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Comments of the Week #34: From fresh forests to the cosmic woods

"There is no secret ingredient. It's just you." -Po, Kung-Fu Panda Each week at Starts With A Bang brings a fresh set of topics from around the Universe -- near and far, large and small, concrete and abstract -- for us to think about. This week has been a splendid example, with new articles on such diverse topics as: Double the flame; half the time? (for Ask Ethan), The forest man of India (for our Weekend Diversion), Messier's final galaxy, M110 (for Messier Monday), Ghostly physics (from contributor Paul Halpern), Into the woods (from science communicator Brian Koberlein), What is the…

Unique Fossils Record the Dining Habits of Ancient Sharks

A photograph and line drawing (left side) of the fossil dolphin Astadelphis gastaldii. The crescent-shaped line in the line drawing represents the bite of a large shark, with the red portions representing damage done directly to the bone. From Bianucci et al, 2010. Shark attacks are events of speed and violence. When they have locked on to a prey item sharks seem to come out of nowhere, and though they can be quite gentle with their jaws (as on occasions when they are unsure about whether something is food or not) their ranks of serrated teeth can inflict a devastating amount of damage.…

Valuable Microbiological Archive Destroyed

Because of bureaucratic infighting, a valuable repository of microbiological specimens spanning over twenty years of collection was destroyed. Researchers, including the Mad Biologist, want to know why (italics mine); you can sign the petition here: Scientists Call for Inquiry into Destruction of Microbes in VA Special Pathogens Laboratory 233 scientists and physician researchers from 27 countries have collectively expressed outrage over the destruction of an irreplaceable collection of microbes numbering in the thousands. The collection included Legionella bacteria (the cause of…

The Ivy-Goldman Sachs Pipeline and the Ethical Failure of Elite Institutions

(from here) A while ago, Ezra Klein posted an interview with an anonymous Harvard graduate who works for Goldman Sachs ("Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street?"). Before I get to the interview, I'll answer the question--and it might not be what you think it is. Ultimately, students from elite colleges have been trained (and, yes, I'm using the same word one uses for a dog) to jump through hoops that authority figures set for them. These are not "the road less travelled" types. Their entire lives, from kindergarten on, are focused on getting to the next round, the next level. Throughout…

Historical lessons from 1918 reviewed by IOM

We continue our summary of the Institute of Medicine "Letter Report" on non-drug non-vaccine measures to slow or contain the spread of an influenza pandemic of a severity similar or worse than that of 1918 (see previous post on models here). The IOM report examined several analyses of historical data from 1918 to see if it was possible to obtain information on the effectiveness interventions on the pattern of outbreaks in various cities in the US. It is well known that both timing and severity varied a great deal in that pandemic. The goal was to see if differences in morbidity and mortality…

More on H1 and H3 influenza

The other day we observed that through week 51 of 2006 (two weeks ago) flu activity in the US looked about "normal" except for the dominance among subtyped isolates of H1 influenza instead of the more usual H3. I began to wonder how common or uncommon this was and have done a little digging, but haven't found all the information I am looking for yet concerning the relative dominance of H3 versus H1 in the years since 1977, which is when H1 made its reappearance. Data on CDC's flu activity website regarding subtypes only goes back to 2000 - 2001 (at last that I could find), and that is also…

Occupational Health News Roundup

The U.S. Supreme Court released two big decisions yesterday. The first, which you’ve probably heard about, ruled that for-profit companies can deny female employees insurance coverage for birth control if it conflicts with their religious beliefs. (For more on the potential consequences of this outrageous and offensive decision, read this great piece in Slate. Also, since this is the Occupational Health News Roundup, it bears mentioning that in her dissent, Justice Ginsburg noted that the cost of an IUD is about a month’s full-time pay for a worker earning minimum wage.) But in addition to…

Finding Λ - Nobel Prize in Physics for Cosmological Constant

Congratulations to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt for the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 for the observations of the acceleration of the Universe. The prize is specifically for a series of papers, beginning in 1998, measuring the redshift and luminosity distance of a sample of type Ia supernovae, independently by two teams, and showing that, combined with other known constraints, the result was consistent with a Hubble constant that was increasing in the recent past, and therefore an accelerating universe. ΩΛ from SCP> "Measurements of Omega and Lambda from 42 High-Redshift…

Salon Investigates the Dark Side of Coming Home

Last week, Salon.com published a disturbing in-depth series, called âComing Home,â about the tragic consequences of the Armyâs inability to provide adequate care to soldiers returning from Iraq. Focusing on just one base â Fort Carson, Colorado â they found the following: Salon put together a sample of 25 suicides, prescription overdoses and murders among soldiers at Colorado's Fort Carson since 2004. Intensive study of 10 of those cases exposed a pattern of preventable deaths, meaning a suicide or murder might have been avoided if the Army had better handled the predictable, well-known…

Wait, the infamous “Black Death” still plagues the United States?

This is the eighth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Michelle Formanek.  For many of us in the scientific world, particularly budding infectious disease epidemiologists like myself, the Plague (or, more dramatically, the “Black Death”) is a prime example of the rapid and devastating spread of an infectious disease. So devastating, in fact, that it wiped out nearly one-third of the population in Europe in the mid-1300’s. That’s roughly equal to 25 million people. It then persisted and has caused various outbreaks throughout history, most notably the Great Plague of London in which 1 in 5…

Historical lessons from 1918 reviewed by IOM

by Revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure We continue our summary of the Institute of Medicine "Letter Report" on non-drug non-vaccine measures to slow or contain the spread of an influenza pandemic of a severity similar or worse than that of 1918 (see previous post on models here). The IOM report examined several analyses of historical data from 1918 to see if it was possible to obtain information on the effectiveness interventions on the pattern of outbreaks in various cities in the US. It is well known that both timing and severity varied a great deal in that pandemic. The goal was to see…

Emerging Disease and Zoonoses #17--How now, mad cow

People make terrible jokes about "mad cow" disease. ("Why is PMS called PMS? Because mad cow was already taken.") Pundits use it as an example of an over-hyped disease (and to be fair, estimates of total cases due to the consumption of contaminated beef in the UK have varied widely, ranging from a few thousand up to well over 100,000). Vegetarians note it as one benefit that comes from their soyburgers. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion. So-called "mad cow" disease, in humans, is a progressive neurological disorder more correctly called variant Creuzfield-Jacob disease (vCJD).…

The Tet Zoo guide to rhynchosaurs, part II

In the previous rhynchosaur article we introduced these remarkable Triassic reptiles [adjacent Hyperodapedon restoration from wikipedia]. Their amazing, specialised jaws and teeth were mentioned and discussed in passing, but I skimped on the details. Make yourself some strong coffee and be sure you're not sitting in a comfortable chair, as here's where the going gets heavy. It's a story of shearing jaws, expanding tooth fields, and maxillary grooves... Both the maxilla and dentary in rhynchosaurs possessed more than one row of teeth. You should imagine the occlusal surfaces of these bones as…

Chinese black rhinos and deinotheres, giant sengis, and yet more new lemurs

As explained in the previous article, here's another by-now-outdated effort to report on stuff that's been published recently, or recently-ish. This time: mammals. Several neat new fossil mammal discoveries have gone unreported in the press so far as I can tell. Deng & Qiu (2007) recently reported the first black rhino - that is, a member of the genus Diceros - from eastern Asia. Similar to the extant black rhino D. bicornis in size, the Chinese animal is from the Late Miocene Liushu Formation of Gansu Province and has been named D. gansuensis. The Liushu Formation has also recently…

Survivors, diggers, herbivores, first giant terrestrial vertebrates: the caseids

Among the many, many groups I have yet to cover on Tet Zoo are stem-group synapsids: Synapsida is the tetrapod clade that includes mammals and all of their relatives, and there is a long tradition of referring to non-mammalian synapsids as 'mammal-like reptiles' (other names include protomammals and paramammals). Because synapsids are not part of Reptilia*, referring to them as 'mammal-like reptiles' is both technically incorrect and misleading, hence the push to use their proper name. * Reptilia and Synapsida are sister-taxa within the tetrapod clade Amniota. The photo here was provided by…

Troodontids and owls: oh, the irony (part I)

Apologies if you're here for the vampires. I'll come back to them soon, I promise, but in the meantime I got distracted... Some biologists - and scientists from other fields - have been quite critical of the fact that people speculate, and speculate, and speculate about dinosaurs (and by 'people' I don't necessarily mean palaeontologists, as in fact most technical palaeontological literature is appropriately dry, boring and conservative). But let's be fair: how can anyone not try to imagine what these animals were like when they were alive? I will also say that informed (note: informed)…

Remembering Dan Middaugh on this Worker Memorial Day

"Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living" was the rallying cry of community organizer Mother Jones (a.k.a. Mary Harris Jones, 1837-1930) to fire up workers as they demanded better working conditions and labor rights. The motto still resonates today, especially this week when workers, human rights, and public health advocates commemorate International Worker Memorial Day. Hazards magazine offers a list of events scheduled across the globe and the AFL-CIO provides a list of activities here in the U.S., as does the victims' support group United Support and Memorial for Workplace…

March 1979 Washington Post: “Some Hair Dryers Give Off Asbestos”

Last month, my circa 1980 hand-held hair dryer finally gave out. It was a Christmas present during my first year in college. The motor on the cream-colored Conair didn’t exactly fail, but I had to jiggle the electrical cord in just the right way or it wouldn’t turn on. I bought a new one, and my old one went into the garbage can. But after reading a paper in the latest issue of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health (IJOEH), I sort of wish I’d kept it. I knew I had an appliance relic on my hands, but now I’m curious to know whether it contained asbestos. James…

Wait until the creationists try to wrap their little minds around artificial life … oops, too late

Here's some exciting news: Artificial life likely in 3 to 10 years. It is exciting but not surprising at all — but of course we're going to be able to assemble entirely artificial life forms soon. It's just a particularly complicated kind of chemistry, and it's more of a deep technical problem than anything else. I wouldn't be quite so specific about the date — there are also all kinds of surprises that could pop up — but I'm optimistic, and I think the overall assertion is supported by the increasing rate of accomplishment in the field. But of course, in addition to the usual suggestions…

America's Christian Colonies

Whenever you see a religious right apologist claiming that America was founded as a "Christian nation", you inevitably find them defining the nation not from the point it was founded - the time of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - but from the time of the colonies that were still ruled by England. In particular, they like to point to documents like the Mayflower Compact and the charters of the various colonies, all of whom had official established churches, as proof that we were indeed founded as a Christian nation. The National Reform Association, which has been around…

Global Day of Overshoot

August 13th was Earth Overshoot Day. The correct date, if calculated precisely, would come earlier and earlier each year, the current choice is just an approximation. This year, the year 2015, by sometime around August 13th, humanity had consumed as much of what we require from the lands and seas as our planet can sustainabley provide in an entire year. That is another way of expressing the fact that at current consumption rates, humanity requires 1.6 planet earth's worth of fruits and vegetables, meat, fish, wood and other organic materials. It is a remarkable annual deficit, and if it is…

Can'tcun

I largely ignored Copenhagen (the conference, not the city, I hasten to add: very nice place I'm sure and I mean no disrespect) and chose instead to push for Carbon Tax Now, though I felt obliged to read a little bit of what they had to say. But now we have Cancun. What to say about that, other than rather unoriginal puns? Nothing but the obvious really: it was a total failure and it would have been better if it had never occurred. Cancun was the triumph of the negotiator-class: the parasites encouraged by all the process: yet another waste-of-time conference designed purely to generate…

Evolution vs. Lit Crit. (Part Two)

We continue now with our discussion of Brian Boyd's article, “Getting it All Wrong,” from the Autumn 2006 issue of The American Scholar. Click here for Part One. We have already seen Boyd's characterization of modern literary criticism as resting on two pillars: Anti-foundationalism and difference. The former refers to the lack of a secure foundation for knowledge, while the latter refers to the lack of universals in human culture. In discussing anti-founationalism, Boyd provides the following excellent summary fo the merits of science: Human minds are as they are because they evolved…

How to reach the outer solar system

"Even in hindsight, I would not change one whit of the Voyager experience. Dreams and sweat carried it off. But most of all, its legacy makes us all Earth travelers among the stars." -Charley Kohlhase In the early days of space exploration, it was quite a feat just to get up and out of Earth's atmosphere. There's are two good, simple reason for that, of course: first, it takes a lot of energy to go up that high... Image credit: Nathan Bergey of http://psas.pdx.edu/orbit_intro/. and second, if you don't get your spacecraft moving really fast, you're just going to fall back to Earth once you…

Asteroid #2 down; on to Asteroid #1!

"I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to the public." -Giuseppe Piazzi, discoverer of Ceres, the first Asteroid Out beyond Mars, but not quite out as far as Jupiter, a collection of thousands of rocky objects, ranging in size from pebbles all the way up to the size of Texas, lies the asteroid belt. Image credit: David Minton and Renu…

Has #Ebola Death Toll Surpassed Malaria in West Africa?

In the earlier days of the West African Ebola outbreak, it was not uncommon to hear people note that we should not panic about Ebola because, after all, far more people are killed from Malaria than Ebola. This is of course an irrelevant argument. That is like telling a person who has lost their family in a tragic airplane accident that it isn't so bad because, after all, far more people die in car crashes than aircraft crashes. For example, on August 5th, James Bell write in the Guardian, in a piece called Concerned about Ebola? You’re worrying about the wrong disease: Since the Ebola…

How do we use the CMB to learn about the Universe?

The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what no body yet has thought about that which everyone sees. -Arthur Schopenhauer Most of you who've been reading Starts With A Bang for a while have seen this picture come up many, many times. Why do I keep putting it up, and why is it so important? Let's go back to the 1960s for a little bit. Back then, there were two major rival theories about the origin of the Universe: the Big Bang theory and the Steady-State model of the Universe. The Big Bang contended that the Universe was hotter and denser in the past, and thus of…

The Quantum Universe by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

So, this is the new book from the authors of Why Does E=mc2?, covering quantum mechanics in a roughly similar manner. This book, or, rather, Brian Cox talking about some material from this book, created a bit of controversy recently, as previously discussed. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play? The big hook here is that they set out to discuss quantum mechanics for a popular audience using a Feynman-type picture from the very beginning. This is an intriguing idea, and sort of appealing in the same basic way that Sakurai's famous graduate text in quantum mechanics and…

Stem cell breakthrough

A recent discovery in stem cell research is no minor event: researchers have figured out how to reprogram adult cells into a state that is nearly indistinguishable from that of embryonic, pluripotent stem cells. This is huge news that promises to accelerate the pace of research in the field. The problem has always been that cells exist in distinct states. A skin cell, for instance, has one set of genes essential for its specific function activated, and other sets of genes turned off; an egg cell has different patterns of gene activation and inactivation. Just taking the DNA from a skin cell…

Hobbits and Prime Ministers: The Physics of Doors

Over at Tor.com, Kate has begun a chapter-by-chapter re-read of The Hobbit, and has some thoughts on Chapter 1. It's full of interesting commentary about characters and literary technique, but let's get right to the important bit: Physics! Kate mentions in passing in the post that the Hobbit style round door with a knob in the middle seems a suboptimal design choice, however pretty it may look once Peter Jackson's set designers get done with it. This draws a couple of comments noting that the doorknob-in-the-middle thing is an English affectation, and pointing to the Prime Minister's…

Peter Irons makes Billy Dembski cry

Peter Irons has again been having way too much fun with creationist shenanigans. Irons, you may recall, is a hot shot west coast lawyer who had a grand time with the Pivar situation, and has lately been nudging Dembski on the case of his misuse of the Harvard/XVIVO animation. Would you believe that Bill Dembski went crying to his lawyer because Irons was making him miserable? The email exchange is below the fold. John Gilmore is the St Paul lawyer who defended Dembski in the recent Baylor flap, and he does seem to have rather more sense than his client. First, here's the email from Dembski to…

When the Universe was twice as hot

“Hell must be isothermal; for otherwise the resident engineers and physical chemists (of which there must be some) could set up a heat engine to run a refrigerator to cool off a portion of their surroundings to any desired temperature.” -Henry Albert Ben One of the most amazing ideas to come out of our observations of the Universe over the last century is that our vast, star-filled, mostly-empty Universe hasn't always been like this. Image credit: Ricky Barnard / Fine Art America. Today, the Universe is very cold, expanding, and the average distance between galaxies is increasing as time…

Big East Basketball Preview

Some time back, I offered the right to pick a post topic to anyone who managed to name one of the Physics Nobel laureates for 2006. Tom Renbarger won, and picked his topic: OK, with Midnight Madness on the horizon, I've decided to request a sort of season preview of two (trying to press my advantage since I got two names) of the following three conferences: A-10, plus one of the Big East or ACC. Or, if you get on a roll, all three. If you're pressed for time, the A-10 would suffice, and maybe something about Maryland. :-) I've already talked about the ACC, and in this post, I'll take up the…

The Carnival of Evolution #3

Welcome to the Third Edition of the Carnival of Evolution. The previous edition of this web log 'carnival of the vanities' was at Jason Rosenhouse's Evolution Blog. The next edition will be written by Mike (TUIBG) and hosted here, at Clashing Cultures. Please submit your web posts on Evolution for the next carnival, which is slated for Mid October! Use this handy dandy submission form. And now, on with the show: Newly reconstructed Neanderthal female. (View larger image) A Very Remote Period Indeed presents Fear and Loathing in the Pleistocene. "... [the] narrator announces "Today,…

Cassini Pinpoints Source of Jets on Saturn's Moon Enceladus

This sweeping mosaic of Saturn's moon Enceladus provides broad regional context for the ultra-sharp, close-up views NASA's Cassini spacecraft acquired minutes earlier, during its flyby on Aug. 11, 2008. See PIA11114 and PIA11113 for the higher resolution views. This false-color mosaic combines Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) narrow-angle camera images obtained through ultraviolet, green, and near-infrared camera filters. Areas that are greenish in appearance are believed to represent deposits of coarser grained ice and solid boulders that are too small to be seen at this scale, but which are…

Mary's Room

Philosophy is chock-full of fantastical thought experiments. Sometimes, though, the scenario we're asked to imagine is so fantastical that it undermines the point of the experiment. From my perspective, the “Mary's Room” experiment is one such. This thought experiment was proposed by Frank Jackson in 1982, though the basic idea for it has a far longer history. It is meant to cast doubt on materialist understandings of the mind. Here's the essence of it, as presented by Daniel Dennett (quoting Jackson) in his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking: Mary is a brilliant scientist…

Think Like a Physicist

There was a flurry of discussion recently on campus about "critical thinking," and how we sell that idea to prospective and current students. This was prompted by a recent report arguing for the importance of the humanities and social sciences (which I found really frustrating in ways that are neither surprising nor important for this post). This eventually led to a meeting on Monday this week to discuss this sort of thing, in the course of which one of our Deans mentioned an abandoned project to collect statements about the modes of thinking associated with particular disciplines, which I…

It almost makes me disbelieve that HIV causes AIDS!

Nah, not really — that work has been independently confirmed many times over. Recently, though, Deepak Chopra has been praising Luc Montagnier, the Nobel prize winning co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus, for tumbling down the walls of science — which ought to be enough to condemn the poor guy right there. But I had to take a look at exactly what Montagnier is claiming, and I'm afraid the only thing tumbling is his credibility. Montagnier claims in several papers that the DNA of pathogenic bacteria emits an electromagnetic signal, and further, that if you dilute that DNA…

The Quantum Leap effect - creating a body-swapping illusion

A ridiculous number of science-fiction TV series and films have moments where characters exchange minds, from the brilliance of Quantum Leap to the latest season of Heroes. Body-swapping is such a staple of imaginative fiction that it's tempting to think that it has no place being scientifically investigated. But Valeria Petkova and Henrik Ehrsson beg to differ - while actually exchanging minds is clearly impossible, these two scientists have created an illusion that can make people feel that another body - be it a mannequin or an actual person - is really theirs. The idea that our bodies…

Objectivity: True-to-Nature, Mechanical, and through Trained Judgment

Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion The last post (Scientific Objectivity has a History) was about an article from 1992 called "The Image of Objectivity," by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. Daston and Galison, 15 years later, have now written a book-length treatment of the topic, Objectivity (MIT Press, 2007). It argues that "To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge.…

Down with the Male-Killers: A Tale of Evolution in Our Time

Like many parasites, a species of bacteria called Wolbachia takes charge of its own fate. Wolbachia can only survive inside the cells of its hosts--invertebrates such as this lovely common eggfly. This way of life limits Wolbachia's opportunities for long-term survival. If Wolbachia lives inside a female insect, it can infect her eggs. When those eggs hatch and mature into adult insects, they will be infected by Wolbachia as well. But if Wolbachia should find itself in a male, it has reached a dead end. It cannot infect sperm cells, and thus it has no escape from a male host. When a male host…

Wanted: Hominids for Clinical Drug Trials

In March, six men entered a London hospital to receive an experimental drug. The men were volunteers, and the drug--a potential treatment for arthritis and leukemia--appeared from animal tests to be safe. But within minutes of the first round of doses, there was trouble. The men complained of headaches, of intolerable heat and cold. The drug made one man's limbs turned blue, while another's head swelled like a balloon. Doctors gave them steroids to counteract the side-effect, and managed to save their lives. But several ended up on life support for a time, and they all may suffer lifelong…

The Fate of Forgotten Memories: Sudden Death, Not Gradual Decay

Every now and then, I read some science from some other dimension. That is, the methods are so unusual, the relevant theories so fringe, or the conclusions so startling that I feel like the authors must be building on work from a completely separate science, with its own theories and orthodoxy. This can be good or bad, and is usually the latter. But in the case of Zhang & Luck's recent papers, it's very, very good. To appreciate what they've done, here's a little background from this dimension's science - specifically, the science of forgetting. The phenomenon of "forgetting" has been…

Does ESP exist?

The mind is a complicated and a still very much unknown entity. The earliest conceptions of the mind didn't even have it placed in the brain, instead it was very much separate from the body. This is of course all very silly, the only possibility is that the mind wholly and completely resides in the neural system and that system is responsible for every aspect of the mind, from perception, to language, and even for experiencing the presence of a higher power. With all of these misperceptions of the mind it isn't surprising that people could think that this soul of ours could interact with…

Background to the 20 year coma recovery

When a man wakes up after a 20 year coma, you know that people are going to pay attention. Particularly after the Terry Schiavo business, I think it is important to add some facts to this debate as early as possible before it gets completely out of control. So let's talk about this guy. In 1984, Terry Wallis has a car accident where he was thrown from his pickup. He goes into a coma. Despite his family's objections, it would appear he was misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state rather than a minimally conscious state: But improvements in the care of patients could be made…

Evolutionary history of early primates places human origins in context

A simplified evolutionary tree of primate relationships showing the placement of Darwinius in relationship to other groups. From Williams et al., 2010. The study of human origins can be a paradoxical thing. We know that we evolved from ancestral apes (and, in fact, are just one peculiar kind of ape), yet we are obsessed with the features that distinguish us from our close relatives. The "big questions" in evolutionary anthropology, from why we stand upright to how our brains became so large, are all centered around distancing us from a prehistoric ape baseline. Despite our preoccupation…

Good for cops, bad for geneticists?

A recent PLoS Genetics paper triggered a sea change in the way genetic data is handled by research institutions like the NIH, the Broad Institute, and the Wellcome Trust. The paper, which came out last month, demonstrated that it's possible to identify a single individual's DNA in a pool of DNA from thousands of different people - something previously assumed to be about as feasible as finding a needle in a haystack. Using the cumulative effect of tens of thousands of tiny differences in each individual's DNA (called SNPs), a team led by David Craig were able to determine if a specific person…

What are my duties if I offer to help?

At Aardvarchaeology, Martin describes an ethical conundrum: Let's say that Jenny's in bed with a cold and asks her partner Anne to take out a book for her from the library. This Anne does, but on the way home she loses the book. Maybe she absentmindedly puts it on a shelf in the grocery store and it gets stolen, or she forgets to close her backpack and the book falls into an open manhole along the way. Who pays the library for the lost book? At its heart, this is a question about just what responsibilities one takes on when one volunteers to assist someone. In this particular case, when…

The deadly power of denial, part 2

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…

Andrew Bolt takes back "nice words"

Andrew Bolt responded to my debate with Monckton by defaming me, calling me "vituperative, deceptive, a cherrypicker, an ideologue, a misrepresenter and a Manichean conspiracist only too keen to smear a sceptic as a crook who lies for Exxon's dollars". You'll be glad to hear that Bolt now says I take back my nice words about Lambert. Even though he admitted that "Many of these issues are over my head" he is now utterly convinced by a dishonest post from Joanne Nova that I somehow tricked Monckton. Nova quote mines Pinker's explanation for this phrase: if we give Christopher Monckton the…