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Location fun

This will be old hat to most people but I've discovered two funky new location-type things today. Number one, after I got a puncture and so needed a taxi back home, was getting a text from the taxi company saying "your driver is 2 mins away; click this to track him" whereupon I did, and got a cute Google map that showed him moving up the Milton road, stopping at all the traffic lights. I haven't tried Uber; I presume it is similar. Number two was after I discussed with him how this was done. It is, of course, as I should have guessed but didn't, not a special hardware fit to the vehicle but…

Links for 2012-04-12

What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions | Brain Pickings So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? It seems like a simple question, but it's an infinitely complex one, the answer to which is ever elusive and contentious. Gathered here are several eloquent definitions that focus on science as process rather than product, whose conduit is curiosity rather than certainty. Inside the DOJ's ebook price-fixing case against Apple: an analysis | The Verge We just got our hands on the DOJ's antitrust complaint…

Don't Miss the Perseids

Did you notice something funny about the Google logo yesterday? It was full of falling stars. This marked the maximum of this year's Perseid meteor shower. Every year about this time, Earth moves through the exhaust cloud left behind by the comet Swift-Tuttle. When gravel and sand from the comet enters our atmosphere the grains burn brightly, looking like shooting stars. The meteor shower, that has been known for over 2000 years, looks like it originates in the constellation named for the Greek hero Perseus. But Swift-Tuttle itself wasn't observed until 1862! Last night before bed time me and…

Me And My Tea

I love black tea, and by that I mean brews from leaves of Camellia sinensis and C. s. assamica, nothing else, milk and sugar please. Earl Grey is basically Assam flavoured with oil of bergamot, a citrus fruit. It's OK if there's no plain tea. But many café employees believe that Earl Grey is plain tea. Sometimes I drink honeybush which is kind of nice, but that's another plant and nothing compared to real tea. I don't like rooibos much. Here are my favourite teas. Assam CTC. This is Crushed, Torn and Curled Assamica. Dark, strong, the main ingredient in "English breakfast". Yunnan (Swedes,…

Damn Good Swedish Soul

Lately I've been listening a lot to Damn!'s fourth album, Let's Zoom In, that was released last year. Damn! is an unfortunately namned soul/funk octet from Malmö in southern Sweden, mostly known as a backing band for rapper Timbuktu. Excellent stuff, among the best music the country has to offer! Though the album's main single played in the live clip above is a shouting-blues type of thing, most of it is dominated by ultra-smooth Curtis Mayfield style falsetto singing. And there's a lot of kraftwerkesque vocoder on it too. As I explained to my wife yesterday, a vocoder is a beautiful thing…

New Office

I've been working as a consulting editor for the Royal Academy of Letters for almost a decade, most of that time from home. But since 2006 I've had an office at Academy headquarters in a quiet part of Stockholm. This is very good for alleviating the isolation of a non-affiliated scholar. But the actual room I've been in had its upsides and downsides. It's part of a museum on the premises, which meant that while I did have the world's gayest tiled stove, I unfortunately also had to use a little 19th century writing desk designed for a petite lady. Furthermore, I always had to get out before…

Take Your Flu Shot

I have just spent a week nursing my family through an onset of the flu. High fever. Bucketfuls of snotty bog roll. Headaches. Stomach aches. Rattling coughs. Shoving innumerable paracetamol suppositories where the sun don't shine. But I was unscathed myself. Dear Reader, come autumn, do what I did and take your flu shot. I have sometimes met with incredulity, even opposition, from the district nurse when I've popped down for my annual vaccination. "You're a strong healthy young(ish) man, you don't need a flu shot!" Indeed. I do not need a flu shot to survive. But it costs only $20, takes only…

Bones of Copernicus Get Positive ID

Polish bishop asks archaeologists to find the unmarked grave of Nicolaus Copernicus under the floor of Frombork Cathedral. Archaeologists find a damaged burial including a jawless skull, and note that it's a male of the right age and with signature wounds visible on contemporary portraits of the astronomer. But they're still not quite sure if they have the right bones. So they do something extremely smart. They vacuum a book known to have belonged to Copernicus, kept in a library in Uppsala, and they get little bits of human hair out of it. Then they have the hairs and a number of bones and…

Donkey Shot

I'm reading Steven L. Kent's engrossing 2001 book The Ultimate History of Video Games, and of course it reminds me of a lot of games I played as a kid. My first real video games were played on the Atari VCS/2600. (The book is in my home because my 10-y-o son is both a video gamer and a bookworm, and took it out from the library.) A memory. It's 1982 or '83. The Nintendo Donkey Kong Game & Watch is the hottest game around. My classmate Pär comes up to me in the hallway in school and asks me if I "saw Donkey Shot". Confused I reply that of course I've seen Donkey Kong, everybody has one…

Tee hee

VV has the main story but this little pic tells the tale... ...that "Stoat" is in bigger letters than just about anyone else other than RealClimate (well, duh) and ATTP (gnashes teeth). Actually, that's not the story. The funny bit is the "yellow ghetto" featuring the anti-science folks: WUWT, BH, and Climate Etc, tee hee. La Curry is not amused, as you'd really rather hope. I imagine Mark Lynas isn't desperately happy either. von S is welcome to the ghetto after publishing tripe from Alex Harvey; and CA? Well, pffft. Update: there's now an updated graphic, http://bit.ly/MySciBlogREAD (h/t A…

Starry night

Isaac Held again. Though nobody cared last time. A reminder that you can do basic interesting things with GCMs; that abstract thinking on problems can be illuminating; and that atmospheric dynamics is more complicated than you thought. The video is from his blog; it shows "tropical cyclones" via their wind speed over a month of simulation on an [[f plane]] representation. Its a very heavily idealised model: SST is constant, there is no land, and the Coriolis parameter is a constant. And they find that in those circumstances, the model fills up with long-lived "tropical cyclones". The real…

Dale is a boys name.

PZ officially wins the internet. He wins it. Its his. A month ago, he did what any of us would do-- defended a kid from Reavers 'Catholics'. His reward? A month of bullshit. The Reavers 'Catholics' are still frothing at the mouth. But I guess Reavers 'Catholics' can hold a long grudge, the creepy, creepy author of this article is even still bitching about EXPELLED (I thought Catholics accepted evolution?). LOL! Let it go, Reavers 'Catholics'. You lost this round. You didnt get away with assaulting a kid. You didnt get to fire a professor who refused to give Jesus blow-jobs. You…

What do the DI fellows think of the ADL?

I know Im not the only one who has eagerly anticipated the Discovery Institutes response to the ADL officially denouncing EXPELLED. Well John Kwok is not one to sit by and wait patiently for a press release. He emailed dear David Klinghoffer, 'Jew', DI fellow, to ask about his position on EXPELLED: Dear David, The Anti-Defamation League issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of 'Darwinism' with Nazism in 'Expelled'. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design or belong to a…

Interesting Times For Chess and Go Players

For the chess fans, the big candidates tournament begins in Moscow tomorrow. Eight of the top players in the world will be competing for the chance to face Magnus Carlsen in a match for the title. As it happens, the US has two representatives: Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura. Going strictly by ratings, they are the first and third seeds. And they are paired in the first round! And Go is center stage as well. Hot on the heels of the first-ever victory by a computer over a strong human go player, Google's program AlphaGo is now playing a five-game match with the human world champion…

Bill Maher on Abstinence Programs

From Salon.com (you have to view a commercial to get free access to the whole article: New Rule: Abstinence pledges make you horny. A new eight-year study just released reveals that American teenagers who take "virginity" pledges of the sort so favored by the Bush administration wind up with just as many STDs as the other kids. But that's not all -- taking the pledges also makes a teenage girl six times more likely to perform oral sex, and a boy four times more likely to get anal. Which leads me to an important question: where were these pledges when I was in high school? Seriously, when I…

Joining a Group Blog

I am pleased to announce that I have been invited to join In The Agora as a contributor and have accepted that invitation. For those who are not familiar with it, In the Agora is an excellent group blog founded by Josh Claybourn and Paul Musgrave. I have admired their work from afar and linked to them once in a while; ironically, this invitation came as a result of having been critical of something Josh had written about a recent Supreme Court decision. I have long considered them to be two of the best young conservative writers, and I am pleased that they've asked this mildly left-wing…

Shanley Gets Sentenced

Paul Shanley, the defrocked Boston priest convicted of raping and molesting a 6 year old boy in his parish, has been sentenced to 12-15 years in prison. At 74, it is likely a death sentence for all practical purposes. But here's what bothers me about the whole priest sex scandal issue. Why are there no bishops being brought up on charges of obstructing justice or failure to report child abuse? In dozens of cases, the church has been made aware of priests sexually abusing children and has required them to go to counseling and moved them to another parish. In no case, so far as I know, has any…

A Big Thank You

I have to send out a box full of gratitude to Reed Cartwright, who was kind enough to rescue me from my cluelessness and install the mt-blacklist plugin on my blog. I have tried several times and couldn't seem to get it to work, so I sent Reed and email and asked him for help and he got it working for me, and also upgraded my MT software to version 3.14 while he was at it. Reed is also the man who handles virtually all of the programming work at the Panda's Thumb, hacking away at the MT code and producing the wonderful style sheet that it uses (which is so much better than mine). He's one of…

The Most Impossible Idea From Star Trek (Synopsis)

“‘Star Trek’ says that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived.” -Gene Roddenberry Today would have been the 95th birthday of Gene Roddenberry, the mind that brought us the Universe of Star Trek. In addition to a utopia where maladies like hunger, disease and poverty were eradicated, Star Trek promised a future where technology was widely available and sufficiently advanced to the benefit of all of humanity. Image credit: ©2015 KGO-TV, of the “Scanadu” medical tricorder. While many of these…

Weekend Diversion: The Best Mining Destination (Synopsis)

“Well, this is a thing unheard of. An Elf would go underground, where a Dwarf dare not. Oh, I’d never hear the end of it.” -Gimli, Lord of the Rings When you think about the different elements present here on Earth, I hope you think about the different ways they bind together, combine, and add value to all we do. Extracting them is a great difficulty, as Uncle Tupelo will sing to you in their song, Coalminers. Image credit: Theodore Gray, via http://theodoregray.com/periodictable/Posters/index.posters.html. For each pure element, there's an abundance in our Solar System that's relatively…

Mostly Mute Monday: The Beauty Of Reflection Nebulae (Synopsis)

“Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” -Ernest Holmes When you've got a gas cloud in space that emits light, it's only for one of two reasons: Either it's at high enough temperatures that its atoms are excited and it's emitting its own light as the electrons fall in energy and recombine with nuclei, Or it's cool and neutral, and is reflecting light off of the brightest stars in its vicinity. That latter case has a dead giveaway: it always shines blue. Image credit: ESO/Igor Chekalin, via http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1105a/. But there's much…

Throwback Thursday: A Static Electricity Surprise (Synopsis)

“Electricity can be dangerous. My nephew tried to stick a penny into a plug. Whoever said a penny doesn’t go far didn’t see him shoot across that floor. I told him he was grounded.” -Tim Allen Static electricity is often the first exposure to physics beyond gravity that we encounter in our lives. Simply rub a balloon against a piece of fabric, and you can stick it to almost anything (or anyone) you like, possibly to their chagrin. No idea where this image came from. But it’s maybe the best one I’ve ever seen. But the way you probably learned that it happens -- rub two materials together,…

Pluto’s Unique Moons! (Synopsis)

“Movin’ right along. You take it, you know best. Hey, I’ve never seen the Sun come up in the West?” -The Muppet Movie Few things in this world are as regular as sunrise and sunset. With the application of a little physics, you can predict exactly where and when the sun will rise or set from any location on Earth. Thus far, every world in our Solar System -- planet, moon and asteroid -- has had the exact same experience as us. Image credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry, of the LADEE spacecraft. But out in the Kuiper belt, Pluto is different. The only known world in the Solar System where a…

Mostly Mute Monday: Sunsets from Space (Synopsis)

“Lost — yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.” -Horace Mann The beauty of a sunset (or sunrise) is rare and unique, happening but once a day for those of us on Earth. But aboard a spacecraft like the ISS, these are sights that happen sixteen times a day. Image credit: NASA / Karen Nyberg / ISS Expedition 36/37. And while we're used to dramatic, slow sunsets where it takes between two and three minutes simply for the Sun's disk to drop below the horizon, it takes mere seconds…

Will the LHC be able to test String Theory? (Synopsis)

A few weeks ago, Amanda Peet gave a public lecture that we live-blogged here. In the Q&A part after the talk, she made a statement that I sort of glossed over: that the LHC was able to verify some of the predictions of String Theory. In my head, I thought, "yeah, all the predictions that the Standard Model itself made, and nothing more." And I let it go. Image credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation, via http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/conversation-with-brian-greene.html. But maybe it's time to ask that question for real: will the LHC be able to test String Theory? And if so, how?…

Ask Ethan #88: Where is the Cosmic Microwave Background? (Synopsis)

“We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won’t need to tell anybody it does. Lighthouses don’t fire cannons to call attention to their shining- they just shine.” -Dwight L. Moody When it comes to the farthest thing we can see in the Universe, that's the Cosmic Microwave Background, or the leftover glow from the Big Bang, emitted when the Universe was a mere 380,000 years old. But what, exactly, does this mean? Image credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration. Does it mean that we're seeing the "edge" of the Universe? Does it mean that there's nothing to see, farther back…

Ask Ethan #87: The Shape Of The Universe (Synopsis)

“Never erase your past. It shapes who you are today and will help you to be the person you’ll be tomorrow.” -Ziad K. Abdelnour But even moreso than the fact that we're shaped by our past, the Universe itself -- geometrically -- is shaped by its history and composition. You might imagine all sorts of possibilities for how the Universe could have been shaped: positively curved like a higher-dimensional sphere, negatively curved like a higher-dimensional saddle, folded back on itself like a donut/torus, or spatially flat on the largest scales, like a giant Cartesian grid. Image credit:…

String Theory, Black Holes, and Reality (Synopsis)

“I just think too many nice things have happened in string theory for it to be all wrong. Humans do not understand it very well, but I just don’t believe there is a big cosmic conspiracy that created this incredible thing that has nothing to do with the real world.” -Ed Witten So the cat is out of the bag, and has been for a long time: as far as theoretical physics ideas go, I think String Theory is a blind alley, a dead end, an idea for whom the fat lady has sung. Image credit: Perimeter Institute’s Public Lecture series. But all it takes is one prediction -- a prediction that's unique…

Bring Deep Space Home (Synopsis)

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.” -Carl Sagan For thousands of years, humanity has looked up at the night sky and wondered at what might be out there. For the first time in all of our history, we not only have the answers to what's present in the Universe, we not only know the nature of most objects we see (and infer), but we even have images and true-to-life (we think) illustrations of them all. Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Wouldn't it be great if there were a book out…

Astroquizzical: What happens to light when it hits the Sun? (Synopsis)

Over at Starts With A Bang, Jillian Scudder of Astroquizzical takes on a doozy of a question: If a photon of light escapes from a star, when it hits another star, does it get absorbed and have to complete another cycle before it can escape again? After all, it takes (on average) over 100,000 years for a photon created in a star's core to find its way to the surface and exit. Image credit: NASA/Jenny Mottar. But what about the photons -- much lower energy than the gamma rays the core generates -- that hit the surface? Will they simply be absorbed and re-emitted outward, the way the Earth's…

The astronomical objects that shouldn’t exist (Synopsis)

“Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.” -Boris Pasternak When it comes to theoretical physics, you might realize the entire point is to set up a framework to predict what phenomena are going to occur in the Universe. So if you rewind the clock back to very early times, set up the initial conditions and apply those laws, you would expect to get our Universe out, if we've gotten things correct. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Unmismoobjetivo; of a logarithmic view of the Universe as centered on the Earth. And if we don't have things figured out properly? We'll start…

Mostly Mute Monday: A Comet Comes Alive! (Synopsis)

“In the year 1456 … a Comet was seen passing Retrograde between the Earth and the sun… Hence I dare venture to foretell, that it will return again in the year 1758.” -Edmond Halley When ESA's Rosetta mission "caught" its target, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August, 2014, one of its main science goals was to watch the comet become active from up close. Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM — CC BY-SA IGO 3.0, via http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2015/02/Comet_on_31_January_201…. Half a year later, the flux of particles being emitted by the comet has intensified tremendously, and so…

Ask Ethan #75: How can we still see the Big Bang? (Synopsis)

“We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.” -Dejan Stojanovic When we look back to greater and greater distances in the Universe, we're looking back to earlier and earlier times as well. At some point, we can see far enough back that we reach the location at which the Universe cooled enough to first form stable, neutral atoms. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss. But this is no nearby location: it's presently located some 45.3 billion light-years away! All the stars, galaxies, clusters and gas clouds that…

The Big Bang by Balloon (Synopsis)

If you want to map the entire sky -- whether you're looking in the visible, ultraviolet, infrared or microwave, your best bet is to go to space. Only high above the Earth's atmosphere can you map out the entire sky, with your vision unobscured by anything terrestrial. Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration. But that costs hundreds of millions of dollars for the launch alone! What if you've got new technology you want to test? What if you still want to defeat most of the atmosphere? (Which you need to do, for most wavelengths of light.) And what if you want to make observations on…

Science by democracy doesn’t work (Synopsis)

“Even when Darwin’s teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.” -Trofim Lysenko We love having debates when there's a disagreement. When there are multiple competing explanations for an effect, multiple possible causes, and multiple ideas flying around, different people will inevitably be drawn towards different sides. Image credit: Springer 2007 / Union of Concerned Scientists, via http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology…

Fixing Occam's Razor (Synopsis)

“It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.” -Amelia Barr All things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the best. At least, that's how Occam's razor is most commonly phrased these days. Yet, when it comes to the headlines -- whether it's a "discovery" of dark matter or "evidence" for life on Mars -- you have to wonder what "simple" actually means. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SAM-GSFC / Univ. of Michigan. The answer isn't what most people suspect, and it shouldn't really be up for debate. If you want to hypothesize that something novel is occurring, something…

Throwback Thursday: The Universe’s Fate (Synopsis)

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.” -Robert Frost Sure, it's getting colder and colder all over the northern hemisphere, as the cold season of winter approaches. But we can be fairly confident that this won't be the case forever: the Earth will tilt its northern hemisphere back towards the Sun, and warmer weather, after a few months, will ensue once again. Image credit: Jean-Charles…

Messier Monday: The Little Dumbbell Nebula, M76 (Synopsis)

“If there is nothing new under the sun, at least the sun itself is always new, always re-creating itself out of its own inexhaustible fire.” -Michael Sims It takes the death of old stars to create the newer generations of stars in the Universe, and it's through the very act of that stellar death that "interesting" material finds its way into the Universe. This way, the subsequent generations of star systems will have more heavy elements, more rocky planets, more complex chemistry, and -- in the end -- more opportunities for life. Image credit: J-P Metsavainio, via http://astroanarchy.…

Weekend Diversion: Space & Science Nail Art (Synopsis)

“Once I knew only darkness and stillness… my life was without past or future… but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.” -Helen Keller Our tiny, little fingers make all the difference in the world, enabling us the use and manipulation of advanced tools, among many other things. Why shouldn't we use them for luck, as Laura Marling would sing us in her song, Cross Your Fingers, or for our own artistic enjoyment wherever we go? Image credit: Scientista Foundation / Cosmetic Proof, via http://www.…

Ask Ethan #57: How will Black Holes die? (Synopsis)

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” -T.H. Huxley It's said that nothing lasts forever, and as far as we can tell, this is true. Every living thing that has ever lived will die; every star that's ever burned fuel will run out of it; galaxies will eventually be destroyed as their stars are thrown out from gravitational interaction, and even black holes will eventually decay. Illustration credit: ESA, retrieved via http://chandra.harvard.edu/resources/…

Ask Ethan #55: Could a Manned Mission to Mars Abort? (Synopsis)

“I sometimes catch myself looking up at the Moon, remembering the changes of fortune in our long voyage, thinking of the thousands of people who worked to bring the three of us home. I look up at the moon and wonder, when will we be going back, and who will that be?” -Tom Hanks Imagine, hopefully, the not-too-distant future, when humanity launches the first manned mission to another planet in our Solar System: probably Mars. You're on your way, and then -- all of a sudden -- you realize that something is wrong. Image credit: Frank G., via https://shufti.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/aaa-around-…

Everything is different now (Synopsis)

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.” -Milan Kundera Many of you have been along on this journey with me for years now. And one of the great joys in my life that I got to share with you -- at least a little bit -- was that of my dog, Cordelia. Image credit: me. You may also have noticed that I didn't do an Ask Ethan this week, I didn't write a Comments of the Week article, and I didn't give you a diversion for this…

Could Dark Matter just be Normal Stuff that’s Dark? (Synopsis)

“When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.” -Corrie Ten Boom When you look out into the Universe at distant galaxies, at clusters of galaxies or at the Universe on the largest scales, what you see is the luminous stuff, which is pretty exclusively stars and stellar-related objects. Image credit: Richard Payne (Arizona Astrophotography), via http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap040223.html. But based on what we know about gravitation on those scales, we know there's got to be much more mass than that, most…

Throwback Thursday: The Meteors You’ve Been Waiting For (Synopsis)

"I’m a shooting star. A meteor shower. But I’m not going to die out. I guess I’m more like a comet then. I’m just going to keep on coming back.” -C. JoyBell C. Every year, meteor showers sizzle and fizzle, yet no matter what happens in the skies, there's always one meteor shower that's reliable for a good show: the Perseids. After sunset tonight (and for about the next week) in the skies, they'll delight skywatchers across the globe. Image credit: created by me using Stellarium, available free at http://stellarium.org/. Have you ever wondered where these (or any) meteors come from? If you'…

Messier Monday: The Most Curious Object of All, M24 (Synopsis)

“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” -Thomas Sowell Every object of the 110 in the Messier Catalogue tells its own unique story, but not every object is a true astronomical object on its own! Along with two groupings of stars -- a double star (M40) and a quadruple star (M73) -- there's also a very special object that's neither a star cluster nor a chance grouping: the Sagittarius Star Cloud! Image credit: RoryG from East Texas, at http://eastexastronomy.blogspot.com/2011/03/messier-24-sagittarius-star…. What you're actually seeing is a hole in…

Day One of Roberts Confirmation Hearings

Well, day one is in the books. It consisted mostly of each member of the committee attempting to feign erudition while reading a script no doubt lovingly prepared by one of their staffers. The opening statements of each of the judiciary committee members has the primary purpose of allowing the Senators to stirke a pose for the various interest groups they represent. The secondary purpose is to test the nominee's ability to sit motionless and pretend to be paying attention for hours on end. In that regard, some are already criticizing Roberts for smiling unduly as one Senator praised his…

Gorenfeld's Latest Moon Expose`

John Gorenfeld has an article in the American Prospect detailing the Rev. Moon's ties to North Korea and to the political right in America. It has long been known that Moon has been pumping hard currency into North Korea, but Gorenfeld provides some shocking numbers as well as evidence of Moon's involvement in an arms deal that Moon was involved in that enhanced North Korea's missile capability. He also puts the lie to the oft-repeated claims by Moon's employees at the Washington Times that they have complete editorial independence. The long history of the Washington Times' running what are…

Rowe on Deism, Christianity and the Founders

Jon Rowe has an excellent post up about deism, Christianity and the founders. He and I have talked a bit about this lately and it's something he's been writing about a lot. In particular, about the different types of deism, the different types of Christianity, and the ways in which the views of the founders are often oversimplified by those seeking to enlist the founders on their team in the religious battles. His post is well balanced in that regard, and so is the article he references from, of all places, First Things. That article was written by Avery Cardinal Dulles of Fordham University…

ACLU Defends Religious Liberty Yet Again

The ACLU is planning to appeal a Federal judge's ruling in Nevada that upheld a Clark County school rule banning religious messages on students' clothing: "We said from the very beginning this is a decision that would be made at the Court of Appeals," Nevada ACLU lawyer Allen Lichtenstein said Thursday. Lichtenstein said he will appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco... The ACLU argues that federal constitutional issues are at stake. It filed the case in October representing high school junior Kim Jacobs. She was suspended at Liberty High School in Las Vegas in…

Buy These Harmful Books!

Via Radley Balko comes this amusing link. The very right wing newspaper Human Events took a poll of prominent conservatives to get a list of the most harmful books ever written. The list was pretty much what you'd expect, with Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto in the top ten. I was disappointed to see that two of my favorites, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill and On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin only made honorable mention (but got a good chuckle out of the rather predictable fact that they got the name wrong on the second one, calling it Origin of the Species). But here's the…