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Balko on Carruthers Arrest

Radley Balko is quoted in this ABC News story about the arrest of BetOnSports CEO David Carruthers. He points out the futility, the hypocrisy and oppressive nature of the coming crackdown on internet gambling. First, the futility and hypocrisy: "It's wrong for about 1,000 reasons," said Balko, "but the main ones are it's not gonna work -- it'll just push it underground." Balko argues that any attempts to curb Internet gambling are bound to fail and are hypocritical due to the legal nature of online horse and lottery betting, which benefit individual states. And of course, he's right. Unless…

Volokh on First Amendment History

Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who blogs, has an excellent article in the National Review Online. He correctly points out that constitutional law is a good deal more complex than we often hear from conservatives throwing out such noble-sounding but mostly meaningless catchphrases as "original intent" and "strict construction". Speaking of the free speech clause of the first amendment, Volokh writes, This also shows the error of faulting liberal judges for "making up the law" in this area. Unfortunately, the First Amendment is so general that judges have to create legal rules that turn…

The Nobel Doesn’t Mean Gravitational Wave Astronomy Is Over; It’s Just Getting Good

"Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be." -Jonathan Nolan Yes, we detected gravitational waves, directly, for the first time! Just days after Advanced LIGO first turned on, a signal of a 36 solar mass black hole merging with a 29 solar mass black hole gave us our first robust, direct detection of these long-sought waves, changing astronomy forever. Einstein’s General Relativity was validated in a whole new way, and over 40 years of work on developing and building LIGO was vindicated at last. The inspiral and merger of the first pair…

Presidential Politics

There are two Presidential election campaigns underway at the moment. Both feature establishment / incumbent parties that are pretty much in disarrary, wracked by missteps and accusations of corruption. They're opposed by candidates who are somewhat unexpected. One of these campaigns is unquestionably Important, and will affect my life and the lives of everyone in the world in the future. The other is, well, not terribly important to me, or 99.999999% of the world's population. Am I a Bad Person, then, for being absolutely captivated by the train wreck that is the SFWA presidential election (…

The Agony Files: U. S. Championship Edition

I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but the U. S. Chess Championship is currently going on in St. Louis. I have been dutifully following the games online, of course. It is one of the great cruelties of chess that forty perfect moves can be undone by one moment of carelessness. We amateur players blunder all the time, of course, but somehow it's always a bit comforting to see the top players do likewise. For example, here's a position that occurred in the game between Benjamin Finegold (playing white) and Yasser Seirawan: We have come to the finale of a long endgame. Finegold had…

The Internet Makes Everything Better

For one obvious example, I'm typing this on a plane-- Southwest has started doing wi-fi on some flights, and it is totally worth $5 to be able to web-surf in flight.It would be even better if the flight wren't packed, so I could type more comfortably, but I'm ok with just reading (once I post this). Another example is the way that net access enabled me to have a far better time in Miami last night than I ordinarily would have. Everybody from the meeting I went there for took off, so I was on my own for the evening, and South Beach isn't my kind of scene, being neither rich nor famous nor fond…

Links for 2009-11-14

WTF, Aerosmith? WTF? | Popdose "Never has there been a band so unbelievably great and so sadly shitty at the same time. That, to me, is the Aerosmith legacy, and it's only bound to get worse. Yet, there is something that still seems sacred about this band, beyond mere nostalgia. I just think they need to go away for good before we'll be able to figure out exactly what that is." (tags: music culture popdose blogs) Book Review - 'What the Dog Saw - And Other Adventures,' by Malcolm Gladwell - Review - NYTimes.com "The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself…

Previous K2 Spice/synthetic marijuana coverage in The Washington Post

In remarking Sunday on coverage of the synthetic marijuana products in The New York Times, I totally missed that a more detailed article appeared the day before in The Washington Post. With contributions from Aaron C. Davis, the article by writer Michael W. Savage provided an insight into Spice use in Adams Morgan and around the District. The second page of the online article goes into much more detail than the NYT article by addressing the pros and cons of state approaches to outlaw the compounds and products. Savage also included commentary by Marilyn Huestis, chief of chemistry and drug…

Update from Norman

Saturday was the last full day of the OSLEP course and we had the students thinking about religious and other reactions to Darwinâs ideas; three hours on St George Jackson Mivart, Alfred Russel Wallace, Ernst Haeckel, and Charles Kingsley, followed by another three hours on American anti-evolutionism. The students really seemed to get into the material and Iâve been very impressed with what theyâve been able to accomplish since Wednesday. For those that may be interested, on Wednesday we discussed natural theology (Paley & Hume) and Darwinâs life. Thursday was devoted to discussions of…

Feynman Lectures Online - Thanks Bill!

Microsoft Research's Project Tuva website is up. Project Tuva is a collection of seven searchable Feynman lectures aimed at a popular audience (with extras coming online in the future.) The rights to these lectures were obtained by Bill Gates after he was entranced by them over twenty years ago. Well worth watching, especially if you're about to give a popular science talk (I've always been fascinated by how Feynman uses his hands in describing physics.) Even more interesting, in my egocentric universe, are the comments by Mr. Gates himself about Feynman: Someone who can make science…

QEC 07 Videos Online

Interested in quantum error correction (who isn't!) Daniel Lidar informs me that the talks from the QEC07 conference are now all available online. See such amazing acts as Tutorials Dave Bacon [ppt][video] Daniel Gottesman [ppt][video] Raymond Laflamme [pdf][video] Lorenza Viola [pdf][video] Keynote David Cory [ppt][video] (no audio) John Preskill [pdf][video] Peter Shor [ppt][video] David Wineland [ppt][video] Invited Robert Alicki [pdf][…

UW-Madison Lecture: What's Next for Science Communication?

Next week on Thursday, June 25 I will be visiting one of my favorite cities Madison, Wisconsin to give a lecture titled "What's Next for Science Communication?" It's part of a summer speaker series sponsored by the Dept. of Life Sciences Communication and the Holtz Center on Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin. If you are interested in the themes discussed in last week's article at Nature Biotechnology, then you will definitely want to come out to the presentation. If you can't make it, online video will be available and Wisconsin Public Television will be re-…

In the Clamor Over George Will, Pundits Win But Public Loses

Back in January, Desmog blog noted what they dubbed a "troubling" trend online, plotting a rise in mentions of "global warming + hoax." The graph was construed as evidence of growing strength for the climate skeptic movement. At the time I observed to a few colleagues that the graph probably also reflected the intense interest in so-called "denialism" among the liberal climate netroots. By constantly responding to and attacking the climate skeptics in blog posts and comments, liberal bloggers were only bringing additional attention to their claims. The same observation currently applies to…

The malignant Jack Cashill

Perhaps you have no idea who Jack Cashill is — he's not a person of great consequence, but he is representative of the deranged right. I first ran across him as a creationist activist, which tells you right there that he's a few bushels short of a hogshead. He was featured on A Flock of Dodos as the fervent but somehow, supposedly, reasonable political voice of creationism. He didn't have two heads, he didn't tie anyone to a stake and set them on fire, so by golly, he must not be that bad a fellow…which is an interesting phenomenon, that we so readily set aside significant intellectual…

Starts with L, Rhymes with Rife

If you sometimes look around and ask yourself, "So what is life, anyway?"--even if you haven't ingested some illegal substance--you may be interested in a story I've written for Seed magazine. "The Meaning of Life" is the cover story for the August issue, which just turned up at my doorstep. The story isn't online yet, but when it does pop up, I'll make a note of it. The idea for the story crystallized during the course of my work on my next book. My initial idea for the book was to investigate this very question, "What is life?" There is actually a lot of new research and thinking going into…

Blood biomarker of heart disease discovered in dogs

Image of elderly dog By Jon Sullivan via Wikimedia Commons The mitral valve is located between the left atrium and left ventricle of the heart where it serves an important role in preventing backflow of blood into the left atrium as the ventricle contracts. Mitral valve prolapse, a condition that occurs in humans, is characterized by regurgitation of blood into the left atrium, which receives blood from the lungs. Hence, this condition can lead to congestive heart failure as blood backs up in the lungs. Scientists at Tufts University, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, were studying…

Latif sets the record straight (again) on "several years of cooling"

Thanks to the dogged determination of über climate blogger Joe Romm, here's what Mojib Latif wants us all to understand about his previous references to a short-term cooling trend: Given all the warnings about and plans to forestall global warming, people may be surprised to find, over the next several years that, over parts of the Northern hemisphere, summers are no warmer than before, maybe even a bit cooler-and that winters are as cold, or a bit colder, than they have been in the past couple of decades. This is because the climate may go through a temporary halt in warming. It's nothing…

Casual Fridays: Are all MP3s equal?

There's a lot of debate online about whether people can really tell the difference between the various audio formats -- AAC, MP3, you name it. Does it really make a difference? Recently I saw a blog post suggesting that the methodology for many so-called studies on the phenomenon was flawed. If you're going to test this sort of thing, listeners shouldn't be aware of the format they're listening to. And they shouldn't be asked to compare two versions of a song, they should simply rate how good each particular recording sounds. According to this post, few studies take the time to be rigorous…

Is "friends with benefits" beneficial?

The name sounds so benign: what could be better than friendship? Why, friendship with benefits, of course! But when a friendship moves from platonic to sexual, even if both partners claim they're not "romantic," doesn't the dynamic of that relationship necessarily change? It's a puzzle that's often discussed in locker rooms, chat rooms, and online forums, but according to the New York Times, hasn't been the subject of much formal study. An article in the Times discusses one recent study on the subject, conducted by communications researchers Melissa Bisson and Timothy Levine: [They] surveyed…

ScienceBloggers talk about Virginia Tech

Earlier today I wrote a post about optical illusions. I was hoping it would distract me from thinking about the Virginia Tech shootings. It didn't. I began to see connections between the illusions and the tragedy: That sinking feeling that somebody was being shot, that spiral like a gun sight. The problem is that human brains are connecting machines: we can connect anything to anything else. Trying not to think about the shootings was the worst thing I could do. How should I be handling it? I should be talking about it directly -- preferably face-to-face or over the phone. I did spend some…

Study: Playing video games helps kids transition to adult life

A new longitudinal study suggests that playing online role playing games can help kids prepare for the world of adult responsibility: Young players who become members of a clan, guild or faction (terminology depends on the game) find they have responsibilities to attend to if they wish to receive any kind of reward, rank advancement or recognition. There are also penalties if they disobey rules or fail to meet commitments. A faction may require the player to participate in missions/quests or other tasks such as mining materials or guarding a prison. Successful missions/quests result in the…

James Hansen: The Bilbo Baggins of Climate Politics

In the latest issue of New Scientist, I've got a review of climate change journo Mark Bowen's new book, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. I have to say, this book is right up my presumed alley, and yet I had a hard time getting through it. You can't read the entire New Scientist review online, but here are a few parts: Unfortunately, while Bowen gives play-by-play details - who emailed whom, who sat in on what meeting - Hansen remains curiously distant, or just plain absent, from much of the narrative. The story of his past is…

The New York Times on Hurricane Policy, and More

In anticipation of the start of hurricane season, today's Science Times had a pair of great articles on hurricanes, global warming, and coastal defenses in the U.S. I have just put up a post at Huffington Post, entitled Risky Scenarios, that comments on the latest Times package. You can read it here. Meanwhile, my forthcomig book about all of this, Storm World, has gotten another positive early review--this time from Booklist, which is published by the American Library Association. Here's what gets said: Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming. Mooney, Chris (…

Details, Details, Details

Once again, I can't keep up with all the latest reactions to Nisbet-Mooney. There are just too many of them (over 160 comments at PZ's blog alone; and even my own blog is pushing 40 right now). I'm in Australia prepping a series of talks, and that's the top priority at the moment. However I'd like to make one major comment: There's a somewhat disingenuous critique circulating out there, which is that we don't give any specifics, or even that we don't back up our argument with data. On the contrary, the Science article was amply referenced, and Matt and I have been continually elaborating on…

Hooray, DonorsChoose t-shirt winners!

I'm just thrilled with our final numbers from our DonorsChoose campaign -- because of your generosity, $2953 are going to go help 1,126 needy kids learn some critically important science. And I'm also psyched that Sciencewomen came in second of all the Scienceblogs participating in both amount donated, and numbers of donors (43!!) We came in 4th in terms of the number of students reached. Congratulations, everybody. I've also finally pulled together the list of winners of our t-shirt drawing. Methods and winners are below! Okay, so I feel the need to share my "random selection" in a…

Didja feel the earthquake?

I woke up at 5:30ish realizing the room was moving. Irrationally I thought it might be because of the geothermal installation - maybe the foundations had been disturbed and the house was going to fall down! Or maybe there were burglars, as I heard a crash downstairs. As my brain kicked into gear, I realized it must be an earthquake, leapt (I got air, I tell you) out of bed, and stood in a door, but it was pretty much over by then. I came down stairs anyway to see if it was burglars. It wasn't. Nothing was damaged, so far as I can see. My first thought was to call my husband but I didn't…

An online book by a prosopagnostic

Bill Choisser (left) has written an online book called Face Blind!, where he describes his experiences of prosopagnosia, a neurological condition in which the ability to recognize faces is impaired. In extreme cases, prosopagnostics are unable to recognize family members, and even their own face. Prosopagnosia (commonly known as face blindness), often occurs as a result of damage to a region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, located near the inferior (lower) surface of the temporal lobe at the midline. The damage may be due to head injury, stroke, or various neurodegenerative…

Why do we get fevers?

The answer is that it increases lymphocyte motility, helping to fight the infection: Nobody likes coming down with a fever, but feeling hot may do a body good. Researchers report online 5 November in Nature Immunology that a fever in mice revs up the immune response by helping white blood cells enter lymph nodes, where they join the battle against microbial invaders. All mammals can develop fever when they're sick enough, and even cold-blooded animals with infections, such as fish and lizards, will seek warmth to raise their body temperatures. This suggests that fever somehow helps the body…

Cancer = Stem Cells Gone Wild!

This recent discovery actually makes a lot of sense: errant stem cells are often the cause of cancers and tumors, and therefore should be better targeted with chemotherapy. Stem cells are the precursors to all tissues, good and bad, and many cancers could be considered the result of stem cells' division process gone awry. Suddenly, stem cells may be producing massive amount of cells with no particularly purpose, which don't belong, and actually destory healthy normal cells. This is often the result of genetic mutations caused by chemicals, age, radiation, UV exposure, genetic predisposition,…

Encyclopedia of Life

There is a new website, rel="tag">Encyclopedia of Life.  It is an online resource that aims "to document all species of life on Earth."  One featured species is Pissodes strobi (Peck), the White pine weevil. src="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/image%0As/beetle.jpeg" class="inset" height="231" width="460"> The site currently contains: About 25 href="http://www.eol.org/content/exemplars">exemplar species pages. These pages show the kind of rich environment, with extensive information, to which all the species pages will eventually grow. These pages have been…

FASEB: Urge Congress to Support the NIH and NSF

From the Federation of American Scientists for Experimental Biology (for all you non-biologists who are wondering who FASEB is): Urge Congress to Support Research Increase for NIH and NSF Depends On It! ACTION REQUIRED NOW! The 2 Most Important Weeks for NIH and NSF Funding in FY2008 Dear FASEB Society Members: The next two weeks are the most important for determining the level of appropriations that can be attained in FY2008 for the research agencies we support (NIH, NSF, DOE, VA, USDA and NASA). The Budget Committees are meeting this week to finalize the level of discretionary spending…

Swiss Government Enacts Strict Pet Laws

UPDATE: Looks like the fount of wisdom that is The Time's Online lost a thing or two in the translation. Lucky for us, informed Zooillogix reader and sometimes D&D player, Dragon's Sorrow End, has set the record straight. The government of Switzerland has passed the most comprehensive laws in the history of pet ownership to protect the well being of social animals. In hopes of creating an "informed population," the laws cover everything from guinea pigs to rhinoceroses. Here are some of the more interesting regulations: - Dog owners are required to become qualified in a two-part course…

Roger Moore Expelled by Ben Stein ...

Yet another demonstration of creationist's inability to get what they want without resorting to ethically questionable behavior ..... Shortly before he was to attend a screening in January of the documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," ... Roger Moore, a film critic for The Orlando Sentinel, learned that his invitation had been revoked by the film's marketers. "Well, you already invited me," he recalled thinking at the time. "I'm going to go." So Mr. Moore traveled to a local megachurch and planted himself among a large group of pastors to watch the movie.... There were nondisclosure…

Reveal yourselves, O Hidden Ones!

I learn from Janet, Bora, PZ, and Afarensis that this week is supposedly National Delurking Week. Lurkers, for those of you who aren't hip to the Internet lingo, are people who read blogs (or, for that matter, any form of online forum), but never (or only rarely) leave comments or posts. They are said to be "lurking." During National Delurking Week, we bloggers are supposed to ask lurkers to delurk momentarily and leave a comment. Given that Respectful Insolence averages somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 unique visits per day on most weekdays (a little more than half that number on weekends)…

Steve McIntyre's DOS attack on GISS

NASA's GISS has on-line graphing system that lets you see a graph of temperatures for a particular weather station (For example, here is Sydney airport).) Steve McIntyre decided to run a script that asked the GISS system to produce graphs of each and every station in the data set (thousands of weather stations). Since his script was requesting these as fast as it could, it made it difficult for anyone else to use the system, so the GISS webmaster blocked his access. When he asked why, the webmaster explained Although you did not provide any further details about your problem, I will assume…

Leakegate: Leake caught cherry picking to make wind power look bad

BusinessGreen reports: The renewable energy industry is this morning considering lodging a complaint with the Press Complaint Commission (PCC) over reports in the Sunday Times yesterday accusing "feeble" wind farms of failing to deliver as much power as expected. A misleading story in The Sunday Times? You can guess who is responsible. Leake tries to make a case that wind farms are a "feeble" source of electricity by cherry picking the ones that perform the worst: The analysis reveals that more than 20 wind farms produce less than a fifth of their potential maximum power output. Nowhere…

Outcropedia: cool geology for Google Earth

Last month, another structural geologist came to town to check out possible sites for a future field class. While we were out looking at one of my favorite teaching sites, he commented that geologists seem unusually willing to share their secrets with one another. (We had met at one of the Cutting Edge workshops, where great teaching ideas are free for the taking, technically unpublished but shared online and in person.) A few weeks ago, I learned about another example: Outcropedia, a project of the International Union of Geosciences' TekTask group. From the organizers' e-mail: The…

Press Releases are Written by Stupid People

PLoS Biology's press releases have taken another step toward being dismissed as "crap" by people who know jack shit about evolution, thanks to a new press release published last week. It starts off like so: Evolution has taken another step away from being dismissed as "a theory" in the classroom, thanks to a new paper published this week in the online open-access journal PLoS Biology. And goes on like this: As all students of Darwin know, evolution occurs when there is variation in a population; where some variants confer a survival or reproductive advantage to the individual, and where the…

Trust and Critical Thinking

At Science Online 2010 (or, as I like to call it, Esss Oh Ten Oh) I'll be participating in a session organized by Stephanie Zvan called Trust and Critical Thinking, with herself, PZ Myers, my favorite Radio Talk Show Host Desiree Schell, and Kirsten "Dr. Kiki" Sanford. Oh, and me. Pursuant to this session, we've put up a few posts discussing the topic. They are: Are you a real skeptic? I doubt it. ...Fine. So I could say that people have different opinions about the meaning of the word "skeptic," or more dogmatically, that some people don't understand the meaning of the term. And I will…

In which Orac struts his stuff elsewhere...

Believe it or not, I’ve had two weekends off, which is why there won’t be a full post today. Basically, what happened is that I’m an idiot. I took a long weekend last weekend, worked a couple of days last week, and then took a three day weekend at a cottage near a lake this weekend with my family. (Yes, believe it or not, I have a family, complete with a couple of incredibly cute nephews whom I love and who amuse the hell out of me, given that they are six and two years old.) I should have just taken the entire week off, but I had agreed to attend a Komen function on Wednesday night and…

Ocean Dead Zones Double Every 10 Years

NY Times reports "In a study to be published Friday in the journal Science, researchers say the number of marine "dead zones" around the world has doubled about every 10 years since the 1960s. At the same time, the zones along many coastlines have been growing in size and intensity. About 400 coastal areas now have periodically or permanently oxygen-starved bottom waters. Combined, they constitute an area larger than the state of Oregon. "What's happened in the last 40, 50 years is that human activity has made the water quality conditions worse," Robert J. Diaz, the study's lead author and a…

"Cuba of the north"

Iceland Voters Set to Reject Debt Deal: After the dust began to settle last year -- after the banks failed, the currency collapsed, the stock market crashed and the government fell -- the dazed inhabitants of Iceland woke up to another unpleasant problem: They owed, it seemed, some $5.3 billion to more than 300,000 angry people in the Netherlands and Britain. These were the customers of Icesave, a now notorious online retail branch of the Icelandic bank Landsbanki, which went bankrupt in October 2008 along with 85 percent of Iceland's banking system. The British and Dutch governments…

Lesch-Nyhan

There is wonderful, disturbing, and extremely graphic article in last week's New Yorker (not online) about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a mysterious disorder characterized by excessive amounts of uric acid and a dangerous tendency to injure oneself. In its bleakest incarnation, Lesch-Nyhan turns victims into their own worst enemy, as their can't help but chew off their lower lip, or bite of their own fingers, or curse at a loved one. (For Lesch-Nyhan patients, aggression and hateful speech are a sign of love.) What biological mistake could cause such a tragic behavioral disorder? The problem…

Molecular Gastronomy

When people ask for me tangible examples of how art and science can work together to discover new things - that's a theme of my first book - the first thing I mention is food. In recent years, chefs like Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz have demonstrated the possibilities of translating the lab techniques of modern science to the kitchens of fancy restaurants. And so you get things like the El Bulli "olive," which is actually a sphere of olive juice, encapsulated in a thin gel made from sodium alginate. Place an "olive" in the mouth, and a burst of briny liquid is released.*…

Creationist amendments

Terri Leo just offered an amendment to add a standard to Biology 9: D) analyze and evaluate the evidence regarding formation of simple organic molecules and their organization into long complex molecules having information such as the DNA molecule for self-replicating life. It passed, with reservations expressed by various members who hadn't had time to review it. This will come up for a vote again tomorrow. Mavis Knight proposed to remove the creationist amendment McLeroy introduced last time. The vote failed, with Agosto abstaining. McLeroy is now advocating an amendment to add another…

Facebook is not a revolution

A follow up to my earlier post on information technology, In The Age Of Facebook, Researcher Plumbs Shifting Online Relationships: "You can ask somebody, 'Of your 300 Facebook friends how many are actually friends?' and people will say, 'Oh, 30 or 40 or 50,' " said Baym. "But what having a lot of weak-tie relationships is giving you access to are a lot of resources that you wouldn't otherwise have. Because we do tend to cluster in relationships with strong ties to people that are pretty similar to ourselves. So they don't necessarily know a whole lot that we don't know. They haven't…

Civility, shmivility: results of the comment survey

Thanks to everyone who participated in the unscientific survey on commenting. The results are back, and I'd like to share them with you. As many of you have noticed, we've been talking about comments a lot here lately, both at BioE and on Sb in general. There's also a big session on online civility coming up at SciOnline '10. So the main purpose behind the survey was to get you involved in that discussion. I've brought the issues of uncivil and uninformed comments up in several posts, sometimes rather provocatively, but we already know that the majority of blog readers don't comment often,…

You Don't Have to Like New Music

The tagline up at the top of this blog promises "Physics, Politics, and Pop Culture," but unless you count my own photos as pop art, I've been falling down on the last of those. This is largely because, despite being on sabbatical, I've been so busy running after the kids that I don't have much time for pop culture. And also because this is kind of a frustrating pop-culture moment, with a number of media currently dominated by works that just aren't my thing. That's a critical bit of context for my reaction to a recent Salon interview with music critic Jim Fusilli, which sports the headline "…

Social Security is Toast

Mike the Mad Biologist links to a piece arguing that Social Security is fine thank you very much. Rumor to the contrary is pure political propaganda, and the fact that many young people think they'll never see a dime is a result of simple fearmongering. I am sorry to say that they're not right. They're not even wrong, having missed the point entirely. Indeed as a factual matter their understanding of the way Social Security and its trust fund operate is fine. It's simply that "there is no crisis" does not follow from the premise that we can always borrow more. First, consider the Social…

Election plans

I guess I should've posted this a few days ago if I wanted to influence early voters, but here's my advice to California voters who still haven't figured out how to vote. Propositions: 19: Yes. There's not really a good argument against this. There's no scientific reason to single out marijuana for stricter regulation than cigarettes or alcohol, indeed alcohol may be more dangerous. Legalization gets criminal gangs out of the system, clears non-violent drug offenders out of the courts and prisons, and moves our whole criminal justice system towards a more rational future. Yeah, the…