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Kalathomyrmex: New Genus, Old Species

Kalathomyrmex emeryi (Forel 1907), Argentina. In Zootaxa last week, Christiana Klingenberg and Beto Brandão introduced to the world an entirely new genus of fungus-growing ant, Kalathomyrmex.  Yet the single species, K. emeryi, is a widespread neotropical insect that has been known for over a century.  In fact, I photographed it twice during my recent trip to Argentina.  How does this happen, a new genus devoid of novel species? The answer is understandable in light of the distinct pattern of evolution among the fungus growing ants, revealed in a 2008 study by Ted Schultz and Sean Brady…

Key West Pharmboy Awards

Okay, Dear Reader, I know you are tired of my ranting about Key West no matter how much I try to make it a focus of natural product therapeutics. So, with your indulgence, I need to make two serious awards to acknowledge the warmth and kindness of the good souls of Key West. Two people went above and beyond the call of duty to make our trip wonderful: 1. To the waitress (and likely owner) of Flamingo's Cafe: We had a terrific brunch at one of the few places (thankfully) that does not serve alcohol on Duval Street. I indulged otherwise with the incredible Crabcake Eggs Benedict and a side of…

Last shot for Medicare coverage of radioimmunotherapy (RIT)

With the help of the good people at Patients Against Lymphoma, we've been following the ruling by Medicare that costs of radioimmunotherapeutics for lymphoma would now only be reimbursed at less than the acquisition cost (CMS-1392-FC). So ridiculous is this proposition that Newsweek's Jonathan Alter weighed in with an article, "How Washington is Nixing a Cancer Cure." We've now learned that two senators are modifying the language of the bill coming up for approval by the Senate Finance Committee tomorrow (4 Dec). However, there seems to be misinformation spreading regarding the affordability…

Forty lashes for a cosmeceutical company

I wrote about the general issue of eyelash-enriching "cosmeceuticals" on my Terra Sigillata back in July. Increasing the number and thickness of eyelashes is not some hokey magical wish - it is a known side effect buried in the prescribing information for the prescription glaucoma drugs, bimatoprost (Lumigan®) and latanoprost (Xalatan®). Last Friday, the US FDA seized a product called Age Intervention Eyelash at the San Jose facility of Jan Marini Skin Research, Inc., citing that the product contained an unapproved drug and could be harmful to the user's vision. When composing my post in…

Barry Yeoman's "Green-Collar Work Plan" excerpted in new issue of Utne Reader

Sitting back today looking at news and webcams in my former home of Colorado had me also reflecting on the events that conspired to put me in North Carolina. This unexpected turn in my life also opened me up to a local community of remarkably creative people with national and international reputations in their respective fields. One of these people whom I am fortunate to call a local hero is journalist Barry Yeoman. Barry was described in the Columbia Journalism Review as, "(One of) the best unsung investigative journalists working in print in the United States.... Yeoman specializes in…

Coal supplies running low?

Implicit in every "clean coal" advocate's pitch (no pun intended) for subsidizing the technology to free us from our oil addiction is the assumption that we have at least 200 years' worth of the stuff under American soil -- and plenty more around the world. That could be very wrong, according to a new National Academy of Sciences study. Matthew Wald has the story in today's New York Times. Here's the relevant section from the study itself (bold emphasis mine): Despite significant uncertainties in existing reserve estimates, it is clear that there is sufficient coal at current rates of…

Latest IPCC report: Climate Uncertainty vanishing

Of course, we'll never be absolutely certain about the causes and future trends of climate change. That's not the way science works. But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we're getting pretty darn close to that magical 19-times-out-of-20 territory that passes for conclusive evidence in scientific language. The Toronto Star has got ahold of what is most like a next-to-final draft of the IPCC next report, due Feb. 2, and the language could scarcely be more worrisome. Here are the excerpts,as reported by Peter Gorrie: "It is very likely that (man-made) greenhouse gas…

Cut Hawking some slack

I wasn't going to wade into the Stephen-Hawking-has-lost-it debate, but then I came across an otherwise unrelated story this morning pitting Cosmologist Numero Uno against the late Pope John Paul II. For those unfamiliar with the fuss, Hawking had the nerve last week to publicly support the idea of colonizing the Moon and Mars because, he said, things are looking pretty dicy down here on Earth. As Stein so eloquently put it at Dynamics of Cats, "Hawking is not being ridicilous. At worst he is being pessimistic about the time scale for major potential catastrophes, and optimistic on feasible…

The Human Eye, Optimized For Sunlight. Maybe.

The human eye is sensitive to a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call visible light, which extends from around 400 to 700 nanometer wavelength, peaking in the general vicinity of greenish light at 560 nanometers: Here's the intensity (formally: power per area per unit solid angle per unit wavelength - whew!) of the radiation emitted by an object with the temperature of the sun, plotted as a function of wavelength in nanometers according to Planck's law: $latex B_\lambda(T) =\frac{2 hc^2}{\lambda^5}\frac{1}{ e^{\frac{hc}{\lambda k_\mathrm{B}T}} - 1}&s=1$ Spectral radiance (…

The Ladder

Fundamentally, you can start off with the Standard Model. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good description of the particles and forces of nature especially at the mostly low energies of our soar system. Using quantum mechanics you can built up those particles into distinct nuclei, and calculate how they can fuse to form new nuclei. Tack on even a rudimentary Newtonian understanding of gravity and you're already able to describe stars from scratch. Keep going with atoms and eventually things move out of the physics building into the chemistry building as those atoms combine to form…

The viruses that have been infecting mammals for 105 million years

The two-toed sloth is a walking hotel. The animal is so inactive that its fur acts as an ecosystem in its own right, hosting a wide variety of algae and insects. But the sloth has another surprise passenger hitching a ride inside its body, one that has stayed with it for up to 55 million years - a virus. In the Cretaceous period, the genes of the sloth's ancestor were infiltrated by a "foamy virus", one of a family that still infects humans, chimps and other mammals today. They are examples of retroviruses, which reproduce by converting an RNA genome into a DNA version and inserting that…

Visiting Nigeria: Part 1 - An Introduction.

So having just returned from a two week stint in Nigeria, I'm going to spend the next little while writing about the experience itself (I had planned to do this whilst there, but internet access was, at best, sporadic, and its speed could only be classed as heartbreaking . In any event, this series of posts will hopefully be (i) an eye opener, (ii) an invitation to be grateful for the way science is done around developed settings, and (iii) an information session for recruiting others who may be interested in such things. Hope you enjoy. - - - Part 1 | 2 | 3 Pretty sure, scientific…

Nerd Off Round-Up Over at Janets: Some choice quotes

Janet has finally put up the results for the nerd-off here, and I have to say that I feel like it was a fair and heated battle. Some folks have mentioned that I was a better contender for winning a "Geek-Off" and I am similarily confused by the Geek vs Nerd nomenclature. This I fear, could be a whole field in the philosophy of names. Anyway, here are some choice reasons used for the battle: That's a real picture of me on my blog, balding ponytail and all. (Mark Chu-Carroll) When I was in high school, my sister was watching Star Trek. I walked into the room. I saw Kirk leaning over the…

DIY Infrared Sensing, on the (Very) Cheap

All right ladies and gentlemen, today we're performing an experiment! More of a demonstration, really, but one that's very easy and will impress your friends. You will need: 1) One remote control. 2) One camera phone. The vast majority of remote controls operate via an infrared light-emitting diode situated at the front of the device. You press a button, and the diode lights up in a particular pattern of pulses corresponding to the button you pressed. A little sensor at the front of the TV detects these pulses and converts them into the electric signals that tell the TV to switch from…

Sunday Function

Today is Easter Sunday, the most sacred and second most widely observed holy day in the Christian calendar, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. Friday was Good Friday, the remembrance of the crucifixion. Thus after spending three days buried, Jesus rose from the dead. Wait, three days? Let's see... Friday night to Saturday is a couple of hours, Saturday is a full day, and Sunday morning is a few more hours on top of that. So a day and a half, then. But of course all the liturgy and ceremony talks about three days. This is because the ancients counted time as opposed to measuring it…

Quantum Algorithms and the Strange Nature of Quantum Theory

Over at Information Processing, the InfoProcessor talks about teaching Bell's theorem: I find that the hardest thing about teaching this material in class is that, after half a year of training students' brains to think quantum mechanically, it is extremely difficult to get them to feel the weirdness of Bell's theorem and spooky action. It all seems quite normal to them in the context of the course -- they know how to calculate, and that's just how quantum mechanics works! In the comments an anonymous commenter says that this is all backward, that Bell's theorem isn't strange, and that we…

Searching For Feynman

Blue Monday, which was January 21, of this year, is supposedly (and I say supposedly when I might have better said, erroneously) the most depressing day of the year. Now there are plenty of reasons given for this: you finally realized your New Year's resolutions aren't going to happen, you've just gotten your credit card bill for all that rampant consumerism you participated in over the holidays, etc. But, if you're in academia, you know the real reason to be depressed during this time of the year. That's right: it faculty search season. Since everyone else is talking about it and…

The Howler Test

If you've ever been to a Central American forest, you've probably heard the hoots and wails of a howler monkey. But these creatures deserve our attention for more than their howls. They turn out to tell us a lot about the evolution of our own senses. We and some of our close primate relatives are remarkable for having powerful color vision. What triggered the evolution of this adaptation some 25 million years ago? Some researchers have proposed that as the global climate cooled, our ancestors were forced to shift from a diet of fruit to leaves. An ability to detect red and green colors would…

Downie and Schudson on Restructuring American Journalism: Implications for Science Media

In today's Washington Post, former editor Leonard Downie and communication scholar Michael Schudson preview the release of a major new study on the future of news. Below are some of the key recommendations of the report which reflect similar themes I have described in recent articles and at this blog specific to new models for science journalism. In particular, Downie and Schudson echo the need for government funding of new journalism ventures in areas such as science and health and the vital role at the local level that public media organizations and universities can and should play. […

Night at the Smithsonian: What Do We Learn in Museums and at IMAX Movies?

Night at Smithsonian topped the Box Office this Memorial Day weekend with a smash opening of more than $70M outpacing Terminator Salvation which scored a $43M debut. Museum directors and science educators are sure to be looking to ride the movie's success with efforts to broaden their reach in terms of attendance and community engagement. Yet the adventure and the joy of a museum experience, captured so well in Ben Stiller's "Night at..." fantasy series, leaves open the question of what we exactly learn about science when visiting a museum and just as importantly, how we learn. That was…

A Strong Speech That's Trumped by a 3AM Phone Call

The people running John McCain's campaign know what they are doing. By linking their advertising strategy to the news narrative, they continue to successfully counter-punch against an anemic Democratic convention message. The McCain team opened the week with an ad featuring a former Hillary backer now pledging her support for McCain and telling others to join her. The ad immediately reinforced the distracting focus on the Clintons at the Dem convention while also seeking to break the "spiral of silence" among Hillary supporters. Yesterday they followed with a somewhat clumsily edited but…

What if Google was evil?

@dnghub Twitter Feed Most people know that Google's informal tagline is "Don't be evil." In fact, that phrase comes with a little background, nicely described at Wikipedia: "Don't be evil" is the informal corporate motto (or slogan) of Google,[1] originally suggested by Google employees Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel at a meeting. Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out," adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were…

Big Pharma needs more money! (Wait a minute....does not compute...)

In the Feb 26 issue of Science, the Chief Patent Counsel for GlaxoSmithKline has written a "Policy Forum" article outlining the reasons that the pharmaceutical industry needs longer and stronger patent protection on its new drugs (to fend off those nasty generics). I was kind of shocked to see such a propaganda piece in Science, but I suppose it is all part of looking at both (all) sides of an issue. Big pharma has been telling us how tough they've got it for years, and the argument that they must charge very high prices to pay for all that R&D is so old that you can probably find it…

But do you LIKE "The Big Bang Theory"?

A next step beyond believing in it (or any well established theory -- e.g. Evolution) is to ask: do you like it? (and here I'm talking about the real thing, we'll deal with the television show later). Einstein didn't like it. So much so he made his self-proclaimed "biggest mistake" trying to work around it. Over on Oscillator, Christina quotes a great line from the biography of Barbara McClintock: "Good science cannot proceed without a deep emotional investment on the part of the scientist. It is that emotional investment that provides the motivating force for the endless hours of intense,…

A Pen Name Unmasked, A Contest, A Literary Bonanza

Listen, we've got a lot to do here, it's a hectic post, lots of links, so stay awake, put down your cell phone, and keep those new windows open and visible in new tabs. World's Fair guest contributor Oronte Churm uses a pen name -- if it wasn't obvious. But he reveals his identity today in two spots. Check out the great interview with him at Litpark.com. It's good reading on its own. Go look real quick, I can wait. Now you're back. So then check out the new volume of Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University over at McSweeneys. This is your must-read of the day. I…

Encephalon 41

Encephalon has a particularly good crop of brainy goodness this issue, so let's get started. Mind Hacks looks at a fascinating case of a man with unstoppable hiccups because he has Parkinson's disease. Neuroscientifically Challenged looks at the possibility of using a nanopolymer from sea cucumbers as electrodes for recording or stimulating in the brain. (I work in a lab that makes these kinds of electrodes, and let me just tell you if there were a way to make them better that would be super-useful.) Not Exactly Rocket Science discusses research that uses an fMRI scanner to tell what you…

Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution

Ron Paul just lost my vote (not that he really had it before). See the video below the fold (the question is at about 2:40): So here's my deal. I'm a libertarian, and Paul does advocate some policies that I agree with. For example, he advocates returning the gold standard. In light of the Fed fiddling with the markets and creating a moral hazard after the sub-prime meltdown, I am beginning to think this is a wise policy. Furthermore, he is the biggest deficit hawk of the candidates at the moment. Therefore, it would make sense for me to support him. However, I have two objections to…

The Size of an Ant's Eyes Correlates with Diurnal Variation in Foraging

There is a really cool paper in Current Biology about the how even an animal's sensory apparatus adapt to their particular evolutionary niche. Greiner et al. looked at four closely-related species of ants from the genus Myrmecia. (As you can see from the picture, these ants are also huge.) These four species are all relatively similar lifestyles, going out to forage on daily intervals. The four species differ, however, on when they go out to look for food. Some of them go out in mid-day; some go out only at night. The authors compared the time when the animals would forage with the size…

Setting the record straight

Larry Moran seems to think that I belong to the "Neville Chamberlain 'apeasement' [sic] school" of evolutionists. So what does one need to believe to be part of this school? Moran, having spent long hours talking with me on these issues, and knowing me so well, can enlighten us. In short, one must believe the following: These are scientists who are willing to compromise science in order to form an alliance with some religious groups who oppose Christian fundamentalism. Do you believe in miracles? That's okay, it's part of science. Do you believe that God guides evolution in order to produce…

Saturday Football

ASU are playing #3 USC this evening. The game last year was a classic, although ASU lost 38-28 after leading 21-3 at the half. Here is what I wrote last year. I have my doubts that today's game will be quite as close. Update #1: End of the first half and ASU are down 21-7. Once again, ASU have no passing game (Carpenter is 6 for 11 and 86 yards), Ryan Torain has been practically the only Sun Devil playing (12 rushes for 34 yards and one TD; 2 receptions for 40 yards), and Zach Miller is unused except as a (very effective) blocker. Dumb unforced errors as always are hurting. Update #2: Well…

At The NY Times Mag, is it really "bad science" or is it bad communication?

In a cover story at this week's NY Times magazine, Gary Taubes digs deep into the world of epidemiological research on diet and health. It's an important topic to call attention to, but the article is framed in disastrous and irresponsible ways. Instead of telling a detective story hung around just how amazingly complex it is to figure out the linkages between diet, drug therapies, and human health, Taubes and his editors go the unfortunate route of defining the article in terms of conflict, drama, and public accountability. They readily translate their preferred interpretation by way…

As Congressional Lawmakers Launch Blogs, How Long Until Science Institutions Take Advantage of the New Communication Platform?

Where once it was the province of against-the-establishment rebels and citizen media types, major institutions are now taking wide advantage of blogging technology to promote their message or to expand their audience. And it's not just major media outlets like the Washington Post or the NY Times, even Congressional lawmakers are getting in on the act. Here at scienceblogs.com, individual scientists and others weigh in, but recently over at Year of Science 2009, a consortium of science organizations have started doing it at the institutional level. Yet how long will it be until other…

Science Issues Play Central Role as GOP Hopefuls Jockey for Position; Schwarzenegger's Brand of "New Centrism" Offers Sharp Contrast to Romney's Ostrich-Headed Appeasement of the Right

Science issues are lining up to be a big part of the political jockeying by the 2008 presidential hopefuls. Plans are in the works to make Framing Science the-go-to-site for news and insight tracking the candidates' strategies and positions. So stay tuned...but today, an update on the GOP side. Former MA Gov. Mitt Romney has emerged as a hot ticket on the GOP fundraising trail, reportedly raising millions, and accumulating top staff to join his Boston HQ. Meanwhile, Washington buzz is that he is already the candidate of choice among Christian conservatives, based on his strong anti-…

NY TIMES SPONSORS READER FORUM ON ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT: Word is that Series Will Continue in 2007, and that the Innovative Beat is the New Normal at the Times

In more than 20 articles over the past year, a team of New York Times reporters and editors have detailed many of the intersections between energy policy and the environment. It's a tough issue to cover since it doesn't fit neatly any single traditional news beat. In fact, it spans many beats including science, the environment, business, regulatory agencies, and political news. Energy issues are also very technical, and frankly, while extremely important, can also be pretty boring. So for reporters who have to dramatize any issue to sustain reader attention, energy might be one of the…

They're coming to get you, Chandra!

The crackpot wing of the astrobiology community (and I do know, there are rational and scientific members of that group!) has now flowered into full-blown paranoia. N. Chandra Wickramasinghe has published a remarkable paper on arXiv titled Extraterrestrial Life and Censorship, which isn't as much a review of the evidence as a personal recounting of the global conspiracy to silence people who claim to have evidence of extraterrestrial life. It's a bizarre piece of work that has the keywords "Darkâ©Matter;â©Planetâ©Formation:â©Cosmicâ©structure;â©Astrobiology", when it's not really about any of…

Rupert Murdoch, Tear Down This Wall!

[Update 10/18 8:30 am: Honestly, when I wrote this post last night, I could only access the first couple paragraphs of the op-ed in question. But now the link takes you to the full text. Could it be that my cries were heard?? Doubt it, but open access is always nice.] In today's Wall Street Journal there was a very provocative op-ed by ecologist Daniel Botkin. He argues that the evidence of potential harm from global warming is overblown. Here is what you can see for free... Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life -- ours and that of all living things on…

Genetic Ghosts of Hominids Past

Last week I blogged about the strange story of our past encoded in the DNA of lice. We carry two lineages of lice, one of which our Homo sapiens ancestors may have picked up in Asia from another hominid, Homo erectus. I always get a kick imagining human beings, having migrated out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, coming face to face with other species of upright, tool-making, big-brained apes. It's pretty clear that it happened in Europe, which was occupied by both humans and Neanderthals for several thousand years. But encountering Homo erectus would be even weirder. Studies on DNA…

What a long strange trip ...

Janet has an interesting piece on her career change (from chemistry to philosophy) and this has prompted me to think a little about the path my career has taken since I began as an undergraduate twenty-one years ago (!). Get an undergraduate degree in zoology with a minor in biochemistry. By sophomore year be sure that you are going to obtain the PhD, work on mammalian evolution, and get a teaching job somewhere in Ireland. Begin a PhD project on the genetics of hybridization among deer species. Abandon it after six months because, let's face it, running gels is boring. Develop a project on…

The anti-vaccination movement---rotten to the core

The movement against vaccination is old---very old. All medical interventions require scrutiny. Like any medical intervention, vaccines require systematic investigation before deployment, and monitoring during their use. Still, vaccines have done more for public health than most Westerners under the age of fifty can imagine. Inoculation and vaccination have been vilified in many ways, from interfering with the will of God, to being a vast conspiracy to infect [insert ethnic group here] with [insert disease here], to a cause of autism. There have been "bad" vaccines, and when this has…

I hate needles

(This post has been migrated from my old blog for reference. --PalMD) But should you? Needles administering vaccines have saved millions of lives. Needles draw blood to help diagnose disease. They save diabetics' lives daily. Of course, they also help heroin addicts get high and catch diseases. So needles themselves must be good...or evil...or something...right? To add more to the mix, an interesting study was just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (Hakkke, et al. German Acupuncture Trials (GERAC) for Chronic Low Back Pain. Arch Intern Med/Vol 167(17), Sept 24, 2007, pp…

Super Earth

Of course, you've already heard. A team of European astronomers have discovered a planet five times as massive as the Earth orbiting a distant, dim red star known as Gliese 581. I've already started lamenting the proto-future, the first contact with extraterrestrial life, that I imagine my generation -- already so media savvy, so keen to negotiate alternative spaces with their own sets of digital constraints -- will probably just miss out on. I could cry, just weep, thinking about it. Although most scientific developments of this magnitude -- including the recent discovery of another new…

Pluto's OK, We're OK

A lot of people, sweetly, have been asking for the Universe(TM) perspective on this "new planets" issue. I've written about itonce before, of course, around the time that the latest new planet discovery really brought the question out into the astronomical limelight. This is, however, a long-standing issue. For those of you who aren't abreast on this development: the increasingly frequent discovery of astronomical objects larger than Pluto (most of which reside in a belt of icy rocks outside Neptune called the Kuiper Belt) has put into serious question the status of Pluto as a planet. The…

Migration versus emulation

Just a quickie post today— In answer to my post about intertwingularity, commenter Andy Arenson suggested that the way to rescue an Excel spreadsheet whose functions or other behaviors depended on a particular version of Excel was to keep that specific version of Excel runnable indefinitely. This is called "emulation," and it assuredly has its place in the digital-preservation pantheon. Some digital cultural artifacts are practically all behavior—games, for instance—and just hanging onto the source code honestly doesn't do very much good. The artifact is what happens when that code is run,…

The problem of "expert location"

A common problem adduced in e-research (not just e-research, but it does come up quite a bit here) is expertise location, both local and global. You need a statistician. Or (ahem) a metadata or digital-preservation expert. Or a researcher in an allied area. Or a researcher in a completely different area. Or a copyright expert (you poor thing). Very possibly the person you want works right down the hall, or in the building next door, or in the library, or somewhere on campus. But how on earth do you know? You could call around to the offices or departments most likely to contain the expertise…

Let Them Eat Disk

Many people, first confronted with the idea of data curation, think it's a storage problem. A commonly-expressed notion is "give them enough disk and they'll be fine." Terabyte drives are cheap. Put one on the desk of every researcher, network it, and the problem evaporates, right? Right? Let me just ask a few questions about this approach. What happens when a drive on somebody's desk fails? What do we do about the astronomers, physicists, and climatologists, who can eat a whole terabyte before breakfast and hardly notice? What do we do about the social scientists, medical researchers, and…

When coping mechanisms fail (the dark side of junior faculty life)

You may have noticed that there's been some "radio silence" around here, as they say, lately. Never fear, I'm still here, and I'm....coping. Sort of. Executive summary: I haven't been myself lately, and it's really, really starting to take a toll. (Warning: extreme frankness ahead!) I am not really sure what triggered this latest, extended meltdown of confidence. It could be the extreme stress of the last few months, stored and bottled up and not really dealt with, finally coming out. It could be the end-of-the-year meeting I had with my chair, which was in some ways helpful (some…

The Fatter we Get, the Less We Seem to Notice

Does this look "normal" to you? A significant number of overweight and obese individuals believe their body weight to be appropriate or normal and are satisfied with their body size. Misperception of overweight status is most common among the poor vs wealthy, African Americans vs white Americans, and men vs women. The unfortunate consequence is that overweight individuals who perceive themselves to be of normal weight are less likely to want to lose weight in contrast to overweight individuals with accurate perceptions. Such individuals are also more likely to smoke, have a poor diet,…

Something is amiss: Pankaj Mishra's review of Gandhi's truthiness book

The review is here [Guardian]. I have read Gandhi's My Experiments with Truth twice so far: once in school and then again while doing my undergraduation. It had a great influence on me during my younger years and I still owe much to the book for showing what passion and commitment to one's belief means. The second reading was at a time when I was very impressionable which naturally led me into the moral servitude of abstinence from meat. I served time for 6 years and casually broke the abstinence during a fine dinner in a Namakkal hotel with spicy chicken. The reason: I had realized my…

Gay "Kiss-In" at Mormon Temple

A gay couple kiss in front of the Salt Lake City Mormon Temple / David Daniels For the second time gay activists and allies held a kiss-in at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The action held this morning was to protest the arrest of two gay men two weeks ago who showed "inappropriate" public affection on LDS Church property. According to The Advocate: Aune, 28, and Jones, 25, told the newspaper that they were walking back to their nearby home in the evening when they crossed the plaza holding hands, then stopped to kiss on the cheek. Several security guards arrived and told the couple…

Are "orchid kids" the same as "gifted children"?

Over at the Times Magazine Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin ran a short post about my Atlantic "Orchid Children" piece a couple days ago, and some of the responses she got strike to an issue that has come up quite a few other places. I posted a note on this at Motherlode, and wanted to expand on it a bit here as well. This is the first what may be several posts of the "FAQ" sort examining reader or blogger concerns. In this case, the concern dominating the Motherlode commenter thread responses, and in a few other places as well, is whether the "Orchid Children" of my title are what many people…