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Isaac is a Hurricane

This isn't even in the advisories and discussions yet on the Hurricane Center site, but they are calling Isaac a hurricane. Here's a recent snapshot: Hurricane Isaac The current track puts Isaac just southwest of New Orleans with the heaviest winds and storm surge along the outer reaches of the delta and Lake Pontchartrain. Expect a storm surge in Southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi east of where the landfall occurs of 6-12 feet, with diminishing storm surge reaching as far as the Florida West Coast. Rainfall will be between 7 and 14 inches across a large area, with isolated areas…

Step away from the security vehicle with the dog in it.

The other day I found myself with Huxley standing outside a townhouse with no way to get in, within a walled-in court yard, in Minneapolis. Suddenly a K9 Patrol car with dogs came tearing into the courtyard. Other police cars showed up. Cops with drawn guns were running around. It was interesting to contemplate the difference in strategy to avoid ricochet bullets within the stone and brick enclosed area vs. attack dogs who might assume that we were bad guys. I moved Huxley to a corner facing away from the action and then I watched, prepared to throw him up on my shoulders while I wrestled…

Oklahoma antiscience bill dies

Oklahoma's House Bill 1551, one of two bills attacking the teaching of evolution and of climate change active in the Oklahoma legislature during 2012, is now in effect dead, according to Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education. Originally introduced in 2011, HB 1551 was rejected by the House Common Education Committee in that year, but revived and passed by the committee in 2012, and then passed by the House of Representatives on a 56-12 vote on March 15, 2012, and sent to the Senate Education Committee, where it died. April 2, 2012, was the last meeting of the Senate Education…

UFO Found in Austria

A UFO (Underground Freaky Object) has been located in Austria by a farmer searching for his lost cat. "I managed to get a big magnet which I dangled down there and it clearly fastened onto something at the bottom -- so there is something large and metallic about down there," he said. "It also sounds as if there is a hollow space around about whatever the metal object is. It sounds as if there is a room underneath." He even called a local plumber, who lowered a camera down the pit on a rope -- but the camera failed just as it reached the object. Knoglinger said that the interference may have…

Why did Phobos-Grunt fail?

The Russian probe destine for the Mars system never made it out of Earth Orbit and recently crashed back into Planet Earth. Why did the rocket ship fail? There has apparently been a lot of obfuscation of what caused this disaster, but now there is some better information. It may have been caused by a computer programming error. From Irene Klotz at Discovery News: In a report to be presented to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin on Tuesday, investigators concluded that the primary cause of the failure was "a programming error which led to a simultaneous reboot of two working…

Dennis Markuze, aka Dave Mabus, Arrested in Montreal

These are the tweets from the Montreal Police: For those who don't know, Dennis Markuze is a perennial internet-only (so far) stalker who has been sending nasty emails and tweets to anyone he sees as a key Atheist figure or anyone thusly linked, and posting rambling often offensive sometimes threatening blog comments on our blog sites, for several years now. He is a Nostradamus cultist. A while back he was arrested and put by Montreal authorities into psychiatric care, and later released under certain conditions including that he not bother people on line any more. More recently he…

Support EPA's Water Infrastructure Project

By signing this petition: A new report from Green For All found that we could create nearly 1.9 million jobs and inject over a quarter of a trillion dollars into the economy by fully upgrading America's aging water and stormwater infrastructure. Every year, 860 billion gallons of raw sewage spill into our waterways - enough to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania one inch deep. Fixing that problem creates jobs. Green For All's report, available here (http://bit.ly/WaterWorksReport), shows that making the EPA's recommended $188 billion investment - enough to manage stormwater and preserve…

Michael Mann Receives NCSE Friend of the Planet Award

The National Center for Science Education, the nation's leading organization in support of science education, has awarded Professor Michael Mann the coveted Friend of the Planet award. From the NCSE Climate change deniers have faced a similarly impressive foe: Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State. More than almost anyone else, Mann has been the public face of climate science. The author of more than 160 peer-reviewed papers, Mann has appeared before countless Congressional committees, battled climate change deniers in court, and written breakthrough books (such…

Björn Brembs Resigns Editorship At Frontiers Journal Over Recursive Fury Fiasco

Yesterday, Ugo Bardi resigned his editorship at Frontiers Journal over the Recursive Fury Fiasco. Today, a second editor has done so as well. You should go read the original post, but here's a key part of it: Frontiers retracted a perfectly fine (according to their own investigation) psychology paper due to financial risks for themselves. It can only be seen as at best a rather lame excuse or at worst rather patronizing, if Frontiers were to claim to be protecting their authors from lawsuits by removing the ‘offending’ article. This is absolutely no way to “empower researchers in their daily…

Two Rings To Rule Them All: Amazing Space Discovery

We know know what the famous announcement by the European Southern Observatory is. They found an asteroid with ring! Two of them! ...the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings. Telescopes at seven locations in South America, including the 1.54-metre Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile were used to make this surprise discovery in the outer Solar System. This unique finding has sparked much interest and debate since it is the smallest object by far to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System — after the much larger…

Matt Ridley Wrong, John Abraham Right

Recently, formerly respected writer Matt Ridley has been making a fool of himself with absurd and scientifically unsupported commentary on climate change. Recently he wrote something for the Wall Street Journal, "Dialing Back the Alarm on Climate Change," that serves as an example of this. Professor John Abraham has also provided an item for the Wall Street Journal that addresses Ridley's goof. As Abraham puts it, "Matt Ridley states that a forthcoming major climate change report will lower the expected temperature rise we will experience in the future ("A Reprieve From Climate Doom,"…

The Teabaggers New Health Plan: Cut Medical Research by $1.6 Billion!

But you won't stand for it. Later this week the House will vote on HR 1, a "continuing resolution" (CR) to fund the federal government for the remainder of FY 2011. HR 1 would cut NIH funding by $1.6 billion (5.2%) BELOW the current level - reducing the nation's medical research budget to $29.4 billion! Everyone in the scientific community - researchers, trainees, lab personnel, etc. - must protest these short-sighted cuts. The cuts will slow the discovery of new treatments, lead to wasteful termination of projects, and ultimately cost some Americans their jobs. In addition, cutting the NIH…

They just keep lying

Look at this: the Expellers are lying again. In this case, they're screening people who've asked to attend showings, and then, instead of just telling them that they are not invited, they're being cowardly and telling them that the screening has been cancelled. It's so pointless — they could just state the truth, that they are only allowing friendly reviewers into the early screenings, but instead they seem compelled to make up pathetic, transparent excuses. I guess once they started lying, they can't stop anymore. (By the way, if you're expecting me to annoy Ben Stein for yet another weekend…

Audiommunity Episode 9 - Id just like to second everything Abbie said

LOL! Former blag-brother Kevin, along some friends from Harvard, have an independent website set up for educating the public about immunology: Emmunity.org They have a page I will link to many times in the future, describing the basic cellular components of the immune system, as well as another page filled with animations explaining some tricks those cells like to perform. They also have a fantastic podcast: Audiommunity I was super excited when they invited me on to talk about the Immunity Project, specifically, the paper that group just published. *SPOILER* As four scientists working in…

A Real Horror Story

I hate scary stories.  They annoy me. Its the same reason I dont fall back on pop-culture 'viruses' to explain real virology-- I dont need to make up fake scary viruses. There are REAL scary viruses. Likewise, you dont need to make up scary stories about 'mad scientists'. There are very real humans who were scientists who have done terrible, horrifying things. The New Yorker has a story up about one such scientist, Amy Bishop. A scientist who killed three and wounded three more of her colleagues in 2010 for denying her tenure.  A Reporter at Large A Loaded Gun-- A mass shooter’s tragic past…

Carl Zimmer: "We Are Viral From the Beginning"

Carl Zimmer is, hands down, one of the best science writers out there.  Its no surprise, then, that he is almost as obsessed with viruses as I am.  Viruses are our past and our future, and Zimmer *gets* it. So while I am busy in the lab this week, I will happily point you to a piece he recently wrote about ERVs and embryos. We Are Viral From the Beginning Regarding the paper he is writing about-- I dont think the active ERVs are 'doing' anything in embryos.  I dont think we have evidence that the active 'silent' viruses are genuinely domesticated.  I think the ERV activity is probably a side-…

Success!

The new Minnesota Atheists radio show was very good — they're going to have a hard time topping getting a heavy-hitter like Richard Dawkins next week (well, maybe not: next week they're talking about sex), but they've clearly got no shortage of material to talk about. My segment was cut a bit short, but it was my own fault — my usual wordy exposition needs refinement. Dawkins was great, and give a clearer explanation of Sam Harris's point about not calling ourselves atheists than Harris has; he also talked about his experience with the movie, Expelled. If you missed it, it will be available…

Born to Do Science: The Podcast!

Monty Harper is an Oklahoma musician who writes/performs songs for kids with pro-science messages. You guys helped get his latest CD 'Songs from the Science Frontier' made, but what Monty is known for locally are the 'Born to Do Science' programs he organizes for the Stillwater Public Library! He gets local scientists to come in and speak to kids about their research. I did one a couple months ago on vaccines and it was so much fun (kids are so friggen smart these days, its creepy...)! Well, until now, these programs were just for kids in the Stillwater area. Now Monty is producing…

Friday Baby Blogging

I had planned to catch up on blogging a bunch of things this afternoon, but I decided I needed a nap more than I needed to pump up the blog traffic. So, here's a cute-baby picture to make up for it: This is The Pip, trying to figure out what's up with the little dude in the mirror in his portable crib. He had his four-month check-up this morning, and got a clean bill of health, other than some mild concern that he's a skinny little dude-- his weight has gone up, but down in percentile terms. SteelyKid had the same thing happen when she was little, and she's a solidly built preschooler these…

Links for 2012-02-28

Religion News Service | Blogs | Mark Silk - Spiritual Politics | Santorum v. JFK But if, as Santorum suggests, you do go on and read the speech, you will discover that Kennedy never said that people of faith have no role in the public square or that faith is not allowed there. He did, however, articulate a number of positions that Santorum should be asked if he agrees with. Here's the questionnaire: From Rapunzel to The Little Red Riding Hood, Beloved Children's Classics as Minimalist Posters | Brain Pickings As a lover of children's books, especially classic ones with timeless wisdom for…

Links for 2011-08-14

THE "Don't Miss" Volume? | Tor.com "In the 1995 Hugos thread, Womzilla asked what was THE don't-miss novel of Bujold's Vorkosigan series. There has been much interesting discussion in the thread of the idea of a series novel winning the Hugo and specifically of which Bujold to read first, but I think the whole question of "the one don't-miss volume" is interesting to examine. It's quite a different question from "Where do I start?" It's full of assumptions and worth unpacking." I am the Very Model of a Singularitarian - Charlie's Diary "If the Singularity is our new Maginot Line, what's the…

Dream Blogging

I hardly ever remember my dreams. When waking and then going back to sleep, like on a Saturday morning, I can however sometimes bring back fragments into the real world. This morning I dreamed that we were moving to a new apartment in an unfamiliar area that was apparently not far from where we live now. The apartment swap took place one object at a time: I would carry a lamp over to the new place, and the bearded guy who lived there would come walking the other way with a potted plant. It was after dark. Asphalt, fluorescent street lights, passing the front of a grocery store. I had no…

Jonathan Lindström Enlightener of the Year

The Swedish Skeptics Society (VoF) has just announced its annual awards. The Popular Enlightener for 2007 is none other than my friend Jonathan Lindström, the guy with the Neolithic kids' book! (I abstained from voting, being heavily biased in his favour.) States the press release, "He receives the award for his pop-sci books where he relays, in words and images and with endless curiosity and stellar pedagogics, the latest advances in astronomy, cosmology, natural history and archaeology. Jonathan Lindström's books are a pure pop-sci pleasure for all ages to gather around." The 2007…

Rock of Ages

Field archaeology has its perks, one of which is the interaction with the public. Most site visitors are simply full of polite interest. A few tend to be local patriots who wish to reaffirm that their neck of the woods was once enormously important. And then there are those who, well, possess more curiosity than knowledge, shall we say. A colleague at the Stockholm Town Museum told me a story about this latter group. He was digging in the Old Town once, when a person approached his trench and looked intently at his spoil dumps. After a while this person stooped and picked a small stone out of…

Journal of the North Atlantic Announced

A new peer-reviewed intercontinental multidisciplinary journal has just been announced: Journal of the North Atlantic (JONA). Apart from my discipline, JONA will also cover paleo-environmental reconstruction and modelling, historical ecology, anthropology, ecology of organisms important to humans, human/environment/climate interactions, climate history, ethnography, ethnohistory, historical analyses, discussions of cultural heritage, and place-name studies. Its offices are in Maine and the editorial board includes people based in the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroes, the Shetlands…

Recommended Reads

I usually divide my evenings between the computer and a book, interspersed with the occasional fondle-raid on my wife. Here are a few recommended reads from the past year. How and Why Lisa's Dad Got to Be Famous. Michael Allen 2006. Charming short novel about the insanity that is reality TV. Reviewed here. Year's Best SF 11. Ed. Hartwell & Cramer 2006. Excellent science fiction short stories. I particularly liked the contributions by Langford, Gregory, Robson, MacLeod, Rucker, Jarpe, Sterling, McAuley, Chiang, Morton, Reynolds, Haldeman. Reviewed here. Voices. Ursula K. LeGuin 2006. A…

WATN: it's November

Those who poke around in obscure corners of the wub may have noticed that Force X from Outer Space was due to be published in October: We are ramping up the end of this series because we’ve been informed that both of David’s papers will be published in October — one on the error in the climate models and one on the notch delay solar theory. This was an event of somewhat less note than AW's epoch-making non-paper but surely it deserves some kind of mockery rather than total contempt? Or perhaps not. Anyway, it is now November. Perhaps the papers didn't make Nature after all. I tweaked them…

Links for 2012-04-23

How do I get my students to prepare before coming to a flipped class? - Turn to Your Neighbor: The Official Peer Instruction Blog A whole lot of words about the virtues of Peer Instruction and Just-in-Time Teaching, followed by a one-paragraph response to the question in the title. Don't blink or you might miss it. Screening Out the Introverts - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education While I have some sympathy, I'm not sure how far you can really go to lessen the strain on introverts in academia given that one of the primary professional activities necessarily involves talking to a room…

Marsh Meringue

Visa större karta Here are two pieces of convoluted Scandy and English etymology that converge in my head. "Marshmallow" was originally the common name of a plant, Althaea officinalis (Sw. läkemalva), from which a thickening agent was made. This agent was added to meringue foam to produce the toastable sweet pillows we all know and love. And so the sweet took over the name of the marsh-dwelling mallow plant. On GÃ¥lö, the peninsula where I helped with excavations yesterday, is a place called Kärrmaräng. This means "Marsh Lagoon Meadow", but the Swedish word for meringue is maräng, so "…

The Man Who Wasn't There

Magnus Ljunggren has a lovely little piece about two Russian writers in today's Svenska Dagbladet. 1. In fiction, a man who doesn't exist. Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov (1894-1943), a Latvian Jew, wrote the satirical novella Lieutenant Kijé (1927) about a non-existent military officer who gets entered into the rolls through a misunderstanding and rises through the ranks to general. 2. In reality, a body of fiction ascribed to a man who writes nothing. Anatolii Surov (d. 1987) published several successful plays and received the Stalin award twice, all on the strength of work that he stole from…

New English Gold Hoard Tpq AD 15

Thanks to a good metal detectorist and a swift response by British Museum archaeologists, all English Iron Age aficionados can now enjoy and study a hoard of 824 indigenous gold stater coins, buried in AD 15 or shortly thereafter. The hoard was in a plain pottery vessel, buried in a rectilinear cultic structure near Wickham Market, Suffolk. It's the largest Iron Age gold coin hoard reported from Britain since 1849. In Sweden, we don't have a single coin deposited at such an early date, and it wouldn't surprise me if the Danes don't either (though they do have other very cool imports of the…

Inventive Gay Dolphins

Kai reports from an on-going exhibition at the Stockholm Museum of Natural History on homosexuality among non-humans. It is based on Bruce Bagemihl's research. I am impressed by the gay dolphins' invention of nasal intercourse. To pull that off, one human would have to be hugely endowed in the nose department and the other very petite indeed elsewhere. I wonder what happens if you sneeze? In the title of his entry, Kai reminds us of the Flintstones, who of course had a gay old time. Now, the bit that I've been wondering about is "they go down in history". On whom? In other news, I came up…

Affiliation

You know the Iggy & Stooges track "Penetration"? The one where Iggy sounds like he might be the penetratee rather than the penetrator? Now, I want you to imagine me singing that song, only with the word "affiliation" rather than "penetration". For the second time, my friend and frequent collaborator Howard Williams provides me with valuable university affiliation. Through his good offices, I have been appointed Visiting Research Fellow of the University of Chester, students from which made up most of my fieldwork team back in September. This is really good for my troop morale. They may…

Malacology morning

My wife thought this story about left-handed snails having a competitive advantage, in that they seem to be better able to escape predation by right-handed crabs, was pretty cool. She also recalled that I'd scribbled up something about snail handedness before, so to jump on the bandwagon, I've brought those stories over from the old site. The handedness of snail shells is a consequence of early spiral cleavages in the blastula. It's a classic old story in developmental biology—everyone ought to know it! There was also a story last year about shell chirality in Euhadra. There, it wasn't a…

Face to face

From a pub conversation with Old Man Roscoe: so often, electronic communication snarls you up. Its so easy for small disagreements to blow up; for genuine disagreements to get entrenched; to lose any fellow-feeling for the people, or fleeting electronic blobs, that you're "conversing" with. I see this at work, time and again: an email conversation degenerates into near-warfare, and is only saved when one party or another has the sense not to press "send" but instead wanders off and talks to the other person, at which point sanity prevails. No wonder all this blog-based "discourse" is doomed…

Embracing Your Fifth Dimension (Synopsis)

When it comes to the fabric of our Universe, we live in four dimensions: three space and one time. At least, that's what it seems like. But it's possible that at very high energy scales -- or at very small distance scales -- not only might even more forces unify, but we might discover that the interactions between particles spill over into even more spatial dimensions. Image credit: TU Wien. Is there anything we can use about these higher-dimensional ideas to learn something more about our Universe? Or, conversely, is there anything we can use from our Universe to learn about the potential…

Throwback Thursday: The Physics Of Fireworks (Synopsis)

“Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it.” -Summer of 4 ft. 2; The Simpsons There are few things as closely associated with American independence as our willingness and eagerness to celebrate with fiery explosions. I refer, of course, to the unique spectacle of fireworks, first developed nearly a millennium ago halfway across the world. Image credit: © Copyright 2005–2015 Capital Concerts, Inc. But these displays don't happen by themselves; there's an intricate art and science required to deliver the shows we all expect. So what's the science behind…

But Isabella is such a lovely name!

Apparently, you shouldn't name your daughter "Barbie" unless you want her to grow up to be an airhead. A study, reported in the Guardian, claims that names have a powerful influence on social expectations — they report a significant effect in lowering exam scores based on whether the student's name is classifiable as coming from a distinct ethnic/socioeconomic class, and further claim that the femininity of a name has a negative correlation with performance in math and science. It's somewhat odd. For one thing, they calculated a femininity score for various names based on letter and sound…

From Heaven to Earth (Synopsis)

If you want to know where you are on Earth, you use a GPS, you use other terrestrial landmarks to help determine your location, or you use some well-known objects in the sky. Image credit: still by Fraser Gunn, additions by Ethan Siegel. This will get you latitude easily, but how about longitude? While there are some tricky things you can do to help yourself out, one of the most commonly used techniques for centuries -- surprisingly -- was using the moons of another world: Jupiter! Image credit: Robert J. Modic, over a mere 10-minute timespan! Image was processed down from 3.2 MB to a…

Landing at the End of the Solar System (Synopsis)

“I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.” -Henri Nouwen So, maybe you've been living under a rock, but whether you have or haven't, the news is still amazing: we've just landed on our first not-a-rock in space, but rather the remnants of an icy world from our Solar System's early moments of formation. Image credit: ESA / CNES / Philae, via https://twitter.com/ObservingSpace/status/532596055783661568/photo/1. That's right, for the first time ever, we've landed a manmade probe on a comet, and are now prepared to…

Pat Robertson's Latest Insanity

Much has been written about Pat Robertson's latest bit of insanity, suggesting on the 700 Club that we should assassinate the president of Venezuela. The only thing I have to add is this: if this were a Muslim cleric rather than a Christian one advocating the murder of a head of state, he might well find himself in Gitmo. Especially since this same nutball just a few short months ago was saying that we should drop a bomb on the State Department. If he was Muslim, he'd be on a terrorist watch list by now at the very least, and quite possibly in custody. But he's a Christian, and a loyal…

Judge in Wiccan Divorce Case Overturned

I reported a few months ago about Judge Cale Bradford, of the Marion Superior Court in Indiana, placing a restriction in a divorce decree that said that neither parent could expose a child to their Wiccan beliefs. Both parents were Wiccan, but they send their son to a private Catholic school. The judge decided that because there are potential conflicts between what the parents teach him at home about Wicca and what he is learning in school about Catholicism, the parents should be prevented from speaking to the child about their beliefs. At the time, I called this one of the most disturbing…

Howard Phillips on John Roberts

The Worldnutdaily is reporting that Howard Phillips is publicly opposing the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court because he once did pro bono work on a landmark gay rights case: Continued Phillips: "Judge Roberts apparently had no moral objection to using his skills to advance the homosexual agenda. It suggests an absence of an understanding by Mr. Roberts that homosexual conduct is sinful and ought to be discouraged." Phillips says it's now clear Roberts would not use "biblical morality in determining his position in particular cases." And this from the founder of the…

Canada Passes Gay Marriage Bill

Canada's House of Commons passed landmark legislation Tuesday to legalize gay marriage, granting same-sex couples legal rights equal to those in traditional unions between a man and a woman. The bill passed as expected, despite opposition from Conservatives and religious leaders. The legislation drafted by Prime Minister Paul Martin's minority Liberal Party government was also expected to easily pass the Senate and become federal law by the end of July. Gay marriage has already been legal in some Canadian provinces, but this is still a significant victory. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin…

Gull Lake Brushes off Lawsuit Threat

The Gull Lake School Board has essentially decided to brush off a threatened lawsuit from the Thomas More Law Center on behalf of two teachers who say they have a right to teach intelligent design creationism in their science classrooms. Lisa Swem, attorney for the school district, is saying that the school will continue with its current policy of having a committee meet and decide on how to proceed regardless of the TMLC's threats. That committee, as I previously reported, has already met and ruled against the teachers on a 5-2 vote, which should have ended the whole thing according to what…

Christian Lending Principles?

Since I'm in the mortgage business, the frequent spam emails I get promising the lowest rates ever regardless of credit just get deleted out. But a few minutes ago, I got one that caught my attention, from ChristianMortgageUSA.com. Refinance Your Home with Christian Lending Partners says my "lending advisor with biblical values." I sure hope that doesn't mean that they'll be using the interest they charge me to smite an infidel or stone a homosexual. More and more, I am inclined to cheer Bill Hicks' suggestion that anyone in advertising or marketing should kill themselves because they are…

Hovind Found Guilty

In the most predictable result ever, the jury deliberated only 3 hours before finding Kent Hovind and his wife guilty on all charges. A federal jury has convicted Kent Hovind and his wife, Jo, of tax fraud. Hovind faces a maximum of 288 years in prison. His wife faces up to 225 years. Her charges include aiding and abetting her husband with 44 counts of evading bank-reporting requirements. He won't get that much, of course, nor should he. A couple years in jail, a nice fine. That oughta send a pretty strong message. It's all lost on Hovind, of course. He is impenetrable to reason and he will…

links for 2007-10-09

The Booze News Because the world needs another web site dedicated to drunk college students (tags: academia stupid) Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: The Educrats' Attack on Teaching Hugo Schwyzer goes to a workshop on "improving student learning outcomes," then gets snarky about it. (tags: academia education) YouTube - "Dog" An anti-drug ad from people on drugs (tags: silly drugs dog) Taming tiny, unruly waves for nano optics Fairly garbled press release about light propagation at nanometer scales. (tags: physics news science) Confessions of a…

Picture Contest Update

Several days ago, I mentioned that I had taken over 1,000 pictures on the trip thus far. That number has increased somewhat since then, and I offered a prize to the person who comes closest to guessing the final number, without going over. Specifically, I promised something cheap and tacky from Japan. I can now announce what the cheap and tacky item is: It's an honest-to-God glow-in-the-dark Great Buddha key chain, purchased at the official Great Buddha gift shop. so, if that sounds like the sort of ironic kitsch item that you just have to own, leave a guess in the comments as to the number…

Awesome Rice Art

One great link, while I'm posting things: rice paddy art in Inagadate: [B]y precisely planting four varieties of rice with differently colored leaves in fields their ancestors have farmed for centuries, the people of Inakadate Village have this year grown remarkable reproductions of famous woodblock prints by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). And this is no cheap gimmick -- the images from the artist's "Fugaku Sanjurokkei (Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji)" on the 15,000-sq.-meter paddies are nothing if not spectacular in both their scale and detail -- even as every day brings them nearer to…