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Congress vs. the White House on Regulatory Agencies

The Bush administration isnât the first to expand executive branch influence over the activities of federal regulatory agencies (like FDA, EPA, and OSHA), but it has taken the practice to a new level. Now that the Democrats are controlling Congress, though, moves by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that would erect more hurdles to regulation are facing opposition from the legislative branch. Back in January 2006, the OMBâs Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) issued a draft bulletin that laid out a new risk assessment protocol for federal agencies. The…

Creationists in the American classroom

Here's the most depressing thing I've seen all week (and I'm grading genetics exams): it's the result of a national survey of high school biology teachers. At least 16% of our high school teachers are young earth creationists. Furthermore, 12% our our teachers are using biology classes in public schools to teach creationism in a positive light. The majority are still pro-science, but even in the good cases, relatively little time is spent on teaching evolution. The news isn't all bad. One constructive discovery is that it is neither legal battles nor demanding state standards that determine…

Children's books--the unofficial "ask a scienceblogger"

So, over at the World's Fair, they've put together an unofficial ask a scienceblogger: Are there any children's books that are dear to you, either as a child or a parent, and especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility? Just curious really. And it doesn't have to be a picture book, doesn't even have to be a children's book - just a book that, for whatever reason, worked for you. So, I'm quite late to the party, but nevertheless I've listed some books below--some science, most not--that either I read as a kid, or I read with my kids now, or both. My…

*sigh* Influenza pandemic not guaranteed? Gee, no kidding...

Skeptics warn bird flu fears are overblown Doomsday predictions about bird flu seem to be spreading faster than the virus itself. But a small group of skeptics say the bird flu hype is overblown and ultimately harmful to the public's health. There's no guarantee bird flu will become a pandemic, and if it does there's no guarantee it will kill millions of people. The real trouble, these skeptics say, is that bird flu hysteria is sapping money and attention away from more important health threats. While I agree with some points the so-called "skeptics" make (we don't know if H5N1 will become…

Family Research Council endorses Homobigot Surgeon General

Bible Belt Blogger brings us this excerpt from the Family Research Council's "Dear Praying Friends" letter: Surgeon General Nominee under Fire - Dr. James Holsinger, President Bush's nominee for Surgeon General, has been harshly condemned by pro-homosexual activists for a 1991 paper he wrote for the Methodist Church describing male gay sex as unnatural and unhealthy. Sen. Barak Obama (D-IL) attacked Holsinger and President Bush saying, "...The Surgeon General's office is no place for bigotry...that would trump sound science." But Holsinger's work catalogued the obvious. The Center for Disease…

Photographing all the world's penguins on the same day

A lot of zoos have very neat murals and other works of art. Over the weekend we visited Marwell here in Hampshire: it's our 'local' zoo and we go there a lot. I really like the 'march of the penguins' feature they have on the outside of the penguin pool. Here's Will, looking at each penguin species in turn... While I've photographed this feature a few times before (I previously featured it here), this time round I did something new: I photographed each penguin figure individually. Here they are, squashed into a montage that destroys the sense of correct scaling present in the original. Are…

Unofficial "Ask a ScienceBlogger": Childrens Books (UPDATED)

Over at fellow SBer {Worlds Fair][worldsfair}, they've put up an unofficial "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question, about childrens books: Are there any children's books that are dear to you, either as a child or a parent, and especially ones that perhaps strike a chord with those from a science sensibility? Just curious really. And it doesn't have to be a picture book, doesn't even have to be a children's book - just a book that, for whatever reason, worked for you. I've got two kids, a girl who's almost six, and a boy who's three. And they're both showing serious signs of being pre-geeks.…

Fractal Borders

Part of what makes fractals so fascinating is that in addition to being beautiful, they also describe real things - they're genuinely useful and important for helping us to describe and understand the world around us. A great example of this is maps and measurement. Suppose you want to measure the length of the border between Portugal and Spain. How long is it? You'd think that that's a straightforward question, wouldn't you? It's not. Spain and Portugal have a natural border, defined by geography. And in Portugese books, the length of that border has been measured as more than 20% longer…

Ordinal Exponents and Really Big Numbers

With ordinals, we use exponents to create really big numbers. The idea is that we can define ever-larger families of transfinite ordinals using exponentiation. Exponentiation is defined in terms of repeated multiplication, but it allows us to represent numbers that we can't express in terms of any finite sequence of multiplications. As usual, the concept of ordinal exponentiation comes from a concept of set exponentiation where the ordinal αβ where α=|A| is the set of positions in the well-ordering of Aβ; and Aβ is the set of all ordered tuples of length β consisting of members of A. (It…

More Stupid Tautology Arguments from Dr. Egnor

So over at the DI whiners blog, Egnor is, once again, trying to pretend that he's actually making a case for why evolution is irrelevant to antibiotic resistance. It's really getting silly; he repeats the same nonsense over and over again, desparately doing the rhetorical version of sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "La La La! I can't hear you!": The Darwinist assertion that random variation and natural selection (chance and necessity) account for all biological complexity has nothing to do with the mundane observation that it's unwise to unnecessarily expose populations of…

Basics: Optimization

Yet another term that we frequently hear, but which is often not properly understood, is the concept of optimization. What is optimization? And how does it work? The idea of optimization is quite simple. You have some complex situation, where some variable of interest (called the target) is based on a complex relationship with some other variables. Optimization is the process of trying to find an assignment of values to the other variables (called parameters) that produces a maximum or minimum value of the target variable, called the optimum or optimal value The practice of optimization…

In which Bob Nicholls exceeds expectations and produces some jolly good artwork

My mate Bob Nicholls (of Paleocreations) has been producing some awesome artwork lately. Why, for example, there's this... ... and this... The first illustration (both pics © Bob Nicholls and used with permission) shows the Jurassic pliosaur Liopleurodon Pliosaurus performing its usual trick: modifying other plesiosaurs such that they become manageable chunks. In the second piece, a group of the Cretaceous ichthyosaur Platypterygius prey on fish. As I'm sure I've said before, Platypterygius encompasses a pretty substantial diversity: numerous species have been named and it's likely that '…

A 'lake monster' caught on film at Lake Champlain

The big buzz in the cryptozoology community right now concerns a piece of footage taken on May 31st 2009 at Oakledge Park in Burlington, Vermont, and on the shore of Lake Champlain. Lake Champlain is famous in the world of lake monster research as it's alleged to be home to a large, long-bodied animal of some sort: for a previous discussion see my article on the Mansi photo (easily the best known image purporting to show a large, unidentified animal in the lake). The new film was taken by Eric Olsen on his mobile phone: the original version is viewable here on youtube, but can no longer be…

Paul the Prognosticating Octopus Oracle Sez ...

tags: Paul the Prognosticating Octopus Oracle Sez, soccer, football, World Cup 2010, fun, offbeat, weird, news Paul the Prognosticating Octopus Oracle has disappointed his German fans by choosing Spain over Germany in tomorrow's World Cup Football match. Paul is a two-year-old English-born octopus of unknown species who has lived in the aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany since shortly after he was born. Image: Mark Keppler / DAPD This is a bummer for all those German fans who believe in tooth fairies and Santa Claus, because Paul the Prognosticating Octopus Oracle of Unknown Species (PPOOUS…

Stuffed megamammal week, day 4: Sumatran rhino

Yay: day.... err, 4 of Stuffed Megamammal Week (day 1: Khama, day 2; Eland, day 3: Okapi). And now for something completely different... a perissodactyl. Specifically, a rhino and, more specifically still, the weirdest rhino of them all (among extant forms at least): the Sumatran rhino Dicerorhinus sumatrensis. You might have noticed that the claim made earlier in the week that I would go all 'text-lite' for a while hasn't really panned out, so this time I'm going to make a real concerted effort to add nothing new. The good news is that I previously produced a long article on the Sumatran…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Male Or Female? Coloring Provides Gender Cues: Our brain is wired to identify gender based on facial cues and coloring, according to a new study published in the Journal of Vision. Psychology Professor Frédéric Gosselin and his Université de Montréal team found the luminescence of the eyebrow and mouth region is vital in rapid gender discrimination. 'Glowing' Transgenic Monkeys Carrying Green Fluorescent Protein Gene Pave Way For New Disease Models: A transgenic line of monkeys carrying a gene encoding green fluorescent protein fully integrated into their DNA has been created for the…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Inbreeding Was Major Cause Of Fall Of Spanish Habsburg Dynasty: The powerful Habsburg dynasty ruled Spain and its empire from 1516 to 1700 but when King Charles II died in 1700 without any children from his two marriages, the male line died out and the French Bourbon dynasty came to power in Spain. Gonzalo Alvarez and colleagues at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain have provided genetic evidence to support the historical evidence that the high frequency of inbreeding (mating between closely related individuals) within the dynasty was a major cause for the extinction of its male…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites. The Big One today, I'll cover in a separate post a little later, but here I also want to point out a paper by my good friends Elsa Youngsteadt and Coby Schal, back from my NCSU days (Dr.Youngsteadt now works for…

The year in crackpottery, and what it costs us.

The Touch That Doesn't Heal : Is there anecdotal evidence that unconventional therapies sometimes yield positive outcomes? Yes. There's also anecdotal evidence that athletes who refuse to shave during winning streaks sometimes bring home championships. It was George D. Lundberg, a former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who said: "There's no alternative medicine. There is only scientifically proven, evidence-based medicine supported by solid data." We'd do well to keep that in mind as we plot the future of American health care. It's not like we've got billions to…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Simple Eyes Of Only Two Cells Guide Marine Zooplankton To The Light: Researchers unravel how the very first eyes in evolution might have worked and how they guide the swimming of marine plankton towards light. Larvae of marine invertebrates - worms, sponges, jellyfish - have the simplest eyes that exist. They consist of no more than two cells: a photoreceptor cell and a pigment cell. These minimal eyes, called eyespots, resemble the 'proto-eyes' suggested by Charles Darwin as the first eyes to appear in animal evolution. They cannot form images but allow the animal to sense the direction of…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Ice Age Beasts In Europe: Migration Of The Woolly Rhinoceros Earlier Than Assumed: The newly described skull of the oldest woolly rhinoceros in Europe shows that these giant creatures - with two impressively large horns on the bridge of their noses - once roamed across central Germany. The large shaggy mammals grazed at the foot of the Kyffhäuser range, whose unforested, rocky slopes loomed out of the broad, bleak plains of northern Thuringia 460,000 years ago. The climate at this time was icy cold and far drier than today. Evolution's New Wrinkle: Proteins With 'Cruise Control' Act Like…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Daylight Saving Time: Clock-shifts Affect Risk Of Heart Attack: Adjusting the clocks to summer time on the last Sunday in March increases the risk of myocardial infarction in the following week. In return, putting the clocks back in the autumn reduces the risk, albeit to a lesser extent. This according to a new Swedish study. Programmable Genetic Clock Made Of Blinking Florescent Proteins Inside Bacteria Cells: UC San Diego bioengineers have created the first stable, fast and programmable genetic clock that reliably keeps time by the blinking of fluorescent proteins inside E. coli cells. The…

New and Exciting in PLoS Biology

Some really cool stuff just got published a few minutes ago in PLoS Biology: A cool paper: Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition: A crucial step in the emergence of self-recognition is the understanding that one's own mirror reflection does not represent another individual but oneself. In nonhuman species and in children, the "mark test" has been used as an indicator of self-recognition. In these experiments, subjects are placed in front of a mirror and provided with a mark that cannot be seen directly but is visible in the mirror. Mirror self-…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

This is funny - I start reading interesting stuff, really stuff that I find catchy regardless of where I work....and it's all from PLoS ONE! We rock! The journal that some people regard as a repository for "boring, incremental stuff" is publishing all the most exciting papers around....just see these: Transgenic Plants Don't Hurt Beneficial Bugs, Entomologists Find: Genetically modified (GM) plants that use Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), a common soil bacterium, to kill pests won't harm the pests' natural enemies, according to new research by Cornell entomologists. Honeybee Dance Breaks Down…

My Picks from ScienceDaily

Does The Victim Affect Snake Venom Composition?: A snake's intended prey might affect the type and evolution of toxins in their venom, research published in BMC Evolutionary Biology shows. In snakes, venom composition varies both between species and within a particular species. Land snakes feed on a range of animals and birds, so scientists think that these snakes need a diverse array of toxins in their venom. Sea snakes, on the other hand, tend to have a more restricted diet, feeding only on fish. The toxins in these snakes have now been shown to be less diverse than those in terrestrial…

Embattled HoneyBees

Western honeybee, Apis mellifera. Image: William Connolley. When I was in graduate school, I nearly decided to study social bees for my dissertation work, but in the end, I decided to pursue my greatest passion, birds. However, despite this, bees have long been a favorite animal of mine, and if I had my own place to live, I would be keeping social and semi-social bees of various species, particularly native species. But it looks like the nation's bees are not doing very well: something is killing them. The domesticated western honeybee, which does much of the pollintation of crops, has…

Brazzaville Beach

I absolutely loved this book, Brazzaville Beach, by William Boyd (New York: Perennial, 1990). Even though the book was published 16 years ago, I cannot understand how I could have missed it. But thanks to my friend, Coturnix, who sent the book to me, I had the priviledge to finally read it, so I include a review of it here. Not only is the prose surprisingly rich and evocative, but this book is probably one of the best examples of the new genre, LabLit -- short for Laboratory Literature -- which deals with real-life scientific themes without being science fiction. This interesting story is…

Some Notes About Avian Influenza in Nigeria

Transmission electron micrograph of Avian Influenza Virus. (click image for larger view in its own window) I just received a message from ProMED-email regarding the appearance of the avian influenza virus that was just identified in Nigeria. ProMED-email is a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases that serves to keep medical personnel and other professionals up-to-date on emerging diseases around the world. In this message, Debora MacKenzie, a writer for NewScientist.com news service, points out that; The article [in NewScientist.com] was posted before we found out the…

Give him a fair trial and then execute him!

The murder of George Tiller has brought some vile people creeping out from under the woodwork…especially the kinds of nasty minds that like to dress up in clerical collars. Looking for a good emetic? Look no further than this sermon by a Presbyterian minister for a great example of deploring a murder while praising the murderer's motives. A notorious murderer met what is certain to become a notorious end. By the goodness of God the witness of the Church was not entirely silenced in Dr. Tiller's life. He had been excommunicated by his previous congregation, a church of the Missouri Synod…

Megalodon and other sharks at Darwin Day

Last night, braving horrible traffic on the way there, and snow on the way back, I made my way to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences for the Darwin Day shark lecture co-organized by NESCent and the sneak preview of the Megalodon exhibit which officially opens today. I have to say that the trip was very much worth making - the exhibit is excellent! I like the way the exhibit is making good use of the space - so many exhibits feel cluttered and an all-out assault on all of one's senses. Upon entering the room, it looks quite sparse. Yet, once I started going around I saw how much it actually…

Seeing in the Dark: LISA 6

Bats' ears at AMNH To really see in the dark, at some point you must abandon the light... You can go far in faint light by using high efficiency detectors, large collecting areas and amplification; but, as nature discovered a long time ago, to really find things in the dark you need to switch to an entirely different spectrum and look at vibrations. This is also true if you want to look at Black Holes. You can do a lot with light, but to really probe what is going on with black holes, to come close to the event horizon, to test relativity, to measure spins and test astrophysics of formation…

pensive on penzim

To recap: There is a claim that penzim, an enzyme extracted from cod intestines, has strong antiviral properties, and in particular is effective in killing the H5N1 virus in vitro The Times has a decent article on it So, what is the big deal? Well, probably nothing, there are no clinical trials or safety studies yet, but since the stakes are high, it is worth contemplating. Never know, this might be the silver bullet... Penzim is a psychrophilic protease. That is to say, it is an enzyme that breaks up protein, which works well at cold temperatures. A good thing for arctic cod to have in…

Eclipsing White Dwarves

Graduate student at the University of California at Santa Barbara finds edge on transiting binary white dwarf system, with self-microlensing! Ok, this is just way too cool... artist conception - click for full res version The modestly named NLTT 11748 is a dim helium white dwarf about 500 light years away. Helium white dwarfs are the partially burned out cores of moderate mass stars, whose final stages of evolution as giants were interrupted, generally by a companion stars ripping off the giant envelope, leaving the partially burned core, typically at about 0.2 solar masses, composed…

Rumble on Mt Real

Ok, end of day two of the 40 Years of Pulsars conference and what have we learned... Well, pulsar emission mechanism is still a mystery; we still don't have a good handle on strong rotating magnetic fields, reconnection or field evolution; and, the population numbers for various pulsating neutron stars don't quite add up. It is not quite as bad as I make it sound, a lot of work has been done, and the picture is coming together. Chatting with a colleague, I get the impression that a lot of old, hard problems are close to solution, some just need an additional insight, or two, others just…

Protecting health by genetically engineering mosquitoes

Mosquito-borne diseases, like Dengue and Malaria, are serious problems in many parts of the world. While some people are working on treatments for mosquito-carried disease, others are looking at ways to treat the mosquitoes. Figure 1. Image of Aedes aegypti from the Public Health Library tags: tropical disease, yellow fever, dengue, insect control, malaria Controlling insect activities by messing with their genomes isn't a new idea. In many parts of the world, screwworms are controlled by damaging their genomes on a large scale by treating the flies with X-rays and releasing the…

Ada Lovelace Day: Jane of See Jane Compute

Wednesday was Ada Lovelace Day! Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide. In 2010 Ada…

Treating Mental Illness Defies Quick Fixes

Seung-hui Cho clearly was mentally incapacitated. He clearly was a menace to society and to himself, but who could have predicted that he would respond to his situation in the way he did? Even Cho's roommate was shocked and surprised by what transpired. So how do we decide who to haul away in handcuffs? And who should make those decisions? In view of the recent Virginia Tech massacre, it is easy to say that a mentally ill person should simply be locked up until his or her symptoms abate, but the fact is that treating mental illnesses rarely resolves a person's problems quickly. Instead, this…

Are Family Responsibilities Holding Back Female Scientists?

tags: researchblogging.org, women in science, feminism, gender disparity, academia, career Image: East Bay AWIS. An article was published in today's issue of Science that explores the reasons that female scientists are not achieving that elusive Principle Investigator (PI) status that is generally thought to be the epitome of success in academe. In short, this article argues that family responsibilities hold women back; women sacrifice their own career aspirations to care for children or elderly parents, and they also are more likely to sacrifice their career in favor of their spouse's…

Berry Butts: Parasitized Black Ants Resemble Red Berries

tags: researchblogging.org, neotropical ants, Cephalotes atratus, parasitic nematodes, Myrmeconema neotropicum, tetradonematid nematode, evolution, coevolution, fruit mimicry A neotropical black ant, Cephalotes atratus, infected with the newly described parasitic nematode, Myrmeconema neotropicum. The ant's infected and swollen abdomen does not actually take on a red pigment. It becomes a translucent amber. With the yellowish parasite eggs inside and a touch of sunlight, it appears bright red. Image: Steve Yanoviak, University of Arkansas. In the first known example of a parasite…

Salmonella in chicken: Multiple missed opportunities for prevention

The Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News has put together an excellent - and alarming - story on salmonella in chicken. Jeffrey Benzing, Esther French and Judah Ari Gross outline the problem this way: Salmonella is found in a range of food products, including meat, produce and eggs. Chicken is the single biggest source of infection among cases where a food has been identified, causing about 220,000 illnesses, 4,000 hospital stays and at least 80 deaths annually in the U.S., according to an analysis of CDC data by the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. But gaps in…

Still no day in court for worker safety violations at Crandall Canyon coal mine

NPR's Howard Berkes reported this week on the disposition of criminal and civil charges stemming from the disaster nearly four years ago at the Crandal Canyon mine in Utah. The makings of the catastrophe began months earlier, (previous posts here, here, here) but came to a deadly denouement in the early morning hours of August 6, 2007. An explosive outburst of rock and coal, related to the retreat-mining method in use at the mine, struck (killed) and buried six coal miners: Kerry "Flash" Allred, 57; Don Erickson, 50; Jose Luis Hernandez, 23; Juan Carlos Payan, 22; Brandon Phillips, 24; and…

Exaggerating the cost of workplace safety penalties, instead of limbs, lungs, lives saved

Kentucky’s Labor Secretary Derrick Ramsey announced this week that his department would be issuing a “Monthly Workplace Safety Report.” The report will provide a recap of the previous month’s safety consultation services, which are offered to employers at no charge by the state’s Division of Occupational Safety & Health Education & Training. The Labor Secretary says he wants to change the public's perceptions about the Division of Occupational Safety and Health’s work. “For years, employers across Kentucky viewed the issuance of penalties and citations as the cornerstone of the…

Yearbook on OHS profiles exceptional reporting by investigative journalists

This week’s recap of "The Year in US Occupational Health and Safety" concludes with the section dedicated to national reporting on worker health and safety topics. When Kim and I looked back over the past 12 months and brainstormed topics to include in the report, on the top of our list was the contributions of investigative journalists. The stories we profile in Section IV the report include the following: The New York Times’ Sarah Maslin Nir exposed the “price of pretty nails” in her investigation of working conditions for nail salon workers in the New York City area. In the May 2015 series…

Obama Administration takes next step to protect beryllium exposed workers

OSHA announced today that it is proposing a health standard to protect workers who are exposed to beryllium. Exposure to the lightweight but super strong metal causes a debilitating illness called chronic beryllium disease (CBD) and lung cancer. The proposed rule is coming about, in part, because of an effort by those who will be most affected by an OSHA beryllium regulation: the nation’s primary beryllium manufacturer, Materion, and the United Steelworkers (USW). They engaged in two years of negotiations to agree on key provisions of a regulation. In February 2012, they submitted their…

Researchers find food assistance program is linked with better mental health

Do food assistance programs deliver more than food and nutrition? Can relieving the stress of food insecurity provide positive psychological benefits as well? A new study says yes it can. In a study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers set out to examine whether participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly referred to as food stamps, was associated with better overall well-being and specifically, lower rates of psychological distress. In analyzing data from the SNAP Food Security survey, the largest longitudinal…

I Was a Cash Cow in Gambia

In the preceding entry I gave a list of good stuff about a Gambian vacation. Here's the flip side. My first trip to Africa, a week in Agadir, Morocco in the mid-1990s, was marred (but not ruined) by the locals' constant begging and aggressive attempts to sell me stuff. I recently relived this experience in Gambia's coastal resort district. The Gambians don't beg. But everybody tries to sell you goods and services all the time, often making you feel quite besieged. The room cleaner tried to sell my wife apples in the bathroom. The hotel's tailor nagged us daily about arranging an outing for us…

Landscape Archaeology, Muddy Boots

In front, a boulder upon which I found cupmarks. Behind, a Bronze Age burnt mound consisting of fire-cracked stones. In order to study the landscape situation of something you need to know precisely where it is. This poses a problem when it comes to Bronze Age sacrificial finds, because they are almost never made by someone who can document the find spot. They used to be found by farmers and workers before anybody owned a map and before there was a national grid, and they are no longer found much at all. Sacrificial finds, or "deposits", are defined by two negatives: they are not in graves…

Recent Archaeomags

The non-profit Center for Desert Archaeology is located in Tucson, Arizona and publishes a fine magazine, Archaeology Southwest. These generous people contacted me one day out of the blue and offered me a complimentary subscription. On Monday issue 23:3 (summer '09) reached my mail box on snowy Boat Hill, and I was soon enticed to read it from one end to the other thanks to its fine graphic design, its lovely photographs and its exotic theme. I learned a lot! Archaeology Southwest 23:3 is dedicated to Paleoindian archaeology in Arizona, New Mexico and the Mexican state of Sonora. The…

Frances, top weatherman

It (it? Philippe Verdier, possibly-ex-weatherman) is all a bit silly, but here's a snapshot from the Torygraph if you like. Its the same old stuff: We are hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change – a war machine whose aim is to keep us in fear... I received a letter telling me not to come. I'm in shock... This is a direct extension of what I say in my book, namely that any contrary views must be eliminated. Apparently the IPCC "blatantly erased" data that was contrary to their conclusions. Yawn. [Update: yup, definitely ex.] Oh, the picture? That's from The Wildlife Photographer Of…

Me on P. Thorne on Hansen et al.

I previously promised to read Hansen et al., and I finally have - well, at least skimmed. It hasn't really changed my opinions. global CO2 emissions continue to increase... the threat posed by ice sheet instability and sea level rise This is in accord with what I've said before, that the most obviously unambiguously bad physical consequence of GW is SLR (see What I think about global warming from 2010 for the rest, which I don't see any great reason to wish to update). So H focussing on it is understandable; but this leads to a regrettable tendency to need lots of SLR earlier than is…