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The Friday Fermentable: The Woody Creek Tavern for sale

If you've been to Aspen, Colorado, for a scientific conference you have no doubt made the bike ride down valley to the venerable Woody Creek Tavern for margaritas and such. (The ride back to town is a wee bit more challenging, by the way.) The Aspen Times now reports that the Tavern is up for sale: The Woody Creek Tavern is located along Upper River Road, adjacent to the Woody Creek Trailer Park. It has been a local hangout for about 27 years. It also has provided liquid refreshment, food, gossip and political cover to many diverse and famous personalities, including the late writer Hunter…

The 100-Mile Diet. Could you eat only food grown and produced within a 100 mile radius of your home?

It looks like a lot, but really it's not (hey, that rhymes) Clearly, food is a hot topic these days. You see it constantly in the cultural dominance of things like the Food Channel, Martha Stewart, or The Iron Chef. But more fittingly, thankfully even, you also see a boon of discussions that look closely (we're talking maybe even academically) at our relationship to the food we eat. And a lot of this dialogue has been spurred on by the existence of well written and engaging books by respected writers such as Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal,…

Would you buy a Vespa?

Sales of Vespas are up -- largely because of high oil prices. Vespas and other motorcycles have significantly greater fuel economy than your average car. Part of me is happy about this because it illustrates that people are making more fuel-efficient choices. When prices go up, people use less gas. Go figure. On the other hand, I don't think I will ever get over my aversion to riding a motorcycle -- inculcated by my ER doctor father who has had to deal with the grisly remains of motorcycle accidents. Fuel economy notwithstanding, I don't think I can get over the safety issue. It is as…

Plundering Congo: 5 million reasons to be ashamed

The history of Congo (and Africa, in general) is one of unbroken plundering by the outside world. And, history repeats more keenly in African than anywhere else. More than 5 million people have been murdered, women and children have been raped, families destroyed and unspeakable atrocities have been committed in Congo in the past decade - the consequence of the world's insatiable demand for raw materials. Johann Hari writes in The Independant: the debate about Congo in the West - when it exists at all - focuses on our inability to provide a decent bandage, without mentioning that we are…

How to smile in Japanese

The emoticon for "smile" in most western cultures is this :). One of the ScienceBloggers does it backwards (: (can you guess who?), but the symbol is essentially the same. In Japan, however, the smile is depicted like this: ^_^. You might think that's just because the traditions evolved separately, but emotion researcher Masaki Yuki doesn't buy it. He argues that the difference in Japanese emoticons is related to cultural differences in real smiles. when Yuki entered graduate school and began communicating with American scholars over e-mail, he was often confused by their use of emoticons…

Highway Robbery

I'm about to enter the Spring 2009 semester, a term that will probably be one of the most difficult I have ever faced. (For me, at least, the fall semester is always good and the spring is invariably wretched.) What has made it worse is the fact that I am required to shell out $60 for a course packet for one of my courses. Chad has recently written about the difficulties surrounding high-priced textbooks, but this is a little different. This is not a textbook, but a specially-selected collection of papers and articles assembled by the professors that could very easily be made available on the…

Adam Finkel Replies to Your Comments on Newsweek, Bob Samuelson, and Global Warming

There were a lot of comments to Friday's post, in which I shared U. Penn risk assessment specialist Adam Finkel's critique of a particularly bad Robert Samuelson column in Newsweek. Now, Finkel has come back and responded in detail to all of your comments. Check it out. A very brief excerpt: Unfortunately, economists have a HUGE problem thinking adequately about uncertainty in cost, and they tend to "solve" it by ignoring it. On a good day, they can tell us something about how much money is needed to drive the "partial equilibrium" phase of a regulatory program--the one in which some people…

Pandemic, the Board Game

We spent most of last night playing a very cool board game, Pandemic. It's sort of like Risk, but instead of fighting opposing players' armies, you're cooperating against a global wave of infections. In the game scenario, four different diseases break out in different regions of the world (they're given colors, not names, though you can guess at an ID based on the games' illustrations; one is clearly a bacillus, another is a filovirus). The players have to cooperate and pool their resources to treat and control local outbreaks, while searching for cures for all four diseases. The surprising…

The Earth Day 2009 resolutions meme.

Mike Dunford initiates a meme for Earth Day 2009: I'd like you to take a minute or two to come up with three things that you can do to be more environmentally friendly. The first should be something that's small, and easy to do. The second should be more ambitious - something you'll try to do, but might not manage to pull off. The third should be something you can do to improve something you're already doing. I love this meme! No matter what habits you've already cultivated (and we've cultivated a few), there's always room to optimize them. So here are my Earth Day 2009 resolutions:…

A WTF? fundamentalist moment

I was in Lansing, MI giving a talk at MSU the other day. Although time was very constrained and I didn't get to see much of the campus at all, on the way back to the airport, I saw a very odd fundamentalist billboard. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a picture of it with my cell phone camera; so I'll have to do the best that I can by memory to tell you what it says. The billboard said something like this (I could be off considerably in the exact phraseology, but this was the gist of the sign): Forgive us, O Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Too long we have relied upon the automobile industry…

Isn't Oxygen the opposite of anti-oxidant?

Why, yes it is, and that's why I've got a stupid product for you not to buy (not that my above-average-intelligence audience would anyway ;)  ). The POD, or Personal Oxygen Device, by GO2, is simply that: portable oxygen for you to "energize" and "refresh, restore, renew your mind and body on the cellular level with oxygen". Ooooo...cellular. Sounds scientificy, let's get it! First I have to note that if your body is short on oxygen, you'll simply breathe harder. Now, why is the product harmful? Oxygen is reactive, our bodies exploit this aspect by having O2 accept the energy that we use…

Sink into Nonsensical Squid Knowledge

Have you ever wondered if it is appropriate to wink at a west-coast squid? Or, perhaps, which of his tentacles is used for deep tissue massage? If you would like to know the answers to these questions, and more, but don't have time to slip through the looking glass and ask the Walrus (who likely wouldn't give an honest answer, anyways,) then this is the book for you. Animals of the Ocean, in Particular the Giant Squid is the latest installment in the How Book Series of the Haggis-on-Whey World of Unbelievable Brilliance, following such informative delights as Giraffes? Giraffes! Dr. and Mr.…

Where Hummingbirds and Ants Meet

Time for a gear shift on the Refuge. Handy-dandy tip number 105: "How to keep ants out of your hummingbird feeders". I can't say that I blame the ants for swarming over the feeders. After all, who doesn't love a little sucrose in solution with water? Heck, as my brother, an avid cyclist at one time, used to say "I never met a carbohydrate I didn't like." Anyway, no matter how careful I am about not spilling nectar, the local ants always seem to find the feeders. I don't know if they bother the hummers (mostly ruby throated where we live), but as the feeders are hanging off of our decks, I'm…

Monetizing Networks

There's one other angle to the social network story that I wasn't able to mention in my Wired essay. Right now, retail companies are investing a pretty penny in consumer preference algorithms, that AI software which suggests books to buy on Amazon, and DVD's to rent on Netflix, and songs to purchase on iTunes. The assumption is that human preferences are predictable - if you like Bob Dylan, you'll probably like Astral Weeks; if you like How We Decide, you might like Predictably Irrational; if you like The Wire, you might like Homicide, or The Shield. These algorithms have their limitations,…

Mathematical proof that God Spoke Creation (if you buy his book)

One of my fellow SBers, Kevin over at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge wrote a scathing article reviewing an incredibly bad anti-evolution blog. There's no way that I can compete with Kevin's writing on the topic - you should really check it out for a great example of just how to take a moronic creationist, and reduce him to a whimpering puddle of protoplasm. But while looking at the site that Kevin shredded, I can across a link to another really, really bad site, and this one is clearly in my territory: Science Proves Creation, a site set up by an individual named "Samuel J. Hunt". Mr…

Birds in the News 100 (v3n27)

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Can anyone out there identify these mysterious birds? I have no information about the birds, such as location, but several experts are already proposing their guesses (one thinks it's a Chough, another one disagrees). Several ornithologists think these birds are captives rather than wild birds. [larger view]. Birds in Science Urban birds are regular tough guys compared to their country cousins. The avian urbanites adapt to changing environments and noisy, crowded habitats, a new study shows. Birds that hang out on…

How would you like your placenta? Broiled or freeze-dried?

After nearly 11 years (!) at this blogging thing, I thought I had covered pretty much every medical topic a skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine would be interested in covering. However, if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that there's always something I've missed, some hole in my blogging oeuvre that needs to be filled. Perhaps when I've been at this for 20 years I'll have filled them all in. Even if that becomes true sometime in the next nine years, I will likely have only filled in the old gaps, while new ones will have formed. Dealing with pseudoscience is…

McMastergate in chronological order, or, Do libraries need librarians? (Updated!)

So, here's the story. A week or so ago, McMaster University Librarian Jeff Trzeciak gave an invited presentation at Penn State, tasked by the organizers to be controversial. To say the least, he succeeded. Perhaps the most controversial idea in the presentation was that he would basically no longer hire librarians for his organization, only subject PhDs and IT specialists. As you can imagine, the library blogosphere and Friendfeedosphere has had a field day with this one. You can see the slide in question here and get a bit of a background on the situation of librarians at McMaster here.…

A Spectacular Chance for Gravitational Waves

"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -Isaac Asimov One of the most spectacular and successful ideas of the 20th Century was Einstein's General Relativity, or the idea that matter and energy determines the curvature of spacetime, and the curvature of spacetime in turn determines how gravitation works. Image credit: Hyper-Mathematics - Uzayzaman / Spacetime. From the orbits of planets to the bending of starlight, General Relativity governs all gravitational phenomena in the Universe, and accurately describes every observation we've…

Combatting the alt-med stereotype of oncologists anxious to administer toxic chemotherapy

It is an article of faith among believers in alternative cancer cures that conventional oncology consists mainly of a bunch of money-hungry surgeons and oncologists who want nothing more than to cut, poison, and burn patients with cancer and charge them enormous sums of money to do so for as long as they can until the poisonous chemotherapy finally kills them. It is an evil and malicious caricature, of course. People don’t endure four years of medical school, three to five years of residency, and three years of fellowship in order to be able to cut, poison, and burn without regard for whether…

At long last, Dromeosaur tracks!

The sculpted skull of the AMNH Deinonychus mount. For nearly as long as I can remember, artistic depictions of Deinonychus and related dromeosaurs have featured the dinosaur as a pack hunter, often pouncing on a hapless ornithischian like Tenontosaurus (see here, here, here, and here for examples). After being confronted with such imagery time and time again I didn't think twice about the pack-hunting behavior in Deinonychus as a kid, but I started to wonder on what evidence all these gory illustrations were based. The popular books in my own library treated the behavior as a fact and gave…

Visualize This! Interview with Moshe Pritsker

Moshe Pritsker and I first met at Scifoo, then shared a panel at the Harvard Millennium Confreence and finally met again at the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago. Moshe is the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visualized Experiments, the innovative online journals that publishes videos demonstrating laboratory techniques. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job? I am a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). It is my full…

From Viruses to Viral Video: Interview with Anna Kushnir

Anna Kushnir was one of the first bloggers on the Nature Blog Network, she writes a personal food blog and recently started running the JoVE blog. We first met at the Science Foo Camp last August, then at the Foodblogging event in Durham, then at the Millenium conference at Harvard, then at the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago, where Anna was on the Student blogging panel--from K to PhD. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job? At least for the next…

Think of a Dust-Free Keypad: Interview with Rose Reis

Rose Reis interviewed me in person on the Sunday morning right after the second Science Blogging Conference in January. Then, I got scooped for the interview. But I will not be deterred - so here is, finally, the exclusive interview with Rose for A Blog Around The Clock: Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real World job? Hi, Bora! I am your biggest fan! Apart from that, I am a program specialist at the INFO Project, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of…

February Pieces Of My Mind #2

The 1844 bridal chest that my great granddad donated to the Nordic Museum in 1940. I've decided that although immigration and refugees are important political issues, I've been reading too much about them lately. Redistribution of wealth and flattening the pyramid is even more important. Because wealth equals power. I don't give a damn about the US primaries. A brother of Queen Euphemia of Norway was Bishop of Cammin, whose cathedral is famous for a Danish casket from about AD 1000, decorated with Mammen style animal art. The surname Garfunkel means "carbuncle, garnet" and is thus…

A beat up of Himalayan proportions

Newspapers such as the London Times are reporting that the IPCC is about to retract something from the AR4 WG2 report: A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. The claim was indeed wrong. John Nielsen-Gammon has written a detailed analysis of the error with an update here. I've discovered a bit more about it, which I will get to presently, but first I want to look at the Times statement that it was a "central claim" and the New York Times statement that it was a "much-publicized estimate". Actually, the estimate does…

SOPA: Why it's a bad idea

The Stop Online Piracy Act is a piece of legislation in the US whose aims are: The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who makes the request, the court order could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill…

Short Breaks May Counteract Toll of Sedentary Time

As Travis Saunders has explained, evidence is accumulating about the unhealthy effects of excessive sedentary time. This isn't just because sitting burns fewer calories than walking or standing, but because sedentary behavior is associated with changes in triglyceride uptake, HDL cholesterol, and insulin resistance. And bouts of intense exercise every morning or evening can't completely offset the effects of spending several hours sitting at a desk or behind the wheel. Given that a large segment of our population works at sedentary jobs, this is disturbing news. But a recent story by NPR's…

Information Insecurity

I only started using FriendFeed a few months ago because other people at the Science in the 21st Century workshop were documenting the conference on it. I quickly became a fan of the service, which not only added an extra dimension to the meeting, but has also been a continuing source of interesting material from the feeds of others. If you're not familiar with it, FriendFeed is a service that aggregates online content from other sources, and puts out a feed of all your online activity. my feed, for example, includes blog posts, del.icio.us links, YouTube videos, Flickr pictures, and…

Matthew Hughes, Template [Library of Babel]

A little while back, Matthew Hughes offered a free copy of his forthcoming novel Template to online reviewers via his web site. I wasn't able to read it fast enough to get in on James Nicoll's review-a-thon, but I finished it a few days ago. Template is set in the same basic world as Majestrum, a human civilization many millennia in the future, where Old Earth is ruled by an Archonate, and the high aristocrats have worked so hard to refine their perception of rank and status that they have difficulty even noticing the presence of ordinary citizens. The new book doesn't start off on Old Earth…

Science Online 2010: Lessons for IRs and data curators

One way and another, I heard quite a lot of talk at Science Online 2010 relevant to the interests of institutional-repository managers and (both would-be and actual) data curators. Some of the lessons learned weren't exactly pleasant, but there's just no substitute for listening to your non-users to find out why they're not taking advantage of what you offer. In no particular order, here is what I took away: The take-a-file-give-a-file content model for IRs is much too limited and limiting. Real live scientists are mashing up all sorts of things as they do their work; one wiki-based lab…

The Affordable Care Act's First Year: A Few Disappointments, Lots of Progress

Exactly one year ago, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - the most sweeping change to US healthcare since the legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. The law's most important achievement is its creation of a system that will slash our nation's shameful uninsurance rate by an estimated two-thirds once it's fully implemented. Public opinion on the law is still mixed, and that's likely due to two things. First, many of the law's provisions won't kick in until 2014. Second, for those of us with a reliable source of affordable health…

A bouquet of fallacies from Gary Becker and Stephen Dubner

Stephen Dubner quotes Gary Becker as saying: According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life. Dubner describes this as making "perfect sense" and as being "so unusual and so valuable." When I first saw this I was irritated and whipped off a quick entry on the sister blog. But then I had some more systematic thoughts of how Becker's silly-clever statement, and Dubner's reaction to it, demonstrate several logical fallacies that I haven't…

What's New on ScienceBlogs.de

It's been a little over a week since ScienceBlogs launched a beta version of its first daughter site, in German. Today, we present what we hope will be the first of many informal updates on what's buzzing among the 13 German-language blogs at ScienceBlogs.de. (Unless noted, links will take you to posts in the original Deutsch.) Thanks to German Sb editor Beatrice Lugger for her translations. 1. The UN on Forests The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali wasn't the only scientifically-interesting UN activity in the first half of December. The United Nations Forum on Forests had a…

Jobs: work with Project Exploration!

POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT: Title: Manager of Web and Publications Reports to: Director of Operations Project Exploration Background: Cofounded in 1999 by paleontologist Paul Sereno and educator Gabrielle Lyon, Project Exploration is a nonprofit science education organization that works to make science accessible to the public-- especially minority youth and girls--through personalized experiences with science and scientists. Project Exploration meets its mission through youth development programs, services for schools and teachers, and public programs such as exhibits and online initiatives.…

Online Social Media: Taming the Beast for the Classroom Part I

ejbSF's Flickr photostream My office is often a flurry of activity with students coming with a wide array of questions. Whenever possible, I respond to their questions via email. Last Fall, one of our students expressed dismay when I told her I would respond to her request with an email. "Email, Dr. Toney? That's so old fashioned." After some thought, I realized she was right. After all, I sent my first email message sometime before the class of 2014 was born (in the early to mid 1990's), so it should be no surprise that this form of communication could be seen as quaint. It is…

What do you think are the most important events in politics, science, the environment, etc. this year?

This is what I was thinking: Nationally and globally, the most important events probably included the Earthquake in Haiti (not to minimize the importance of the current, ongoing cholera epidemic there); the dramatic increase of the use of stem cells in therapy (and research) with some real potential for cures just around the corner; Tiger Woods did not get laid all year; Iceland's volcanic eruption and its effects on European travel; New research shows that tigers are about to become extinct in the wild and there isn't much we can do about it, though token efforts will be made; The end of the…

Redefining 'Redneck' and Faux Populism

One of things I never got around to blogging about after the 2008 election was how lower-income whites do vote Democratic, even in the South, despite misperceptions on both the left and right to the contrary. In that vein, Amanda, commenting on Alexandra Pelosi's campaign documentary, clarifies a phenomenon that I couldn't quite jibe with the polling data (and the long history of lower income whites voting for Democrats at higher rates than other white economic groups). What we're witnessing is the transformation of a class-based term into a culture-based one: But please look past the…

Failing the Pepsi Challenge

It took a couple of days, but the overlords at SEED Media Group have aborted the Food Frontiers blog. If anyone is still wondering why so many members of the Scienceblogs community abandoned ship after we learned that Pepsi had bought itself blogging space at SB, as good an explanation as any can be found in an email I received Thursday from a friend of the family. She had copied me on a letter she had written to SB CEO Adam Bly: I am just a lay reader but reasonably well educated (law degree, clinical psychology BS summa cum laude). I follow climate and science issues as closely as I can -…

Shout Out to sciencegeekgirl!

This week we have found a couple of bloggers who have promoted the festival on their blogs! A shout out to Dr. Stephanie Chasteen at sciencegeekgirl with a blog post this week about the festival! Do you have a blog and would like to help us get the word out about the science festival? Contact us if you have written a post about the festival. We will give you a shout out, re-post it here and link to your blog. Thanks! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From sciencegeek girl's blog post on March 10: USA Science & Engineering Festival - October in DC Sorry…

The Indonesian vaccine problem again

Indonesia has still to provide the WHO flu surveillance program with any H5N1 viral isolates since the first of the year. The issue is access to what will certainly be a scarce vaccine supply if a pandemic would start in the next five or or even ten years. The leading candidate for a pandemic strain at the moment is one that starts in Indonesia, the world's current hotspot for avian influenza both in poultry and people. So controlling access of vaccine makers to H5N1 isolate from within its borders recognizes they have something the rich countries that have the vaccine plants need. One reason…

McCain on climate change: Bush league

For all you climate change deniers out there dismayed at John McSame's apparent embrace of global warming, you have nothing to fear: John McCain had the eager press lined up on this one for weeks. He was going to take a stand and differentiate himself from Bush by offering his solution to climate change. And today was the momentous day. McCain made his speech and no less than the New York Times dutifully trotted out an article titled McCain Differs With Bush on Climate Change. (Devilstower at Daily Kos) The 71% of the electorate thinks the globe is warming and of these, human activity is…

Failure of pandemic preparedness: look in the mirror [rant alert]

The AP's Margie Mason is a pretty good flu reporter and she has a story on the wires today whose title encapsulates the bird flu history of the last four years: Bird flu continues march 4 years later. The number of human deaths is still not large -- a few hundred -- just a day at the office in Iraq. But the virus just keeps extending its geographic range in poultry stocks and wherever it does it there is a risk of human infections. Fourteen countries so far have officially confirmed influenza A/H5N1 cases. The number of birds killed by infection or slaughtered to prevent the spread of…

Grant writing

Writing a big grant proposal can be an all consuming affair. At least it's consuming all of me. And it's not because it's my first time. I wish. In fact it's the fourth time I'm doing this particular competitive renewal for a mega research program I've managed to keep continuously funded for 16 years. But each 5 year cycle it gets tougher, not easier and I wind up thinking about it all the time. The whole experience is reminiscent of the story of the World War I doctor given the task of selecting one of three volunteers for a dangerous and urgent mission. There was only time to ask each…

Profiting from others' suffering---the difference between skeptical doctors and crooks

Morgellons "disease" is not a disease in any classic sense. There are no agreed-upon definitions of a case, so all else is meaningless. That being said, people are suffering. Since they feel ignored by doctors, they seek help elsewhere. It's a problem in thinking, in some ways. When you don't feel well, you should seek help from a professional and see what they think, rather than have a fixed idea of what's wrong, and find a professional to confirm it. Otherwise, we wouldn't need professionals. I could simply call my chest pain "Pal's chest pain syndrome", and, no matter what the…

Yoko has an opponent

This is actually somewhat interesting, and I'm not going to reject all of it out of hand. The Fair Use Project of Stanford Law School is going to defend the use of Lennon's song "Imagine" in the movie Expelled. On the one hand, they are using a very short clip — and I am not a fan of the kind of draconian enforcement of every second of a song that the music industry seems to favor. There are reasonable grounds for fair use of short clips of music … the question is whether this is one of those cases. On the other hand, I think Premise is horribly dishonest, and this press release is personally…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Boy Or Girl? It's In The Father's Genes: A Newcastle University study involving thousands of families is helping prospective parents work out whether they are likely to have sons or daughters. The work by Corry Gellatly, a research scientist at the university, has shown that men inherit a tendency to have more sons or more daughters from their parents. This means that a man with many brothers is more likely to have sons, while a man with many sisters is more likely to have daughters. The Last Neandertals? Late Neandertals And Modern Human Contact In Southeastern Iberia: It is widely accepted…

Facebook News and (my) Views

Let's start with some Essential Facebook Readings of the day: The Facebook Juggernaut...bitch! Where are Facebook's Early Adopters Going? Hmmm, Facebook: a new kind of press release All your widgets are belong to Facebook Why We're Like a Million Monkeys on Treadmills Facebook: the new data black hole What would get me (and others) to shut up about Facebook? Why I Dropped Scoble and Seceded from the Hunt for Newer Shinier Things My predictions for the near future, and I'll explain them below: 1) In a Clash Of Titans, Google turns iGoogle into something better than Facebook. Facebook is…

Iceland's Freezeout

So how did the li'lest economy get frozen first? So Iceland's economy is facing an interesting shock, first banks failing and now foreign currency reserves running out. How they got there is interesting, and also a pointer to how they'll get out. (this is my perspective, from the outside, I am not a financial analyst) Iceland deregulated in the late 80s and 90s, moving from an economy hinged on a single line of export, to an aggressive modern anglo-american style post-industrial economy, tech heavy, and heavily leveraged making aggressive finanical investments in niche markets. Iceland got…

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus!

Whew, dodged a mistake — the movie is on RIGHT NOW! An alert reader caught me in time and let me know I live in the Central Time Zone. I haven't even touched the hooch yet. It starts with Deborah Gibson, Submarine Pilot, dodging angry whales, and...breaking a giant octopus out of a block of ice? And it then destroys an oil drilling platform? I'm confused. That means I have to take a sip. (No, not a drink. I plan to survive this event. A shark just leapt up and ate a jetliner? What the hell? OK, big drink. Never mind survival. I may not make it through this abomination. It's not just the…