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Music Meme

OK, fine. 1. Total volume of music on my pc: About 12Gb---all of my CDs and LPs converted to Ogg. This is just a back up, since I just play the songs on my Iriver player. 2. Songs playing right now: Steel Monkey by Jethro Tull. 3. Last album purchased: Dial a Song by They Might be Giants 4. Seven songs I've listened to a lot lately, from several genres: Helpless by kd lang When Doves Cry by Prince Van Diemen's Land by U2 Sounds of Then by GANGgajang Imitation of Life by R.E.M. Irving Berlin by Ian Tyson Bob by Weird Al Yankovic 5. Pass this on to five victims: I don't think so…

Fumento's nemesis: the rake

Long time readers will be familiar with the epic that is Michael Fumento's attempt to debunk the first Lancet survey. A summary can't really do it justice, but what basically happened is that Fumento dismissed the 100,000 number because he claimed that they included Falluja when they should have left it out. When I explained that they had left Falluja out, rather than admit to making a mistake, Fumento repeatedly and loudly insisted that the 100,000 number came from including Falluja. Now he's claiming to be vindicated by David Kane's critique. Kane, of course, is arguing that the Lancet…

Gilbert Burnham seminar on Lancet studies

Gilbert Burnham has just given a talk at MIT on the Lancet studies on deaths in Iraq. You can watch the video here. Some of things he mentioned: USAID (which has expertise in cluster sampling) was told to look for holes in the study, but couldn't find any. They will soon release the data (with identifying material removed) to other researchers. John Howard's idiotic comment "it's not based on anything other than a house-to-house survey" got a laugh. The IBC made vociferous attacks on the studies because they want to defend their methods, and Les Roberts suggests that IBC are trying to stop…

Rampton on Lancet study

Sheldon Rampton has a nice summary of the reactions to the new Lancet study. He concludes: Even so, the results of the Lancet study, combined with what we know about the limitations of other attempts to count the dead, suggest that the war in Iraq has already claimed hundreds of thousands rather than tens of thousands of lives. It is rather striking, moreover, that critics of this research have mostly avoided calling for additional, independent studies that could provide a scientific basis for either confirming or refuting its alarming findings Meanwhile, David Kane has started a blog just…

Rajendra Pachauri to speak at UNSW on Thursday

2008 Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture: Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will deliver the 2008 Wallace Wurth Memorial Lecture in UNSW's John Niland Scientia Building on Thursday 23 October at 7:30pm. Dr Pachaui's lecture is entitled Our Vulnerable Earth - Climate Change, the IPCC and the role of Generation Green. He will also receive an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the University in recognition of his eminent service to the community. ... The lecture series is named after Wallace Charles Wurth, the University's first Chancellor.…

Millionth comment party

Well, we didn't have a fancy sign, on account of being on the other side of the world from Seed High Command, but people were able to find us by spotting the Scienceblogs mug. My brilliant plan to have the party in the Attic Bar because it would be fairly empty on a Wednesday night was foiled by the hotel having a movie night there because it was so empty on a week night. We ended up outside in the courtyard on a pleasant spring evening. Daniel had to go home and pack because he's heading off to the UK on Monday, but the rest of us were there till the place closed at midnight. More…

ScienceBlogs party in Sydney is on Wed Sep 17

All readers of this and any other ScienceBlogs blog are invited to a party in Sydney on Wednesday 17th September from 7pm onwards. We'll be in the Attic Bar of the Arthouse hotel. Daniel MacArthur, who will also be there, has a map. Finding the Attic Bar once you're in the Arthouse hotel is a little tricky -- you have to go out the back door and up the stairs on the outside of the hotel. To help you recognize our group we will have a ScienceBlogs mug on the table. If you are on Facebook please RSVP here. And if you're not in Sydney, there are lots more ScienceBlogs parties all around the…

Steve McIntyre and the Data Quality Act

If you've never heard of the Data Quality Act go read this article by Chris Mooney. Back? Good. Steve McIntyre, still angry after a comment was not released from moderation on Christmas Day, is now trying to use the Data Quality Act against RealClimate. As far as I can make out, because Gavin Schmidt works for NASA, McIntyre thinks that the stringent peer review hurdles of the Data Quality Act (inserted by a tobacco lobbyist to make it harder to use the scientific evidence on the dangers of cigarette smoke) should apply to RealClimate. I wonder where McIntyre learned about the ins and outs…

Ian Enting on Climate science and public debate

Ian Enting, author of Twisted: The Distorted Mathematics of Greenhouse Denial and the definitive list of errors in Plimer's Heaven and Earth has a talk on Ockham's Razor on the public debate on climate science: the central issue is that if there was a real case against a significant human influence on climate, why is so much of what passes for public debate based on fabrication? If Ian Plimer had a real case, why does he misrepresent the contents of dozens of his cited references and fabricates so many of his graphics? More importantly, since Plimer is only one individual, if his fellow…

Tamino calls out Anthony Watts

Tamino writes It has now been independently confirmed, by multiple persons, that my results regarding the impact of station dropout on global temperature are correct. Your claims, in your document with Joe D'Aleo for the SPPI, are just plain wrong. ... If you have any honor at all, you'll set the record straight. You owe it to everyone, and especially to NOAA, to admit that you were wrong. And you certainly owe it to NOAA to apologize. You need to make a highly visible, highly public admission of error, and apology, for using falsehoods to accuse others of fraud. My post from way back in…

Reporting about 2035 error full of errors

Bidisha Banerjee and George Collins have written the definitive account of the error in the WG2 report about Himalayan glaciers: Dozens of articles and analyses of this situation, whether dashed-off blog posts or New York Times coverage, exhibit a curious consistency. Not a single article or analysis appears to include all relevant issues without introducing at least one substantial error. It's as though the original documents contained a curse which has spread to infect every commentator and reporter. The curse seems to stem from not reading sources carefully (or at all), which, ironically,…

Things You Don't Want to Hear, Part V

Things you don't want to hear from your hospital nurse: 1. "Oh, do we have a big surprise for you today!" 2. "Let's see if I've got this straight - you're on for a castration at 1:00, right?" 3. "Here, give me that newspaper - it'll just bore you." 4. "Now where did I leave that thermometer?" 5. "Dmitri will be giving you your bath this morning." 6. "Why don't you take a guess first." 7. "Time for a walk in the halls!" 8. "Hmm...there seems to be something stuck under your mattress." 9. "Let me get you a band-aid." 10. "You haven't had a cigarette in three days - aren't you proud?"

AskaSciBlogger June 15th Response

How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?... In my case I have learned the art of working at twice the speed of the average doctor, not unlike The Flash, who upon overhearing his wife express a velleity for a bowl of peanut-butter-and-chocolate ice cream magically produced it from within the folds of his cape before she even had time to change her mind to Rocky Road. Also, I love to write, that helps. Even when the finished product is riddled with comma splices…

Simpson-o-Mania

Omnibrain started it, and now everyone is making their own Simpsons avatar. Mine found its way into the bar: You can make your own (and catch a beer with Homer) at the official Simpsons Movie site. My son has been asking if I’ll take him to see the movie. Earlier this week, I was letting him watch Tom & Jerry cartoons on Youtube, when he found this clip from the Simpsons, and asked me if it was ok to watch: I’ve watched plenty of episodes, but I hadn’t seen that one. So, I said, "sure, you can. Can I sit in your chair and watch too?" So, thanks to both Omnibrain and my son! Oh, yes…

The Paper Came First

Who went and put a holiday in the middle of the week? Here it is Wednesday, and instead of work, we have a day off, BBQ, and pyrotecnics... I guess I won’t complain. I figure most of the local wildlife is hiding from the sounds of explosives, so I’ll skip photography for the time being. Instead, there’s so much fun stuff to play with. So, without further ado, here is the first of four fun goodies for the fourth. Check out the paper that started it all: The Declaration of Independence Hear it in the fashionable 21st century way, via podcast, Or sign your name alongside our forefathers, and…

Paper Art

This guy is simply amazing. While my fractal art uses a computer to explore the fuzzy boundaries between a 2nd and 3rd dimension, Peter Callesen's art uses nothing more than standard paper--the very same sort you probably have sitting in your printer tray--and a little glue. From these humble beginnings come fantastic landscapes, like this waterfall: Water Always Finds Its Way by Peter Callesen A surreal treat is found at the bottom of the picture, where the paper waterfall spills out of its imaginary landscape onto the frame: Many of Callesen's works disguise hidden treasures like this.…

Halucinate Without Drugs - AKA Fun With Neuroscience

I'm speaking at the ScienceOnline09 Conference in Durham, NC, today so I have little time to post, but I wanted to throw up this fun thing from the Boston Globe to keep everyone occupied while I'm away: "DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn't it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it's easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works." Try for yourself here.  I particularly like the rubber hand trick. […

Butyric Acid (Yarr, she makes a fine stink bomb)

Butyric acid has been covered obliquely before - it's part of the nice-smelling amyl butyrate (which is eau de Juicy Fruit, pretty much). On its own, though, it's a foul vomit-smelling liquid (the Wikipedia article, however, notes that some intrepid chemist tasted it and reported it had a sweetish ethereal taste). You may have gotten from the headline, though, that this particular organic compound has made the news lately because anti-whaling vigilantes threw over a gallon onto the deck of the Nisshin Maru, a Japanese whaling vessel. I can only imagine what it'd be like if I dropped a 4L…

Hydrazine (Gabriel's toxic rocket fuel)

Hydrazine, H2N-NH2 is the nitrogen analogue of hydrogen peroxide: It's useful in the Gabriel synthesis of amines via phthalimide (or saccharin, oddly, but I'm not sure if hydrazinolysis works as well here). In contrast to peroxide, hydrazine is a potent reducing agent and finds use in rocket fuel! Just last week, they used a hydrazine on the space shuttle. It's also quite toxic - the famous chemist Emil Fisher used it and suffered from its toxicity, apparently. A classic use of a hydrazine is the use of 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine to derivatize carbonyl compounds (to which it adds avidly).…

An encouraging development

While I'm sure it's personally difficult for Mary Lambert, this is a good sign: a fundamentalist, literalist church is getting fundamentalist and literal on its congregation. The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on August 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men. She had taught there for 54 years. Consistency is a virtue the religious should pursue more. When they kick out the women, there goes over half their membership; when they start stoning the adulterers and liars and usurers, they'll be rid of 99% of the…

Tyramine (Toxic cheese)

A diverse series of compounds, known as the phenethylamines, are created from the amino acid tyrosine (bold, at bottom, below). In vivo, things like adrenaline and dopamine are generated. Small amounts of tyramine are also generated. These are particularly concentrated in fermented foods like cheese, beer, wine, and pickles. Normally, the body can process these with facility; an enzyme called "monoamine oxidase" exists to do just this. If a food with a large amount of tyramine is ingested, though (mistletoe, apparently, fits this bill), or the MAO pathway is compromised (certain, older…

Amygdalin/Laetrile: (Cancer quacks: Weigh in)

Now with cyanide, it's Laetrile: Which hydrolyzes to: Please check out the laetrile entry on the old site. Various proponents of this bizzare cancer treatment (which liberates cyanide, of all things, upon hydrolysis) pop up occasionally. If anyone knows of any peer-reviewed studies on Laetrile, I'd love to see them (other than the cancer study noted below and on the old site, thanks!). What's fascinating is that it's a structure we know liberates cyanide, and people still go crazy for it. It's not like it's some herb with hundreds or thousands of different molecules in there (although many…

TAL on the economy

Ever wonder what exactly a Toxic Asset is? Follow the engaging story of Toxie the toxic asset on This American Life. This is just the latest in a series of amazing reporting on the financial crisis from a radio show that is not generally concerned with what would be traditionally thought of as "news." "The Giant Pool of Money," which started this series, is still the best break-down of what caused the financial crisis that I've seen. And a follow-up piece a year later gave even more perspective. If you read or hear news about the financial crisis but just don't quite get what it all means…

Poop Factor

Photo source. My recent post "Inquiring Readers Want to Know: "Why is My Poop Green?" generated an extraordinary amount of interest. Why? In the previous post, I was exploring search terms that ScienceBlogs readers most commonly use as an indicator of their interest. I could have chosen any title, but decided to go with reference to the search term "Why is my poop green?" Did readers' interest respond to a "poop factor," {silliness? scatological humor?} or was it because of the more extensive list I included from the top 500 terms that included, in my opinion, many more interesting…

Genomes, Environments, Traits Conference: following at a distance

Yesterday's inaugural Genomes, Environments, Traits (GET) meeting was by all accounts a massive success, pulling together the largest number of individuals with fully sequenced genomes ever assembled in the same room for a long day of discussion about the future of personal genomics. While I was unfortunately unable to attend myself, there was phenomenal coverage of the event on Twitter from several attendees (notably Dan Vorhaus, Jonathan Eisen, Kevin Davies, Emily Singer, and many others). To get a sense of the event yourself there are few better resources than Dan Vorhaus' compendium of…

Sticky! - an animation about the unextinct, giant insects of Lord Howe island

Director Jilli Rose has made a short animated documentary about everyone's favourite back-from-the-dead, hiding-on-an-impenetrable-Pacific-island-fortress tree lobster. Jilli says: So many conservation stories are grim and worrying, it's easy to feel hopeless in the face of them. I want to drop a good story into the mix, to uplift and hopefully energise viewers, particularly kids, and to inspire them to care about the fate of creatures that may not be what they usually consider "cute" or "cuddly". Our film is heartwarming, funny, engaging, beautiful, lively, colourful and hopeful. Colour!…

Under pressure, ice becomes superdense water at -130 C

Following on from last week's discovery of water that can freeze at room temperature, here's another trick. Water at minus 130 degrees Celsius can flow like a thick fluid. The work carried out by Ove Andersson, a physicist at UmeÃ¥ University, showed that by increasing pressure to 10,000 times the norm, ice could be coaxed into a viscous liquid state 30% denser than normal water. The findings lend support to the theory that water has two liquid phases, one at much higher density than the other. I'd imagine it also means liquid water is likely to exist even on frozen planets. As someone…

Giant mayfly swarm caught on radar

Nature is big. Really big! The US National Weather Service revealed this image taken last Saturday showing a massive swarm of newly-hatched mayflies erupting from the Mississippi River near La Crosse, Wisconsin. The swarm was captured using doppler radar, which is used to track the direction and velocity of distant objects (it's the same type of technology used by traffic police in speed guns). The National Weather Service says: The bugs are showing up as bright pink, purple, and white colors along the Mississippi River mainly south of La Crosse, WI. After the bugs hatch off the water…

SciencePunk on air - Guardian Podcast

I've been so busy lately that I forgot to highlight the Guardian Science Podcast of the Secret Garden party - hear guerilla scientist Zoe Cormier, physicist Jon Butterworth, and a variety of festival goers aged 7 - 27 talk about the importance of science communication and the joy of fusing science lectures with music festivals. Also in this podcast - Cary Fowler from the Global Crop Diversity Trust discusses conserving the biodiversity of agricultural crops at the Arctic Svalbard Seed Vault, and news about plans for high-speed rail in the UK, the carbon footprint of babies, what triggers…

What I'm Listening To

Sapri Li Ahuva (Tell me, beloved) by one of my fave Israeli singers, Dindin Aviv. For those who don't understand Hebrew, here is a transliteration (courtesy hebrewsongs.com): Tell me beloved, with your beautiful eyes What does your heart desire? Tell me child, beautiful in my dream How will I wake you up for the day? Day, another night, and a day I am awake and my heart is asleep What I used to be is gone From all the has passed it seems Only when you are with me My heart is playing a melody The one loved by your soul I looked for all over the city Locked garden you are Open it for me,…

Filing TPS Reports Never Felt So Good

Any department at a university will have tons of bureaucratic procedures one must complete in order to do anything from hang a message board in the hallway to purchase an expensive piece of equipment. My department is no different, although the bureaucracy is tolerable. That doesn't mean there aren't times when you need to thumb your nose at the whole system. For instance, when requesting that a purchase be paid for by grant money, we are required to provide both a description of the product purchased and the purpose of the product. Sometimes the description pretty much sums up the purpose.…

Defining Natural Selection

Robert Skipper took issue with Dick Lewontin's definition of natural selection. Skipper did not like how Lewontin removed the struggle for existence and interaction with the environment from the requirements for evolution by natural selection. John Hawks points out that the environment encompasses everything outside of the genome (the proteome, cell environment, extracellular physiology, the extra-organismal environment, and even culture), and I agree with him -- as a reductionist, I like to view the nucleotide as the unit of selection and everything else as the environment. Skipper agrees…

Editor's Selections: Phobias, Dancing, and Retinas in Dishes

Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week. To start with, is there anything that might help with exposure therapy for specific phobias? Michelle from C6-H12-O6 describes a paper that suggests that the administration of cortisol might! While many people claim to not be able to dance, if pressed, most could dance to a beat. Nearly all of us can at least identify when others are on or off rhythm. Over at Neuropoly, DJ discusses a newly discovered form of congenital amusia: beat deafness. If there is anything cooler than a retina grown in a dish, I'm not sure what it is.…

A Conservative's Worst Nightmare: Global Warming AND Evolution

Conservatives in America have become pretty adept at shrugging off worries about global warming, and when it comes to evolution, well, they have their own ideas about how that works. However, this headline from National Geographic might cause some circuits to blow: "Global Warming Is Spurring Evolution, Study Says" Wow, what a catch-22! They can continue to ignore global warming but risk causing the body of evidence in favor of evolution to grow even faster, thus making it more difficult to sneak religious ideas in classrooms. On the other hand, if they try to reverse climate change, they'…

The "Best Of" Some Good Reading

Every year Houghton-Mifflin puts out a edited volume entitled "The Best American Science and Nature Writing". The latest volume looks like some delightful bedtime reading (although I may be biased because I was chosen as one of the authors). It includes works by Freeman Dyson, Edward Hoagland, David Quammen, Oliver Sachs, and many others. Editor Jerome Groopman pulls from a variety of publications including the New Yorker, Outside Magazine, and Scientific American. He suggests "the articles...draw the reader more tightly into the web of the world. They forge links in unexpected ways. They…

Kent Hovind's Dinosaur Adventure Land | Mockumentary

From the YouTube description: Back in April of 2006, there were two not-to-be-missed activities in Pensacola, Florida: a visit to the United States Navy's supremely cool naval aviation museum and watch the Blue Angels practice their high-G maneuvers over the airfield, or a visit to Kent Hovind's back-yard creationist theme park, Dinosaur Adventure Land, to film a documentary using the video feature on a Canon digital stills camera and a Creative MP3 player for the voice overs. Both, we found, were equally rewarding... Addendum: Turns out that Kent Hovind is dealing with some rather more…

Faces in the mist...

Interesting article from the NYT Science Times: More than a decade ago, Diana Duyser of Hollywood, Fla., received a religious message through an unlikely medium: a grilled cheese sandwich she had made herself. As she gazed at the brown skillet marks on the surface of the bread, a familiar visage snapped into focus. A grilled cheese sandwich, top, with an image of what some see as the Virgin Mary sold for $28,000 on eBay. Jesus Christ is seen in an oyster shell, a frying pan and a pirogi. "I saw a face looking up at me; it was the Virgin Mary staring back," she told reporters in 2004. "I was…

The Museum of Gay Animals

Ok.. so perhaps it's not a total museum dedicated to homosexual animals - but it looks like a pretty good sized exhibit. Unless you're in Norway you might be missing the exhibit though. Anyone want to sneak some photos for us? From male killer whales that ride the dorsal fin of another male to female bonobos that rub their genitals together, the animal kingdom tolerates all kinds of lifestyles. A first-ever museum display, "Against Nature?," which opened last month at the University of Oslo's Natural History Museum in Norway, presents 51 species of animals exhibiting homosexuality. Here'…

Campaign Update

The Latest Political News from key sources such as PZ Myers and Jon Stewart. Huckabee is a raving lunatic He wants to change the constitution to match better with the Bible. This guy is dangerous. Jump into the fray here at Pharyngula. The South Carolina Debate Hat tip: Evolving in Kansas Deep Thoughts by Newt Gingerich I'll give you one simple test. Tomorrow morning, will more people try to sneak into the U.S., or sneak out of the U.S.? What strikes me, if millions of people are trying to sneak into the U.S., we don't exactly have an image problem overseas. Go see the Newt himself…

Lysenko would be so proud...

A glow in the dark pig has given birth to more glow in the dark pigs. Fluorescent Chinese pig passes on trait to offspring from PhysOrg.com A pig genetically modified in China to make it glow has given birth to fluorescent piglets, proving such changes can be inherited, state media said Wednesday. [...] The pigs were originally modified (to glow) using somatic cell nuclear transfer.It is not entirely clear to me how the gene got into the gametes. It also appears that the distribution of the gene in the offspring is not exactly the same as in the parent, suggesting something interesting…

Bill Clinton: TED Prize wish: Let's build a health care system in Rwanda

Accepting the 2007 TED Prize, Bill Clinton says he's trying to build a better world to hand his daughter. Unequal, unstable, and unsustainable, our world must correct its course, and private citizens ("like me") can be powerful forces for change. His Clinton Global Initiative, fresh from success negotiating down pharmaceutical prices in the developing world, is now running a pilot health care system in Rwanda, based on the work of Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti. In 18 months, its shown potential as a model for the entire developing world. Clinton's TED wish: Help him build this system in Rwanda, to…

Charles Darwin Video

This is actually a pretty good video. The video concludes, unabashedly: The positive impact of Darwin: -Science became a respectable profession. -Freed science from theological influence. -Established evolution as a valid theory. Negative impacts: -Darwinism misused by eugenicists. -Creationists wouldn't go away. Here is a Senior Group Documentary created for National History Day (NHD) 2006, with the broad theme "Taking a Stand". Our specific topic ... all » is Charles Darwin and his stand for his evolutionary theory. Featuring original artwork and interviews! It won 1st place in…

Jesus Loves Darwin

The Rev. Michael Dowd is preaching a surprising message: Evolution is real and science points to the existence of God. For the last five years, the author and former evangelical pastor has lived out of a van with his wife, crisscrossing the nation to deliver the good news. His latest book, Thank God for Evolution, drew endorsements from five Nobel laureates and dozens of religious leaders. With the battle between science and religion at a fever pitch, it couldn't come at a better time. Just last week Texas papers reported that a curriculum director had been fired in October for forwarding…

Santa's War on Science

Corpus Collosum shows us this graph of search frequency on Google for the word "Science." And asks "What could it possibly mean?" What it means is this: The following is a graph of search frequency on Google for the word "Santa." The graphs are from Google Trends. Just in case it is not utterly obvious, the steep annual dip in science is exactly correlated with the Santa Spike. What is not entirely evident is why are there two Santa Spikes per year? The larger one in December makes sense, but this later one in Feb/March does not. Unless you know that this is the time each year of the…

What the Christian Right thinks about the Arizona Shooting

I wish this was a joke, but Fred Phelps is only one notch to the right of the next guy, and that guy is only one notch to the right of the next guy, and so on. And, by "to the right" I do mean more insane. As Miss Jean Brodie would say, "That does signify, bitches." Well, she never said it exactly like that, but you get the point. Here's Fred: While we're on the topic, here's another view, from before the shooting: And then, there's this: Glen Beck making an utter ass of himself, way back. He's got some stuff to answer to. I love Ed's laugh at the end of the crying sequence.…

Refudiated Word List Published

The latest epic viral fail, designed for maximum wow factor but that hardly qualifies as an a-ha moment, is the Lake Superior University list of words to be banned in 2011. I heard the back story from my BFF, well, it's not very interesting. Some would say that Lake Superior U should man up and admit that language is flexible, and that it is pointless to refudiate neologisms such as "Mamma Grizzlies" if the American People want to live life to the fullest, linguistically, as it were. I'm just sayin' If you think this blog post is interesting, please facebook it. If you want to know the…

Minnesota Recount: It May be Over

Just a quick note. As the Minnesota Governor's Race recount proceeds, it became apparent, as many of us predicted, that Emmer's standing in that context has moved in the wrong direction from his perspective. He will end up losing this race by more votes than had he simply conceded to begin with. It is now expected that Emmer will concede the race any moment now, which has apparently (though this is unofficial) prompted the Electio Canvassing Board to cancel today's meeting at which the contested votes would have been examined. This allows the Republicans to say "We lost by fewer than 9,000…

Comment moderation back on.

Due to an ovewhelming influx of drek from various commenters, I've turned comment moderation up a few notches. This will probably mean that your comments will be grabbed by the moderation monster no matter what you say or who you are, because the Moveable Type comment moderation system totally sucks. I'm doing this because I am now about to spend a bit of family time and can't sit here sorting through shit. I'll do it later when I have time. Sorry for the inconvenience. As I noted in a comment a moment or two back, between the AGW denialists and the "scientific" racists, and their…

Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed

The latest addition to Huxley's Library: Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed by Mo Willems. Here's Mo: Willems explores, through the story of a dresser in a naked world, the social angst of unconformity as it can only be explored in the milieu of Bathyergids. Wilber, a Heterocephalus glaber with a penchant for pants, is at first disdained then accepted but only after a positive word from the mole rat Patriarch. The plot is riveting and the theme tense and poignant, but suspension of disbelief is challenged near the end because Naked Mole Rats do not have Patriarchs. They have Matriarchs.…

Stop the Abortion Coverage Ban

The House of Representatives passed health-reform legislation that included an anti-choice amendment that will seriously jeopardize women's access to abortion - making it virtually impossible for private insurance companies that participate in the new health system to offer abortion coverage to women. This would have the effect of denying women the right to use their own personal, private funds to purchase an insurance plan with abortion coverage in the new health system. We must stop health-care reform from being enacted with this ban! Sign our petition calling on Senate Majority Leader…