all he knew or needed to know. There were other small donors involved too. I told this to Munro on…

CH3SH, H2S, DMS - Holy Allium, Batman!

200 scientists attended an international conference in Chicago this last week in order to sniff out the latest research on a ubiquitous health disorder. "We want to advance the science in this field," said Christine Wu, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who helped organize the conference. [The disorder] is neglected because it is not a disease that will kill people," she said in an interview. "But it's a huge problem. Everybody suffers from [the disorder] at one point in their lifetime." The treatments for this malady range from over-the-counter medicines to an overhaul…

Hydrogenosomes and the living matryoshka doll

My two great thesis project loves are hydrogen and symbiosis, and as such, the recent news of a multicellular organism that lives in a completely oxygen free environment and gets its energy from hydrogenosomes instead of mitochondria is totally fascinating. Hydrogenosomes are organelles that are evolutionarily related to mitochondria. Mitochondria generate energy for the cell by transferring electrons pulled off of sugars molecules to oxygen (this is why we breathe oxygen). The energy from this electron motion is transferred to the production of ATP, the energy currency of the cell, through…

More on Finnish population substructure

There's a new paper in the American Journal of Human Genetics following on from the paper on the genetics of metabolic traits that I posted on earlier in the week. This study explicitly focuses on the population structure of the Finns, and includes these maps showing the correlation between geography and genetics within Finland and related populations: (Image from Jakkula et al. (2008) The Genome-wide Patterns of Variation Expose Significant Substructure in a Founder Population The American Journal of Human Genetics, 83 (6), 787-794 DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.11.005) More details below the…

Oxford Spies on Students Via Facebook

Since it's suddenly all over the media that Oxford University is using Facebook to dig up dirt on students, here's the email that I received from the Oxford University Students Union (OUSU) yesterday: It has been brought to the attention of the Student Union that the Proctors have been using evidence gathered from Facebook for disciplinary matters. Specifically, photos from Post-Exam Celebrations on Merton Street have been sent to members of the University (including those already finished) as evidence of their being involved in "trashings". As such, we advise those of you with Facebook…

Arianna Huffington: "Disconnect From All Our Devices In Order to Reconnect"

Source. Media mogul Arianna Huffington was posed a provocative question: What if you ruled the world? Her answer will likely surprise you. Read on if you dare. From Prospect magazine: I would order the creation of a high-tech tool that forces us to disengage from our 24/7 connectivity. Why? "Knowledge has three degrees," wrote the third-century philosopher Plotinus, "opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second, dialectic; of the third, intuition." Our always-on culture has contributed much to the first two kinds of knowledge--science and…

More Friends, More Liberal?

Photo source. As you prepare for your New Year's celebration, here's something to consider: researchers have found that having more friends may play a role in whether you identify yourself as a liberal or a conservative. How did they determine this? The researchers studied a group of about 2,000 adolescents with different variants of the dopamine receptor ("allele 7R"). The dopamine receptors in our brain are associated with pleasure, cognition, memory, learning and fine motor control to name a few key functions, and the "allele 7R" has been linked to "novelty seeking behavior." They…

Extra, Extra

Science and Science Writing Colin Schultz has committed science blogging! Science bloggers link more often to original research than do mainstream journalists. Not surprising, but good to know there's empirical research. Hannah Waters of Culturing Science ponders the place of young science writers in the broader science writing ecosystem. And in response, some good reminders about the business of blogging for n00b bloggers or journos. (via @edyong209) As usual, another great piece from Bora in which he considers the relative benefits and consequences of being a part of a blogging cooperative…

Everything You Learned in Introductory Genetics Was Wrong

A few months ago, JP posted at GNXP that random mating is not necessary for Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE). One round of random mating is still sufficient to achieve HWE genotype frequencies, but there are some non-random mating strategies that will also allow for HWE. HWE is quite robust to violations of the assumptions. That makes it a poor test for things like natural selection, but it is commonly used to detect population structure. If you sample allele and genotype frequencies from a single population, the genotype frequencies should be in HWE. If, however, you sample from two separate…

Cave Bears More Carnivorous Than Previously Thought

From a University of Bristol Press Release: "Rather than being gentle giants, new research reveals that Pleistocene cave bears, a species which became extinct 20,000 years ago, ate both plants and animals and competed for food with the other contemporary large carnivores of the time such as hyaenas, lions, wolves, and our own human ancestors." Joao Zilhao, Professor in Palaeolithic Archaeology at the University of Bristol, Professor Erik Trinkaus of Washington University and colleagues in Europe made the discovery while dating the remains from Europe's earliest modern humans. Cave bears (…

Study Links Fresh Mars Gullies to Carbon Dioxide

View image The gullies on a Martian sand dune in this trio of images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter deceptively resemble features on Earth that are carved by streams of water. However, these gullies likely owe their existence to entirely different geological processes apparently related to the winter buildup of carbon-dioxide frost. Scientists at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., compared pairs of images from before and after changes in such dune gullies. They determined that the changes occur in Martian…

Why did the cold war really end?

Many people give credit to Ronald Reagan, when he climbed up on the Berlin Wall and personally kicked it down brick by brick while under fire from the East German Stasi. Many people give credit to Team USA, the Hockey Team that beat the USSR team at the Lake Placid Olympics. Still others credit various movies , books, or political revelations. But I tend to agree with what my father always said about this. In 1987, teenager Mathias Rust flew a tiny, unarmed rented Cessna from Helsinki to Moscow, landing very near to Red Square. The soviets never detected the aircraft. This demonstrated…

Cell size and scale

I learned about this from Aleks's Twitter feed. It's got a slider bar at the bottom that lets you move continuously from the scale of a coffee bean to the scale of a carbon atom. Beyond its inherent coolness, this display answers a question I asked last year: When I took science in 9th grade, I remember being disturbed by a gap in the story. From one direction, we were told about atoms and subatomic particles and how they clustered into molecules. From the other, we were told about cells--single-celled animals and single human cells, then multicelled animals, then larger things such as…

On the Trail of Physiology: Updates from Ohio

First stop on the trail of physiology this Fall is the University of Cincinnati where the Ohio Physiological Society held their annual meeting last week. Here are highlights from the meeting: The meeting opened with a seminar from Dr. Ernest M. Wright from the UCLA-David Geffen School of Medicine. His presentation was on the development of new treatments for diabetes using inhibitors of sodium glucose cotransporters (SGLT). In the kidney, these transporters are responsible for preventing glucose from being disposed of in the urine by returning it to the blood. So inhibiting these…

Lots of Links

There's a giant crater underneath Antartica! The collision that caused it may have also precipitated the Permian-Triassic extinction ... or perhaps not. Can't get to the overloaded Knox homepage to read the Colbert Commencement speech? Well then click here. MIT Cosmologist vs. Mus musculus. From Max Tegmark's homepage: According to the authoritative text on the subject, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, humans are the 3rd most intelligent species on Earth, superceded not only by dolphins but also by mice. This page provides evidence supporting that hypothesis, although it can be debated…

Just Science #3: Blue Smokers

From JAMSTEC, Chimney of "Blue Smoker" at a depth of 1470 m Just Science Entry #3 Hydrothermal vents appear from ruptures in the newly created basalt along mid-oceanic ridges. At fractures the surrounding cold water penetrates the crust and mix with red-hot basalt. This mixture emerges through three types of hot springs seafloor. In some cases the liquid simply emerges through a crack or crevice at temperatures ranging from a cool? 5-250 degrees C. At black smokers (270-380 degrees C) and white smokers (100-300 degrees C) the vent liquid is hotter The vent liquid emerges forming structures…

Is Enough Enough?

After what was a mild and low-snow start of the winter, the past few weeks in upstate New York have been nothing short of blanketing. The town of Redfield has just broken the all-time accumulation record for a lake effect snow event. They beat the old record of 127 inches recorded at Montague in 2001 with a total of 131 inches, or nearly 11 feet of snow. The event in question is perhaps better termed as non-stop lake effect ribbons of snow over the course of days. In the past few days these bands have been scarcely more than 20 miles wide, but they haven't moved much. Redfield is probably no…

New eruption at Sinabung in Indonesia

Sinabung on Sumatra erupting on August 29, 2010. Eruptions readers were quick on the news about the new eruption at Sinabung in Indonesia. There isn't much known about the eruptive history of the volcano - checking out the Global Volcanism Program, the last activity at Sinabung might have been an explosive event in 1881 with persistent fumaroles up until 1912. However, most news sources are quoting 400 years as the last known eruption of the volcano, apparently information from the Indonesian government. The eruption itself appears to be an ash-rich explosion with ash fall reported up to 30…

A pile of new volcano images

Sometimes it is hard to keep up with the mountain of remote sensing (or not so remote) images that get released on the internet. Over the last few days, the NASA Earth Observatory has released a bunch of images/videos of current eruptions, so I thought I'd round them all up here for you to peruse. Soufriere Hills releasing puffs of ash-and-steam on October 6, 2009. Image courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory. Four new images in the recent past: A nice, clear picture of an ash-and-steam plume from Rabaul in PNG was captured by the Terra satellite's MODIS imager on September 30, 2009. The…

More eruptions at Redoubt and Llaima

Today looks to be a doubleheader of volcano news: Redoubt Image courtesy of AVO/USGS, taken by Rick Wessels. An infrared image of the north slope of Redoubt showing the hot, new dome material and hot block & ash flows confined to the valley. At 11:30 AM yesterday, AVO put Redoubt back to Orange/Watch alert status after the volcano seem to settle down to small steam/ash plumes. Less than 12 hours later (at ~6:30 AM Alaska time), the volcano produced another large explosive eruption, sending an ash column up ~50,000 feet / 15 km and producing what seems to be a significant lahar that…

Post-Cretaceous Dinosaurs

New Geochronologic And Stratigraphic Evidence Confirms The Paleocene Age Of the Dinosaur-Bearing Ojo Alamo Sandstone And Animas Formation In The San Juan Basin, New Mexico and Colorado: ...An assemblage of 34 skeletal elements from a single hadrosaur, found in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the southern San Juan Basin, provided conclusive evidence that this assemblage could not have been reworked from underlying Cretaceous strata. In addition, geochemical studies of 15 vertebrate bones from the Paleocene Ojo Alamo Sandstone and 15 bone samples from the underlying Kirtland Formation of Late…

Selection & the innate immune system

Signatures of natural selection are not uniform across genes of innate immune system, but purifying selection is the dominant signature: We tested the opposing views concerning evolution of genes of the innate immune system that (i) being evolutionary ancient, the system may have been highly optimized by natural selection and therefore should be under purifying selection, and (ii) the system may be plastic and continuing to evolve under balancing selection. We have resequenced 12 important innate-immunity genes (CAMP, DEFA4, DEFA5, DEFA6, DEFB1, MBL2, and TLRs 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 9) in healthy…

I See Stupid People: the Evolution and Morality Edition

I might have more to say about the Delaware mini-pogrom later, but by way of Bartholomew's Notes on Religion, I found this bit of abject idiocy: Just two hours prior, while executive session was held, Bennett led nearly 100 spectators in song as they waited patiently for the news. ..."If these kids are taught evolution -- that they came from apes -- and they're not given the basis of faith, what's to stop them from acting like animals?" he said. "What's to stop them from acting like animals?" I dunno. How about doing your fucking job as a parent, and setting a good example? Not running…

Guess who the first leader of the Soviet Union was

The conventional wisdom is that it was Vladimir Lenin, but officers in our military have access to secret knowledge, thanks to Rick Warren: it was actually Charles Darwin. We learn this from one of those ghastly power point presentations the military churns up, this one from Air Force Chaplain Christian Biscotti, who argues that the way to prevent suicide is to throw away the facts. At least, that's the impression I get from the twisted history he serves up to justify his thesis, that Warren's vacuous little book provides the way to make troops combat ready. It might even be true, if turning…

Around the Web: The librarian tech skills gap, Bookless libraries and more

Considering the librarian tech skills gap Ten Easy Pieces on the Profession of Librarianship Nation's first bookless library on university campus is thriving at UTSA Conference Report: Beyond PDF 2 Opinions, Morals and What Science Could but Shouldn’t Tell Us Degrees of Certainty The Ethics of MOOCs The Brave New World of College Branding Journal’s Editorial Board Resigns in Protest of Publisher’s Policy Toward Authors On PyCon I Have a Few Things to Say About Adria If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, why are scientists from Earth? For Libraries, MOOCs Bring Uncertainty and…

The Buzz: Megafloods and Supervolcanoes: Oh, My!

Last weekend, some ultra-powerful movers, shakers, and carvers of our planet caught ScienceBloggers' attentions. First, researchers debated the potential for Mt. Saint Helens to form a supervolcano, an extraordinarily large volcano with the potential to cause massive wildlife destruction and devastating impacts on climate. Bloggers also discussed two megafloods: one that permanently separated Great Britain from continental Europe, and another that firmly established the topography, soils, and agriculture of the Pacific Northwest. While the Pleistocene epoch may not have been the most…

World Science

* Cleansing nuclear fallout from the body: A U.S. government scientist envisions purging the body of fallout with a compound from crab shells. * Gay men likelier to gamble addictively, study suggests: A small study may fuel a charged debate over why homosexuals, as growing evidence suggests, suffer addictions unusually often. * Saturn moon found to resemble Earth at life's birth: Hazy skies on early Earth, similar to those on Saturn's moon Titan, could have provided the ingredients for life, chemists say. * Mystery of sudden infant deaths may be solved: "Sudden infant death syndrome" results…

This is my next screensaver!

Thanks to The Science Pundit for alerting me to this amazing animation (now also for sale as screensaver): Secret Worlds: The Universe Within: View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe…

How long does it take to sequence an influenza virus?

...asked Joe. Answer: only a few days to sequence, clean up the data, and submit to NCBI. Seven H1N1 swine flu sequences are up (H/T Jonathan Eisen). I've not had a chance to crack anything open yet, but I hope to see some analysis from more of the genomics geeks soon...However, one bummer is that they don't have any from the Mexico cases available--and particularly, any sequence data from any of the fatal cases. These will be helpful to see if there are any point mutations that could possibly account for a virulence difference between the Mexican and US cases. (Unlikely, I'd guess,…

Bring on that Army of Inspectors!

Our friends from the WSJ recently endowed us with this bit of wisdom: Unsafe products are a fact of life. The U.S. has created its own share of food- and product-safety scares over the years, from E. coli-tainted spinach to faulty Bridgestone Firestone tires. Even the best inspection regime, whether government or private, will miss serious problems from time to time. But at the end of the day, the private market stands a better chance of protecting consumers than an army of government inspectors ever will. O RLY? Here's the type of product produced by the private market in China, where the…

Gender Trends in Science and Medical Writing

Karen Ventii, a former SciBling and now a science writer, wonders: As a medical writer, I've noticed that most medical writers I meet are female. A quick Google search using the keywordsâ "freelance medical writerâ" produced seven female and three male writers (approx. 2:1 ratio) from the first 10 eligible results.1 While it is difficult to draw statistically relevant conclusions from such a small sample size, it certainly implies a trend. The American Medical Writers Association is the leading professional organization for medical communicators, with over 5,500 members from around the world…

Around the Intertubes....

Scenes from the science fair Funerals Make Me Glad to Be an Atheist Laurie Garrett talks global health at U of Iowa Small Bodied Humans From Palau Chinese Water Torture Wheat and climate change The Quail and They can hide, but they won't run Democrats Are Losing Perspective Let's see, what to call this....OK, how about 'racist bullshit'? What alien can you make up? Sunday stroll: frozen puddles EEA 2008: Butterfly Conservation Ruby wants to know Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature John Edwards to endorse? Which candidate passes the moral test of our generation? A Responsible…

Blowing My Cover: On Film in NYC

tags: SciBlings I am sitting here at the main filming table at the SB get-together at this very monent, getting ready to expose myself on camera, watching Mr. "Thoughts from Kalifornia" (Traveling from Kansas) strip his clothing in preparation to moderate our table's discussion. The cameras are not yet running, but the antics associated with getting ready for the filming are more interesting than the actual filming .. maybe. I will try to write about this on my blog, live from my table, as the events unfold, or until my battery dies. RPM: Framing is full of shit. PZ: laughter. Later; RPM: I…

Looking for the lizard guts story?

Another bit of distortion from Ray Comfort: he claims now that I was asked to present the very best evidence for evolution, and that all I could come up with was some "little infolding of the gut". If you've come here from Comfort's ignorance zone, here are the details of the evolution of lizards of the genus Podarcis. What Comfort cannot comprehend is that there is no one absolute make-or-break piece of evidence for evolution — evolution is a conclusion from the totality of the evidence. There are thousands of cases that demonstrate that the principles of evolution work and are useful for…

A small eruption in Loki?!?

Mystery flashflood reveals new hydrothermal system and probable small subglacial eruption this week, or two, or three... Who the f#@k named a volcano Loki anyway... The other night there were some gentle rumblings on the west side of Vatnajökull Literally: small earthquakes and low frequency tremors characteristic of large volume fluid flows. Fögrufjöll (click to embiggen) From geographic.org This was right under "Hamarinn" - aka Loki - Fögrufjöll Hamarinn (click to embiggen) From vedur.is These are part of the complex of volcanic bumps and bits on Bárðarbunga, which is a ginormous…

microglobalization

Lobster market collapse! Gordon Brown to blame. Maine Lobster Crisis "...Faced with high fuel and bait prices, fishermen were able to keep their heads above water with the price at $4 a pound, but the international financial crisis has sent shock waves that were felt in a fault line running from Iceland through Maritime Canada to coastal Maine. The crisis in Maine is tied directly to the collapse of Icelandic banks which were key lenders to processors in Canada, according to Dane Somers, executive director of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council. Without ready credit from those banks,…

The Reason for this Holiday

tags: Martin Luther King, MLK, streaming video I am not religious in the least, but I admire Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I own his essential writings and speeches and it is my personal tradition to read a selection from them every year on this day. He is so eloquent and passionate that his words always inspire me. But even more than a writer, MLK's true genius was that he was a master orator, something that I think should never be forgotten. This short video from his last speech always amazes me. I'll share a few more clips from his speeches with you today, including one longer one that I…

Ohio Board of Education Faking Meeting Minutes?

According to my friends from Ohio Citizens for Science, Steve Rissing and Patricia Princehouse, in this article in the Akron newspaper. Patricia Princehouse, evolution advocate and professor at Case Western Reserve University, said the achievement committee didn't run behind schedule by accident. Princehouse said the committee ate up the two hours by rewriting minutes from July to remove from the public record any direct mention of intelligent design. Steve Rissing, an Ohio State University professor and evolution backer, said the changes in the minutes are significant. "The corrected…

Desperate Santorum Supporters and the Green Party

Sen. Rick Santorum has been consistently behind in the polls in his race against Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and it looks like they're getting really desperate. They're trying anything they can to siphon support from Casey, including helping the Green Party candidate, Carl Romanelli. Paul Kiel examined all of the political contributions given to Romanelli's campaign and found that every single one of them, except one donation from Romanelli himself, came from Republicans. And now the Pocono Record is reporting that several Santorum staffers have been helping Romanelli gather signatures for his…

Good Ol' Larry Fafarman

I'm sure you all remember Larry Fafarman, the hyper-litigious irrationality jockey who commented here for a while until I tired of his nonsense and banned him from commenting. He actually emailed me to complain about being banned and I told him if he didn't like it, start his own blog. I just got another email from him complaining that he keeps leaving comments and they don't show up on the blog. Uh, yeah, Larry. That's what banning means. He knew he was banned from commenting because he griped about it to me, but he's apparently still been leaving comments and wondering why they never show…

Subway Conversation

From Tor yesterday (and I translate): A short while ago I sat down in the subway beside a sixtyish lady, opened my backpack and got out a book titled From Frege to Gödel. A conversation ensued. "Oh my, that's a thick book! Is it maths?" (Tor sighs silently and pulls out his ear plugs.) "Yes, mathematical logic." "It's like a brick!" "Yeah, but you don't have to read it from cover to cover, it's an antholo..." "Have you read Wittgenstein's Taractus?" "The Tractatus? Well, bits and..." "When I am on the operating table, under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, Bertrand Russell keeps me…

Another Reader Gift

I am the lucky recipient of another completely unexpected gift from a reader. A reader from Texas named Jeff emailed me today and said he would like to send me a gift basket of authentic Texas BBQ from Cooper's Old Time Pit BBQ, one of the most famous and well reviewed BBQ joints in the nation. I don't know what all is included, but I'm sure there'll be some brisket, which is the heart and soul of Texas BBQ. I didn't start this blog to get rewarded like this, but I sure as hell ain't gonna say no to good BBQ! This is just a way to say thanks to Jeff for his generosity and thoughtfulness. Now…

Just for Fun

I think some of my readers will find this quite amusing. Over on In the Agora, the comments after a post about Bush's statement on teaching ID in schools has spawned about 100 entries. About half way down the discussion is joined by someone with the nickname "lawyerchik" and it really gets funny. She trotted out the old "2nd law of thermodynamics" argument and it went rapidly downhill from there. After getting hammered from piller to post, she declared victory. It's quite like the Black Knight from the Holy Grail as he got his limbs cut off but kept shouting, "It's just a flesh wound". Anyway…

Laws of Discourse?

Two more quick observations from last night's Wesley Clark event. Or, rather, one from the event, and one from dinner beforehand. Both strike me as fairly general principles about political discourse: 1) Your current political opinions are interesting in inverse proportion to the number of times you use the word "fascist" or variants thereof. Likewise "communist" and variants thereof. 2) A colleague observed at dinner that a really remarkable number of problems are, at their base, due to people failing to understand irony or metaphor. Or, in his more colorful phrasing, "People who can't…