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Smartphones and the Apocalypse

I think I am now officially old. I think this because I was horrified by this article, from HuffPo: Movie theaters and entertainment venues have long banned the use of smartphones during performances. But now one venue just outside Seattle is reversing that etiquette by welcoming cellphone and camera use in the theater, according to The New York Times. With the newly constructed 2,000 seat theater set to open in 2014, the move is intended to attract younger audiences by cultivating a digital-friendly environment where people can update Facebook and send text messages and tweets throughout…

Honey Bee Microbiome: What is normal?

To quote me from 2009: Since ~2006, honey bee colonies in the US have been dropping dead overnight. Literally. They call it 'colony collapse disorder'. While large populations of organisms dying is disturbing, no matter the species, we need honey bees-- they help pollinate so many of our crops. I grew up in the banks of the Missouri River, around apple and peach orchards (who always had their own bee hives, and honey) and hell, I eat everything on that list... What is killing our bees? People have accused GMOs and wireless internet and pesticides and antibiotics... We didnt have a clue before…

Standard Lunacy From the Religious Right

Well, I've been grading exams for about ten minutes, and I'm already depressed. (One of my students seems to think that one fourth is an integer. Get the idea?) So how about another post? Here's Keith Olbermann from last nights' edition of Countdown proving once again why he is the only one worth watching on cable news: Tonight's winner, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, responding to the two shooting nightmares in Colorado Sunday by e-mailing this to his group, quote, “it is hard not to draw a line between the hostility that is being fomented in our culture from some in the…

Fish on Evil and Suffering

Writing in The New York TImes Stanley Fish discusses two new books on the problem of evil. Since Fish hails from the pompous, pseduo-intellectual school of writing, in which it is considered extremely low-brow to actually make a point with force and clarity, he has little light to shed on the issue. He does manage to take a few swipes at the atheist trinity of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, however: What Milton and Paul offer (not as collaborators of course, but as participants in the same tradition) is a solution to the central problem of theodicy - the existence of suffering and evil in a…

Insanity From Cato

Writing at the Cato Insititue blog, Chris Edwards believes he has found the Ann Coulter of the left: For those who think that it's just conservatives, such as Ann Coulter, who are mean-spirited, they should check out the new book by Jonathan Chait, a senior editor of the New Republic, entitled The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics. I managed to get through the introduction and first chapter of Mr. Chait's book. Alas, I could read no more. Here are some of Chait's characterizations of supply-side economists and supply-side economics-…

Krugman on Fire

Paul Krugman does his usual fine job of exposing the utter lack of conscience on the American political right: Soon after the radio address, right-wing bloggers began insisting that the Frosts must be affluent because Graeme and his sister attend private schools (they're on scholarship), because they have a house in a neighborhood where some houses are now expensive (the Frosts bought their house for $55,000 in 1990 when the neighborhood was rundown and considered dangerous) and because Mr. Frost owns a business (it was dissolved in 1999). You might be tempted to say that bloggers make…

Mooney on Yoffe

Blogging over at The Huffington Post, my SciBling Chris Mooney has an excellent post up on the subject of global warming. He is responding to this op-ed from Emily Yoffe, a writer for Slate. Yoffe was trying to present herself as the calm, clear-thinking purveryor of common -sense against the blinkered alarmism of people like Al Gore. Mooney does an excellent job of showing she has little idea what she is talking about. For example, Yoffe writes: Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it's supposed to be a sign I'm in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when…

SteelyKid and the Big Telescope

SteelyKid's class at her after-school day care has been learning about space for the last month or two (the program is very flexible-- the teachers ask the kids what they want to learn about, and then they spend however long on that topic the kids like), so we've been getting a lot of tidbits about astronomy related to us during car trips and dinner conversation. Last night, there was an open house at the Union College Observatory, so I picked her up a little early, and took her to campus to look through the big telescope (20-inch Cassegrain, for those who care about such things). This served…

Sports Are Science

Unless you've been marooned on a desert island for the last couple of weeks-- or, you know, foreign-- you're probably at least dimly aware that the Super Bowl is this evening. This is the pinnacle of the football season, and also the cue for lots of people to take to social media proclaiming their contempt for the Super Bowl, NFL football, or just sports in general. This can occasionally be sort of amusing, as with Kyle Whelliston's "Last Man" game, but usually, it's just kind of tedious. The AV Club has pretty much the only necessary response, namely that Nobody Cares That You Don't Care…

On Fear of Parental Perception

I almost killed the Pip last week. By accident, of course, but I do mean that literally. His day care was closed for the day, so I took him out to the store to avoid a freakout when Mommy left. I was heading into the store with him in one arm and a hot cup of tea in the other hand, chattering inanely to him as one does with a toddler, and tripped over the curb. I took three huge stumbling steps that probably looked pretty comical on the security cameras, but somehow managed to avoid dropping him right on his head, falling on top of him, or scalding him with my hot caffeine. I went down really…

Redefining Spirituality

Via Jerry Coyne I have just come across this op-ed, from the USA Today, by Chris Mooney. The title: “Spirituality Can Bridge Science-Religion Divide” My initial reaction: No it can't! Mooney's argument is a standard one: Across the Western world -- including the United States -- traditional religion is in decline, even as there has been a surge of interest in “spirituality.” What's more, the latter concept is increasingly being redefined in our culture so that it refers to something very much separable from, and potentially broader than, religious faith. Nowadays, unlike in prior…

Monday Math: The Sum of the Reciprocals of the Primes

Time for the big finale! We now have all the pieces in place to establish the divergence of the sum of the reciprocals of the primes. Recall that we have the Euler product expansion of the harmonic series: \[ \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n}= \prod_p \left( \frac{1}{1-\frac{1}{p}} \right) \]   We noted that this formula was really just a consequence of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. This is definite progress, since we now have a product indexed over the primes. To convert that to a sum over the primes we simply take the natural logarithm of both sides: \[ \ln \sum_{n=1}^\infty \…

Department of Low Standards

Just in case you were thinking that religious institutions have not always bathed themselves in glory in their relations with science, here's Ronald Numbers to set you straight: Historians of science have known for years that White's and Draper's accounts are more propaganda than history. ... Yet the message has rarely escaped the ivory tower. The secular public, if it thinks about such issues at all, knows that organized religion has always opposed scientific progress (witness the attacks on Galileo, Darwin, and Scopes). The religious public knows that science has taken the leading role…

PNAS: Pam Korda, Medical Device Developer

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Pam Korda, a physicist working for a medical device company.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I am a "Lead Scientist" at an R&D subsidiary of a medical devices company. In practice, this means I oversee a…

Socialization of Toddlers

In last weekend's post about arguments from innate differences, I suggested that I might be willing to illustrate my position with adorable toddler pictures. On thinking more about it, I'm a little hesitant to write about this at length, because it could easily topple over into arrogant-physicist territory. But then, it's an excuse to post adorable toddler pictures, so... So, let me put a short disclaimer up front: I'm not attempting to claim that I have suddenly uncovered a unique and obvious flaw in innate-difference arguments, by virtue of my Big Physicist Brain. I am well aware that the…

It's All About the Offensive Line

Last night's Giants-Cowboys game was not one of the finer displays of football you're ever see-- the score makes it seem like a close game, but the Giants turned the ball over five times and gave up a punt return for a touchdown, basically handing the Cowboys 28 points. Other than that, you know, they played really well. This morning, the sports-radio people are all wondering why the Cowboys are so much worse than expected, and the Giants are looking better than expects. The answer to this is really simple: The offensive line. It's probably the least glamorous position on the field, but the…

Links for 2010-01-05

America: Too Stupid To Cook | Ruhlman.com "That one sentence crystallized the issue for me, turned my frustration from a wall into a lens. Americans are being taught that we're too stupid to cook. That cooking is so hard we need to let other people do it for us. The messages are everywhere. Boxed cake mix. Why is it there? Because a real cake is too hard! You can't bake a cake! Takes too long, you can't do it, you're gonna fail! Look at all those rotisserie chickens stacked in the warming bin at the grocery store. Why? Because roasting a chicken is too hard, takes FOREVER. An…

Links for 2009-12-02

AMC - Blogs - SciFi Scanner - A Cinematic Voyage Through Hollywood's SciFi Solar System Our solar system is a wondrous and frightful venue, and from the magmatic center of the sun to the ghost ships orbiting Neptune, Hollywood has explored it all. Join us for a cinematic voyage through the scifi solar system, which features if not the most well-known movies about our sister planets, then at least the ones that tell us something interesting about the way we think of other worlds. (tags: sf movies blogs planets astronomy) McSweeney's Internet Tendency: If the Manhattan Project Worked Like…

What's Your Name Again?

The Dean Dad takes a question from a reader on a topic of perpetual interest: How do other teachers remember their students' names? I confess, I am AWFUL with names. My wife and I have gone to the same small church for 20 years and I still go blank on names of people we've been friends with for all that time. ("you know who I mean honey, the tall guy who always wears that corduroy jacket. His wife is in the choir. You mean Tom? yeah, Tom!") This is a real difficulty for me in the classroom, even with a light teaching load. I have one class this semester (I am an adjunct) and only 32…

“Cult” is the new “fundamentalist”

I have to hammer on one more thing from Sam Harris's reply. He objects to the label "atheism" because it will chase away people who do not want to … well, read what he says. They have read the writings of the "new atheists," sent us letters and emails of support, are quite fond of criticizing religion whenever the opportunity arises, but they have no interest whatsoever in joining a cult of such critics. And there is something cult-like about the culture of atheism. In fact, much of the criticism I have received of my speech is so utterly lacking in content that I can only interpret it as a…

Familiarity and Lies-to-Children

One of the interesting things to come out of the switch to Matter & Interactions for our intro classes has been some discussion among my colleagues of how the books treat specific topics. A couple of people have raised concerns that the coverage of certain topics is different from the traditional presentation, in a way that isn't entirely accurate. This is interesting to me not because it calls the books into question, but because the standard treatments of these things aren't entirely accurate, either. Both the new book and the older book are full of lies-to-children. "Lies-to-children"…

The most studied ant species are either trampy or European

Figure 1. For the 32 most-studied ant species, the percentage of publications 1984-2008 in various contexts. In thinking about where the myrmecological community ought to devote resources in the age of genomics, it occcured to me that putting some numbers on where researchers have previously concentrated their efforts might be useful.  So I went to BIOSIS previews and quantified the number of publications in 5-year intervals from 1984 to 2008 recovered under searches for various well-studied ant species (methods and full data here).  Here's what I found: Number of publications 1984-2008…

Photo Technique: On-Camera Flash Diffusion

Flash is a necessary evil in insect photography. This necessity is due to two unfortunate traits shared by most insects: small size and stubborn unwillingness to sit still for the camera. These traits confound each other in a way that renders insect photography uniquely challenging. Small subjects need to be close to the lens, placing them squarely in the zone where depth of field becomes razor-thin. Depth of field can be increased by using a small aperture, but that restricts the amount of light reaching the sensor. With so little light entering the camera, a proper exposure requires…

Dr. Ashanti Pyrtle: Combining a love of science with a passion for mentoring

Dr. Ashanti Pyrtle is an assistant professor in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. She's a chemical oceanographer who studies the fate, transport and retention of radionuclides in aquatic ecosystems. Her PhD work investigated the marine distribution of radioisotopes from the Chernobyl accident, and she's currently doing work in Puerto Rico, off the Florida coast, and in the Savannah River. She's one of the first female African-American chemical oceanographers, and the first African-American to earn an oceanography Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. Dr. Pyrtle…

BikeMonkey's Best/Worst Cover Song Meme

I was tagged with a meme by BikeMonkey (whose initials "BM" make me laugh) at Sun Dappled Forest a few days ago but didn't have a chance to get to it. Post your best/worst covers and tag some more muppethuggers. Oh and do a linkback to whomever tagged you if it wasn't me. In the meantime, several of those tagged have posted many of those songs that the world agrees are among the best covers of all time: The Jimi Hendrix Experience's "All Along The Watchtower" is phenomenal and so beyond comparison that even its creator, Bob Dylan, is on the record as loving it so much that he adopted Hendrix…

Homeopath to be awarded honorary Doctor of Science from first US school of pharmacy

The complicity of revered academic institutions in the promotion of pseudoscience today takes another step forward. The University of the Sciences in Philadelphia (USP), known formerly as the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science (PCP&S), will bestow an honorary Doctor(ate) of Science on John A Borneman, III, to celebrate their Founders' Day. From the university press release: Borneman has spent his lifetime committed to the development and regulation of homeopathic medicine within the United States. He is the third of four generations of "John Bornemans" to attend the Philadelphia…

Go read: Getting Better with Dr Val

If you haven't already heard it elsewhere, one of your favorite blogging physicians, Dr Val Jones, has recently hung out her own e-shingle at Getting Better with Dr Val. Many of you know Dr Val from her previous blog at Revolution Health, Dr Val and the Voice of Reason. Dr Val served there as Senior Medical Director and oversaw the growth of the consumer health portal as it grew to 120 million pageviews per month (!). Here's how Dr Val describes her new digs: Getting Better is the continuation of Dr. Val Jones' previous blog at Revolution Health: "Dr. Val and the Voice of Reason." The…

"You got lead in my marijuana. . ."

". . .you got marijuana in my lead." Two great tastes that do not go great together (with apologies). [Welcome Fark.com readers on 12 Oct 2008 - I comment on the recent story here and you can read our other posts on drugs of abuse here. Thanks for stopping by - APB] A concise but fascinating medical detective story appears in the letters of this week's (10 Apr 2008) issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (free full text at the time of this posting.). An astute group of physicians at Leipzig Hospital in Germany noted a local surge of young people presenting with classic symptoms of…

Must people die before DSHEA is repealed?

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) allows herbal and non-herbal supplements to be sold in the US without demonstration of effectiveness or safety. Despite recent improvements in Good Manufacturing Practices required of supplement manufacturers, these products still pose significant risks to the population simply because the hands of regulatory authorities are tied - products cannot be removed from the market until there is evidence for lack of safety, meaning that consumers must first be harmed before FDA is authorized to intervene. After cautions a couple weeks…

Branford Marsalis brings more 'cool' to Apple Macintosh

I've been giving a fair bit of thought to moving my laboratory back to Mac computers. I had a superb, Windows-savvy postdoc in the late 90s who convinced me to go to PC machines because the choice made our grant money go further. But I miss the elegant simplicity of Macs and, as an amateur musician, would love to give GarageBand software a whirl. So, I read with great interest that jazz saxophonist, Branford Marsalis, will be speaking tomorrow (12 Nov, 6:30 pm) to the Triangle Macintosh Users Group at the NC Mutual Life Building in Durham, North Carolina. The program format will be similar…

If an MD-stock analyst warns that cancer drug prices are too high, does anyone hear?

This week has seen the launch of a new health blog by the Wall Street Journal. While I don't hold the highly conservative views of the WSJ editorial pages, I have found the paper one of the best international sources of information on health trends in both conventional and alternative medicine. The only problem about the blog is that while it links to the day's health news, the original articles are still firewalled behind the subscription. But I do wish to note Jacob Goldstein's post on an article by Geeta Anand about Dr Steven Harr. Harr is a Hopkins-trained doc-turned-stock analyst who…

Common pesticide is good news for parasites, bad news for frogs

Our amphibians are not doing well. Populations of frogs, toads, salamanders and newts the world over are falling dramatically. Their moist, permeable skins and their need for water to reproduce make them vulnerable to a multitude of threats including drought brought on by climate change, a deadly fungus, and other infectious diseases. Now, we can point an accusatory finger at another culprit - a chemical called atrazine that is second most commonly used pesticide in the United States, and perhaps the world. Jason Rohr and colleagues from the University of Florida found that atrazine exposes…

Elephants recognise themselves in mirror

You are on a date and by all accounts, it's going well. Midway through dinner, you excuse yourself and head to the bathroom where, to your chagrin, the mirror reveals that you have a streak of sauce on the side of your face. Embarrassed, you wipe it away and rejoin your date. It's a fairly innocuous scene but it requires an ability that only the most intelligent of animals possess - self-awareness. It's the understanding that you exist as an individual, separate from others. Having it is a vital step to understanding that others are similarly aware and have their own thoughts and…

Rising carbon dioxide levels weaken plant defences against hungry insects

We've all seen the images of receding glaciers and stranded polar bears that accompany talks of climate change. But rising carbon dioxide levels also have subtler and less familiar effects, and may prove to be a boon for many animal groups. Plant-eating insects, for example, have much to gain in a high -CO2 future as rising concentrations of the gas can compromise the defences of the plants they feed on. Plants and herbivorous insects are engaged in a silent war that we are rarely privy too, where chemicals  act as both weapons and messengers. Munching mandibles trigger the production of…

The trouble with Los Angeles

Jon Gertner's feature in the current Sunday New York Times magazine is a timely reminder of 1) why the Nobel Committee is giving peace prizes to environmentalists and climatologists, and 2) why (as if we needed another reason) Bjorn Lomborg is wrong when he argues mitigating climate change is a poor use of money. Gertner begins by pointing out that while sea level rise tends to get all the attention from the long list of bad things that come with a warmer planet, the threat posed by declining freshwater supplies in places like the western half of the United States is at least as troubling. As…

Is it the end of the world as we know it?

They call it "climate porn," for lack of a more sophisticated vocabulary. Sensationalist. Alarmist. Hyperbolic. You pick the term. But the criticism is only valid if the media coverage of climate change is based on something other than a fair representation of the science of climate change. So is it? This week's edition of the BBC's radio program(me) One Planet takes a poorly-aimed stab at the question. Instead of even trying to provide an answer, the producers merely reiterate the claim that the coverage is alarmist. Excuse me, but we already knew that. The real question is, is the alarmism…

Inside the Dyson Sphere lives a lovable crank

Freeman Dyson is one of those important scientists it's impossible to ignore, even when he's dead wrong. In an interview with Salon, he says lots of silly things -- don't worry about the polar bear, religion and science are compatible, and "we have no reason to think that climate change is harmful." But you gotta love the guy anyway... You gotta love him for two reasons. First, because he came up with the very cool idea of the Dyson sphere, a mammoth shell surrounding a star that supplies the inhabitants of the interior with the maximum amount of solar energy. Second, because he's humble…

Climate and Doubt: Two birds with one stone

Here on the Island of Doubt, climate change is a favored topic for two reasons. First, there is no more important a public policy challenge, no matter what Bjorn Lomborg says. Second, the role of uncertainty in climate science -- and science in general -- has been grossly distorted in many popular media, and this blog was established in part to combat such propaganda. So imagine my reaction to the appearance of a graph in last week's Science that addresses both climate change and uncertainty. At first glance, it may appear a little daunting, but it's worthy thinking about, so bear with me as…

Pretending to know what you're talking about

Remember Chrissy Hynde? Maybe if you're old enough to have some Pretenders CDs in your collection. Otherwise, probably not. But she has enough name recognition to convince the editors of Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper to let her weigh in on that most inevitable sign of spring, the rhetorical war over the seal hunt that dominates the news on the country's east coast. You might think that op-ed essayists for a major daily newspaper, even those relegated to web-only contributor status, would bring something more than musical fame to the subject. You would be wrong. Hynde brings precisely no…

Edwards blogger episode as science story

At the heart of the fuss over the departure of two members of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards' blogging team is a science story, specifically the controversy surrounding the "Plan B" birth control pill. This has been overlooked in favor of the larger political fallout and bears re-examining. Of the two former Edwards bloggers, Melissa McEwan's writings were the less sensational. Her reference to President Bush's "wingnut Christofascist base" and use of profanity suggests she needs to learn to be a little more careful, but it wasn't her personal blog posts that really made the…

How Single-Colored Is A Laser?

In most books or articles that talk about lasers, you'll see a definition of laser light in terms of "coherence". But coherence is sort of a term of art, and the books will go on to explain coherence in terms of the waves being in sync with each other, or the emitted light being very monochromatic, or something else slightly vague. This is all pretty good as far as it goes, but we'd like to do a little better. (Though for this post, not much math. But don't get too comfortable!) The word "coherence" means something like "holding together", and this is actually a pretty good description of the…

Enforcing the Cosmic Speed Limit

Last time we took a pulse of light and shot it through a medium with a frequency-dependent refractive index. The particular form of the refractive index was sort of interesting - for some frequencies, it was less than 1. That implied that the phase velocity of a sine wave would be faster than the speed of light. But pulses of light contain a band of frequencies so normally we'd invoke the group velocity to show that the pulse as a whole propagates with a speed less than c. For reference, here's the refractive index curve we postulated: We can't do that group velocity jazz here. Take a look.…

Greatest Physicists #2 - Albert Einstein

#2 - Albert Einstein Einstein. When a person's name and photograph are both literal synonyms for genius, it's a pretty good sign they're among the greatest of the greats. But even if Einstein had not become the popular legend which lives on to this day, he'd still tower above the science of physics. In one year - his annus mirabilis of 1905 - he wrote four papers, any of which would have cemented his reputation in the canon of the great physicists. The first was an analysis of Brownian motion. If you drop a pollen grain into a glass of water and look very closely with a microscope, you'll…

Vandalizing Big Brother

Seed's editorial policy is unusually generous in the latitude we ScienceBloggers get. Let's hope it's generous enough for this! Linked via Instapundit, I saw this interesting article about theft of and damage to speed cameras. As an strong supporter of civil liberties, this warms my heart. If a flesh-and-blood police officer catches me speeding, fair enough. But ubiquitous surveillance of every move, invading privacy in order to fill city treasuries... I'm not such a fan. And make no mistake, it is to fill treasuries. Public safety is a convenient fig leaf. Studies have shown that in…

Sanajeh, the snake the ate baby dinosaurs

Snakes have been around for nearly 100 million years and scientists have found many fossils of extinct species. But this astonishing specimen is different. This serpent is Sanajeh indicus. It is sitting in a dinosaur nest and its coils surround three eggs and the body of a hatchling. There are many reasons to think that this prehistoric tableau represented a predator caught in the act of hunting, rather than a mash-up of unconnected players thrown together by chance. The snake is perfectly posed, with its head resting atop a coil and its body encircling a crushed egg. All the pieces are…

Echolocation in bats and whales based on same changes to same gene

Millions of years before humans invented sonar, bats and toothed whales had mastered the biological version of the same trick - echolocation. By timing the echoes of their calls, one group effortlessly flies through the darkest of skies and the other swims through the murkiest of waters. It's amazing enough that two such different groups of mammals should have evolved the same trick but that similarity isn't just skin deep. The echolocation abilities of bats and whales, though different in their details, rely on the same changes to the same gene - Prestin. These changes have produced such…

Meet your viral ancestors - how bornaviruses have been infiltrating our genomes for 40 million years

Cast your mind back 40 million years and think about your ancestors. You're probably picturing creatures that looked like a bit like today's monkeys, but they're only part of your family tree. To see your other ancestors, you'd have to whip out an imaginary microscope. Meet your great-great-great-etc-grandviruses. The human genome is littered with the remains of viruses that, in ages past, integrated their genes into the DNA of our ancestors. They became a permanent fixture, passed down from parent to child. Today, these "endogenous retroviruses", or ERVs, make up around 8% of our genome.…

Mantis shrimp eyes outclass DVD players, inspire new technology

The most incredible eyes in the animal world can be found under the sea, on the head of the mantis shrimps. Each eye can move independently and can focus on object with three different areas, giving the mantis shrimp "trinocular vision". While we see in three colours, they see in twelve, and they can tune individual light-sensitive cells depending on local light levels. They can even see a special type of light - 'circularly polarised light' - that no other animal can. But Nicholas Roberts from the University of Bristol has found a new twist to the mantis shrimp's eye. It contains a…

Robots evolve to deceive one another

In a Swiss laboratory, a group of ten robots is competing for food. Prowling around a small arena, the machines are part of an innovative study looking at the evolution of communication, from engineers Sara Mitri and Dario Floreano and evolutionary biologist Laurent Keller. They programmed robots with the task of finding a "food source" indicated by a light-coloured ring at one end of the arena, which they could "see" at close range with downward-facing sensors. The other end of the arena, labelled with a darker ring was "poisoned". The bots get points based on how much time they spend near…

Hot Funky Love

By Guest Blogger: Oronte Churm. World's Fair friend, the venerable, unparalleled Mr. Churm, is our guest for the day, contributing the post below. He is the author of a top notch blog over at InsideHigherEd.com (called "The Education of Oronte Churm") and one of my favorite sub-features at McSweeney's, "Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University." Of the 15 dispatches, I might highlight #10, On Repose, as a personal favorite. If it isn't clear from those references, Mr. Churm is in fact a real-deal writer who teaches in the English department at a big state university. He…