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The Graduate Junction

Graduate Junction is a new social networking site designed for graduate students and postdocs. I looked around a bit and found it clean, easy-to-use and potentially useful. This is how they explain it - give it a try and let me know what you think: The Graduate Junction is a brand new website designed to help early career researchers make contact with others with similar research interests, regardless of which department, institution or country they work in. Designed by two graduate researchers at the University of Durham, The Graduate Junction has proved very popular with research students…

Science Blogging Conference - Registration is now open!

Late last night we opened the registration for the 2nd Science Blogging Conference, to be held on January 19th, 2008 on the Sigma Xi campus (publishers of 'American Scientist') in the Research Triangle Park which is officially on the territory of Durham, NC. To register, go to the registration form and fill out the details. To see who is already registered, go here. If you will be here on day before, on Friday, January 18th and want to join us for dinner, add you name to this list. If you are on Facebook, join the Conference Event and invite your friends. Some of the news will be…

The Best of March

I posted 133 times in March. I was quite focused on science communication and journalism this month and blogged quite a lot about these topics. See, for example, Why it is important for media articles to link to scientific papers, or New science journalism ecosystem: new inter-species interactions, new niches or What is journalism and do PIOs do it? And what's with advertising? or What is Journalism? or Push vs. Pull strategies in science communication. And I was keeping tab on what others are saying: Science Journalism/Communication week in review, Science Journalism must-reads of the day,…

Myrmecos Blog at Two Years

Myrmecos Blog appeared online two years ago today.   While I'm obviously the guy writing most of the posts, the reason we're still on the air isn't me and my bloviating.  It is all of you guys- the readers, the guest bloggers, the commentators. Without the life provided to the site by the many participants, I'd long since have lost the incentive to keep at it.  So, a heartfelt thank you. If I had to finger any one difference between blogging in 2007 and blogging in 2009, it is this.  In 2007 blogs had already risen to mainstream acceptability, especially in the political, commercial, and…

Technical difficulties

As many of you may have noticed, we're having some technical difficulties, with prolonged posting times for comments, errors, etc. I assure you that, however much it might annoy you to watch your browser chug away slowly and seemingly endlessly after you've composed your pithy and erudite comment and hit "Post," only to deliver an error message at the end, it annoys me infinitely more because it's happening to me nearly every time I try to edit or save a post or comment and has been for several days now. I've learned that what's going on is tha apparently traffic at ScienceBlogs has finally…

12 Books for Every Sustainability Nut

Note: I'm way behind on my 31 books resolution - I'll have to hurry to catch up. In the meantime, will you count these 12? I bet you don't own them! Worms Eat my Laundry by Alcea Grovestock - Worms are hot - in-house domestic composting is everywhere. But have you considered the way red wigglers could augment your laundry routine? After all, so many of us, taken up with homestead and farm work, garden and family chores have developed that layer of laundry that never seems to get washed, composting at the bottom of the hamper. With the addition of red worms and regular contributions to…

The GOP Needs New Followers, Not Leaders

Well, the leaders suck pretty bad too. Having just spent two weeks in Virginia, this account of a meeting of McCain/Palin supporters rings true: I immediately realized that the McCain/Palin folks were having a little meeting....I sat down at the table next to the group just as they were starting their meeting. As soon as the last member of their group came in, they prayed. In their prayer they begged that God "deliver the country from the evil socialists" and even prayed that "Obama find God"... ....The next person lamented that their whole office was voting for Obama. The McCain/Palin…

To Subsidize Corporate Bond Issues, Less Money for Education

I've written before about how the Collapse of the Jenga of Shit (aka the 'subprime' loan crisis) has raised the price of borrowing money--which is paid for with higher state and local taxes--due to the collapse of bond insurers and a liquidity crisis in municipal bonds. Now your property and sales taxes can take another hike courtesy of ratings agency like Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service, and Fitch Ratings. From the New York Times (italics mine): If they are right, billions of taxpayers' dollars -- money that could be used to build schools, pave roads and repair bridges --…

China: A Looming Antibiotic Resistance Problem

And you thought fixing the renminbi was bad. By way of Glyn Moody, we find that The Guardian has a very disturbing report about antibiotic resistance in China (italics mine): Chinese doctors routinely hand out multiple doses of antibiotics for simple maladies like the sore throats and the country's farmers excessive dependence on the drugs has tainted the food chain. Studies in China show a "frightening" increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly…

Rent Extraction + For-Profit Healthcare = Sepsis

Imagine someone had designed a device that would essentially eliminate bloodstream infections (sepsis) caused by contamination of needleless injection ports. Great news right? Well, guess what happens next: Unlike some of the solutions floated by big medical device makers, such as coating the ports with silver, Shaw's innovation added only a few pennies to the cost of production. And it seemed to be remarkably effective: a 2007 clinical study funded by Shaw's company and conducted by the independent SGS Laboratories found the device prevented germs from being transferred to catheters…

Research, Teaching, Tuition, and Overheads

Someday, a science reporter is going to hybridize with an economics reporter and then the topic of how science is funded will actually be covered accurately. Until then, you're stuck with the Mad Biologist. By way of The Intersection, we come across this Chronicle of Higher Education commentary by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. I think the overall point, which is that colleges and universities have strayed from their core mission, which is education, is a good one. But like much commentary on this subject, it neglects the harsh, cold reality of revenue (Got Pepsi?). Here's their…

Public health is public

The national bird flu plan is quite explicit in its promises to local public health. There aren't any. The plan is, "you're on your own." Fair enough. A pandemic happens everywhere so there's no "outside" to send help from. But how well prepared is local public health? Bush has given them the power and supposedly provided them with money to handle bioterrorism attacks. That should have been some help. It wasn't. Unfortunately what the left hand giveth, the Right Hand taketh away. From Cape Cod, Massachusetts: But budget cuts over the past few years, coupled with a lack of staff, have left…

Discover the STEM Power of Walmart -- From Farm Production and Fleet Truck Design to Energy Efficiency and Skilled Trade Employment!

  Many people know Walmart as the largest corporate retailer in the world, but did you also realize it is a leading innovator and employer in STEM? At Festival Expo 2014, you'll discover in unforgettable ways this other side of Walmart, which this year is serving as an Americum-level Sponsor of the Festival! Walmart's imprint on STEM is significant worldwide, and is especially noted for: developing ways to make its foods more healthful by reducing sodium, sugar and fat; designing high-tech fleet trucks; working with farmers to produce better crop yields; creating energy-efficient retail…

Things to Remember About US Healthcare

A lot of the media coverage of the healthcare debate lately has focused on the politics, probably because journalists feel like they've already spent several months explaining the various aspects of proposed reform. But there are a few things that bear repeating, because not everyone seems to remember them. The Washington Post's Ezra Klein has one key reminder: In the US, we already ration healthcare: We ration. We ration without discussion, remorse or concern. We ration health care the way we ration other goods: We make it too expensive for everyone to afford. I've used these numbers before…

The mess at Interior

One of the peculiarities of our media right now is that, as everyone knows, the best political reporting is being done by a couple of comedy shows on cable. Another source that has been surprising me is Rolling Stone, which has unshackled a couple of wild men, Tim Dickinson and Matt Taibbi, to go after the corruption and insanity of American politics — one of those things we once upon a time expected our newspaper journalists to do. I guess the powers-that-be think it's safe to let the drug-addled hippies and punks (and college professors) who read Rolling Stone to know about the failures of…

New ?Guide Book To Medieval Stockholm

Historiska media is a publishing house in Lund. In recent years they have been putting out pop-sci guide books about Medieval Sweden, province by province. I've reviewed the volumes about Södermanland and Uppland provinces here. And now my friend and Fornvännen co-editor Elisabet Regner has written the first volume in the series that deals with a town, not a province: about Stockholm, in whose suburbs I've lived for almost all my life. Together with the Uppland and Södermanland volumes, Det medeltida Stockholm gives us Stockholmers a pretty good grip on our Medieval surroundings. I shouldn't…

Levees and the National Flood Insurance Program (NAP)

The National Academies Press of the United States has recently released a report that will be of interest to those of you concerned with climate change (which better be every one of you dammit!). The report talks about increasing floods due to weather whiplash and sea level rise due to glacial melting (and subsidence), mainly in relation to the levees program and insurance, but also more generally. Here's a small excerpt to give you a flavor: Community flood risk scenarios will continue to evolve as change occurs. Climate change will have a variety of regional impacts, and the geographic…

Calculating The Carbon Cost Of ... well, anything.

There is currently a twitter argument happening, along with a bit of a blogging swarm, over a chimera of a remark made by John Stossle and Bjorn Lomborg. They made the claim that a million electric cars would have no benefit with resect to Carbon emissions. The crux of the argument is that there is a Carbon cost to manufacturing and running electric cars. When we manufacture anything, we emit Carbon, and when we make electricity to run the cars, we emit Carbon, etc. etc. Lomborg is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But here I want to focus on one aspect of why he is wrong that applies…

EBooks and Agencies

The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the "agency model" of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links dumped an article about the detailed charges, and three of the six companies involved have agreed to a settlement that will change the way their books get priced. A couple of the publishers, particularly Macmillan, whose nasty public spat with Amazon kicked this whole thing off, have decided to fight…

DonorsChoose: Buy This Blog

At the time of this writing, the Uncertain Principles blog challenge stands in first place on the ScienceBlogs Leaderboard, with just under $2,000 in donations so far. That's almost a third of the challenge goal of $6000 in just three days, which is fantastic. Thank you for your generosity. Of course, that still leaves $4,000 to go, which means more donations are definitely wanted. The hip thing to do appears to be to offer incentives for donations, and who am I to pass up a good idea. So, here you go: For a $30 donation to the DonorsChoose challenge, you can buy this blog. Details, terms,…

Hello, world

Well, I just flew in from DC, and boy, are my arms tired. But seriously, folks.... It's a fine thing to be asked to guestblog by the eminent Dr. Oilcan, and I'll do my best to entertain you sporadically over the next few weeks. Like he said, I first met Chad back in his Usenet days, which was back in my Usenet days as well. That's obvious, yeah, but it's key that we both refer to time on Usenet as long past. I haven't read or posted to a newsgroup in five years, and even then my interest had been pretty much dead for a couple years. I first encountered Usenet as a wide-eyed…

Creationist Physics 101

A weird anti-evolution crank seems to be ramping up his efforts around the blogosphere recently: C. David Parsons has been leaving comments at Florida Citizens for Science, and Wesley Elsberry directly addresses his "conflict driven" views. Parsons has apparently been trying to raise his profile because he has a new book out, and he wants creationists to buy it. It's being put out by Tate Publishing, which seems to be a vanity press dedicated specifically to bilking Christian authors. If you have $40 and a complete lack of sense, you too can be the proud owner of The Quest for Right: The…

Fall Break

The beginning of this week was fall break at our college campus. We had the weekend off as well as Monday and Tuesday. Since I had been planning to return home to northern Minnesota for the first time since moving down to west central Minnesota in August, I decided to take Thursday and Friday off also. The few days I spent away from this desolate prairie wasteland and back among the conifers and lakes were phenomenally enjoyable. This is my first year of college away from home and a long way from home it is. I remember the first few weeks I was down here, only vaguely though, a lot of…

ScienceGrandma has left the building

After staying with us for about a month, ScienceGrandma is now on the plane flight back to her home. Last night was our first night without her. Below the fold, a few reflections on living with three generations under one roof. I am happy to be returning to the master bedroom and bath, which we had given up because of accessibility issues. For the duration of her visit, we'd moved a guest bed into my home office and I'd cleared off some bookshelves for clothes. Two adults and a toddler in a single tiny bathroom gets a bit crowded, especially because of needing to keep everything out of a…

Stimulating shovel-ready NIH extramural research

Over the weekend, Comrade PhysioProf at DrugMonkey posted on the details of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus funds distribution for the US National Institutes of Health. For some unusual reason, the letter that was sent to NIH investigators and posted on the NIH website has now been removed and replaced today by the statement: The announcement from the Acting NIH Director will be issued later today. We are making every effort to get this vital information to you as soon as possible. This page was last reviewed on February 23, 2009. From the DrugMonkey post and an article…

Fire Drill!

[I'm foregoing the usual Saturday miscellany for a Very Special Built on Facts. It's important!] Imagine a basketball sitting on the top of a hill. The slope of the hill is pretty gentle, and so you can roll the ball around a bit without the risk of it rolling away. But hit it too hard and it's going to catch the slope and zoom off. You and many of the materials which surround you are not so different. They're made of atoms which are comfortable so long as you don't hit them very hard. But hit them hard enough with oxygen molecules and they'll go flying away. And they'll hit other…

So how will you spend your 37 tons of carbon?

Inspired by a letter to New Scientist by Londoner Guy Robinson, herewith a not-so-abstract thought experiment based on the trillionth-ton climate change concept. According to a pair of papers recently published in Nature, the Earth stands a good chance of warming more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels if our cumulative atmospheric emissions of carbon since those days reaches a trillion tons. So far, we've emitted about 520 billion tons. leaving us with just 480 billion tons before we enter into dangerous global warming territory. But some of our total emissions are tied to agricultural (…

Happy Warriors for Vaccines

The NYTimes profiles Paul Offit, author of Autism's False Prophets. Offit has been taking the anti-vaccine lobby to task over pseudoscience, and he hasn't been winning many friends in the process: Those backing Dr. Offit say he was forced into the role. Opponents of vaccines have held rallies, appeared on talk shows like "Oprah" and "Imus in the Morning," been the heroes of made-for-TV movies and found a celebrity spokeswoman in Jenny McCarthy, the actress and former Playboy model who has an autistic son. Meanwhile, the response from public health officials has been muted and couched in dull…

Martial Zoo Law

Over the last couple of weeks, a number of the zookeeper and exotic pet listservs I subscribe to have read more like the classifieds in the back of Field & Stream. Obviously due to the recent tragedy at the San Francisco Zoo, these are boom times for the tranquilizer gun business. I thought I might share a little about what I've learned. The Arsenal: Blow Guns - Good for short range, especially in cages. Wait a minute, blow guns!? Yes, and apparently they have come a long way since our great-great-grandfathers (or in my case, my uncle Jon) used them to score monkey dinners from the tree…

Living within your ethics: animal research and medical care.

From time to time, when we've talked about people who object to research with animals on ethical grounds, the claim has been made that it is hypocritical for people with these objections to avail themselves of modern medicine. Our drugs and surgical interventions, after all, are typically the result of research that includes animal research. Occasionally, a response like this is made: There is no reason to opt out of the existing treatments, since the animal suffering that went into that research cannot be undone. Given that these past animals suffered, the knowledge produced from their…

40 years of Star Trek

Continuing on the nerd/geek theme, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that today is the 40th anniversary of the debut of the original Star Trek series. Forty years, hundreds of TV episodes and books, and several movies later, the franchise is completely ingrained in American culture, so much so that catch phrases like "Beam me up!" are recognized by pretty much everyone. One thing I'm not so sure I'm all that enthusiastic about is the CBS Paramount project to remaster all of the original 79 episodes, replacing many of the special effects with state-of-the art digital recreations of the…

Getting Started with Rockets

Estes is the major brand in low power rocketry, with Quest as an alternative. If you launched rockets as a kid, it was probably Estes. They make black powder motors in cardboard cases. As I have moved on to the bigger projects, the only lingering reason to consider these motors is that you can tape the top of one to the bottom of another for a cheap and easy way to do multi-stage rockets. Realize though that this shifts the weight of the rocket to the rear, which can make them unstable, as I have learned from adding three motors to a rocket designed for one: "Icarus" came back about 15…

My Nature Article

No, I didn't do actual research. But I do have a news feature on neuroeconomics in the new issue. Here's a snippet: Read Montague spent the summer of 2003 thinking about soft drinks. His teenage daughter was working as an intern in his lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and Montague, a neuroscientist, wanted to find an experiment that she could "wrap her head around". After much deliberation, he came up with the perfect research topic: recreating the Pepsi Challenge. In a brain scanner1. Pepsi launched this advertisement, one of the most famous of all time, in the early…

"A Junk Insurance Tax"

To follow up on Tuesday's post about Massachusetts' healthcare, it bears repeating: healthcare reform has to make people's lives better. In other words, people have to like this crap. And this isn't cutting it (boldface mine; italics original): When it came time to renew my own insurance, I asked the insurance broker, what it would cost to buy good insurance in New York State. She said, "sit down". I held my breath in anticipation, she said, "$1300 a month." When it came time for me to renew my health insurance which was a barely adequate policy with a $500 deductible, the new premium…

Biotech and Business Journalism: It's the Business Model, Stupid

In the midst of all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the death and cooptation of business journalism inspired by John Stewart's skewering of Jim Cramer, it's important to remember one thing: that's the business model. Or to put it another way, the customer is always right. If you ever read the biotech press, which is a subset of the larger business press, there is an obvious, inherent structural bias. The biotech press will never critique the fundamentals of the biotech industry as a whole. It will criticize individual approaches or companies. But it will almost never ask…

Digby Closes the Circle on 'Fiscal Austerity'

One of the really difficult things for me to comprehend is why the idea of 'Fiscal Austerity' is so popular among politicians, especially too many Democratic ones, when Fiscal Austerity will lead to high unemployment. The null hypothesis of "people are fucking morons", while personally appealing, just doesn't seem to have explanatory power. However, Digby, as she is wont to do, clarifies things tremendously: I have thought from the beginning of the crisis that this [the erroneous belief that budget cuts will create jobs] was a problem. I could tell from some conversations I was having that…

Bad news for the Affordable Care Act

The NYTimes reporting suggests a 5-4 split against ACA is likely: Justice Kennedy, along with Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. all asked questions suggesting that they had a problem with the constitutionality of the mandate requiring most Americans to buy insurance. Justice Clarence Thomas, as usual, did not ask any questions, but he is widely expected to vote to overturn the mandate. As does CNN's Toobin's analysis: This is interesting. Part of the issue is how much of the law would fall if they turn against it? Would we still be able…

Honey, where's my Super-Suit?

The new Speedo LZR Racer suit, that is. Designed with all the power of science and technology behind it, the LZR Racer is being credited with imparting enhanced, record-breaking athletic performances to its wearers. . It was designed using the same technology applied to reducing drag on the Space Shuttle, with the goal of diminishing the friction and skin movement that normally occur during swimming, thus improving overall hydrodynamics. It's a cool story from the scientific perspective, to be sure, but the public reaction since its unveiling in February 08, and now with the Olympic…

DIY BIO: clone at home but kill them later

Cloning the gene for green fluorescent protein is fun. Lots of fun. Cloners have put the GFP gene into rabbits, plants, cats, fish, and worms, and made mutants that code for proteins in every color of the fluorescent rainbow. Teachers like GFP so much that every year, high school students throughout the U.S. clone GFP in biology class. Now, some people, who call themselves DIY biologists, have started cloning GFP for fun in their kitchens. Other people find this alarming. From Yahoo news: Jim Thomas of ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog organization, warned that synthetic organisms…

King of the Wonks

John Zogby, of the Zogby polling agency gave a talk on campus earlier tonight. I have to say, having heard him speak, that whoever came up with the word "wonk" probably had somebody like Zogby in mind-- he had poll numbers for absolutely everything he talked about, and for every single question he was asked afterwards. I spent a few minutes trying to think of a question that he wouldn't be able to answer with "I did some polling on that...," but didn't come up with anything. He did have a couple of interesting comments, though, that I'll reproduce here for anyone who's interested: The one…

Learn Python Using Minecraft

Minecraft is a gaming world. Or, if you like, a "sandbox." This is a three dimensional world in which characters do things, all sorts of things. The context for the world of Minecraft is very open ended. The player builds things, moves things, gets things, does things, in a way that makes any one gamer's game potentially very different from any other gamer's game. You can buy Minecraft in various forms such as an XBox 360 version. It comes in Lego form (for example, this), and you can get a Minecraft cloud server version at Minecraft.net. If you install Minecraft from Minecraft.net (about…

Bugs Aren't Features

I upgraded to the latest version of Opera a little while ago, and since the upgrade, it has developed a really charming bug: every so often, it just decides not to have anything further to do with certain web sites. It happens most frequently with ScienceBlogs, because I usually have several SB tabs open, but I've seen it with some other frequently-visited sites. It works fine for a while, but after a day or two, hitting "Reload" to, say, update comment counts, does nothing. It says that it's loading, and maybe even that it's transferred some trivial number of bytes, but then it just sits…

Cranky Book "Meme": Voted Off the Island

Jim Henley proposes a "meme" about literature: Adrienne Aldredge has a twist on Bookish Questions I'm herewith turning into a meme: What authors have you given up on for good? And why? I'm going to stick to authors who continue to produce work, and whom I used to follow eagerly, not authors I felt obligated to try and didn't like once I did. Jim offers Dan Simmons and Alan Furst as his choices (read his post to see why). Simmons would be an excellent choice, but, um, I bought both Ilium and Olympos in hardcover. (In my defense, I read Ilium from the library first, and it seemed like a…

What do they call this when it is sushi?

A good friend of mine, whom I shall call L.R., got a job ... a pretty nice job, with benefits and a salary and everything, in the "helping" industry, which she's good at and which she likes. So I took her out for a congratulatory dinner (and just because we had not seen each other in weeks). It took me some effort to get her to tell me where she really wanted to eat. L.R. is a sweetly, quietly self contained person (but made of steel inside, so don't mess with her) so it was totally out of character for her to tell me where we should go so I could buy us both dinner. But I made her talk…

Links for 2009-09-21

Thorium-fuelled exports coming from India "The original design is fuelled by a mix of uranium-233 and plutonium bred from thorium using fast neutron power reactors earlier in a thorium fuel cycle. The LEU variant is suitable for export because it does away with the plutonium, replacing it with uranium enriched to 19.75% uranium-235. Producing 300 MWe, the unit is less than one third the capacity of a typical large reactor. It is designed to operate for up to 100 years and has a "next generation" level of safety that grants operators three days' grace in the event of a serious incident and…

Thoughts on Osama

Some initial thoughts, on a beautiful day in a palpably better world without Osama: 1. I'm astonished he was still alive. I was certain he died from an anonymous bomb or health problems sometime between '01 and '04. He hadn't released any tapes or videos with unambiguous confirmation of when they were recorded, and the general consensus was that al-Qaida was now a fully decentralized organization that had adjusted to operating without him. The fact that he wasn't dead meant that, unlike his suicide bombers and guerrillas, he had basically abandoned his own cause to live in (very) quiet luxury…

Commentary on Impact Factors in JCB

What goes into a journal's impact factor? It turns out that this is a good question. These impact factors are calculated by Thomsom Scientific and attempt to quantify the import of any particular scientific journal. But did anyone read this commentary in the December 17th issue of JCB? It's a revealing look as to how impact factors are compiled. From the article: With the aim of dissecting the data to determine which topics were being highly cited and which were not, we decided to buy the data for our three journals (The Journal of Experimental Medicine, The Journal of Cell Biology, and The…

Tech4Society, Day 2

Getting ready to head up to Tech4Society's final day. I'm on a panel called the tipping point, about how to scale social entrepreneurial success beyond a local region or state. My instinct is to say "pack your suitcase and start traveling" but that's not very helpful. Even if it's how I have been approaching the problem. Yesterday I wasn't on a panel. It was a good moment to do some listening. I sat in on a few panels, but was most moved by the trends in Africa session. In other trends panels, the trends were things like "open source" - positive trends. In Africa it was all about how…

The blunt edge of "the Wedge" strikes again

If you fail at everything else in life, you could always try to work for a scientific organization, reveal that you're a creationist, and then land a job as a professor at Liberty University. That's just what Nathaniel Abraham did, and now he's suing the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute because as they didn't want a creationist working on a project that directly involved evolutionary concepts. PZ already covered this story when it initially came out, but now it seems to have emerged in wider media circles (it was on the Yahoo! front page when I logged on a few minutes ago). The…

Presidential churches

There has been much wringing of hands over video of a speech delivered by Sen. Obama's pastor. Pastor Wright says various and sundry things which go well beyond what ought to be said at a pulpit, and beyond what a presidential candidate would consider, well, presidential. Obama has responded, rejecting those statements (in language stronger than McCain's tut-tutting over Hagee's bigoted statements) but standing by his affiliation with the church. Defending that choice, Obama cites Wright's imminent retirement, with a successor already chosen, and Obama's and his family's ties to the…