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Rowe and Sandefur on Blackstone and Common Law

One of the great things about a group blog is that you get to hear different perspectives on the same topic. That's especially interesting when your co-bloggers are as engaging as mine are at Positive Liberty. In response to my essay on Blackstone and the common law, I've gotten replies from both Rowe and Sandefur. I'm happy to find out I didn't screw up anything too badly. It was a new subject for me and, though I did my research, I was still afraid I'd missed something crucial. Both of them agreed with my basic argument and each added some detail and nuance that helped me understand the…

MSU and Church/State Scholars

David Schraub points out something interesting while linking to my post about Douglas Laycock going to U of M law school and being a grad of Michigan State: Interesting factoid revealed--he attended Michigan State University as an undergrad. Know who else did? Constitutional law and Church/State expert Michael W. McConnell, currently on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals and, in my opinion, one of the more brilliant writers I've ever read. What is in the water in East Lansing? I suspect both of them went to James Madison college at MSU, which is home to a lot of pre-law students. But it is…

Moral Puritans at Illinois State

From Agape Press, via Bartholemew: Some parents with students at Illinois State University want the school to reverse its policy permitting professional staff to engage in unmarried cohabitation in student dormitories. One father, Greg Myers, says he was outraged to learn that the school's Student Affairs Office allowed his daughter's dorm supervisor to cohabitate with his girlfriend in ISU's Watterson Hall. Myers' daughter, a senior at ISU, is a resident assistant in the dorm. Like her father, she objects to the staff cohabitation policy because of her Christian beliefs. The university's…

Balko on Miers

Radley Balko is his usual ascerbic self after noting Arlen Specter's statement that Harriet Miers' nomination was still moving ahead okay but "she might need a crash course in constitutional law": I picture Harriet Miers burning the midnight oil at the library with her Emmanuel Con Law outline all dog-eared up, a cup of Water Joe and a pack of smokes close at hand. "Sorry Senator, only had time to read every other page. Not really sure about the privileges and immunities stuff. Besides, I'm only here pass/fail." Hey, Harriet, lemme' help you out. I got hold of a killer outline from this 2L…

TMLC Prepares for Dover Trial

I got this amusing email last night from someone named John Schroeder, suggesting that the TMLC attorneys in the Dover case are getting a bit desperate. The email says: Testimony in the trial should get really interesting by the middle of next week. At the request of Ms Sherry Doran of the Thomas More Law Center, I have mailed to Richard Thompson on this date a copy of my recently published book, Darwinism:Sorcery in the Classroom. If he employs the scientific data it contains in his defense of the school board decision, the ACLU may have to eat some evolved crow. Schroeder is the founder of…

Evangelicals Mad at Bush?

The Washington Times is reporting that conservative evangelical Christians are upset at President Bush for a wide variety of supposed offenses. Such religious right luminaries as Gary Bauer and Donald Wildmon are sending up warning signals that evangelicals may just decide to stay home on election day because Bush hasn't inspired their faith in him. The mind absolutely boggles, doesn't it? Supporting a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, virtually ending stem cell research in the US, pushing through faith-based initiatives (by executive order in some cases), ranting in his state of…

Do Christians get a humorectomy at confirmation?

There's a rather unsurprising study that shows babies can "lie" at a very early age, deceiving their parents with fake cries as early as six months (any parents out there? You know this is trivial—kids pop out of the birth canal as greedy, selfish little beasts who will do anything to cajole their way into your heart.) Now look at how a fundie blog spins the story: it's sin! It confirms what the Bible tells us, that we are born into sin! And then the author asks, "What stories (humorous, preferably) can you share about how your children demonstrate they, too, are sinful from birth?" It will…

RIP Elaine Morgan

Elaine Morgan, who has done a many thing in her life and is also the chief proponent of the more recent version of the Aquatic Ape Theory, has died at the age of 92. Dr Morgan only retired at the start of this year from writing a weekly column for the Western Mail after suffering ill health in 2012. The coal miner's daughter, who lived in Mountain Ash, Rhondda Cynon Taf, passed away on Friday morning, three weeks after suffering a stroke. Her daughter-in-law Kim Morgan said: "She was an incredible woman and so inspirational to so many people." ... Her book The Descent of Woman became an…

... a young woman getting chased by her past ...

Run is a short movie being made here in the Twin Cities by up and coming film maker Josh Mruz. I know about it because a friend of mine is in the film. It is about "a young woman getting chased by her past, hurdling through new obstacles, and recollecting the jumbled elements of her situation." I've tried to trick them into telling me what exactly she is running from but I'm told this would spoil the film. However, when I suggested it might be dinosaurs, NOBODY SAID NO! Anyway, I'm showing this to you because I want you to give them ten dollars (or more!) to help with this new film. If…

Californial Prop 8 Struck Down by Scotus

From Mercury News: In a ruling that assures further legal battles, the high court found that backers of Proposition 8 did not have the legal right to defend the voter-approved gay marriage ban in place of the governor and attorney general, who have refused to press appeals of a federal judge's 2010 ruling finding the law unconstitutional. It was a 5-4 decision, usual suspects. Reminder: Who is on the Supreme Court matters. Reminder: Who is in the White House matters to who is on the Supreme Court. Reminder: Which party controls the Senate matters to the ability of whomever is in the White…

Atheist Voices of Minnesota Mention

The book Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories has a mention in Publisher's Weekly: While Prometheus Books is the grandfather of publishing atheism books, there are two upstarts, another indication of the category’s strength. The newest is Freethought House, founded in 2011 and debuting last August with Atheist Voices of Minnesota edited by the press’s publisher, Bill Lehto. He says the house plans to publish up to four atheism titles a year, the next being Deliverance at Hand! by James Zimmerman (2013), a memoir by the former Jehovah’s Witness. Da Capo Press has…

Arctic Sea Ice Update

Time to start watching the Arctic Sea Ice breakup. This happens every year, but as you know, the total amount of ice left each summer has been reducing, and the "old ice" which forms a basis for the arctic ice refreeze is disappearing. The result of this change in arctic ice patterns has been a shift from one form of "arctic oscillation" to another which has resulted in changes in Norther Hemisphere weather. Here's a new video by Peter Sinclair bringing you up to date on sea ice as well as sea ice melt denialim: The National Snow and Ice Data Center keeps track of the Arctic ice and…

Santa Cruz, Solomon Island Earthquake and Tsunami UPDATE: several villages destroyed

There was an 8.0 magnitude earthquake a few minutes ago in the vicinity of Santa Cruz Islands, in the South Pacific, and it is now confirmed that this generated a potentially severe tsunami that by now would have hit nearby islands. But, no one has reports from the scene to confirm or elaborate on this. That is a very large earthquake, and apparently shallow. Info here. Of special note, in all caps, because that's how meteorologists roll: http://www.tsunami.gov/product.php?id=TSUPAC.2013 SEA LEVEL READINGS INDICATE A TSUNAMI WAS GENERATED. IT MAY HAVE BEEN DESTRUCTIVE ALONG COASTS NEAR…

670,000,000 people without power in India (AGW-linked)

What is probably the worst power outage India's history had has taken out electricity for fully half the country; This is apparently the "second outage" in two days. I'm not entirely sure how they count outages, however. I'm thinking it is more like a big giant outage that then got much smaller then got much (much much) bigger. There have been all kinds of secondary effects; minors trapped in mines, people succumbing to fire in trains. The reason for the outage is said to be incorrect levels of draw down from the grid by certain provinces. The ancient and out of date electric grids…

Was Microsoft referring to female breasts or its CEO?

This from Slashdot: "Microsoft has apologized and promised to rectify the fact that one of its developers slipped a sexist phrase into Linux kernel code supporting Microsoft's HyperV virtualization environment. In that code, the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor reads '0xB16B00B5,' or a slightly camouflaged 'BIG BOOBS.' After Linux developer/blogger Matthew Garrett criticized Microsoft for the stunt, the predictable debate over sexism in the technology world ensued. Microsoft issued a statement to Network World apologizing and added, 'We have submitted a patch to fix this issue…

Alan Cassels: Seeking Sickness

Alan Cassels wrote Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease, which is all: Why wouldn't you want to be screened to see if you're at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right? Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears. He writes that promoters of screening overpromise on its benefits and downplay its harms, which can range…

Debbie Goddard

Debbie Goddard. Photo from CFI website. One of my favorite people is Debbie Goddard, and she was in town for the last few days for SkepchickCON. (That is where we originally met, a few years back.) We managed to have a few longish conversations about the history and current state of skepticism and secularism. Debbie has been involved in these movements for longer than most people I know well, although she is very young. (She started early.) Also, we share something in our respective pasts that that was kind of fun to talk about which I will not bore you with here. Anyway, while…

"Science education should be based on our economy" Wut?

Republican lawmakers and their kin are opposing the acceptance of National Science Standards. Why? Because those standards are based on science. What they prefer is that the standards we use to guide curriculum in America's public schools be the hobgoblin of the Koch Brothers and the rest of the petroleum industry. Way to ruin the country, man. Civilization too. Nice move. As Chris Hays points out (see below) the anti-science industry in America is leaving Creationism behind and shifting towards the denigration of Climate Science, much to our detriment. The following interview from All…

Creationist humor?

Zeno makes an obvious point: creationists have no sense of humor. He singles out this tedious comic strip running on the Answers in Genesis pages, called CreationWise, and of course when anyone thinks of an unfunny religious apologist with a strip, they think of Johnny Hart. But even worse than any of these is Dan Nuckols. Seriously, if you enjoy cartoons, if you have any sense of humor or even an appreciation of the skill it takes to put together an amusing story in a few panels, don't follow that link; it's like snorting ammonia, it'll ruin the flavor of everything for a few days. Zeno does…

The Crash of Flight 447

Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean (near here) some time ago. In the absence of much physical evidence, experts figured out that the crash involved a misunderstanding of air speed due in part to faulty air speed data from iced over sensors. Then, last April, the cockpit data and voice recorders were fished out of the sea, which is rather incredible. Since then, further analysis has confirmed the initial finding but added a twist: Yes, there was a problem with air speed, but the proximate reason for the crash is because the individuals piloting the plane (especially one…

Bill Nye's Debate Victory Lap on The Last Word

Bill Nye "The Science Guy" went to the Creation Museum to debate "is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern scientific era?" After the debate, Bill Nye came to the Last Word to discuss his faceoff with the founder of the Creation Museum, Ken Ham. Nye said he accepted the debate challenge because the spread of creationism "frightens" him. "I don't think I'm going to win Mr. Ham over any more than Mr. Ham thinks he's going to win me over," Nye said. "Instead, I want to show people that this belief is still among us. It finds its way onto school boards in the United States." Ham,…

iOS and Android edge out Windows and Linux

On this blog. Below is the relative percentage of operating system use by the readers of this blog from a four month longs sample form the middle of the year last year compared to the most recent six months this year. There is not a lot of change, but notice the nearly five percent drop i nWindows use, which seems to be taken up mainly by an increase in the use of iOS. In addition, Linux use has dropped a worrying two percent. However, really, OSX and Android etc. are all based on Unix-like operating systems, so the numbers for this year can be recalculated to look like this: But…

Weather Forecast for Titan: Methane Rain

For the first time, rain has been observed falling at low altitude on this moon of Saturn. Extensive rain from large cloud systems, spotted by Cassini's cameras in late 2010, has apparently darkened the surface of the moon. The best explanation is these areas remained wet after methane rainstorms. The observations released today in the journal Science, combined with earlier results in Geophysical Research Letters last month, show the weather systems of Titan's thick atmosphere and the changes wrought on its surface are affected by the changing seasons. "It's amazing to be watching such…

Insect neurosurgeons

Carl Zimmer has a new post up on zombie cockroaches and the wasps that love them. This is seriously incredible stuff. The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into the cockroach's brain. She apparently using sensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex…

2015 Osteology Report For Stensö Castle

As with the bones from the 2014 fieldwork at Stensö Castle, Rudolf Gustavsson of SAU in Uppsala has again analysed the bones we found this year (report in Swedish here). And as expected, there are no human bones: this too is mostly food waste. The body parts represented indicate that trench D just inside the perimeter wall contained meal remains while trench F inside the south tower contained more butchery refuse. The material is dominated by youngish pigs, a tell-tale marker of aristocratic housekeeping, followed by cattle and finally sheep/goat to a lesser proportion than in the 2014…

Festival Pregnancy

After my first marriage I briefly dated a stoner girl. She was sweet and mild-mannered, her conversation laggy. There was a sleepy micro-pause before each of her replies. She'd spent four years on social security in a Copenhagen squat, smoking pot as a full-time occupation, before moving back to Stockholm and finding a job. Here's her festival pregnancy story, as I remember it. "I met Robert from Ringkøbing at the Roskilde rock festival. We got along really well and ended up in my tent together. Weeks later I realised that I was pregnant. This turned out to be a pretty complicated thing. I…

Happy Birthday, Jacob Bronowski

I just learned that Jacob Bronowski would be a century old today. I wonder how many readers here know anything about the man? Many people will praise the impact Carl Sagan had on people with his program, Cosmos, way back in the 1980s, but I have to say that Bronowski's Ascent of Man was much, much better, and far more influential on me, at least. It's a program that PBS ought to bring back — thoughtful, deep, and intellectually enriching. The testimonial above opens with a great quote from the man: The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader and yet are his own experience…

A Florida rumor

I heard this third hand, so it's not exactly the most well-founded rumor around, but a contact with inside information in the Southern Baptist Ministries has heard that they want to help out with the koo-koo descent into creationist madness that is Florida. They have asked their Florida churches to send information to businesses and school boards — a fine idea, and perfectly acceptable practice, I would think — but you have to see the "information" to believe it. The rumor is that they're going to send a tract called Apes, Lies, and Ms. Henn. That's right, a Jack Chick tract. I'm torn. It…

The return of Louis Savain

I'd be surprised if any of you knew who Louis Savain is — he's a weird little crackpot that I stomped on hard all of 3½ years ago. He claims that the Bible is actually a complete and accurate technical description of the neurological workings of the human brain. It was one of the more memorably loony ideas I've seen come out of religious derangement. Well, Louis is back. Not here, definitely — a comment from him here would probably fuel one of those thousand-comment atrocities where everyone took turns going stabbity-stab-stab with the crazy newbie — but he is plaguing Stranger Fruit with…

I want a heart in a jar

A lab at the University of Minnesota has done something cool: they've grown a functioning heart from stem cells. The problem with building complex organs in a lab is that their normal construction required an elaborate context in the developing embryo, something that is impossible to replicate, short of just growing the whole embryo. The Doris Taylor lab did something very clever: they took an adult rat or rabbit heart and stripped it of its cells, leaving behind a scaffold of nonliving connective tissue. Then they recellularized it with stem cells, and they differentiated appropriately to…

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog: The Big Idea

I'm home with The Pip today, so no extended typing for me, but I pre[ared for this by typing something up ahead of time, and getting John Scalzi to post it for me, as part of his Big Idea series: In a way, a book about Einstein's theory of relativity is uniquely suited to a series about Big Ideas. Relativity, at its heart, is a theory built on a single Big Idea: The laws of physics do not depend on how you're moving. For all its fearsome reputation, everything stems from that single,simple idea. Whether you're moving or standing still, floating in space or on the surface of a planet, you…

Links for 2012-01-03

Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us | Magazine For "Science" read "Medical Science" throughout, but other than that, it's a good discussion of the problem of biological complexity. Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence | National Education Policy Center Teach For America (TFA) aims to address teacher shortages by sending graduates from elite colleges, most of whom do not have a background in education, to teach in low-income rural and urban schools for a two-year commitment. The impact of these graduates is hotly debated by those who, on the one hand, see this as a way to…

It's Hard Work Being This Cute

I haven't sorted out yet how I plan to handle Thursday Toddler Blogging given that the original reason for it being on Thursday was because SteelyKid was born on a Thursday. The Pip, on the other hand, was born on a Monday. Should I do two cute-kid photos a week? Move it to Friday Family Blogging and try to get pictures of both of them? It's all just so complicated... ... it just wears me out. We're almost done with this term from Hell, though-- I gave the final exam for one of my two classes this morning, and the other will be on Monday, so I'll make a final decision next week. In the…

A Very Significant Picture

Here is a very significant picture: "What's significant about that?" you ask. "It's slightly out of focus and oddly framed. Why should I care?" You should care because of the photographer: That's right, SteelyKid has a camera now-- we gave her my old Canon A95. She was playing with Kate's smaller point-and-shoot camera (I forget the model) yesterday, and having a little trouble because it's so small her fingers kept getting in the way. The A95 is a little bigger, and while it's on the heavy side, it fits her hand reasonably well. And she took right to using it. And, because the laws of the…

Daddy's Little Physicist

I've got a ton of stuff to do this morning that will keep me from more substantive blogging, so here's a cute toddler picture: This is SteelyKid playing with the giant magnet in the MRI exhibit at the Schenectady Museum, trying to see how big a tower she could make out of steel washers and hex nuts (answer: 11 hex nuts before it fell over). She also greatly enjoyed tossing washers at the magnet and seeing them snap to it (I was more interested in tossing them so they got deflected but missed the magnet body, and shot off into the wider room. I doubt the other patrons would've guessed…

Links for 2011-06-30

YouTube - âªWits with Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, and Gollum: "I Will Survive"â¬â The Internet is a very, very strange place. (tags: silly internet video music movies television) Confessions of a Community College Dean: Yes, College is Worth It "One way to test the truth of the proposition that college isn't worth it is to observe elite behavior. Are applications to Stanford dropping? Is Harvard going begging? Are the Fortune 500 recruiting at public high schools across America? I didn't think so. The whole enterprise just smells to me like the latest variation on "let's privatize Social…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog On TV

Well, on video over the web, anyway... If you look at the Featured Videos on the National Geographic Channel web page, or, hopefully, in the embedded video below: You'll see a short video clip of a program about quantum physics, that includes me and Emmy among the experts on camera. I'm pretty psyched, though I'm not sure what Alan Guth and Lawrence Krauss will think about sharing the bill with my dog... This is from a show, tentatively titled "Parallel Universes," which is why I went to Buffalo back in October. Most of the scenes in that clip were shot in the abandoned railway station in…

Thursday Toddler Blogging 051211

Tonight's Toddler Blogging features SteelyKid taking a picture of me taking a picture of her, while Appa does the forced perspective thing again: The "camera" in this case is the salt shaker that came with her kitchen playset. Which is a versatile object, serving also as a drinking cup: The beverage in question was "fish juice," squeezed from the green plastic fish you can just make out in her hand. She made us all drink some, despite the fact that it was, as she put it, "little tiny yucky." I'm a little amazed we got these, because at dinner a little while earlier, she slipped off a chair…

Nine-Year-Olds Like Roborally

Now and then I like to play board games: mostly Blokus, Drakborgen (a.k.a. Dungeonquest), Scrabble and Roborally. The latter is an award-winning 1994 game where each player programs a robot to move through a treacherous obstacle course and tag a series of numbered flags. More often than not, your robot ends up a smoking laser-riddled wreck or disappears down a bottomless hole. On the box, Roborally is recommended from age 12 up. I am proud to be able to tell you that the game works just fine with (bright, geeky) 9-year-olds as well. Yesterday after lunch I took Junior and his pal geocaching…

Uppsala Archaeology Grad School Faces Imminent Extinction

Good news from Uppsala: after the end of the year, there will be only one PhD student in archaeology left in that august academic city. This is the result of a simple reform enacted ten years ago by Minister for Education Carl Tham: since that date, no student may enter a PhD program at a Swedish university unless she has funding. The reform was a non-event in well-funded economically productive subjects, but it hit the humanities like a bomb. PhD student seminars started to melt away as people graduated or gave up. But, as I said: good news. It's neither in the best interest of students nor…

Gone to China

Junior and I have gone to China to join wife & sis in Beijing. We're attending the wedding of two old workmates of my wife, a Swedish lady and a Chinese gentleman who met while working as guides in Stockholm city hall. After the festivities we're taking the train to the groom's home town of Luoyang in Henan. I'm really looking forward to the trip: I've never seen Beijing, I've never been to Henan and I've never attended a Chinese wedding. Though my quite non-revolutionary mom did hoist the red banner when my wife and I got hitched... I don't know what kind of internet access I'll have…

Cub Scout Archaeology

Two weeks ago when I worked for Thomas Englund and Bo Knarrström at the 1719 battlefield on Skogsö, I came across a variant on a type of archaeological site that I've blogged about before. A site where children have built and abandoned something, but this time it wasn't a tree house ruin: to me it looks more like the remains of an outdoor gym built by the cub scouts who periodically camp in a nearby house. You know, chin-ups and stuff. To this end, the kids nailed and tied horizontal spires to trees, clumsily and with very little regard for the trees' well-being. While they were at it, they…

I'm Feminine

A memory: Eric, one of the kids from mellanstadiet when I was ten or eleven. Him and another boy were taught a tap dancing routine by our gay counter-tenor music teacher Rune, performing it woodenly in the lecture hall for the entire school. They wore striped vests and straw hats, their faces expressing a mixture of concentration and a dawning realisation that perhaps they were making absolute fools of themselves. Steppens söner, "Sons of the Steppe/Tap Dance". But us in the audience didn't know enough to realise how naff it all was. Anyway, Eric was a pretty boy with an elfin face, and so I…

Radio reminder

Remember — Sunday morning at 9am, you can tune in to the Minnesota Atheists' very own Atheist Talk radio program. This week, we're planning to have a bigger slice of time for the Moment of Science, and Kristine Harley and I will be talking about the idea of bad "design" — the observation that many features of evolved organism don't look at all like they are the product of intent. (Oops, no — not this week. That'll be next week. This week, you'll get to hear from Lori Lipman Brown, and you'll hear a discussion of secular ethics. Tune in!) Feel free to call in, but please do try to be crisp…

Read Thou Daryl Gregory

Daryl Gregory's short fiction is quite remarkable. For the two past years, he's managed to top both the Hartwell & Kramer and the Dozois Year's Best anthologies with "Second Person, Present Tense" and "Damascus". I don't want to spoil anyone's fun by saying too much about the stories: just that they are science fiction stories about neuropsychology. One about the neurological basis of selfhood, the other about the neurological basis of religious epiphany. Gregory is a materialist and a skeptic, my kind of guy, and he's also a fine stylist with great psychological insight. Check out the…

Treehouse Ruin

Back in September, I wrote a piece about that common type of archaeological site, the abandoned treehouse. At these sites you'll see rotting boards and beams hanging from clumsily bent nails on a group of trees, gradually collapsing to the ground. Perhaps some old shag pile carpet decomposing on the forest floor. The woods strewn with an enigmatic collection of objects, haphazardly selected, mostly old household gear. When visiting these sites, I always have the feeling that the inhabitants didn't choose the objects they brought there: they took whatever they were given by someone more…

Going Medieval

There's childhood and youth and young adulthood. And then comes middle age. I've been wondering when my Middle Ages are going to begin. I've left the Iron Age of my youth, for sure, and I have a feeling that my Roman Imperial times are drawing to an end. So, the other day, I found the answer. Three weeks from now, I will be closer to 50 than to 20. That must be my AD 409. That's when the last remaining Imperial officials in the province of Britannia start packing their gear and no longer answer plainly when you ask them how old they are. "Thirty-something" is all they reply. I'm going…

Strung-Up Purple Imp

My friend Stefan Kayat is a truly original man of many talents. With his folk band, Herr Arnes Penningar, he plays eclectic reimaginations of traditional music, and he's also a draughtsman, a painter and occasionally a sculptor. Stefan's asked me to put up a pic of a piece he'd like to sell. This trussed grey/off-white/purple imp could be named Strung Up or Well Hung. (Just how well he's hung can't be seen in the photograph.) Says Stefan: I made him out of papier-mâché, fabric, glue etc. over a skeleton of re-shaped wire-hangers. The eye is glass, the teeth and claws are PVC putty. He's…

A Place To Rest Yer Bones

Lars Lundqvist promptly answered my call for archaeopix. Here's a recently discovered 1st Millennium BC stone setting on wooded outland belonging to the hamlet of Åby, Misterhult parish, Småland, Sweden. The stone pavement, which is not scheduled for any excavation, is a grave superstructure, most likely covering scanty pyre remains similar to those found in Gothenburg Nasties. Such structures are very much ho-hum-yawn to disillusioned cynics like Lars and myself, but the man to the left was really happy to see it. Said this merry Gothenburg biologist: De ä ju änna fantasstisskt att sånna…

Moon Jae-in orders shutdown of old coal-fired power plants

A minor note; President (Moon Jae-in)’s decision to halt operating aged coal-fired plants shows his strong will to provide a fundamental solution to the current fine dust problem,” said Yoon Young-chan, the chief press secretary. Yoon also said Moon has ordered the senior social affairs secretary to create a special task force to deal with measures to combat fine dust here via VV on Twitter. Which is to say, it seems likely that lots of coal will be retired for it's other polluting properties, rather than it's CO2 emissions. This isn't a new observation of course. Meanwhile, it's springtime…