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Masthead Banner Competition

Any artists out there? This blog needs a nice masthead banner at the top. I'd like it to feature the following:The word AardvarchaeologyAt least one recognisable aardvarkRecognisable archaeology stuff, e.g. a square pit, a spoil dump, a sieve, a trowel, a bucket, a folding rule, a metal detector, a surveying instrument on a tripod...The dimensions of the graphic should be 756 x 93 pixels. All submissions will be showcased here, and if I get one I decide to use, then its creator will receive a $20 book token and +3 charisma. Now go play with yer crayons! 5 January. Here's a good one from…

2007 Bloggies Open for Nominations

The Seventh Annual Weblog Awards have opened their site for nominations. "From now until 10:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5) on Wednesday, January 10, 2005, anyone can nominate their favorite weblogs. That Saturday, January 13, three panels of 50 voters will receive an e-mail. It will list the weblogs that have receieved the most nominations in ten categories." So if you remember liking some blog a lot during 2006, for instance a Swedish one, then go there and nominate it. I've nominated myself to absurd lengths, as well as the Grumpy Old Bookman, Pharyngula and Overheard in New York.

New Entry Categories

As you may know, Dear Reader, this blog can be perused selectively by theme if you click "Archives" in the menu bar up top. For a long time I've been tagging entries straying from the blog's main themes "NOIBN", Not Otherwise Indicated By Name. But realising recently that there were almost a hundred such entries, I sorted through them and found a few recurring themes there. Thus a bunch of new entry categories: Environment Health Politics Space Travel Getting this sorted out was quite a chore due to the glacial slowness of Sb's poor over-taxed server. But chances are it'll get upgraded…

By Night He's One Hell of a Lover

My wife and I watched the 2004 biopic Kinsey last night, about ground-breaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Good movie, good acting, interesting theme. And there's an added perk for fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. To the extent that the Kinsey movie has a villain, it's Alfred Kinsey's colleague, Thurman Rice. Professor Rice is an old-school sex-hostile sex educator who shows the class horrific slides of syphilis sufferers and preaches abstinence. And who plays this buffoonish prig of a character? Why, Frank N. Furter himself, the pansexual mad scientist from the planet Transsexual in the…

Four Great 90s Authors

Four of my favourite authors were born in the 1890s and wrote mainly from the inter-war years onward. H.P. Lovecraft 1890-1937 J.R.R. Tolkien 1892-1973 F.G. Bengtsson 1894-1954 F. Nilsson Piraten 1895-1972 There seems to be something about that generation's idiom, taste and experience that resonates with me. But maybe it's just an artefact of chronology. I got into them all as a boy: I was born right about the time when the kids of the 1890s were dying off, which turned the spotlight on their generation once again and led to re-issues. Anyway, check them out!

Peter Sinclair interviewing Maureen Raymo

Another good video from Peter Sinclair on his YaleClimateForum YouTube channel: Maureen Raymo is an expert in paleo-climates.  This is probably the most informative climate science specialty when it comes to anticipating the final outcome of our global experiment in climate disruption.  The rapidity of the current change is outside the realm of anything previously observed which makes it very difficult to model accurately, but the end state is not. Predicting how we get to this end state and what humanity will experience along the way is a far greater challenge, as is predicting how our…

New Blog on Free Speech in Academia

The terrific Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has finally started their own official blog, The Torch. The great thing about FIRE is that, unlike a lot of people who talk about liberty from both left and right, they actually take a consistent stand for freedom of thought regardless of the political viewpoint being expressed. For example, they are currently arguing against hate speech codes and also on behalf of Ward Churchill's right to express his vile opinions, as well as standing up for Lawrence Summers at Harvard and many other cases where the expression of…

More on the Bible Curriculum

Okay, this is a hilarious response from the attorney who represents the group that wrote the outrageously bad bible curriculum I've been writing so much about lately. Hiram Sasser, Liberty Legal: Everyone's come to the same conclusion, that this curriculum was perfectly fine. It meshes well with the educational environment of a school, and it's beneficial, and the Supreme Court has always said it's beneficial for the kids to learn about the Bible. So anyone who's against this has just got to be French. Just got to be French? Did he seriously say that, like with a straight face? Wow.

More Poker Busts

Here's good law enforcement. A poker club is holding a tournament at a local restaurant in a small town near Colorado Springs. The owner of the restaurant has checked it out and thinks it's all legal (the gambling laws are often quite vague and opinions can differ). The police find out about it, and disagree. But rather than go down and talk to the folks there, the police just decide to bust in with guns drawn and put to people's heads, shouting and screaming. These were officers from the Colorado Springs Metro Vice, Narcotics and Intelligence Unit. They just seemed to have forgotten the part…

Woohoo, Dispatches Makes the Cut

Jason Kuznicki, the Grand Poobah of Positive Liberty, has decided to shorten his blogroll for the sake of aesthetics and intellectual clarity, and went through a difficult culling process (described here) that presumably involved goat entrails and a ouija board. I'm proud to announce that Dispatches from the Culture Wars made the cut. Contrary to the current rumors going around, I did not have to promise him either my copy of the Kathy Lee Gifford Christmas Album or my signed Jim and Tammy Bakker PTL Club Partner Bible. P.S. As a fun side game, guess which of those two items I really do own.

On The Move

By the way, Dispatches from the Culture Wars will soon be moving. I have registered the domain name stcynic.com and will be putting up a webpage there this weekend. My hope is to make this into more than just a blog, I also have a lot of other content in mind for the future. But in the meantime, I hope to have my blog itself moved over there after this weekend (wish me luck installing everything correctly and if any of you are MT pros, let me know so I can send cries for help in your general direction should I get stuck). Stay tuned.

Ocean's Eleven at NASA

There's a story about theft of supplies at NASA in the Times today. It's an eight-paragraph wire service blurb, which wouldn't be worth a mention, but for this: In one instance documented by the accountability office, an unidentified worker explained the fate of a missing laptop, worth $4,265: "This computer, although assigned to me, was being used on board the International Space Station. I was informed that it was tossed overboard to be burned up in the atmosphere when it failed." That's absolutely brilliant. If you're going to steal overpriced laptops from the government, do it with style…

Yeah, but What's the Impact Factor?

Via Steinn, the Smithsonian's Astronomy Abstract Service has an index entry for some book called De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by some Polish guy. They've got a scanned electronic version available for free, but the stupid thing is in Latin, and who speaks that these days? Also, it's only got two citations, and both of those are more than ten years old. Boy, this guy will never get tenure... If you have access to JSTOR, you can also read a cranky letter from some guy at Cambridge. The more things change... As Steinn says, "I love those intertube thingies, may they never be clogged."

Pop Culture Supercollider

One of those only-on-the-Internet, adventrues-in-D-list-celebrity videos: A YouTube clip of a hair metal cover band joined onstage by one of the teachers from "Saved by the Bell" and Dallas Cowboys snap-dropper Tony Romo, singing "Somewhere in the Night" by Journey. Romo really gets into it, and Mr. Belding drops the F-bomb a few times, and, well, it's not for the faint of heart. It's like somebody accelerated the Eighties to a good fraction of the speed of light, slammed them into a wall, and now we're looking at the spandex-and-hairspray clad particle tracks.

Windows 386 Is on the Attack

Via a mailing list, I got sent this link to a really mind-boggling Microsoft marketing video from the 80's. It really defies description, but the original poster made a good attempt: Microsoft sent this tape to retailers to explain the benefits of Windows 386. Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys. The link goes directly to the seven minute mark, or I'll embed the full video below the fold (mostly because I want to see how that works). It's nice to see that Microsoft have been PR aces for close to twenty years...

Meet the Babies

From this weekend's visit home, a picture of my father and me, with our respective babies: You recognize SteelyKid, I hope. The fuzzy yellow guy is Bodie, my parents' new Labrador Retriever puppy. Bodie is one day older than SteelyKid, and true to his Labrador breeding, he's a born experimentalist, running around the house giving everything an exploratory bite or two. You can even see him eying SteelyKid: He's thinking "I could totally eat that." And, of course, as a puppy, he maintains an unassailable dignity at all times, even when sleeping: OK, maybe not so much with the dignity thing.

Shorter Advice for Hiring Committees

Over at Sciencewomen, they have a list of six things departments should do to make academic job interviews more comfortable. It's excellent and reasonable advice. Of course, while it is an excellent post, it also contains more words than it really needs to. In the spirit of physics, which always tries to boil things down to a single, unifying principle, here's the rule for hiring committees from which all the other suggestions can be derived: Remember that job candidates are people, too. Think of things that annoyed you or made you uncomfortable when you were interviewing for jobs. Don't do…

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

Halfway through the movie, the dog got up, and curled back up with her back to the tv, presumably in disgust. When it ended, I said to Kate, "Well, that was anvilicious..." "Seriously," said the dog. "All that peace and love stuff was a bunch of crap." "It was a mite heavy-handed," I said. "Harmony with nature, my ass," said the dog. "Let me outside. I'm going to stalk and kill something small and fuzzy." And you know, I kind of agree with her. (Copied from a comment at Kate's LiveJournal. What a howling Mary Sue that was. The animation is pretty, but Jesus, the story is ham-handed...)

links for 2007-12-17

Bell Labs Is Gone. Academia Steps In. - New York Times The pros and cons of partnerships between major corporations and research universities. (tags: academia economics science industry) Matter-Wave Interferometry with Phase Fluctuating Bose-Einstein Condensates A new paper from the Ketterle Empire, on interference between different parts of a split BEC. (tags: physics low-temperature experiment articles science) Testing for Lorentz Violation: Constraints on Standard-Model-Extension Parameters via Lunar Laser Ranging Measuring the distance to the Moon to within a few centimeters gives…

links for 2007-12-02

Amazon.com: Uranium Ore: Electronics "When mixed with Tuscan whole milk I gained the power to control deceased woodland creatures. I am now in the process of raising an army of undead wombats to overthrow the government from deep within my volcanic lair. " (tags: silly internet) FilmChat: Philip Pullman -- the extended e-mail interview Phillip Pullman on the upcoming movie of The Golden Compass, and His Dark MAterials generally. Less crazy than some of his other interviews. (tags: books literature movies religion culture society) Second Sight Rob Knop's new digs. (tags: blogs computing…

I'm very disappointed in Mike Myers

Iconoclasts- Enlightenment Posted 47 Minutes Ago Comedian/actor Mike Myers talks about how enlightenment actually means "lightening up" when he sits down for a one-on-one conversation with philosopher Deepak Chopra in this clip from the next episode of Iconoclasts. Airs Thursday, November 8th @10PM on The Sundance Channel! For More info, visit: http://www.sundancechannel.com/iconoclasts/ Sucking up to Deepak Chopra? Blechh. Pretending that his nonsense has anything to do with enlightenment? Double blechh. The only part that's valid is the claim that humor is part of enlightenment values—…

Some sanity from the Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail has an article by Thomas Homer-Dixon and Andrew Weaver on "responding to the sceptics" that can be read here. It is rather shorter than How to talk to a climate sceptic, having only 4 points. This is the overview of their Q&A: "GLOBAL WARMING HAS STOPPED." Nonsense. "RECENT WARMING IS MOSTLY DUE TO AN INCREASE IN THE AMOUNT OF RADIATION COMING FROM THE SUN." Rubbish. "THE CLIMATE IS ALWAYS CHANGING." Yes, but so what? "SCIENTIFIC UNCERTAINTY IS SO GREAT THAT WE CAN'T MAKE FIRM POLICY DECISIONS." Wrong. Of course they offer a lot more detail, which you can read…

A woman in the Sudan has done the absolutely worst thing a woman can do.

She wore pants. A Sudanese woman has been jailed for a month after refusing to pay a fine for "dressing indecently" by wearing trousers, her lawyers say. Lubna Ahmed Hussein did not want to "give the verdict any legitimacy" by paying the fine of about $200 (£122), her lawyer, Nabil Adib, told the BBC. Ms Hussein, a journalist in her 30s, could have been given up to 40 lashes. Before the verdict, she had said she wanted her trial to become a test case for women's rights, correspondents say. Ms Hussein had resigned from her job at the UN, which would have given her immunity. More here.

New high res images from mars

Mars Orbiter has captured thousands of images in high resolution from the surface of the Grumpy Reddish Planet. The picture you see here is a chain of pit craters. That must have been one helluva noisy event. Reminds me of the walls at the Entebe Airport. Anyway, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera takes pictures that are about 6 km wide and some greater amount long, wiht resolution down to as small as one meter. The pictures are being released a few at a time and you can access them here. There are even 3D images but you will need special glasses to see…

If You Get Sick, It's Your Own Fault

...all you need to do to not die from the flu is to "eat healthy" and take lots of vitamins. If you eat healthy and take lots of vitamins and get the flu, your lymph nodes will swell up a little but that's all.... ...Addicts totally made their own decision to become addicted and then become thieves because they needed a fix. If I have to exercise my constitutional rights and shoot this addict breaking into my home, then so be it. That is not my problem.... ... and so on ... I couldn't help it. I wrote a raving political rant over at Quiche Moraine.

Wikipedia will limit changes to bio pieces

...within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people. The new feature, called "flagged revisions," will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved -- or in Wikispeak, flagged -- it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia's servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version. Sounds like a good idea to me. Actually, it is rather astonishing that it does not already work this way. This is from the NYT.

Religious Bus Driver Suspended in Iowa

A Des Moines bus driver has been suspended for refusing to drive a bus with a pro atheist ad on the outside. The story is here. There is also a poll at that location that you may want to answer. Hat tip Pharyngula. Angela Shiel was suspended on Monday after she refused to drive a bus with an Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers ad on its side. The ad reads "Don't believe in God? You are not alone." Shiel says the message is against her Christian faith. The transit authority removed the ads earlier this month after complaints from riders, then reversed course after meeting with the atheist…

Remember the Columbia House Record Club?

"So take this and fill it out," he suddenly said, thrusting a small square of paper in my general direction, a piece of paper that looked like a postcard on one side and a form to be filled in on the other. "As soon as you can. Do it right now." So my boss had just forced me to join the Columbia House Record Club so he could get a free album by getting someone else to join. I had to pick five albums from this list of mostly totally stupid stuff.... Forced to Join the Columbia House Record Club at Quiche Moraine

Finding Coral

Background: The Finding Coral expedition set sail June 8th in search of deep sea corals on in Hecate Strait and the Queen Charlotte Basin. Two Deep Worker manned submarines will be piloted by our blue ribbon science team, traveling to depths up to 500 metres to document evidence of corals, associated species, and damage from human impacts. The Finding Coral Expedition is the first of its kind in B.C.: an expedition specifically designed to study deep water corals and document threats to their well being. Day 10 video: Day 12 video: The Finding Coral Website is Here

Fallen Warriors

One of the things that struck me in travels through Scotland and the Canadian Maritimes was the monument in every town. Most of them were tiny, just a handful of names from each war-not because few died, but because the town was that small. The memorial at Edinburgh Castle, on the other hand, is of a scale and a simplistic majesty that imposes awe, a trick more church designers would like to have up their sleeves, I imagine. Whatever the size, most memorials are central and public and impossible to overlook. That isn't something we do well here. Read the rest here at Quiche Moraine

Is it true that "Sustainability will not come without reductions in consumption"?

Or, putting it another way, "Why does our energy system face security and environmental challenges?" Please visit ScienceBlog's new blog, The Energy Grid, which is one of those shorter term issue-driven blogs we do at Sb nwo and then. This particular iteration is moderated by Jonas Meckling, from the Belfer Center, and hosted by James Hrynyshyn, who I got to know a bit at the conference last winter, and Coby Beck, both of Scienceblogs Dot Com, and a few other rather impressive looking people. So, please go and help them save the world. Seriously. Let's get a great discussion going here…

Is Horse Domestication Earlier than Previously Thought?

It is a long way from Kazakhstan to Kentucky, but the journey to the Derby may have started among a pastoral people on the Kazakh steppes who appear to have been the first to domesticate, bridle and perhaps ride horses -- around 3500 B.C., a millennium earlier than previously thought. Archaeologists say the discovery may revise thinking about the development of some preagricultural Eurasian societies and put an earlier date to their dispersal into Europe and elsewhere. These migrations are believed to have been associated with horse domestication and the spread of Indo-European languages…

Kepler Launches Tomorrow (Friday)

NASA's planet-hunting space telescope Kepler is slated to launch the night of March 6 from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to find Earth-sized planets that could have liquid water at the surface and potentially harbor life. "It's not just another science mission. This one has historical significance built into it," said Ed Weiler of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. "It very possibly could tell us that earths are very, very common, that we've got lots of neighbors out there. Or it could tell us that Earths are really, really, really rare."…

African 'Pgymy' Shared Stature Allele

This is an oversimplification, but it is exactly what the archaeology and physical anthropology had previously told us. Except the physy and archy data give us more detail. But, important and interesting nonetheless: Short people known as pygmies are scattered across equatorial Africa, where they speak various languages, inhabit different types of forests, and hunt and gather food in diverse ways. Despite their cultural variety, a new study shows that the pygmies of Western Central Africa descended from an ancestral population that survived intact until 2800 years ago when farmers invaded…

School Prayer Case Being Heard in Federal Court

A Texas Law makes it easy for religious teachers and school administers to force kids to pray in public schools. Although this is said to be a "moment of silence" it is known that some school employees are explicit about this event being for prayer. One child was told to be quite and pray a couple years back, and this case was taken into the courts, where last year a federal district judge upheld the law. That ruling is now being appealed, and yesterday a panel of judges from the fifth Circuit (New Orleans) heard arguments regarding the case. There has as yet not been a ruling. Details…

Artist Asks: Can Europe Laugh At Itself?

Answer: Depends on the joke. The Czech EU presidency has apologised for an art installation it commissioned that lampoons national stereotypes. Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra apologised directly to Bulgaria, which has formally complained over its depiction as a toilet... The following is a silent overview of the work: The quote above comes from a BBC story which has a BBC TV reporter creaming in his jeans over the insensitivity of the Czech artist, and the Czech artist being all arty and shit. Ethnic sensitivity and humor: They don't mix, and you won't find either one in…

Now this is nerdiness

Since I got ribbed a bit for my antique D&D lore in a previous comment, I have to defend myself from charges of extreme nerdlitude by distracting you all with a real nerdfest: a discussion of who would win in hand-to-hand combat between a first level magic-user and a housecat, complete with computer simulations. The answer: under the modern rules, the cat usually wins. (When I played, if you said something like "I whack the cat with my staff", there might be a quick check to see if the cat dodged, and otherwise, we'd just say, "OK, you killed the cat. Now what?" Dang rules lawyers and…

H.M. has died

"Henry G. Molaison, 82, of Windsor Locks, CT died on Tuesday. He is known in the medical and scientific literatures as "the amnesic patient, H.M." He was born in Manchester, CT and graduated from East Hartford High School. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation at the Hartford Hospital to relieve his seizure disorder. Immediately after the operation, Mr. Molaison showed a profound amnesia, which became the topic of intense scientific study for more than five decades....he is the most widely studied and famous case in the neuroscience literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.…

Did you vote for Obama? You must now say three Hail Marys.

The priest at St. Mary's Catholic Church in downtown Greenville has told parishioners that those who voted for Barack Obama placed themselves under divine judgment because of his stance on abortion and shouldn't receive Holy Communion until they've done penance. The Rev. Jay Scott Newman told The Greenville News on Wednesday that church teaching doesn't allow him to refuse Holy Communion to anyone based on political choices, but that he'll continue to deliver the church's strong teaching on the "intrinsic and grave evil of abortion" as a hidden form of murder. source So, anyone from the IRS…

Conservatives: Republican Party Not Conservative Enough

From Amanda Carpenter ... conservative leaders convened for a meeting of the minds to plot a way to reinvigorate the Republican brand ... Bozell saw the 2008 election as a decision between a "moderate" and a "far-left" candidate. The moderate lost. Therefore, "the moderate wing of the Republican Party is dead, it is finished," Bozell said. ... Bozell pushed [for] "whole new generation of organizations, particularly on the grassroots level" and "massively increasing the fundraising." Others demanded that conservatives, rather than moderate Republicans, be appointed to fill leading roles on…

Mars Phoenix Lander Is No Longer With Us

Like Jerry the Goldfish, whom I found doing the old back paddle this morning, the Mars Phoenix Lander has ceased communications after five months of operation. This is the seasonally dark time in arctic Mars, and there is a lot of dust in the air for some reason, so there is no longer enough power for Phoenix to keep alive. Engineers received the last signal from the lander on November 2nd. It is possible, but unlikely, that Phoenix will 'phone home' again over the next couple of weeks, and NASA will be listening just in case. Farewell sweet robot. Details here

Ted Kennedy To Hospital, Debates Will Happen, Economy Down Tubes

Don't forget to watch the debates tonight. In watching the pre-debate coverage, we learn that Ted Kennedy has been brought to the hospital. For a man with brain cancer, this may be a not uncommon thing, and there are no details. Stay tuned (to the TV/Radio, not me. What do I look like, AP????) UPDATE: Ted is back home, preparing to watch the debate. In the mean time, enjoy this photo essay from MSNBC depicting a lot of people experience a lot of stress over what is going on right now with the economy. And remember ... after the debates ... kick some ass.

Sarah Palin's Executive Ability Sucks, it turns out

From the Wall Street Journal: The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters. The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin's legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague…

Journalistic Hackery and Anti-Atheist Bigotry at Time

Just in case you were wondering whether weekly news magazines still serve any purpose, the answer is no. Go read this epic post, from Hemant Mehta, documenting the perfidy of Joe Klein in a recent Time magazine cover story. Klein, if you are not familiar with him, has long been one of the hackiest of hack journalists. He pops up occasionally as a talking head on cable news shows, but he has never, not even by accident, said anything interesting or insightful during his appearances. Anyway, after reading Mehta's post, go read Dale McGowan's essay in the Washington Post.

George Carlin Dead at 71

George Carlin was absolutely the very best stand-up comedian in the history of the business. Only Robin Williams in his prime was even in the same league. I have quite a few of his albums, and I find I can still listen to them with pleasure even though I have most of the routines memorized. The cadence of his voice and the strength of his writing make them enjoyable even long after their impact as humor has worn off. You will learn more about good teaching from observing his technique than you ever will in a teaching seminar or education course. The New York Times has a good article…

Uncertain Dots 14

Another week, another hangout with Rhett. In which we actually fielded a couple of questions from readers on Twitter, about the reason for inertia and a kind of meta-question. More audience questions would, of course, be welcome. A couple of links to things that came up: Mach's Principle, a past attempt to explain the origin of inertia. Newton's famous refusal to explain gravity, "Hypotheses non fingo." Sir Isaac was second to none in his mastery of snotty condescension. Veritasium's buoyancy quiz. Aatish Bhatia's post about a new meta-analysis of "active learning" studies showing that…

Uncertain Dots, Episode 7

In which we move out of the original trilogy, and into J.J. Abrams territory. Cue the lens flare! This week's random assortment of topics includes travel, airports, physics models of loading and unloading planes, uses and abuses of curve fitting, odd stuff we get sent to review, and high-speed video cameras. Miscellaneous links: -- Rhett's Atlanta airport post. -- The airplane loading study I was thinking of is Optimal boarding method for airline passengers, by Jason Steffen, from 2008. --The Slo Mo Guys, Smarter Every Day, Veritasium. --Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn by Amanda Gefter. That'…

I'd better not say what I've named my plush octopus, then

Yet another example of religious insanity: A British primary school teacher has been arrested in Sudan, accused of insulting Islam's Prophet by letting her class of 7-year-olds name a teddy bear Mohammed, her school said on Monday. Colleagues of Gillian Gibbons, aged 54 from Liverpool, told Reuters they feared for her safety after receiving reports that young men had already started gathering outside the Khartoum police station where she was being held. I don't know why they're blaming the teacher. Clearly, all of those 7-year-olds need to be hauled out of their homes and stoned to death.

Surrounded by Paganism

Encouraging news from Newt Gingrich: Two leading voices of the Republican Party's evangelical wing visited Rock Church on Friday for a forum aimed at recapturing some of the movement's political momentum. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee urged Christians to get involved in politics to preserve the presence of religion in American life. “I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history,” Gingrich said. “We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.” There are worse things to be surrounded by.…

So, About This "Twitter" Thing...

If I were to start using Twitter, what's the best way to go about that? That is, what interface to the service makes it the least annoying to use? It would be a nice bonus if the package in question could handle multiple accounts, too. I will probably sign up as myself to try things out, but the real point will be to create a Twitter account for the dog, for book promotion purposes. It'd be nice to be able to post things from either account without having to switch programs. (That's not a deal-breaker, but it would be nice...)