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Hippocratic Oath for Scientists?

tags: researchblogging.org, scientific ethics, Hippocratic oath, life scientists, corporate culture I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member. Scientific misconduct is very expensive, leading to years of wasted research dollars and effort in pursuit of a scientific mirage, and it damages…

Fertility Problems Tied to Cleaning Agents

tags: researchblogging.org, quaternary ammonium compounds, fertility problems, repoductive problems, zoos, aviculture, medicine, disinfectants I know a fair number of zoos and aviculturists who disinfect the premises occupied by their breeding flocks of birds with quaternary ammonium compounds to prevent the spread of diseases, especially viral disease. But according to a story that just appeared in the top-tier journal, Nature, exposure to the quaternary ammonium compounds, ADBAC (n-alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride) and DDAC (didecyl dimethyl ammonium chloride), could cause a sharp…

A Day in The Life of Joe Republican

tags: Liberalism, liberals, politics This essay was sent to me by a friend and I thought you would appreciate reading it. I am posting it here intact, except for a few editorial improvements. Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised. All but $10 of his…

Flying Lessons: Additional Insight into the Evolution of Flight in Birds

tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, avian flight, ornithology, birds, avian, researchblogging Chukar, Alectoris chukar; Capitol Reef National Park (Utah, USA) 2004. Image: Wikipedia [larger view]. For more than 150 years, the evolution of flight in birds has one of the most controversial topics that one can discuss at a professional meeting because this topic splits evolutionary biologists into one of two camps; the "ground up" people who think that birds evolved from dinosaurs that ran along the ground and flapped their wings, either to collect food or to escape predators, and the "…

Stem Cell Treatments Offer Hope to Injured Horses

tags: performance horses, polo, racing, tendon injury, stem cell research Beat Maendli on board Principal clears a fence during the dressage and show jumping Grand Prix in Aachen, Germany. Image: BBC. Have you read the featured story in last week's issue of Science News? It is a fascinating look at the use of stem cells to treat injuries to leg tendons of performance horses. This treatment looks like it is successful, although no controlled studies have been done because, as you might suspect, horse owners are loathe to subject their prized horses to a controlled study where their horse…

Birdbooker Report 70

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…

A hearing on worker safety rule would open public debate, but White House thwarts it

A funny thing happened when representatives of U.S. foundries met on March 12 with White House officials to complain about a not-yet-proposed worker safety regulation.  The industry group seemed to forget that the targets of their complaints are contained in their own best practices publication. The American Foundry Society (AFS) requested the meeting with the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to discuss a draft proposed rule by the Labor Department's OSHA to protect workers exposed to respirable crystalline silica.  AFS argued that…

Trust, chromium, and the EPA

Last week, the Center for Public Integrity and PBS released a story that adds another disturbing chapter to the saga of hexavalent chromium (or chromium (VI)), the carcinogenic chemical compound behind the Erin Brockovich story. That story ended with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) paying millions to residents of Hinkley, California, where the company’s operations contaminated local water supplies. In “EPA unaware of industry ties on cancer review panel,” David Heath and Ronnie Green report that this time, the focus is on widespread, low-level chromium contamination; by the…

Starving in Somalia

The kidnapping of two aid workers from the Dadaab refugee camp on the Kenya-Somalia border is a grim reminder of the crisis situation in the region, especially Somalia. Al-Jazeera's Peter Greste has some numbers: [I]n Somalia alone, four million people are still starving nationwide; three million of those live in the South. Of these, 750,000 people risk death in the next four months if they do not get aid immediately. According to the United Nations agency responsible for monitoring food supplies in Somalia, almost half a million children are suffering from "severe acute malnutrition". About…

Experts recommend electronic health records contain information about patients' work history

An ad hoc committee of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) identified a litany of potential benefits of including information about individuals' occupations, industry, and work environment in their electronic health records (EHRs). The reason the question was posed at all stems from a provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which provides hefty incentives for health care providers to convert patients' medical records from paper to electronic form. At the time the bill was passed, one reporter noted that only about 8 percent of the nation's hospitals and 17% of its…

Republican lawmakers interfere (again) in diesel cancer study

The Republican chairmen of the House Education and the Workforce Committee and its Subcommittee on Workforce Protections are invoking "sound science" and "transparency" in a request to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) for data and draft publications of a cancer mortality study of underground miners exposed to diesel exhaust. Congressman John Kline (R-MN) and Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote to NIOSH director John Howard onJuly 8, suggesting that the agency is violating a 2001 federal court order. That order stemmed from a lawsuit filed more than 15 years ago by the…

Institute of Medicine recommends contraception and other preventive health services for women be covered free of charge

One of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act is a requirement that new health plans cover preventive services for women without deductibles or co-payments. The Department of Health and Human Services asked the Institute of Medicine to review what preventive services are important to women's health and well-being and make recommendations about which of these should be required to be covered without cost-sharing. The IOM issued its report, Clinical Preventive Services for Women: Closing the Gaps, yesterday, and it focuses on the preventive services not already spelled out for coverage in…

Baffled by opposition to finding and fixing workplace safety hazards

The construction trade association Associated Building Contractors (ABC) was one of 150 business groups that received a letter from Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) in December, asking for their ideas about federal regulations "that have negatively impacted job growth." ABC responded with a list heavy on opposition to labor protections, such as requirements for prevailing wage and labor-management agreements on federal construction projects. The trade association's hit list also includes three OSHA initiatives, one of which was withdrawn just yesterday by the agency. I'm particularly…

Why Do We Live Where We Do?

It's been an interesting week of discussing urban issues, and I want to thank Sharon Astyk of Casaubon's Book and all of our commenters for making it so fun. I learned some interesting things from the comments - especially that vertical agriculture probably doesn't make sense, even if it sounds like a great idea to a non-expert urban reader (and page after page of Google results have nothing but praise for it). I started off my first post explaining how I decided I wanted to live in the city, and several of the comments make points about why urban living might or might not be such a good…

Report: After years of cuts and even more proposed, public health faces funding crisis

Public health is in trouble. Last month, President Trump released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. It was more of an outline, really, and didn’t provide many details, but it did call for a nearly 18 percent cut to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and for block granting the budget at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, the White House supports repealing the Affordable Care Act. That repeal would also eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund, which now accounts for about 12 percent of CDC’s budget and funds critical public health…

EPA beats Congress’ deadline, names first 10 chemicals for action under new law

Good for them! They beat Congress’ deadline by 20 days. That’s the first thing that came to mind yesterday when I read EPA’s announcement about the first 10 chemicals it's selected for risk evaluations. EPA’s announcement is the first major milestone established by Congress when it passed sweeping changes earlier this year to the Toxic Substances Control Act. One provision of the law (Section 2605(b)(2)(A)) directed EPA to select 10 chemical substances from its 2014 "TSCA Work Plan for Chemical Assessments" and begin risk evaluations on them no later than 180 days after the law was enacted (i…

Labor Day report: ‘The worker justice movement is on a winning streak’

Earlier this week, we published our annual report, “The Year In U.S. Occupational Health & Safety: Fall 2015 – Summer 2016,” chronicling the victories, setbacks and struggles taking place in the American workplace. But it was just about impossible to piece together a report like this without thinking about the strange — and often scary — election before us and its implications for workers. So, when we were crafting the report’s concluding thoughts — a section we call “The Year Ahead” — it seemed almost logical to go down that “scary” road, to talk about the presidential election as if…

Worker survey finds chemicals, poor air quality among top health concerns on the job

In a new national survey, about one in every four U.S. workers rates their workplace as just “fair” or “poor” in providing a healthy working environment. And employees in low-paying jobs typically report worse working conditions than those in higher-paying jobs — in fact, nearly half of workers in low-paying jobs say they face “potentially dangerous” conditions on the job. Released earlier this month, results from the new Workplace and Health survey are based on responses from a nationally representative sample of more than 1,600 adult workers who were interviewed via phone during the first…

Worker database documents 1,073 occupational deaths so far in 2015: ‘Every one of these deaths is preventable’

More than 1,000 U.S. workers have died due to job-related events in the first seven months of 2015, according to new data from the U.S. Worker Fatality Database. Researchers estimate that total fatalities will likely reach 4,500 by the end of the year, which would mean that the nation’s occupational death rate experienced little, if no, improvement over previous years. The database, which launched last year and represents the largest open-access data set of individual workplace fatalities ever collected in the U.S., also breaks down 2015 data by state. So far, Texas leads the pack, followed…

Researchers: Inadequate vaccination rates fueled recent measles outbreak

In a somewhat frightening illustration of anti-vaccine trends, a new report estimates that among groups affected in the recent measles outbreak, the rates of measles-mumps-rubella immunization might have been as low as 50 percent. Earlier this month, a report published in JAMA Pediatrics concluded that MMR vaccination rates in many of the populations affected by the Disneyland-related measles outbreak are well below the necessary numbers to maintain herd immunity. Led by researchers at Boston Children’s Informatics Program, the project used disease data from the California Department of…

Vestfold Barrows and Mead-Halls

The Midgardsenteret visitors' centre at Borre invited me to give a talk about my Östergötland elite settlement project. This went well, with a sizeable and appreciative audience last night. One gentleman explained that they had all learned Swedish from watching kids' TV when they were little. Today I went on a royal Late Iron Age binge. This is Vestfold, home of the Norwegian branch of the Ynglingar dynasty, with sites like Oseberg, Gokstad, Kaupang, Huseby, Gulli – and Borre. The ancient cemetery starts right outside the main entrance to Midgardsenteret with some low mounds of respectable…

Not the Real Face of Jesus

I was annoyed and surprised to learn from a publicist that this weekend the History Channel is airing a programme named "The Real Face of Jesus" that takes a credulous approach to the shroud of Turin. The shroud is a 14th century fake relic, as has been well documented by historical sources and radiocarbon analysis. Here's a quick machine-assisted translation of a 2004 article I wrote on the subject. The shroud of Turin, a linen cloth, 4.5 x 1.2 m, with the image of a wounded male body. The wounds are consistent with the New Testament's portrayal of the last days and death of Jesus of…

Wilkins gets shrill

We have a couple of more eye-witnesses to the start of Dawkins' lecture tour in Arizona, Jim Lippard and John Wilkins. Lippard gives an interesting account, while Wilkins…well, I guess Dawkins interrupted his lecture to walk up the aisle, smack John with a truncheon a few times, rifle his wallet, and as he was stalking away from the poor guy crumpled in his seat, hissed that he was the atheist pope and he could do anything he wanted. At least, that's what I imagine must have happened, and John hadn't quite recovered from his concussion before he started writing his complaints. First of all,…

Climate science identifies the problem – it can’t tell us what to do in response?

The normally sensible John Fleck has a post pointing out the bleedin' obvious - well; it points out the issue; the solution suggested is of course hopelessly wrong1 -, although to be fair it has escaped the attention of many other people too, so perhaps it is only obvious if you think about it. In this case, the obvious is that scientists ...have characterized and clarified the physical science part of the problem, and it’s only natural to then turn to those scientists in our discussion of what to do about it. But... the “what to do about it” stuff lies in a domain different from the…

Exxon speaks

Everyone is being terribly cwuel to Exxon, and they feel the need to respond. You can probably chalk that up as a success, though a minor one. On the ultimate substance I don't feel any need to revise my previous posts: that Exxon's climate science research was far less interesting than the stories are trying to say; that it wasn't secret, but indeed clearly public; and that it didn't give them any special insight that wasn't widely available to everyone else. * What Exxon Knew and When? * What Exxon Knew and When, round three? * What I said about Exxon However, the flipside of that is that…

Columbia President's Response

Lee Bollinger, the President of Columbia University, has issued a very strongly worded and entirely justified statement in response to campus protestors disrupting a perfectly legal speech at the university last week. I'll quote the full text below the fold: Columbia University has always been, and will always be, a place where students and faculty engage directly with important public issues. We are justifiably proud of the traditions here of intellectual inquiry and vigorous debate. The disruption on Wednesday night that resulted in the termination of an event organized by the Columbia…

Rowe Hammers Barton Again

Jon Rowe has an excellent post once again blasting David Barton for his utterly irrational historical revisionism in regard to religion and the constitution. He points to a document I've never seen before, an affidavit that Barton filed in the McCreary ten commandments case. You have to read this document. The illogic is absolutely breathtaking. He points again and again to early colonial laws that were completely opposed to freedom of thought and religion as being the key to understand the nation's founding. For instance: In an effort to substantiate this position historically, critics often…

Anti-Gay Bigots Endorsing Terrorism

As if this story couldn't get any more bizarre, you've got to see the website of Yehuda Levin's group, Jews for Morality. It hasn't been updated in a long time, but it has information about last year's event that they tried mightily to stop. At last year's parade, one lunatic jumped into the parade and started stabbing people, injuring three marchers before police managed to subdue him. And these whackos actually blamed the victims: Who stabbed the marchers at the Jerusalem homo-pride parade? Well, you say, it's obvious, the protestor who jumped into the line of march and stabbed three…

AFA Distortions on Gay Straight Alliances

Agape Press has an article about gay straight alliance groups in public schools, of which there are now some 2000 or so around the country. There's a controversy going on in Michigan in the Forest Hills School District, where religious right groups are trying to get the school district to disband the three GSAs that exist there. The school board so far is refusing to do so and the American Family Association is spreading some manure around to grease the skids. Despite the objections of concerned parents, the Forest Hills School Board has vowed it will not shut down three GSA clubs in the…

DaveScot on HR 2679

Dembski's Sycophant-in-Chief has a brief post supporting the passage of HR 2679. It's predictably ill-reasoned. This bill, introduced in the U.S. House with 50 cosponsers, seeks to bar awarding attorney's fees in lawsuits involving the 1st amendment establishment clause and limit the awards to injunctive relief. The multi-million dollar attorney fees collected by the ACLU have had a chilling effect on the religious freedom clause of the 1st amendment. One can argue, of course, over the proper balance between the establishment clause and the free exercise clause. But even if one believes that…

Kinsley on Bush Legal Authority

Michael Kinsley has a brilliant column about the Bush administration's astonishing legal position that the inherent authority to do whatever they want in the name of pursuing terrorism cannot even be considered by a court to determine their constitutionality. For years, all the intelligence agencies have been tussling with the American Civil Liberties Union over documents about the innovative Bush administration policy of locking people up in foreign countries where they can be tortured without the inconvenience of anyone knowing about it or bringing up, you know, like, the Constitution. It…

Religious Right Targeting Gay-Straight Clubs

One of the most valuable and interesting trends of the last decade has been the formation of Gay/Straight Alliances in high schools around the country. I think it's valuable because, obviously, I think it's very important for straight people to stand side by side with our gay friends and fight for their rights. We should not treat the issue as just their problem; it is our problem as well. But naturally, the religious right is absolutely appalled by such clubs and want them gone. And in some cases, they're winning. At South Rowan High School, near Charlotte, NC, Flip Benham's group Operation…

Interesting Circuit Court Ruling on Drugs

As I mentioned in a comment yesterday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has just issued an interesting ruling in a case called Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Eschenbach. The case involves the question of whether a terminally ill patient can be prescribed a drug that has not yet gotten FDA approval, but has passed Phase One clinical trials and been approved for expanded human testing. The 2-1 decision, including Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg in the majority, was that said patients do have a right to access to such drugs under the Due Process Clause of the 14th…

Rowe on "Gay Studies" Curricula

Jon Rowe has a really, really good post on the subject of "gay studies" programs and currricula. As many of you may know, the religious right is up in arms at the moment about a bill in the California legislature that would require schools to teach "the contributions of people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender to the economic, political, and social development of California and the United States of America.'' I find myself in almost total agreement with him that, while we shouldn't do anything like demanding "equal time", the fact is that gays have had an extraordinarily…

Answering Dembski's Commenters, Part 2

Another commenter at Dembski's blog tries to answer my post about engineers and evolution. Here is the statement he quotes from me: Of what possible relevance is engineering to evolutionary biology? The average engineer likely doesn't know the difference between a species and a speculum. Why would anyone think that they speak with any more authority on evolutionary biology than they do on art history or the art of the zone defense?... An engineer has no more legitimate authority to speak on evolutionary biology than a certified mechanic or a culinary school graduate. And GilDodgen replies: In…

ID Repeating Creationist Arguments

As I've worked on writing the preface to our book on the Dover trial, it has struck me how many of the arguments made by ID advocates today are identical to the arguments made, sometimes by the very same people, in defense of creation science in the McLean and Edwards cases in the 1980s. For example, we often hear them argue that ID is not a religious idea because it does not reference the Bible at all and in fact it doesn't mention any particularly religious idea. As the DI themselves have stated, Unlike creationism, intelligent design is based on science, not sacred texts. Creationism is…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Justify My Funds

This week's question from our Corporate Masters has to do with the ever-popular issue of funding: Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies? "Justify" is an awfully strong word, here... The answer to this question is "yes and no," because there are a couple of ways to take this. If you mean "should individual scientists be required to justify their specific research activities to the general public?" then the answer is a clear "no." But if you take it…

It speaks clearly to truth

What a weird phrase. It sort of sounds like it ought to mean something, but it means nothing at all. "It speaks clearly of truth" would be better - but the grammar doesn't quite work. The alternate title to this post, incidentally, was "Like a trouser, yet not a trouser". I'll reserve that for future use. I picture a large mountain, immaculate and shining with pure snow, glowing with inner fire: Mt Truth, the abode of all that is truthy. And down below, gazing up at the summit glimpsed dimly through the clouds, a small (but clear-voiced) figure speaking. Errm, to the mountain. Is the figure…

Syria: the West makes the usual mistake

I got wound up by this whilst reading news on my phone while sitting in a boring meeting. So I'll vent here. The usual scheme of things that we see so often is that bad things happen (the Assad regime in Syria); it goes on and on and people wring their hands, or ignore it, and anyway whilst bad the people are useful anti-commies or somesuch; and then it gets bad enough that the locals start revolting. At this point, its very much a "which way are you going to jump" issue for everyone in the country. Do they throw in their lot with a pile of untested rebels? Or do they sit on the fence…

Lamay

Which is, wittily, Yamal backwards. The shape of this is now becoming clearer; I think it is safe to post. I first ran across this in The Torygraph, which is worthless, but appears to be based on climateaudit.org/?p=7168. RC ripped into this but its a bit snarky (unlike me, obviously) and perhaps doesn't make the main points all that clearly. And then we have Briffa's statement. So those main points are: 1. MBH '98 doesn't use the Yamal series in question. This isn't too surprising, since it was first used in Briffa (2000). RC points this out. The Torygraph, above, failed to notice that, as…

Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation: Reaching Gender Equality in Physics Faculty

In yesterday's post about the lack of money in academia, I mentioned in passing that lack of funding is part of the reason for the slow pace of progress on improving faculty diversity. That is, we could make more rapid progress if we suddenly found shitloads of money and could go on a massive hiring binge, but in the absence of flipping great wodges of cash, change comes more slowly. This, naturally, sparked a sort of morbid curiosity about whether the scale of this problem would be quantifiable, and of course, there's the AIP Statistical Research Center offering numbers on all sorts of…

Kids and Schools and Liberal Guilt

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed is moving to New Jersey, and confronting one of the great dilemmas of parenting (also at Inside Higher Ed): what school district to live in. This is a big problem for lots of academics of a liberal sort of persuasion: From a pure parental perspective, the argument for getting into the most high-achieving, “desirable” district we can afford is open-and-shut. TB and TG are wildly smart kids who will rise to the expected level; I want the level to be high. That strategy also has the benefit of higher resale value for a house, since other parents make the same calculation…

The Typing Cure

One of the things I miss about not being able to follow college basketball these days is that I don't really know enough about the state of the game to understand Mark Titus's columns at Grantland. They're kind of sophomoric, but you know, a little of that is sometimes good, and I always enjoyed reading his stuff (I also enjoyed his book). But his columns are so heavily referential as to be basically incomprehensible unless you watch a lot of games. I still follow him on Twitter, though, and was a little surprised when he tweeted out a link to a Reddit AMA where he talked about struggling…

Science-y Gifts for Kids

One of the questions from a caller when I was on the "Think" show was about how to keep kids interested in science. As I said, the issue isn't so much creating in interest as working to not squelch the interest that's already there. Taking kids to cool places like zoos and science museums is a great way to do that, and just generally encouraging them to ask questions and try things out. But if you'd like some more specific gift ideas, here's a selection of science-y things that SteelyKid and The Pip enjoy that you might try out on other kids of your acquaintance: -- Magna-Tiles These. Are.…

Weekend Diversion: The Master of Illusions

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures." -Oscar Wilde It's tough to tell fact from fiction, and sometimes just as hard to tell reality from illusion. As long as you're enjoying yourself this weekend, I'd have to agree with Buckwheat Zydeco, and say Let The Good Times Roll. But despite what these images you're looking at might seem to show, there's nothing rolling at all here. Image credit: Illustrator Fiestoforo. Nor is anything moving, nor is there a hint of animation in any of these. Yet, based on what your eyes show you, things appear to be bulging, spinning, or more generally, there…

Peer Reviews Faked In Tiny Percentage of A Small Percentage of Journals, Heads Will Roll.

The academic world and its detractors are all a-tizzy about this recent news reported here: Springer, a major science and medical publisher, recently announced the retraction of 64 articles from 10 of its journals. The articles were retracted after editors found the authors had faked the peer-review process using phony e-mail addresses. The article goes on to say that science has been truly sullied by this event, and anti-science voices are claiming that this is the end of the peer reviewed system, proving it is corrupt. The original Springer statement is here. See this post at Retraction…

Weekend Diversion: Protecting the Night Sky

"As long as one person lives in darkness then it seems to be a responsibility to tell other people." -Bill Hicks If you've ever been out in the wilderness at night, in a place where it truly gets dark, and where you've got, as the English band Keane would tell you, Clear Skies,you will find yourself treated to an amazing view of the night sky. Image credit: Jerry Lodriguss. On a moonless night, depending on the quality of your darkness, not only is the Milky Way visible, but anywhere from 6,000 up to a maximum of 45,000 naked-eye stars are available to the keenest of observers. Although,…

How did we get here?

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack You may find yourself in another part of the world You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife You may ask yourself: well... how did I get here? -Talking Heads Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day was this beautiful shot of the nearest 1.5 million (or so) galaxies, as mapped by the 2-Micron All-Sky Survey, with our galaxy shaded in blue. Now, if you're an astrophysicist, you might ask yourself how these nearby galaxies are distributed. Are they regularly…

Things to do after installing Ubuntu 17.04

We begin with the usual list of things you pretty much always do after installing every Linux OS. Why these things are not automatically done for you on installation is a bit mysterious, but down deep there are generally reasons (legal reasons) for some of these things. In fact, pretty much everything here, with some minor tweaking you can ignore, is the same as for Ubuntu 16. And 15, probably. If you've been upgrading to the latest Ubuntu on a regular basis, this might all be pretty automatic for you by now! Anyway, after installing Ubuntu 17.04, consider these next moves: Update and…

It is time to stop punching the hippies

The Republican line is this: Bring back coal, shut down development, subsidies, any encouragement at all, for solar and wind energy. There is absolutely no logic to this policy, but it is in fact the policy. The reason for it is generally thought to be that the big rich corporations and individuals that control coal and petroleum resources, and that are fully engaged in delivery of those energy sources (and other materials, such as plastic bags made of petroleum) pay off the politicians to support their businesses. And that is true, they do this. But that does not explain why regular…