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Minor epiphany about framing.

In the aftermath of Sizzle Tuesday, Orac wrote a post posing a challenge to the science communicators: How would you deal with antivaccinationism? What "frames" would you use to combat the likes of Jenny McCarthy? In the comments on Orac's post, Matthew C. Nisbet turned up: The anti-vaccine movement is a perfect issue to examine how framing has shaped communication dynamics and public opinion; and how various groups have brought framing strategies to bear in the policy debate. I personally haven't had time to do research on the topic. ... To understand and to make recommendations about…

Lillybridge III: Final Page of an Early 20th Century Photo Essay

An ecosystem is held together by complex interactions between living organisms and their inorganic environment. When early farmers and ranchers transformed the landscape in Colorado, were they destroying an ecosystem, or becoming a part of it? Perhaps there was a bit of both. The settlers who camped near Lillybridge's studio probably didn't have time to question it. It was life. If you worked hard enough, you'd survive. In 1999, Robin Chotzinoff leafed through the Lillybridge collection for an article in Westword. One quote stood out above all the others, capturing the essence of struggles…

The Inevitable Death of the Book, Aleph-Nought in a Series

A lot of pixels have been spilled lamenting the death of Borders books, a rather large fraction of them being used to say stupid things. Particularly in the "they killed off independent bookstores so good riddance to them" vein-- it's great that you lived in a place that had good indie bookstores and enough hipsters to support them, but for large swaths of the country, the big-box chains were the best thing ever to happen to readers. Going from a cramped little B. Waldencrown in the local mall to a full-size Borders or Barnes and Noble store was a world-changing experience for a lot of people…

What Would Jesus Buy? - Beat The Devil

tags: What Would Jesus Buy? - Beat The Devil, religion, parody, satire, funny, humor, streaming video This video is by producer Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) and director Rob VanAlkemade. "What Would Jesus Buy?" examines the commercialization of Christmas in America while following Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse (the end of humankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt.) The film also delves into issues such as the role sweatshops play in America's mass consumerism…

Autism quackery in my second hometown

My first hometown, as many readers of this blog know, is Detroit, where I spent the first ten years or so of my life. My second hometown, as I pointed out a while back when a particularly loony city council candidate caught the eye of the skeptical blogosphere. Unfortunately, I just found out that there's some more looniness going on there in a little more than a week. My cousin e-mailed me this notice: Event: Mrs. Michigan Autism Lecture Date: Thursday, October 15, 2009 Time: 6:30pm Location: Zerbo's Health Foods Event Details: Heidi Scheer is a national spokesperson for Autism Awareness…

Louis Gordon Crovitz’s Disinformation Age

Imagine a newspaper oped with half a dozen fallacies. Such a thing could appear in any newspaper in the US. But now imagine that the author is a Rhodes Scholar and you’re left with the Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz. For years I’ve followed the bizarre arguments of L. Gordon Crovitz, who has a weekly column on information policy in the Wall Street Journal. It’s part of my daily routine of reading the Journal, which is great for business news but something else for everything else. Last week, Crovitz wrote a real howler, arguing that the Internet was really created by Xerox, not…

The science behind Benghazi

Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor (dubbed the Tripoli six) may be executed soon by the Libyan government for the crime of deliberately infecting over 400 children with HIV. If they did infect the children, this would be a horrendous crime. If they did not infect the children, it's the Libyan government that will be killing innocent people. The clock is ticking. Some of you might be wondering (I know I was): How exactly is molecular sequence data being used to solve the crime? Why are scientists and science bloggers claiming that the Tripoli six are innocent? Let's begin by…

Marriage, Money and Shared Expenses

One thing I've never fought about with my ex-wife nor my wife is money. This is no mean feat asBoth ladies are somewhat Bohemian souls with a taste for fine shoes and ladies' fashion. I have never made much money myself. I have a child with each of them. The secret, apart from the basic requirement of marrying only sensible people with an adequate income, is to keep each person's income and expenses separate. This may sound profoundly un-romantic and anti-family, but believe me, it's a lot more romantic and family-like than the ugly fights that invariably result when one spouse uses the…

Links for 2010-06-23

Scanning Electron Microscope Submissions | SEM Image Galley by ASPEX "Do you have a sample you'd like to send us to have scanned by one of our Scanning Electron Microscopes or our Tabletop SEM? Just download the sample submission form below, fill it out, and mail it in along with your sample, and we'll post your images online for the world to see." (tags: science atoms nano contests biology microscopy) AAAS/Science Dancing Scientists? Announcing the 2010 "Dance Your Ph.D." Contest "The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is proud to announce the third annual "Dance…

Navigenics' lame attempt at cut-price genetics

Nearly five months after 23andMe dropped the price of its genome scan service from $1000 to $400, personal genomics competitor Navigenics has made its own foray into the lower-cost genetic testing market. Navigenics has always been the most expensive of the three mainstream genome-scan companies, despite offering essentially the same product as competitors 23andMe and deCODEme: a genome scan examining between 500,000 and a million sites of common genetic variation, known as SNPs. While its competitors charge a one-off fee of $400 (23andMe) or $1,000 (deCODEme), Navigenics whacks its…

Shocking Fraud from Financial Scum

Against my better judgement, I've ended up writing a lot about the financial mess that we're currently going through. If you've read that, you know that my opinion is that the mess amounts to a giant pile of fraud. But even having spent so much time reading and studying what was going on, the latest news from the financial mess shocks me. Even knowing how utterly sleazy and dishonest many people in the financial world have been, even knowing about the stuff they've been doing, the kinds of out and out fraud that they've perpetrated, the latest news makes them look even more evil than I…

Boskone 43

The following will be of interest only to people who were at Boskone, or who for some reason care deeply about what I did there, so I'll put the bulk of the text below the fold. We arrived at about 3:00 Friday afternoon, parked in the hotel garage, and discovered that the trunk of my car would no longer stay closed. Happily, that didn't turn out to be an omen for the weekend, which otherwise went very well. I had a coil of rope in the trunk, that we used to tie the trunk shut, and that held until the next Friday, when I finally got around to having somebody fix the lock. I had exam papers to…

Final notes on the Science Blogging Conference and Anthology

This is what I posted on February 23, 2006, about eleven months ago. As you can see, both from my post, and from the comments, the idea was to have some kind of BloggerCon devoted to science blogging, almost like a giant MeetUp where a bunch of science bloggers can get together, finally match the names (and online handles) with faces, chat and gossip, show off their work, and have lots of beer. But, what's the point (apart from the great fun that would be)? How does one sell this idea to sponsors? It seemed that this idea was doomed for a quick death. But then, Anton Zuiker came into the…

Haley Barbour proposal to merge Mississippi HBCUs meets with ire

Last Monday, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi dropped a bombshell in his new budget proposal. From the Jackson Free Press: In his Nov. 16 budget proposal, Barbour announced that the state was facing a $715 million budget shortfall in fiscal year 2011 and another $500 million shortage in fiscal year 2012. In addition to merging the state's HBCUs, he suggested many draconian budget cuts in response to the impending shortage. "This budget proposes merging Mississippi Valley State and Alcorn State with Jackson State. No campus would close, but administration would be unified and significant…

We can haz Not Exactly Rockit Science?

Yes, we can! My SciBling Ed Yong has collected some of his best posts from the last year and published them as a book. Yes, I already bought a copy for myself. And you should, too - just order it here. Ed says: I started Not Exactly Rocket Science as a way of reaching out to people with no specialist knowledge and only a passing interest in science. The book is meant to help draw in people who don't really read blogs so if you have any friends who are interested in science, why not tell them about it or buy them a copy in time for Christmas? Carl Zimmer wrote a blurb: "Few blogs make a…

More Insane Property Seizures

Radley Balko links to this article about a prosecutor who seized 3 cars from the parents of a guy caught trying to buy oxycontin. Not a dealer, not a distributor (they never even charged him with either), just a user; and they seized his parents' vehicles. They were kind enough to tell the parents that they could buy the cars back if they wanted to. This is crazy. And you know why no legislator will try and do anything about it? Because they don't want to face all those commercials you're seeing right now, those stupid, distorted campaign commercials. They don't want to face a commercial in…

Do someone else a favor; get a Bogo light

I heard about this on NPR last night and I think it's a great idea; Mark Bent has invented a solar-powered flashlight, and when you buy one someone in an impoverished area that lacks electricity for lights at night also will receive one (and you get to pick where your contribution goes). From what I heard last night the battery in the bogo lights last for about two years (considering you use it every night), so it's definitely a worthwhile investment rather than continuing to buy battery-eating flashlights. From what I've read it seems that solar-powered flashlights aren't the end of the…

3 year old buys ugly car on eBay whim

Reason #1 why children are not cute: A three-year-old boy has used his mother's computer to buy a £9,000 car on an internet auction site. Jack Neal's parents only discovered their son's successful bid when they received a message from eBay about the Barbie pink Nissan Figaro. Rachael Neal, 36, said her son was quite good at using the computer. Mrs Neal, of Sleaford, Lincolnshire, said she had left her eBay password in her computer and her son had used the "buy it now" button. The car is incidentally a Pink Nissan Figaro. I say they make him drive it when he turns 16 as punishment.

The Ten Million Dollar Shoes

Saudi offers $10m for shoes thrown by journo Iraq: Wednesday, December 17 - 2008 at 09:22 A Saudi man has offered $10m to buy the shoes that Iraqi journalist Muntadar Al Zaidi hurled at US President George W. Bush, according to a report carried by Al Arabiya net. Sixty-year-old Hassan Mohammad Makhafa, from Aseer, south west of Saudi Arabia, said he is ready to sell all his properties to buy Al Zaidi's shoes, which he described as a 'medal of freedom' to put them on offer at a public auction. HT: href="http://www.juancole.com/2008/12/al-zaidi-injured-pleads-guilty-mosul.html">Juan…

Biopunks and cultural change

Razib Khan has a good response to my post yesterday about biopunks, including this: I obviously support this movement and its intents (I've met a few of the people who are prominent in it). But we need to keep perspective here. This will probably be analogous to the free or open source software movement; the base of tinkers will be much larger than corporations and academic institutions, but it isn't going to expand to cover the majority of the public. But so what? Most us can probably agree that the ad hoc decentralized elements of the software engineering community have done good just by…

Shopping

In the last few months, American consumers have undergone a profound shift in their shopping habits. We've transitioned from being incessant consumers - the spendthrifts of the world - to reluctant savers. Here's the Times: American consumers and businesses are embarking on an era of thrift as the recession deepens, saving more money as they cut spending on purchases as varied as sweaters, new homes and office towers. Department of Commerce Report on Personal Income and Spending That was the picture painted by two government reports released on Monday. One showed that Americans cut their…

Favourite Science Books

Wow - this one is old: December 29, 2004. It is in a need of serious updating, not to mention providing amazon links so I can earn pennies if you click and buy. But, it is still a good list nontheless: I have picked my top ten books on politics and have posted a long list of books before, and now, as I promised, here is my list of best science books. As I struggled so much to restrict myself to just 10 books on politics, and left out so many worthy titles, this time around I decided to cheat a little. Instead of Top 10 Science Books, I will make a meta-list of my top picks of books in each…

Where Is Your Food Coming From? The Bullseye Evaluation

It has been a few years since I've done a really close examination of how much of our food we're producing/getting locally/getting from elsewhere. In that time, some things have changed at our place - some of our fruit trees have begun producing, we've gotten more and different livestock, we've built relationships with some new sources. On the other hand, foster children have meant we are required to provide some purchased milk and other items we didn't buy previously, and we also have been the beneficiaries of a lot of things given to us by our dumpster-diving buddy. I think it is time…

The means of production

U.S. Is Finding Its Role in Business Hard to Unwind: Between financial rescue missions and the economic stimulus program, government spending accounts for a bigger share of the nation's economy -- 26 percent -- than at any time since World War II. The government is financing 9 out of 10 new mortgages in the United States. If you buy a car from General Motors, you are buying from a company that is 60 percent owned by the government. If you take out a car loan or run up your credit card, the chances are good that the government is financing both your debt and that of your bank. And if you buy…

An overview of the Polymath projects so far

I've been fascinated by these projects, but I felt that I didn't have sufficient time to really do them justice here. Michael Nielsen has discussed them in several venues so it wasn't clear what I could add. Then I thought about it some more, and I realized that I probably do have different readers than Michael and my view is definitely different than his (plus he nudged me on friendfeed) so here's a discussion for you. After that rambling preface - you might ask, what's Polymath? It's the name of this project to do massively collaborative mathematics first suggested by Tim Gowers on his blog…

Audience Participation Friday: Pimp Me New Tunes

I'm getting a little sick of the current rotation on iTunes, which means it's probably time for another shopping spree. I've got a couple of albums on my list to buy already (the new Tom Petty, the new Richard Thompson), and I've heard a couple of good tracks on KEXP that I'll check out (new songs by Midlake and the Long Winters), but I'm always interested in new music. So, what's new in the music world that I ought to buy? Ideally, these should be tracks available through iTunes, though I will buy physical CD's if I have sufficiently good reason. My tastes are somewhat eclectic, as you can…

Un-American, anti-capitalist, eco-freak poseurs

Or not. The Compact, in San Francisco, shows regular people doing regular things to reduce consumption. They don't buy anything new. Except maybe shoe polish. Or a drill bit. This Washington Post article discusses the group, whose Yahoo group stood at 1800 strong before the article ran. (They also saw a spike in attention last winter after a similar article in the San Fransisco Chronicle.) "Some have called the Compactors un-American, anti-capitalist, eco-freak poseurs whose defiant act of not-consuming, if it caught on, would destroy the economy and our way of life." Other's haven't.…

Guest Book Review: Death From The Skies

A few weeks ago, I read, enjoyed, and reviewed Phil Plait's Death From the Skies. After I caught my daughter looking at the book a couple of times, I managed to bribe convince her to write a review of the book. The result is the following review. I fixed the formatting a little bit, but I had absolutely no role in the development of the text. Death From the Skies When I got death from the skies I thought that it would be about people getting an unpleasant visit from flaming meteors, I was wrong. It was about the ways the world will end. I then got depressed and then got an unsettling…

Death from the Skies, by Phil Plait: Guest Review!

Originally posted by Mike Dunford On March 6, 2009, at 8:24 AM A few weeks ago, I read, enjoyed, and reviewed Phil Plait's Death From the Skies. After I caught my daughter looking at the book a couple of times, I managed to bribe convince her to write a review of the book. The result is the following review. I fixed the formatting a little bit, but I had absolutely no role in the development of the text. Death From the Skies When I got death from the skies I thought that it would be about people getting an unpleasant visit from flaming meteors, I was wrong. It was about the ways the world…

10,000 New Ebooks, but Nothing to Read

In which we look at how the Brave New Publishing World makes it really hard to find something good to read. ------------ In a recent links dump, I included a link to this post about the current state of publishing, which is a follow-up to an earlier post about the current state of publishing. Elsewhere in my social media universe, this has come in for a lot of derision from anti-publishing friends, particularly the bit where the author complains that there are too many books published. "How can there be such a thing?" is the basic thrust of the thing. "The more books, the better!"…

Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?

tags: Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?, New Scientist, book review, science, trivia Anyone who has ever claimed that science is boring has never spent any time talking with a scientist. However, some people have done so, and in the process, they ask lots of interesting questions such as; Why don't birds fall off their perches when they are asleep? How do you make transparent ice cubes like those in Scotch advertisements? What time is it at the North Pole? Why are traffic signals arranged red over amber over green whereas railroad signals are arranged green over amber over red? If you have…

Nature science writing paywalls are pissing me off

Please forgive me for the cranky. I am still confined to bed and am only writing between fits of coughing that still occasionally drive me near unconsciousness due to hypoxia. I'm stuck at home trying to read some research literature across the VPN and proxy servers from my three faculty appointments that give me access to much biomedical research literature. However, some journals are now no longer granting access if one's IP address does not come directly from the university, even if you are using the university VPN server. And then there's my love-hate relationship with Nature Publishing…

Diavolo!

This guy is Allo Diavolo: He was a circus daredevil. At the dawn of the 20th century he worked on a number of stunts dressed in his ominous horned outfit. These days a lot of people, including me, have heard of him as an example in the pages of physics textbooks. In my case it was Halliday and Resnick, a standard (and good) freshman physics text. Diavolo did a trick where he looped the loop riding a bicycle. It's pretty impressive: The breathless circus ad copy claims that this stunt is more or less certain death. It wasn't, of course. I wouldn't want to try it, but it's certainly a…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Scientists Clone Mice From Adult Skin Stem Cells: For cells that hold so much promise, stem cells' potential has so far gone largely untapped. But new research from Rockefeller University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists now shows that adult stem cells taken from skin can be used to clone mice using a procedure called nuclear transfer. The findings are reported in the Feb. 12 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Manipulating Nature: Scientists Query Wildlife Birth-control Method: Professor Cooper also raises concerns that individuals that…

The pandemic flu risk market

If the number of emails I've gotten about the new "market" in pandemic risk were buy orders, I'd be doing very well. A market in pandemic risk? Of course. Is this a great country, or what? Is a bird flu pandemic coming? Health experts say there is no way to know, and especially no way to know when. But someone does know, or, rather, the combined experience of a lot of someones -- doctors and nurses treating the odd human patient, microbiologists studying virus samples and virus experts studying disease patterns. A new "market" launched on Thursday aims to take advantage of this combined…

Extra, Extra

Welcome to the weekly linkfest, August 28 edition. Science Brian Switek writes about one of the fastest mammals on earth, the pronghorn, and the complex ecology it lives in. Of Pronghorns and Predators. It's an interesting look into the predator-prey relationships between wolves, coyotes, and pronghorns. Another great post from Brian, in which he tells us about the mystery of the missing brontosaurus head. Yet another human falls prey to the illusion of attention. The guys at The Invisible Gorilla explain why there is just no safe way to text while driving. The dog-human connection in…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Russ Campbell

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Russ Campbell from the Fishtown University blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around the Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? Hi Bora. First, thank you for the opportunity to share with your readers. I'm a big fan of your blog…

Going for the pain of paying

For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit: Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared with credit volume of $203 billion. MasterCard reported that for the first six months of this year, the volume of purchases on its debit cards increased 4.1 percent, to $160 billion, in the United States. Spending on credit and charge cards sank 14.8 percent, to $233 billion. "Consumers are rational thinking individuals, and they're going to…

Random Ten

It's been a while since I did one of these: "Crush On You" by Bruce Springsteen from the album The River (1980, 3:11). "Carrot Juice Is Murder" by The Arrogant Worms from the album Gift Wrapped, The Best of the Arrogant Worms (2002, 3:29). "Might" by Modest Mouse from the album This is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About (1997, 1:31). "Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers from the album Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (1976, 3:51). "Brain Damage" by Pink Floyd from the album Dark Side Of The Moon (1973, 3:50). "Vegetable" by Radiohead…

How High Gas Prices Are an Income Transfer to the Very Rich From the Rest of Us

Dan Froomkin has a great article about the role that financial speculation plays in driving up gasoline prices*. Keep in mind that even Goldman Sachs, the largest oil trader, admits that speculation drives up oil prices. But what really disgusting is how this speculation-based rise in prices serves as a wealth transfer from, well, just about everybody to oil company executives (italics mine): By and large, the oil companies' profits are not finding their way back into the communities from which they came; are not being used to create more jobs; and are not being invested in new equipment…

The Science Blogging Anthology - the Great Unveiling!

Yes! It is finally here! What you have all been waiting for, impatiently, for three weeks! The Science Blogging Anthology is now for sale. Go to Lulu.com by clicking here (or click on the picture of the book to your right) and place your order! You can choose to buy a PDF to download (but do you really want to print out 336 pages!?) or order the book with its pretty cover - it takes only a couple of days to arrive at your doorstep. You can see here how it all got started, just three weeks ago, smack in the middle of the holidays when nobody was online and traffic was down to a third of…

Whats your Mann number?

John fleck has been having fun with degrees of separation. See Erdos, Lambert and Fleck and Eight Degrees of Separation (and the comments, where we discover that Steve McI has a "Mann number" of 4). Whats mine? I can do (C+Gregory) to (Gregory and Sexton) to (Parker and Sexton) to (Parker and Folland) to (Folland and M). So thats 4... there is probably a quicker way to get from Gregory for Mann, though. Entertainingly, John sets the challenge of a chain connecting me with Lubos Motl. And if you're wondering why you might want to do that, err, you haven't been paying attention :-) I'll buy a…

Are social networking sites doomed to failure?

Yesterday the preeminent socially generated news site, digg.com, nearly exploded. The way the site is supposed to work is that users submit links to stories (and web sites, photos, and videos) they think will be interesting, and others give those stories a thumbs-up (a "digg") or thumbs-down. If enough users digg a story, it will be promoted to the top of the front page, and this constantly-updated page will reflect a diversity of interesting stories from around the world. Ideally, this system is completely controlled by Digg's users, and the only interference from "management" is to remove…

Beer Keg Loft

And now for something completely different... Pirate flags are the first sign... Team Numb comfortably launched a fat rocket on a P7000 motor to loft a full beer keg over a mile high straight up. ⢠Keg: 175 lbs of beer. Roots. From Oregon. ⢠Motor: 60 lbs of Alumaflame solid rocket propellant (looks like gray styrofoam, but burns in a violet flame). This home brew P motor is twice as big as what you can buy, and you can buy a cruise missile booster from Cesaroni Aerospace in Canada. ⢠Altitude: 6,100 ft. Perfect flight. ⢠Results: Beer shaken, not stirred, and tapped at the…

I am in withdrawal

I need my laptop. Last week, the power input, which was getting loose, finally decided to become fully disconnected. It might have had something to do with the kitten hanging from the power cord. And sadly, when I consulted the repair people I am told the only solution is to replace the entire motherboard, rather than just reconnect or repair the jack. In the meantime I have become grumpy and withdrawn. I am unable to blog without my bookmarks and properly configured web-browser. I realize how fully dependent I have become on this machine. My reference database is on it, as well as the…

Perverting Conservation

Getting "buy-in" from an industry is crucial when attempting to regulate in favor of consumer protection or environmentalism. If the industry fundamentally does not accept the values embodied in the effort, it finds ways around it. After all, these companies have the brightest lawyers and engineers on their side, and if some public policy is supposed to do X, they'll find a way to make it do Y. A case in point is the popularity of hybrid cars and the conservation of fuel. Luxury car companies have found a way to pervert them from energy-saving devices to gas guzzlers with the patina of…

The Science of the Real End of The World

"I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again." -Eric Roth, screenwriter Forget the prognosticators, the fortune-tellers and the mediums. Pay no mind to the soothsayers, the prophets, the augurs and diviners. The seers see no more than any other sighted person, the omen-interpreters have been superseded by the ornithologists, the psychics made obsolete by the scientists. Because if doomsday ever does approach, we won't be…

ScienceOnline'09 - Monday blogging and beyond...

Today, most of the ScienceOnline09 participants are either traveling home or trying to recover. While many managed to blog or liveblog during the conference, as well as discuss the conference on FriendFeed or Twitter and post pictures on Flickr, others have a different mode: taking some time to digest and then write thoughtful summaries later, once they are rested. First of those summaries are starting to show up online and I will keep updating you as others come in: Highly Allochthonous: ScienceOnline Day 2: generalised ramblings The Intersection: Echinoderms Emerge Victorious! White Coat…

Oh no, GMOs.

As SciBlogs resident cowgirl/GMO-shill, I feel an obligation to post a response to a few posts up at 'Whats New In Life Science Research' (Jan 8 through today). I dont want to start a blag-fight, I just want to correct some of their errors and start a conversation (LOL! BLAG FIGHT! BLAG FIGHT!) because I dont think they are anti-GMO green anarchists. I think they are GMO-phobic, and education fixes phobias :) Several authors made it clear they would like it if all GMO foods were labeled 'GMO'. I think that is silly. I can tell you what foods in your local grocery store are GMO: Basically…

Science, Hot off the Press

Bridging new media and old, The Open Laboratory takes the best scientific blogging of the year and prints it on actual paper. For 2010, forty reviewers narrowed down nearly 900 submissions to fifty of the very best. This year's edition also includes six poems and a cartoon! Editor Jason G. Goldman announces availability of the book on The Thoughtful Animal, suggesting you "buy one for yourself, buy one for your significant other, buy one for each family member, buy one each for as many neighbors, friends and colleagues you can think of, and buy a copy for the local library." In another…