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Links for 2011-03-02

Charlie Sheen Quotes Cats « Medium Large "Because turnaround is fair play...or some nonsense like that." (tags: internet silly culture television movies pictures) Neil Tyson's Advice to Young Science Communicators | The Intersection | Discover Magazine "So in graduate school, I wrote a question and answer column for StarDate magazine, out of the University of Texas, and that became a book, and when you have a book, TV shows want your views on things-one thing leads to another. But in all cases, the common denominator is that it starts out by writing. So my advice to someone who wanted to…

Chris Murphy for Senate: The "Hey I Know That Guy" Quasi-Endorsement

Ephblog has mentioned Connecticut Congressman Chris Murphy, Williams class of '96 several times, but until yesterday's announcement and an email from somebody else pointing it out, I never connected the name with the Chris Murphy who was a freshman playing rugby when I was a senior. Having looked at his video announcing his campaign for Joe Lieberman's Senate seat, though: I do kind of remember a guy on the team who looked more or less like that. Only, you know, younger. (In my defense, he played on the line, and those guys were all kind of indistinct and overly well-groomed (no rugby player…

What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics

A quick check-in from Tuscaloosa, where we're getting ready to head out for the football tailgating. While I've got a minute, though, here are the slides from my public lecture, via SlideShare: What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics View more presentations from Chad Orzel. These are probably less comprehensible that some of my other talks, as I deliberately avoided putting much text on the slides, which I think works better for this kind of presentation. The down side, of course, is that it's not as obvious what some of the slides mean, if you don't know the intended flow of the…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update

A few bits and pieces of news regarding How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: We got and accepted an offer for the audio book rights from one of the biggest audio book publishers. Actually, I think there were two offers for the audio rights, which is amazing. I have no idea when it would be produced or who would read it, but the contract does say they'll consult with me about the reader, so I'll know at some point before it comes out... Speaking of other editions, I'm getting emails from my publisher about the paperback edition already, which just seems weird. The hardcover's only been out for a…

Paul Shirley, Can I Keep My Jersey? [Library of Babel]

It's been ages since I did a booklog post here. I've been reading lots of stuff, I just haven't been blogging it. I really should do something about the books in the stack by my computer, though, so I'm going to try to write a short post about each, and then shelve them before they topple over onto the keyboard and break something. Paul Shirley's Can I Keep My Jersey? gets to be first, because it's from the library. I picked it up as seasonally-appropriate reading material-- it's subtitled "11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond," and is about, well, it's…

You Can Read It In The Sunday Papers: Uncle Pat, the Gumbo King

I have to travel to Washington, DC, quite a bit - this week, in fact. So, boy, I wish that our Amtrak rail service to the nation's capital was faster and more dependable because once you get to the airport, go through security, etc., we're starting to get closer to the time it takes to drive. Our European readers will howl they learn it takes almost 6 hours to travel the 280 mi/450 km from the capital of North Carolina to DC. While Amtrak service is pretty awesome from Boston through New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, once you're south of DC the passenger trains have to compete…

Danny Federici - A Real Jersey Boy

A group e-mail showed up today from some of my boyhood friends and fellow Springsteen worshipers on the sad passing of Danny Federici yesterday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NYC from melanoma. He was only 58. Here's my open letter and response to the thread: Hey-a Boyce, Not too much more to add here except my sadness on the passing of a great musician and, as O'D sez, one of the crucial background guys who added so much to the sound without needing the spotlight. I watched the killer video of Danny from March 20th in Indy doing the accordion on "Sandy" - he looked fabulous…

Correction from the Corn Refiners Association?

My post the other day on a study showing a diet high in fructose caused massive increases in plasma triglycerides received an unusually high number of comments for this blog. One comment in particular, from Audrae Erickson, corrected me on subsidies given to sugar cane producers vs. corn producers: Regarding the comment that "large corn-processing companies benefit from subsidies unavailable to conventional sugar cane producers." The U.S. government provides support to a number of farm commodities, including sugar cane producers, in order to ensure a stable farm economy and a reliable food…

Potential loss of women's studies program at Meredith College

In today's Letters to the Editor of the News & Observer, well-known substance abuse treatment researcher Dr Wendee Wechsberg bemoans the potential cost-cutting of religious studies and women's studies at Meredith College in Raleigh, NC. The irony: Meredith College is a well-regarded private women's college established by Baptist missionaries. Meredith counts among its alumnae the journalists Judy Woodruff and Marcia Vickers, Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court Sarah Parker, and attorney/former First Lady of New York Silda Wall Spitzer. Given that her expertise extends from…

Watered down: the unedited IPCC scientific draft

Those who really care about the process behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports will probably want to grab this. It's a draft of Working Group II's Summary for Policymakers before the final editing session stripped it of some of the more dramatic (alarmist?) language following objections from China and Saudi Arabia. You know it's the earlier version because it has "The content of this draft should not be cited or quoted, and is embargoed from news coverage" on the cover page. Thanks to Rick Piltz, who managed to get a hold of the draft posted it at his Climate Science…

True Science for Boys

Ah, the 19th century…when mad scientists were really mad, and not only that, they were popular at parties. In 1818, Dr Ure and Professor Jeffray obtained the freshly killed corpse of Matthew Clydesdale, only an hour from the hangman's noose, and proceeded to experiment on it with a battery in the Glasgow University anatomy theater before a crowd of spectators. In my youth, I had to settle for recent roadkill, a 9 volt battery, and a dark basement, all by my lonesome — my jealousy is acute. Here is a small portion of the account of that day's fun. The supra-orbital nerve was laid bare in the…

"Jumper" Jumped by Farhi and Tegmark

"Jumper" is a new movie about a man (okay, Hayden Christensen, aka Anakin Skywalker) who can teleport himself anywhere just by thinking about it. Quantum teleportation is a procedure where quantum information can be transported using entanglement and a few bits of classical communication. The distance between these two is, *ahem*, rather large. The New York Times today has an article about an event at MIT (that other institute of technology) which brought together the director of Jumper, star Hayden Christensen, and MIT professors Ed Farhi and Max Tegmark. The article is fun, with the…

Carbon Offsets in the World of Flying: A Big Picture - What would it take exactly? How's about a forest the size of Oregon...

To offset flights out of North America in 2007, you'd need to plant a forest the size of Oregon. In this summer's issue of the Walrus, there's a great piece by UBC'er, David Beers, called "Grounded" which imagines circumstances leading to a world where flying is essentially ground to a halt. It's a good read, but in this case, I also had a little fun with the accompanying graphic. In the original picture (the left hand side of the slide), we see the number of trees needed to offset a few particular flights (presumably, a sampling of some that David recently took), and I was essentially…

Dembski and Darwinian fascists

Dembski posted an anonymous email he received accusing a "prominent anti-ID proponent" of supressing an "ID-friendly" experiment (actually a computer model) that was developed by an undergraduate student. What's interesting here is that, despite not being able to confirm anything in the e-mail, Dembski posts it, albeit with the name of the university and professor removed. While he cant prove anything specific, Dembski obviously feels that hints of bad actions by "scientific materialists" are useful for the cause. On the other hand, if the e-mail is a fake and a setup to get Dembski in…

Cut-Grind or Grind-Cut? The Butter Battle Book of Prehistoric Mammals

An artist's rendering of what Pseudotribos robustus or a weasel-possum-lizard, might have looked like 165 million years ago In the November 1st, issue of Nature, a joint American and Chinese research team announced the discovery of a long dead prehistoric mammal with an interesting set of chompers. Although the teeth were very similar in form to other teeth found at the time, they actually were arranged in a "grind-cut" pattern instead of the more common "cut-grind" pattern! Upon realizing what they were looking at, some of the female researchers fainted from embarrassment. These days,…

Debbie Does Derangement

Oh. My. Nonexistent. God. Debbie Schlussel. How does anyone take these "conservative commentators" seriously? She read a NYT article that shows a genetic link between Asians and Native Americans, and guess what that means? It was OK for Europeans to displace them from the Americas, because they were invaders, too! So whom did THEY steal the land from? Somebody else, obviously. Yet, no "Dances With Wolves" and "Into the West" from Hollywood about that. Well, not obviously: no humans lived here prior to their migrations. And yes, there certainly were territorial struggles between different…

We Told You So...Colugos Are Humans' Closest Cousins!

We, the Brothers Bleiman, have speculated for years that humans' closest relative outside of the primate group is the colugo or flying lemur. Turns out we were right! What up, cuz? Two scientists, one from Penn State the other from Texas A&M, have recently proven that... ...the colugo group is the closest cousin to the primate group. They did this by comparing indels (major reorganizations of genetic sequences) in over 30 different groups of mammals to the indels of humans. Turns out we share 7 indels with colugos, the most of any other group! Of course the colugos, those cheating…

Dodos in Kansas

Randy Olson visited the Loom a few months ago in connection with his movie about our national fun and games with evolution and intelligent design, Flock of Dodos. He provoked a lot of discussion with his main point, that biologists were doing a poor job of reaching out to the public. Some skeptics wondered whether accepting Olson's argument would lead to dumbing science down and engaging in the same bogus PR as creationists. This morning Randy dropped me an email note to point out what he considers a depressing confirmation of his thesis. Kansas--where the science standards have been…

Bill and Ann sitting in a tree ...

Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism will apparently deal (in part) with evolution: Then, of course, there's the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from the benighted. But Coulter neatly refutes the lie that liberals are rationalists guided by the ideals of free inquiry and the scientific method. She exposes the essential truth about Darwinian evolution that liberals refuse to confront: It is bogus science. Writing with a keen appreciation for genuine science, Coulter reveals…

Blogging on the Brain: 11/04

A first-hand report of caloric vestibular stimulation - to treat Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which patients often desire to have large parts of their bodies amputated. Ambien, a sleep drug recently discovered to awaken some people from comas is also linked to strange behavior: one woman paints her frontdoor - in her sleep. Altruism as an identifying characteristic of intelligence - "friendly intelligence," at least. Isaac Asimov asks "What Is Intelligence Anyway?" Brian Mingus asks if we'd recognize it if we saw it. Can you extract the "ball" from each image based on motion cues…

Coming soon....

What can I say about an event that counts both Carlsberg (as in the brewery) and Nature (the scientific journal) amongst its sponsors? That event will be the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) 2014. In just a week, I’ll be stepping out of my little bubble in the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, on my way to ESOF 2014, held this year in the big city of Copenhagen. There, I’ll be joining several thousand others, from Nobel laureates to mere journalists in a week-long marathon of science-related events. I’ll be blogging daily from the week-long science fest. Not to name-drop, but…

Bonobos and the Emergence of Culture

In this TED Talk Susan Savage-Rumbaugh discusses bonobos housed in a bispecies environment that have been taught to communicate using pictographs. In the talk she suggests that biology isn't what made humans unique from nonhuman apes, but rather argues that it was cultural developments and social learning. Quite obviously there are some biological differences (around 1% of our genes differ, some of them coding for proteins important for brain formation). However, I challenge you to watch Kanzi build a fire and perform activities that require precise hand-eye coordination (including the…

Meet the amazing and 'ew'-inspiring Pacific hagfish

Image via NOAA/Flickr Pacific hagfish (Eptatretus stoutii), aka "slime eels", are primitive fish that occupy burrows on the ocean floor. Like earthworms, they have 5 hearts. They have no true eyes, no jaws, nor do they have a stomach. They locate their meals through great senses of smell and touch. In addition to small invertebrates, they are known for consuming carrion that fall to the ocean floor. By consume, I mean burrow into the decomposing carcasses and eating them from the inside out. Ew. Given their dietary habits, it is no surprise they are regularly exposed to little to no…

Placental regulation of fetal nutrients

Image of baboon with offspring By RADION Imaginery / Kamil Wencel (RADION Imaginery / http://imaginery.radion.org/) [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons Malnutrition during pregnancy is a major global health issue that leads to restricted growth of developing fetuses making them more prone to death and disease. In fact, babies born from poorly nourished mothers are more likely to develop obesity, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease as adults. Researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Texas Health Sciences Center teamed up to examine whether the placenta can…

Rare fatty antifreeze

I have heard of some animals using sugars as antifreeze (check out the prior blog on wood frogs that freeze and survive!), but never lipids. Image from http://thebuggeek.com/tag/eurosta-solidaginis/ Researchers have discovered that larva of the Goldenrod gall fly (Eurosta solidaginis) shown above survive nearly freezing solid as well, which they hypothesize may be accomplished by accumulating acetylated triacylglycerol, or agTAGs, (i.e. a type of lipid) during winter. They found that the flies accumulate this lipid from September through March and studies of the agTAGs show that this…

Experimental Biology Day 2

Another exciting day at the Experimental Biology meeting for physiologists! Although I am a bit nervous about the session on the negative effects of sleep deprivation, "Sleepless in San Diego: Is Sleep Deprivation the New Silent Killer?" Hmmm, maybe I should have gone to bed a bit earlier last night... Dr. Karen Matthews (Univ of Pittsburgh) has studied the effects of sleep deprivation in teens from low-income families found that less than 6 hours of sleep per night can negatively impact mood, academic achievement and health. Another talk that I found interesting was on how sleep deprivation…

Epilepsy in sea lions

Credit: Image courtesy of Stanford University Medical Center, from ScienceDaily According to a press release from Stanford University, California sea lions develop epilepsy from exposure to a toxin produced by algae called domoic acid. The animals develop seizures which can result in memory loss, tremors, convulsions and even death. The hippocampal region in the brain of the affected sea lions shows similar damage as humans with epilepsy, with losses of about 50 percent of neurons. Dr. Paul Buckmaster, professor of comparative medicine at Stanford was quoted as saying, "We found there was…

Cryptozoology: Could Nessy really exist?

An artist’s reconstruction of the kipunji (Lophocebus kipunji), drawn from a research video shot in the Ndundulu Forest in southern Tanzania and officially described in 2003. Image fromNATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION I just read an interesting article published in The Scientist today about cryptozoology, a field of research specializing in the study of animals about which only anecdotal or partial evidence exists. In other words, no actual specimens have been studied...think Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster. There is now a new peer-reviewed scientific journal, The Journal of Cryptozoology, …

How can we do better at letting y’all know about remote access?

With the recent snowstorms and all, I brought an official work machine home so I could work on full VPN. We have an SSL VPN option and with full network connect, it's just like I'm in my office. Most of the time, when I need an article here or there, I just use the proxy server. From my end, how this works is I either link out from the catalog or I right click and reload through proxy using my LibX plugin. I then login with my directory ID and password. If I need something more "popular" - like reviews for an upcoming purchase, car repair diagrams, or how-to information - I'll just use my…

12-month meme for 2009

Getting this from Drugmonkey - the first line from the first post of each month this year. Looks like I should pay attention to having snappy first lines! The first half of the year is all about preparing for my comprehensive exams and the second half of the year is all about recovering from taking them! Let's hope next year brings a dissertation proposal defense and writing, writing, writing. January: Finished Yin [link] February: This is 2 weeks, and really quite paltry. [link] March: I'm now back into re-reading, so notes will be shorter (and I'm hoping to pick up speed). [link] April:…

Shouldn't the presidential candidates have a debate on science?!

After all, nearly every aspect of our continued existence relies on science, from climate control, to curing existing diseases and preventing new ones. New advances rely on a great deal of funding from the federal government and support from the public at large. Why is it that at best science is an ignored industry when candidates are running for office? The only time science is brought up is in reaction to public religious pressure (stem cell debate) or corporate pressure (global warming). Maybe Al Gore screwed us! He was one of the only candidates ever to talk openly about and support…

Shifting Monkfish

Earlier this year supermarkets removed monkfish from their menus admist concerns about depleted populations. Now, thanks to shifting baselines, monkfish is not overfished after all. According to an article at Seafood.com News published on Friday: A new monkfish stock assessment has concluded that the resource in both the Northern and Southern Fishery Management Areas is not overfished and overfishing is not occurring. The conclusion completely reverses the scientific community's previous understanding about monkfish, which until now was considered to be overfished and in significant need of…

DonorsChoose Final Update - a very special thank-you

As noted in my last post on the end of our ScienceBlogs.com DonorsChoose campaign to raise funds for public schoolteacher projects around the country, we have all been amazed at the outpuoring of generosity from readers who share our passion for educating the next generation of scientists. At the very least, you have all played a part in improving the scientific literacy of kids who go on to do other things, but can still apply critical thinking skills to everything from making sense of politician/sciencespeak to protect themselves from unscrupulous marketers of dietary supplements. But as…

Scientists bite back

A new organisation, SEFORA (Scientists and Engineers for America), has been formed to counter the abuse and supression of science currently popular in American media and politics. They have drafted a "Bill of Rights" for scientists and engineers which includes: Federal policy shall be made using the best available science and analysis both from within the government and from the rest of society. and The federal government shall not support any science education program that includes instruction in concepts that are derived from ideology and not science. The second one is worth playing up -…

Random things

Back from the drinking sessionconference, with many good thoughts. One in particular is due to the talk by Aiden Lyons at ANU on probability and evolution - after more than two decades trying to figure it out, I had to wait for a grad student to put it all neatly into perspective. His argument that there are at least three if not four senses or interpretations of probability and chance in evolution that - apart from anything else - prevents fitness being tautological, raises many more questions, but that is the nature of good papers. Another, in no particular succession, is whether we…

Researchers poo-poo the notion that human speech is due to a single mutation

Babel's Dawn is providing coverage of the Cradle of Language conference in South Africa. Several presenters at the conference are challenging the idea that language arose from a single genetic mutation. Given the complexity of human language, such a finding would certainly be a surprise to me. It's tempting to argue that since there appears to be a "universal grammar" -- that all modern languages share some basic similarities -- they must have stemmed from the same genetic mutation. The evidence doesn't appear to be in the single-mutation advocates' favor: In an afternoon session, Bernard…

Belated Report on Albany

Well, here I am in London....blogging about events from before I left. Better late than never. First of all, the just-finished "Politics and Bioethics" conference--including my own talk--is covered in detail this piece from the Albany Times-Union. I arrived late at the conference Thursday, and so did not see the protests from the Not Dead Yet group that are described in the article. As for the Friday panel on "Politicizing Science" with Richard Doerflinger, the two of us didn't really tangle very directly over adult stem cell issues. The structure of the event, with a third panelist…

Annals of Extreme Statements

Lots of folks have been posting stuff from their prior blogs. I'm not going to do too much of that, but I would like to breathe some more life into one discovery from my old blog--a rather scandalous quote from Energy and Commerce committee chair Joe Barton on climate science. Nowadays everybody knows Barton for his outrageous attack on Michael Mann and his colleagues over the "hockey stick." But do they know what he said in 2001 in denouncing the Kyoto Protocol? To wit: Second thing that the citizens of the United States need to understand about Kyoto is that the science is not settled. In…

Grad Student Pens Parrot Training Book

Rebecca O'Connor, graduate student at the University of California- Riverside, knows why parrots screech and bite and it has a lot more to do with human behavior than the bird's. She's written a book incorporating animal-training techniques, detailing how to improve the manners of an ill-mannered bird by rewarding good behavior while keeping a handle on your own emotions. Part of an emerging group of behaviorists who reject old ideas of punishing and dominating birds, O'Connor is gaining national attention with her book, "A Parrot for Life: Raising and Training the Perfect Parrot Companion…

Wheels within wheels

Dahmen Art Barn, Uniontown, WA While I was growing up, we used to drive past the Dahmen farm every few months. I would always look up from whatever book I was devouring at the time and intently try to count the iron wheels in the fences (there are over a thousand). The barn, which lies just outside Uniontown, WA, about 16 miles from the Idaho border, was built in 1935 for Jack Dahmen and was part of a commercial dairy for several decades. Its distinctive wheel fence began accumulating sometime after 1952, when Jack's nephew Steve Dahmen and his wife Junette purchased the barn. Says…

Group Seeks to Challenge Faith-Based Initiatives

Check out this interesting op-ed piece in the NY Times today, on a case being heard in the Supreme Court over Bush's faith-based initiatives. The question before the court is whether a group seeking to preserve the separation of church and state can mount a First Amendment challenge to the Bush administration's "faith based" initiatives. The arguments turn on a technical question of whether taxpayers have standing, or the right to initiate this kind of suit, but the real-world implications are serious. If the court rules that the group does not have standing, it will be much harder to stop…

Why Damien Hirst's roadkill is worth more than yours

If you think that one inanimate shark is as good as another, your understanding of the art market is, as they say, dead in the water. Mr. Saunders's piece just didn't have the same quality or cache. (Although Mr. Saunders did claim his shark was more handsome.) Most important, it's not just about the work of art; rather, the value placed on a particular work derives from how it feels to own that art. Most art dealers know that art buying is all about what tier of buyers you aspire to join. From The New York Sun's amusing review of Don Thompson's upcoming book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark:…

Mind Metaphors

Some of you who are interested in the history of psychology or philosophy of mind might find this paper interesting: Gentner, D., & Grudin, J. (1985). The evolution of mental metaphors in psychology: A 90-year retrospective. American Psychologist, 40(2), 181-192. Abstract It seems plausible that the conception of the mind has evolved over the first hundred years of psychology in America. In this research, we studied this evolution by tracing changes in the kinds of metaphors used by psychologists to describe mental phenomena . A corpus of metaphors from 1894 to the present was collected…

Lady, the Toad Sucking Cocker Spaniel

"Toad licking" has been well documented around the world with secretions from many species causing intense hallucinations. In this 2006 NPR podcast, they tell the story of a poor cocker spaniel who became addicted to toad. "We noticed Lady (the cocker) spending an awful lot of time down by the pond in our backyard. Late one night after I'd put the dogs out, Lady wouldn't come in. She finally staggered over to me from the cattails. She looked up at me, leaned her head over and opened her mouth like she was going to throw up, and out plopped this disgusting toad." Increasingly Lady would return…

“For there's no such thing as a reckless octopus hunter. You're either careful or dead.”

Uh, right. That line comes from a story in a 1949 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, "Octopus wrestling is my hobby". The story involves a ferocious octopus with 25-foot long arms that fought an entire village of people armed with clubs, knives, and spears—the description of the battle isn't at all clear, but it sounds like the monster is coming to the surface in shallow water and fighting all these people milling around. It's a very silly story. It was difficult to spear the octopus if it were far back in the coral caverns. But Roo had his own system for drawing the creature out. Retreating a…

Lost in time, freezing cold ... unable to utter the simplest "beep"

The Rover Spirit is hibernating on a dark slope on the winter end of the planet Mars. Solar panels may be providing enough energy to keep its clock going. If not, it will become suspended in time and not know to wake up and send a signal that it is 'alive.' The panels may or may not keep the battery temperatures above 40 degrees below zero Celsius so that batteries survive the Martian winter, which is said to be almost as bad as the Minnesota winter. But probably not. And for now, the mission controllers are waiting for a beep that could come any time. The earliest date the rover could…

Another update from the mothership on the DDoS attack

Our (mostly) benevolent but unfortunately all-too-uncommunicative Seed Overlords have finally bestowed upon us another report regarding the ongoing DDoS attack. Believe me, I know many of you can't access ScienceBlogs and, most important of all to me, this blog, the better to read every word of Insolence, Respectful and otherwise, that pours from my keyboard. I can even see it reflected in my traffic over the last week or so. Here is the latest on the explanation: Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating…

Sydney Writer's Festival forum on climate change

Jeff Sparrow has some pictures of the climate panel at the Sydney Writer's Festival. It was very popular and many people were turned away when the room filled. I'm afraid that there doesn't seem to be a recording available. David Spratt and Sharon Beder's talks were based on their articles in the latest issue of Overland, but I talked about something different. I read out this blurb from Quadrant (link added by me) Debate censored When the Sydney [Left] Writers' Festival hold a phoney "forum" on climate change they ensure dissent is silenced by excluding Ian Plimer - writer of the best…

Bellamy mystery solved

Hey, remember when David Bellamy claimed? Indeed, if you take all the evidence that is rarely mentioned by the Kyotoists into consideration, 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980. And George Monbiot's heroic efforts to track down the source of this claim? Bellamy got it from a crackpot web site ("The next ice age could begin any day"), which got it from Larouche's 21st Century Science, which got from SEPP (presumably S Fred Singer): The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland…

The Washington Post can't go out of business fast enough

Not content with publishing George Will's fabrications about the stolen emails (for which, see Carl Zimmer), they now have a piece by climate expert Sarah Palin. The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes. Let's look at just one paragraph: The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even…