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Almost a bump

Bumps again, hurrah. The distant sound of gunfire. The culmination of a lot of peoples training for a long time. And, as I discovered once again while waiting for the start, a deeply unpleasant / scary / unnerving experience. It didn't help that we had to stand around for 20 mins waiting for the 4-minute gun, wondering what the hold up was: it turned out to be the bloody Georgina. Meanwhile we're chatting, thinking, looking about, going for a wee, trying to dispel the nerves. Early rain had given way to a beautiful evening, though getting dark now. We'd done a good start after the railway…

Zero tolerance for pseudo-science?

Hat tip to JB, who points me at John Beddington saying: "We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality...We are not--and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this--grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method," It gets better: Beddington also had harsh words for journalists who treat the opinions of non-scientist commentators as…

Himalayan glaciers to disappear by... when?

Reader enragedparrot asks the rather sensible question, which appears to have been somewhat neglected in the vast war of words of 2035, 2350, and quite what is the source for what: if 2035 is badly wrong, what is the right date? The answer, of course, is that I don't know. But I may be able to tell you something useful along the way. If you've seen a better answer, please point me at it. [Dragged from the comments: http://web.hwr.arizona.edu/~gleonard/2009Dec-FallAGU-Soot-PressConference-Backgrounder-Kargel.pdf is excellent -W] So (forgive me, to clear more wrong stuff out of the way) 2035 is…

That East Antarctic mass loss, in full

Ah, a fertile theme for post names. Excellent. So, much excitement over a new GRACE study in Nurture (Accelerated Antarctic ice loss from satellite gravity measurements, J. L. Chen et al.) indicating that Antarctica as a whole was losing mass: In agreement with an independent earlier assessment, we estimate a total loss of 190plusminus77 Gt yr-1, with 132plusminus26 Gt yr-1 coming from West Antarctica. However, in contrast with previous GRACE estimates, our data suggest that East Antarctica is losing mass, mostly in coastal regions, at a rate of -57plusminus52 Gt yr-1, apparently caused by…

Can a creationist be a good scientist?

I honestly think that while belief in creationism is the antithesis of scientific thought, it is still possible to be a good scientist and a creationist at the same time.  This is for two main reasons.  Firstly, creationism is a term that covers a wide spectrum of beliefs, from literal 6000 year old earth bible thumping denial of evolution to a more nuanced kind of mysticism that believes somewhere beneath the deep layers of complex and wonderful natural processes exists an unexplainable and supernatural foundation. There is no practical difference between investigating how deeply "God's"…

Agnosticism, Follow-Up

John Wilkins has offered this reply to my criticism of his earlier essay on the subject of agnosticism. Well worth reading, even though I sitll think he's wrong. He seems to think that in order to be justified in asserting “X does not exist” you must be able to prove that X, indeed, does not exist. This seems like the wrong standard to me. Biochemist Larry Moran weighs in with these worthy senitments: John, with all due respect, if you walk like an atheist and talk like an atheist then, to all intents and purposes, you're a practicing atheist, whether you want to admit it or not. You can…

024/366: Soaring

While I have a bunch of stuff in progress, it's been a hectic week already, so I blew off the middle park of the day to go to Thacher State Park and take a hike with my camera. I got a whole bunch of photos from this, and later on, I'll sort them all and put the good ones in an album on G+. for now, though, I have two that are good photo-of-the-day candidates. When I set out on this hike, I only took my two fixed-focal-length lenses, the 50mm f/1.8 and the 24mm f/2.8. Each of them fits easily in the pocket of a pair of cargo shorts, and I figured swapping between the two would provide a…

Help Me Understand Comment Spam

So, I get a lot of comment spam here, probably a couple of orders of magnitude more than I get real comments (sigh). The vast majority of this gets blocked by built-in filters, so none of the stuff pitching medically implausible treatments for whatever makes it to a point where I have to see it. There's one new category of junk comment, though, that slips through the filters and requires human moderation (i.e., I have to approve or reject it), and I find this utterly baffling. The comments are sorta-kinda relevant to the post that they're sent to, albeit with dubious English, and they don't…

GPA's Are Idiotic

I was thinking about something only tangentially related to grading, when it struck me that the way we go about generating student grade point averages is the kind of mind-bogglingly stupid system that requires lots of smart people working together to produce. Two very different groups of smart people, with very different ways of looking at the world. As a scientist, the starting point for assigning grades is generally a set of scores on a bunch of individual assessments. These are generally combined to form some sort of weighted average, which can be expressed as something like a percentage…

Happy Halloween 2013: Rainbow Dash edition!

"I'm not ashamed to dress 'like a woman' because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman." - Iggy Pop Well folks, it's that time of year once again: to share my favorite holiday with you and change my digital avatar for the next 365 days! Traditionally, I've dressed as superhero-figures from my childhood, but I wanted to switch it up a little bit this year. This year, my halloween costume is based on Rainbow Dash. Image credit: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Season 1 Episode 16, via http://mlp.wikia.com/. For those of you who've never encountered the new My Little Pony: Friendship…

That asteroid did kinda hit the Earth after all! Maybe.

Remember that asteroid that was supposed to pass harmlessly by the Earth on Sunday? Well, things didn't go exactly as planned... Apparently, a meteor hit Nicaragua late Saturday night, forming a 12 meter wide crater. This would be a small chunk to make a crater that little. It has not been confirmed yet, but there is a strong possibility that this meteor was associated with 2014 RC. NPR quotes AP which quotes a Nicaraguan government official as saying the meteor "appears to have come off an asteroid that was passing close to Earth." NPR also quotes the BBC which quotes another astronomer…

Global Warming In November

The NASA GISS global temperature anomaly for November has been published. October's value was originally reported as 104, but has been corrected (it is normal to have small corrections on an ongoing basis) to 106. November's value, just out, is 105. This is hundreds of a degree C anomaly, the standard number used to report, off of a baseline. The baseline in the case of NASA GISS is 1951-1980, which does not represent pre-industrial levels. The huge uptick we saw during the last part of the current year is the result of global warming, which has been pushing temperatures up, and the…

Weekend Diversion: Watching the Planets Go By

"I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates." -Angela Carter When I'm getting clear nights, sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of them, and just go and look outside; the allure of the sky is too much. It reminds me of a Sufjan Stevens song, He Woke Me Up Again.During the winters in Portland, that's -- to put it mildly -- a rare occurrence. But this morning, something almost made up for it. I came across the best Flash Solar System app I've ever seen over at dynamicdiagrams.com…

While I'm away for a few days...

"If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days." -Dorothy Canfield Fisher Everyone needs to take a vacation, even your favorite science bloggers. I'm always telling you to get out there and enjoy the world, and while I'm not going to Antarctica like some people (yet), I should have a great adventure ahead of me. Starting today, we're headed up to Vancouver, BC and Whistler, where for…

Happy Snowy New Year!

"They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?" -Jeanette Winterson Here in Portland, it's just cold for now. But much of the world has been blanketed in those familiar white flakes, and recently. Snow is one of those simple things that nature just does, but it's still as wonderful for most of us as it was when we were little kids. Image credit: Fillies Wo/UNEP/Still Pictures. Rather than liquid freezing, snow comes from water vapor -- the gaseous form of…

Lego Technic Builder's Guide

The Unofficial LEGO Technic Builder's Guide by Pawet "Sariel" Kmiec (Second Edition) tells you how to build machines, models, robots, etc. that will work. You need to construct these things in a way that ensures they won't easily fall apart, and that requires a certain amount of engineering. There are some fairly expensive and specialized Lego Technic pieces that you may not have on hand, and this book can help you emulate them. How do you matcha motor or servo to a specific task? You need to know some stuff to make that decision sensibly. How do you make a transmission? Or an…

Trump Supporter Charged With Vote Fraud, Grammar Infraction

How can you tell what a megalomaniac is really up to? You find out what the megalomaniac is accusing everyone else of. That's what they are up to. While the just barely brighter than dim press and pundits are focusing on Trump's call for his followers to carry out voter suppression in African American and Hispanic neighborhoods on November 8th, or before at early voting elections, and accusing the Democrats of voter fraud (suppression and fraud are different, sort of opposite, things) something different is actually happening. This is how dog whistles work. Dog whistles, usually used by…

The Wall Street Journal Is A Rag

But I'm sure you already knew that. The Wall Street Journal is so far behind the curve when it comes to the science of climate change, and so deep in the pockets of the oil industry, that the following is now true: If you are in business or industry, and want to keep track of important news about markets and other important things, don't bother with the Wall Street Journal. You no longer need it for the stock info (that's on your smart phone). The editorial and analysis, and I assume the reporting, from the WSJ is so badly tainted and decades behind the times that the newspaper as a whole has…

Pregnancy, C-Sections, and Postpartum Depression Are Preexisting Conditions in New American Healthcare Act

This is from Parents magazine: When you talk about “preexisting conditions,” you probably think of things like diabetes, heart disease and cancer. But the reality is that healthcare companies consider a whole slew of common health concerns preexisting conditions. Odds are, if you’re a mom, you probably already have one of them. And now that the American Healthcare Act passed the House of Representatives today—if it becomes law, your health insurer could charge you thousands more for your coverage or reduce your insurance coverage because of these "preexisting conditions." "Things that are…

Catholic Church Refuses Gay Adoptions

Catholic Charities of Boston has decided to close up its adoption agency rather than comply with a Massachusetts policy that gays be allowed to adopt children. This charity had been facilitating adoptions for over 100 years, but placing foster children with gay parents is a violation of Church doctrine. On the one hand, I think they are completely wrong in their position on gay adoption. On the other hand, I respect the fact that they chose to withdraw from acting as an official state agency rather than compromise their beliefs. Interestingly, the group decided not to ask for a religious…

Universities Censor Mohammed Cartoons and More

For those who think that the whole Muhammed cartoon issue is just a European issue, let me give some examples of how the zeal to repress anything that someone might find offensive is spreading to American colleges. FIRE is reporting on a number of controversies, the latest of which is a student at the University of Chicago who faces possible expulsion from the dorms there for putting up a commentary about the controversy on his dorm room door with a sketch of Mohammed and the text Mo' Mohammed, Mo' Problems. He was forced to take it down and to apologize to a student who complained, but still…

American Family Association Weighs In

The American Family Association has issued an amusing press release on the Dover ruling. It says: "According the logic of the court, any hint of the existence of God, whether derived by scientific means or otherwise, renders it off limits to public schools," said Stephen Crampton, Chief Counsel for the AFA Center for Law & Policy (CLP). "The rigid denial of any competing theory to evolution suggests that evolution itself may be the only god allowed in our schools," Crampton added. Isn't it interesting how, in order to counter Judge Jones' ruling, the pro-ID crowd has to distort it…

Ed is Selling Out

I hinted a few weeks ago at some big news about this blog that would be upcoming, but I couldn't actually make an announcement because it wasn't official; now it is. Dispatches from the Culture Wars will be moving sometime in the next week or so to a new location. When the move is completed, I expect that I'll just make this page automatically forward to the new one to make it easy on everyone. In the meantime, let me address the two obvious questions - where is it moving, and why? A few weeks ago I was approached by the editors of a fairly prominent scientific publishing company, Seed Media…

True confessions

Oh, I hate these difficult questions. If you're a professor and you want to change the world, what do you do? In 1993--quit and become an activist. In 2007—start a blog. Or so it seems. PZ Myers blogging at Pharyngula is probably doing more for evolution than PZ Myers publishing papers in scientific journals. Is that true PZ? No. Hmmm, I guess it wasn't so difficult after all! Just to expand a little bit, though: it's definitely not true that I'm now doing a better job of increasing the scientific understanding of evolution. I'm not discovering anything new (well, except that I do have an…

Is Bullying A Feature Or A Bug?

This looks interesting: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. This is the description of the book: The No Asshole Rule was awarded a Quill Award as the Best Business Book of 2007. When Robert Sutton's "No Asshole Rule" appeared in the Harvard Business Review, readers of this staid publication were amazed at the outpouring of support for this landmark essay. The idea was based on the notion, as adapted in hugely successful companies like Google and SAS, that employees with malicious intents or negative attitudes destroyed any sort of productive…

Everything is political: Some books

The best politically oriented book of the year that I know of is without doubt Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow. It is a must read and you will love it. A quick description: "One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither Jefferson nor the other Founders could ever have envisioned the modern national security state, with its tens of thousands of "privateers"; its bloated Department of Homeland Security; its rusting nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and difficult to dismantle; and its strange…

Sandy hits the proverbial fan

Sandy was originally scheduled to pass over the Gulf Sream, intensify, then back off a bit in intensity as it spun closer to the cost, with the midpoint of the thousand mile wide tropical storm passing over the coast in the wee hours of the morning, Tuesday. Instead, Sandy has sped up and is heaving itself landward as a full blown Category One hurricane of unbelievable extent. Since the hurricane is hitting New Jersey, it's right punch is heading for New York City, and as I write this, the storm surge at The Battery (that's the lower, southernmost tip of Manhattan, where you catch the Staten…

Lance Armstrong and Arthur. What to do?

Do you know the TV show Arthur? It is a very good kids show on PBS, involving anthropomorphic animals (including Arthur the Aardvark), most of whom are middle school students, who face the daily struggles of life with families, schoolyard dynamics, difficult teachers, etc., and learn lessons and and all that stuff. One of the more memorable episodes is the one where the beloved Cafeteria Lady, Mrs. McGrady, has cancer and Lance Armstrong, with bunny ears (everybody has to be an anthropomorphic non-human animal), comes to town and helps make everybody feel better. Here's the trailer for that…

"I got this note from John Ritchie, Dennis's brother"

From Rob Pike Dear Rob-- As Dennis's siblings, Lynn, John, and Bill Ritchie--on behalf of the entire Ritchie family--we wanted to convey to all of you how deeply moved, astonished, and appreciative we are of the loving tributes to Dennis that we have been reading. We can confirm what we keep hearing again and again: Dennis was an unfailingly kind, sweet, unassuming, and generous brother--and of course a complete geek. He had a hilariously dry sense of humor, and a keen appreciation for life's absurdities--though his world view was entirely devoid of cynicism or mean-spiritedness. We are…

October Pieces Of My Mind #3

Leonard Cohen got from the used books store to the cake shop ahead of me. /-: Wish somebody would demolish all the modern houses on top of the ruins of Visborg Castle. The ruin of St. Olav's church in Visby is a protected ancient monument. It is being damaged by the ivy that covers it. Sadly the ivy is a protected plant. Ny Björn points out something interesting about St. Olav's ruin in Visby and its super ivy. An important reason that the ruin and the ivy survive today is that both fit well with Romantic ideas about picturesque ruins. Thus they were both preserved, and both for the same…

September Pieces Of My Mind #3

Just got the application referees' evaluation for a job I've been hoping for. I'm afraid to read it. Taking a walk first. I'm really tired of this thankless shit. Impatient for December, when I'll know if I'll have money to write that castles book or if I should start calling people about a steady job in contract archaeology. The one I stupidly turned down in fucking 1994. Osteologist Rudolf Gustavsson has documented traces of flaying on cat bones that we've found at Stensö Castle. Reading the ribald 15th century "Marriage Song" that has just appeared in a new critical edition, I found a…

May Pieces Of My Mind #1

Unpleasant discovery. I've known for a long time that looking at the age of people who get lectureships in Scandy archaeology, the third quartile is at 46. In other words, 75% of all the jobs are given to people aged 46 or less. But now I've looked at the contents of the fourth quartile. And it consists almost entirely of the value 46. In fact, I know of only one case where someone older than 46 got a job, and that was a short part-time temp job. Well, at least this gives me a definite date for when I can finally quit reading the damn job ads. Senior archaeologist calls lo-tech traditional…

Pickwick Afterlife

The final third of Stephen Jarvis’s upcoming novel Death and Mr Pickwick continues in the same rather kaleidoscopic fashion as before. The asides and Chinese boxes are innumerable. We never do get an important female character. The frame story is never developed much. In fact, the book only really has Robert Seymour the artist and Charles Dickens the writer, plus innumerable minor characters, and an agenda. Jarvis's main points with the novel are that a) Seymour deserves credit as co-creator of Pickwick's first two or three chapters, b) Dickens deserves blame for dissembling and not sharing…

Stockholm Film Festival 2014

Before this month I'd never attended a film festival in any concerted way. But I was inspired by Ken & Robin's podcast to do so, and got myself a membership card for the Stockholm Film Festival, 5–16 November. The festival's excellent web site made it easy for me to choose which viewings to attend. And I enjoyed myself! Teaching in Umeå and a boardgaming retreat in Nyköping took chunks out of the festival for me, but I still managed to see nine feature films and a programme of nine short films. Three of the feature films have my particular recommendation: A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night…

An 81 million year herpes infection: First endogenous herpes virus found!

1-- Herpes viruses are old. They are ooooooold. Like, hundreds of millions of years old. Specifically, about 400 million years old. 2-- Herpes viruses are everywhere. Fish, reptiles, birds, cows, humans, everywhere. And there are lots of different kinds that humans have to deal with-- CMV, EBV, HHV-8, VZV, HSV... 3-- And, though herpes viruses should not be inserted into the genome of their host cell, generally, some herpes viruses can. Its called 'strategic somatic genome integration', and some herpes viruses (and only a small percentage of cells infected with that virus) do insert. So…

GMO viruses for coronary artery disease

Whoda thought that injecting viruses into peoples hearts would be not only fun, but good for their health!  I just wrote about this little guy that can turn regular heart muscle cells into pacemaker cells (in guinea pigs), and here is another cool study hot off the presses: Long-Term Follow-up Assessment of a Phase 1 Trial of Angiogenic Gene Therapy Using Direct Intramyocardial Administration of an Adenoviral Vector Expressing the VEGF121 cDNA for the Treatment of Diffuse Coronary Artery Disease There is a cell protein-- VEGF, vascular endothelial growth factor-- that convinces your body to…

PIGS! PERVS!!

We now have the complete pig (aka Sus scrofa) genome!  You know what that means..........!!! PERVs!!!! Analyses of pig genomes provide insight into porcine demography and evolution While I am a huge fan of all ERVs, including PERVs, PERVs hold a special place in my heart. Literally. Physicians can use pig parts and organs for human transplants.  Thanks to a pig, someone I love very much is alive today.  It would be fantastic if pigs could be used to their full medical potential... but because of PERVs, some people who could benefit from a pig transplant, cannot. Pigs have ERVs just like…

Story by SteelyKid

While I was editing and posting the pictures for last night's family blogging, SteelyKid came in and said "Daddy, we watched [indistinct name] today, and they created their own story on the show. But I don't know how to do that." "Sure you do, honey," I said. "You create stories all the time. You were telling me a story last night, something about bears in a cave. You can create stories if you want to." That cheered her up, and after a little bit of negotiation about who was going to write on what, she created the following story: That's a SpongeBob activity book that she got from I-don't-…

Links for 2012-03-07

Luis Alvarez: the ideas man - CERN Courier Luis Alvarez - one of the greatest experimental physicists of the 20th century - combined the interests of a scientist, an inventor, a detective and an explorer. He left his mark on areas that ranged from radar through to cosmic rays, nuclear physics, particle accelerators, detectors and large-scale data analysis, as well as particles and astrophysics. On 19 November, some 200 people gathered at Berkeley to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth. Alumni of the Alvarez group - among them physicists, engineers, programmers and bubble-chamber…

Links for 2012-01-31

Quantum Diaries Science is complex. There's no getting around that. But it's essential that everyone engage constructively with it. That's particularly true of the political and business leaders in Davos, whose decisions on science-based subjects can influence everything from the well being of our children to the future of the planet. It's vital that those decisions are taken from an informed position and on rational grounds. The challenge that science faces is that we live in a world where it's de rigueur to know your Shakespeare, Molière or Goethe, but quite all right to be proudly…

The Physics Book by Clifford Pickover

It's hard to go more than a couple of days without seeing another "imminent death of publishing" article somewhere, predicting the ultimate triumph of ebooks, There's one category of books that I expect to remain safe for the foreseeable future, though, namely books that are specifically constructed to be aesthetically pleasing. In other words, coffee-table books. Clifford Pickover's new Physics Book is one of these. It's a very attractive and well-made book, pairing some 250 full-page images representing milestones in physics, paired with one-page descriptions of the underlying scientific…

Strongly Correlated Physics in a Superposition State

It's been a while since I posted anything science-y, and I've got some time between flipping pancakes, so here's an odd thing from the last few weeks of science news. Last week, there was an article in Nature about the wonders of string theory applied to condensed matter physics. This uses the "AdS/CFT" relationship, by which theorists can take a theory describing a bunch of strongly interacting particles in three dimensions (such as the electrons inside a solid), and describe it mathematically as a theory involving a black hole in four dimensions. This might seem like a strange thing to do,…

More Fun With Fracking

I intended to do a big book-sales post today, but our DSL modem may be dead, so there was no Internet in Chateau Steelypips this morning, and I forgot to copy the relevant files onto a thumb drive, so it will have to wait. Maybe this afternoon. In lieu of that, here's some other stuff on shale gas drilling in the Northeast, following on Tuesday's post: -- It's always nice to have my half-assed writing about economic issues supported, even indirectly, by people who know something about the subject writing similar things. Thus, Felix Salmon on cost-benefit analyses of oil drilling: Under…

The Dark Clan? Me?

There was a lecture at UCL recently by Dr Oktar Babuna and Ali Sadun Engin. They spilled the beans, and we're all in trouble now. He then showed just how "insightful" the folks at Harun Yahya can be by quoting from one of their books, The Dark Clan, which explains that evolutionary science is inspired by "a dark clan behind all kids of corruption and perversion, that controls drug trafficking, prostitution rings". Evolution is the "greatest deception in the history of science". The Dark Clan actually isn't bad — nice moody music about vampires and such. I was just listening to a couple of…

Oseberg Skeletons Exhumed

The Oseberg ship burial of Norway is a mind-blowing find, full of Early Viking Period carved woodwork and textiles of unparalelled quality. Dated by dendrochronology to AD 834, the long ship and its contents were sealed under a clay barrow, perfectly preserved when excavated in 1904. I consider myself a stakeholder in the Oseberg find, as it was excavated by Gotlander Gabriel Gustafson. In 1881-82 G.G. had performed the first excavations with useful documentation at the Barshalder cemetery on which I wrote my dissertation some 110 years later. The Oseberg barrow was opened during the Viking…

Strawberry Parking Lot

Dear Reader -- let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to the Strawberry Parking Lot. For the past century and a half, the naming of Swedish places has largely been taken out of the people's hands and regulated by the authorities. New names of big important places are no longer negotiated organically among those who talk about them. Instead, county and municipal planners tell people what to call a certain place. Thus a number of new names in my home area: Saltsjöbaden, Solsidan, Jarlaberg. Fine names handed down from on high, meaning "Salt Sea Bathing Resort", "Sunny Side" and "Earl's…

Linnaeus 300

As I've observed before, enlisting bloggers to do marketing offers some interesting possibilities and limitations. Unlike the case with mainstream media, you can choose exactly which person will receive an advance copy of your product (preferably someone who will like it), and the blogger is likely to feel flattered that you even took her seriously enough to contact her. A blog often also has a tightly defined readership, so by choosing the right blogger you can usually reach a very specific target market. The main drawback is of course that of readership: you can be reasonably sure to get a…

The rule of law

Is a familiar concept but also a page-turning pot-boiler by Thomas "just call me Tom" Bingham, which I'm in the middle of reading1. And there is much to be said upon the subject, including the need for clarity; but my attention was drawn to two clauses in his "history of" section, where he includes the USAnian Bill of Rights aka the first ten amendments to their constitution. Which are Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof and the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed3 The first is negative:…

Science with SteelyKid

There are a bunch of physics stories that I'd sort of like to write about, but don't have time for, and politics is oscillating between "darkly hilarious" and "indescribably depressing," so that's best left alone. So, here's some cute kid pictures instead. SteelyKid has lately taken to telling all and sundry "This is my daddy. He's a scientist." She also sometimes adds "I'm a scientist, too!" so it seemed appropriate to go out with her and Do A Science. As previously mentioned, she got a bunch of Backyard Safari gear from my aunt and uncle, which included a safari vest and a collapsible mesh…

Book Roundup: People Talking About Dog Physics

I've been falling down on the shameless self-promotion front, lately, but that doesn't mean I'm not tracking How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog obsessively, just that I'm too busy to talk about it. Happily, other people have been nice enough to talk about it for me, in a variety of places: The most significant, in terms of probable impact on sales, is this excerpt at BoingBoing, which is the text for the dog dialogue from Chapter 8. This is the same dialogue that became the "Looking for the Bacon Boson" video, and, indeed, they were nice enough to include the video in the post, too. Woo-hoo…