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Links for 2009-08-12

Pimp My Novel: Genre-Specific Sales, Part 1 of 8: Fantasy "The good news, however is this: fantasy is actually doing all right, and in many instances, sales of fantasy books are up over last year's sales. Without quoting you exact BookScan numbers, I can tell you that fantasy book sales are up at my house by roughly 10%, which is the number currently being quoted for most of the major trade publishers." (tags: publishing writing business economics books SF) Dealing With Corporate America | Mother Jones "Frankly, my dealings with the government, on average, are better than most of my…

Against Pointless Racism in Children's Stories

I'm taking some flak in the comments to yesterday's book recommendation request post, so let me illustrate what I meant with an example. Lots of people recommended the Andrew Lang Fairy books, which are freely available online. I looked at the first story in the first book, which is plenty entertaining, but also has this bit that stopped me short: Hardly had [an evil sorceror] reached his own house when, taking the ring, he said, "Bronze ring, obey thy master. I desire that the golden ship shall turn to black wood, and the crew to hideous negroes; that St. Nicholas shall leave the helm and…

SFGate.com Mark Fiore wins Pulitzer for animated editorials

If you've never heard of Mark Fiore, you should. And will. Mark Fiore of the San Francisco Chronicle was recognized today with the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. For a distinguished cartoon or portfolio of cartoons characterized by originality, editorial effectiveness, quality of drawing and pictorial effect, in print or online or both, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000). Awarded to Mark Fiore, self syndicated, for his animated cartoons appearing on SFGate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle Web site, where his biting wit, extensive research and ability to distill complex issues set a…

ON THURS: Harvard Panel with Andrew Revkin

A reminder for readers in Boston and Cambridge: Thursday this week I will be a panelist on a discussion about climate change and the media at the Kennedy School of Government. Details are below and at this link. Audio of the panel discussion will be archived online and I will post a link when available. The big draw, of course, will be fellow panelist Andrew Revkin, making one of his first public appearances since taking a buyout from his full time position at the New York Times. The Public Divide over Climate Change: Science, Skeptics and the Media Seminar Series: ENRP Seminar Open to the…

Did anyone else take the Jeopardy contestant exam?

I took the Jeopardy contestant search exam online last night on a whim, and quite frankly it kicked my ass. Did anyone else take it? The format of the test is 50 multiple choice questions for which you have 15 seconds to respond. Let me just tell you that 15 seconds is just enough time to choke and but not enough time to answer. The questions are obscure (expectedly)... Who was the only bachelor president? Buchanan, but I guessed Andrew Johnson What is the longest river in Asia? Yangtze (guessed right) Who painted Nude Descending a Staircase? Duchamps (which is one that I knew but choked…

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

I don't know if you caught it on these two posts, but I have started to add the Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research Icon whenever I am analyzing a peer-reviewed paper specifically. These icons were created by bloggers, including Sciblings Dave Munger, Mike Dunford, and John Wilkins, with the intent of clearly delineating when we are talking about peer-reviewed research, with the general aim of improving the quality of reportage on this research. If you are a blogger and use peer-reviewed research, I encourage you to check out their site to see how you can include these buttons. Here are the…

Why Good Sex is No Rat Race

I'm wondering why I don't write about sex more often, now that I've done it and found it so pleasing. Scientific American just published online a piece I wrote -- brief but gratifying, I pray -- about pacing in rat sex: "Good Sex is Not a Rat Race." The study in question seems to contradict many previous findings and much conventional wisdom about male rat (and human) preferences, namely that it's the natural way of things for males to X and run. This clever study, working the usual rat-sex research tools in some new ways, found that if a female rat is allowed to "pace" mating in a way that…

Why Good Sex is No Rat Race

I'm wondering why I don't write about sex more often, now that I've done it and found it so pleasing. Scientific American just published online a piece I wrote -- brief but gratifying, I pray -- about pacing in rat sex: "Good Sex is Not a Rat Race." The study in question seems to contradict many previous findings and much conventional wisdom about male rat (and human) preferences, namely that it's the natural way of things for males to X and run. This clever study, working the usual rat-sex research tools in some new ways, found that if a female rat is allowed to "pace" mating in a way that…

Are we getting stupid again? Two ways of reporting on a study

Is the Flynn Effect ending? Are kids getting dumber again? Could it be that after years of striking intelligence gains, we're now actually losing ground? We are if you read this article in the Times Online: After studying 25,000 children across both state and private schools Philip Adey, a professor of education at King's College London confidently declares: "The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years' worth in the past two decades." It's an extraordinary claim. But it's one that should startle parents and teachers out of complacency. Shocked by the findings, experts are…

National Review on Science

This post is basically a pile-on. We're already flogging National Review over its promotion of Tom Bethell. So why not rub it in? In The Republican War on Science, I outline conservative attacks on science in a variety of areas. Not surprisingly, it turns out that many of the leading strategies are reflected in articles published by National Review Online. Three quick examples: Global Warming: Most of the pundits that NR publishes on this topic seem attached to one of a small number of well-known contrarian think tanks. Examples: Iain Murray and Christopher Horner of the Competitive…

The Science Project

We recently penned an article together in the current issue of Mother Jones: As the rhetoric from the campaign trail demonstrates (remember the ad with John McCain at the wind-turbine factory?), nobody is against renewable energy. But no amount of green talk can change the fact that our economy is dangerously fossil-fuel based and foreign-energy dependent. The reasons are numerous, and in some cases notorious. Congress is hamstrung by pork-barrel politics and regional interests (e.g. West Virginia coal). We still don't have a federal equivalent to the laws in more than half the states…

Transitions: How does your online persona change as your real life changes?

You've got a blog. You've developed a comfortable voice. Your writing has found a receptive audience, with thoughtful and supportive commenters. Things are going well. Then, WHAM! You defend your thesis. Or you get a new job. You have a baby. Or get a divorce. You move to a new continent. Your blog gets assimilated by a Borg. Or you decide to come out of the pseudonymous closet. Suddenly, you find you've lost some confidence in your writing. Maybe your usual stream of topics has been cut off. Maybe you worry about the appropriateness of your blogging in your new professional capacity.Maybe…

Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) Online Archive

Today FAS put up an online public archive of documents produced by the Office of Technology Assessment. As you may know, the OTA was a legislative office authorized in 1972 to produce comprehensive nonpartisan reports for Congress on a variety of scientific topics. It was defunded and closed in 1995, and the bulky paper reports it produced have been rather hard to find. Although these reports no longer represent the state of the science, they are remarkable, often prescient time capsules - a fascinating look at how teams of experts tried to predict the trajectory of new technologies we now…

PLoS One and Why I Believe In Open Access

I am very excited that the new year brings an exciting opportunity for me. I was solicited, and I accepted an Academic Editor position with the open-access journal PLoS One. PLoS one invited me to join to increase the presence of ecological and marine biological studies at the journal. Many of you may have noticed my hints in the last month. For those of you who don't know, or have a skewed view, here is what the open-access concept represents. Publications are full text, peer-reviewed articles, that occur online and can be accessed at no charge to the user. Note that these are permanent…

Friday frivolity: what's that in my office?

This week I had one of those rare moments between work projects to pause and take a look around. I mean that literally -- I actually took a look around in my office and noticed that I have accumulated some stuff in it that one might not be able to count on finding in your typical faculty office. For example: Wee containers of red pepper flakes, obviously left over from the last time I brought a slice of pizza to my desk. (That may have been Spring 2008.) A votive candle wrapped in fabric with a tag attached that says "Thank you!" I cannot for the life of me recall who gave it to me, or…

Dawn Closing In on Vesta: The Movie

NASA's Dawn space ship is getting closer to the asteroid Vesta, and has produced a very short movie. The movie is a compilation of 20 frames, shown here repeating several times: This movie shows surface details beginning to resolve as NASA's Dawn spacecraft closes in on the giant asteroid Vesta. The framing camera aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained the images used for this animation on June 1, 2011, from a distance of about 300,000 miles (483,000 kilometers). Vesta's jagged shape, sculpted by eons of cosmic impacts in the main asteroid belt, is apparent. Variations in surface brightness…

The Skeptics' Circle: Dedicated to Carl Sagan

Yes, I know that skepticism and Christmas don't exactly mix. After all, most people, even highly skeptical and unreligious ones, tend to enjoy at least a few, if not many, of the myths that accompany the season, myths such as Santa Claus. But we won't let that stop us from having a bit of skeptical fun next week on Thursday, when the next Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle lands at Humbug! Online on December 21. A while back PZ pointed out that December 20 just so happens to be the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan's death at the too young age of 62 and that a memorial blog-a-thon is being…

Ask Science... Live! Thursday at 6pm EDT #askscilive

I'm trying something new. For several years now, I've been contributing to an online community called r/askscience. It's a place where curious people can ask questions, and have them answered - often with great, yet understandable detail - by expert scientists that have a passion for explaining their work. It's an amazing forum, and I'm continually astounded that so many scientists are so willing to donate their time and expertise to educate people, and that so many people are interested in hearing them do so. Unfortunately, not everyone that would appreciate this sort of thing are using…

Helix Health announces hostile takeover of 23andMe

Personalised medicine pioneers Helix Health have announced their intention to seize control of the assets of personal genomics company 23andMe. Helix Health founder Steve Murphy (left) laid out his takeover plans during a press conference this morning. "It's time to seize the moral high ground!!!!" he proclaimed, physically spelling out the additional exclamation marks to the assembled reporters. "23andMe have played their BS PR games for too long, and I'm here to put that right!" During a four hour-long monologue that was often rambling and at times completely incoherent, pausing only for…

Madame Geoffrin's 21st Century Drug Salon

A Reading in the Salon of Mme Geoffrin, 1755 Madame Geoffrin's 18th Century salons, as a gathering place for public discourse, are regarded as Renaissance versions of online social networking. Such collective knowledge and discussion has found numerous creative uses, including fresh approaches to improve public health. In this case, NIH scientists are searching for new uses of old drugs - those already approved by the FDA for a particular illness by mining large databases and sharing their data, a 21st century version of Madame Geoffrin's salons - speeding up the process of drug discovery…

Elvis reincarnated as a mouse in the name of art

All That I Am is an art piece which involves a transgenic mouse imbued with the essence of Elvis Presley in an effort to model the late great's behaviour. Koby says: A combination of three online services make this project possible. Hair samples of Elvis Presley, bought on ebay were sent to a gene sequencing lab to identify different behavioural traits (varied from sociability, athletic performance to obesity and addiction). Using this information, transgenic mice clones with parallel traits were produced. The genetically cloned models of Elvis are tested in a collection of various…

Tidbits, 5 March 2010

I'm in Urbana-Champaign this weekend to teach an in-person day for my online collection-development class. I'm looking forward to it; every time I teach I am reminded that students are smarter than I am. For now, tidbits! As world plus dog probably knows already, The Economist tackled the data deluge. Adam Christensen gives us the modest, unassuming Data. The foundation for everything on an intelligent, interconnected, instrumented planet. Rethinking scholarly communication from the ground up: SciBling John Dupuis asks Are computing journals too slow? and Dan Cohen muses about how best to…

Friday Sprog Blogging: a map of the Earth.

Younger offspring: I drew this picture of the Earth! Dr. Free-Ride: Wow, that's quite a picture. Will you tell me what's going on in it? Younger offspring: Yes, but first scan it in. Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. Is it maybe not a coincidence that you're bringing home a picture like this on a Thursday night? Younger offspring: That's a really tall volcano. And over there is a smaller volcano -- for grilling stuff. [1] Dr. Free-Ride: I see. What else is there? Younger offspring: On the other side of the tall volcano is a meteor coming toward the Earth, and right under that is a meteor-catcher…

What It is Like to Live in a Developed Nation Struggling with Food Issues

Mark Notaras has a terrific piece on what things are like in Japan, in a culture that has for several generations not had to worry too much about their food. There are useful lessons there for all of us: But to what geographic point do people's concerns about radiation extend? Once nearby prefectures are associated with contamination, even if the contamination is confined to one small area or a few products, shoppers in Tokyo may choose to stay away from all raw or fresh products from an entire prefecture. When the Japanese government prohibited the sale of spinach from Ibaraki prefecture,…

The Biggest Baking Soda Volcano Ever

Ah, science fairs. To the left, observe my colleague, fellow Seed-ster Lee Billings, feeling the science fair glow at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Intel ISEF is the world's largest and most acclaimed gathering of pre-college-age scientists. Held each May, the fair brings together 1,500 students from over 40 nations to present their research, meet one another, and compete for prizes including a $50,000 college scholarship. As PZ Myers notes at Pharyngula, "when I was growing up, this was better known as the Westinghouse science fair, and…

Hackers Release More Emails Stolen from Scientists ...

For now, a press release. More later: WASHINGTON (Nov. 22, 2011)--In an apparent effort to discredit climate science, hackers again posted stolen emails from leading climate scientists online today, just days ahead of a United Nations climate meeting. According to the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, the emails released today are part of the same batch that was stolen from the university years ago. Only some of those emails were released in November 2009. Since then, multiple investigations exonerated scientists who had their emails stolen of misconduct. "These leftover…

Antiquity Editor Quotes Blogger on Creationism

Antiquity is the world's most respected and widely read academic journal in archaeology, our equivalent of Nature or Science. Its summer issue reached me last Friday and yesterday I brought it to the beach. On the first page of his editorial (entertaining, anti-po-mo, available on-line behind a paywall), Martin Carver attacks creationism and quotes a blog entry from March last year by Aard regular Chris O'Brien of the Northstate Science blog! After quoting Turkish creationist Harun Yahya and describing his propaganda efforts, Carver continues: Here is Christopher O'Brien, a Forest…

The story that will not die

Good morning, anti-censorship intellectuals! Remember that story from January about Abunga Books, the online bookstore whose sole unique feature is that it claims to "empower decency" by enabling prudes to vote to censor their offerings? Now it has made ABC News. It's amazing how much press this thing has received — I'm beginning to suspect there is some marketing genius behind the store who knows how to whip up a media frenzy. They've got a couple of quotes from me and from the founder of Abunga, Lee Martin. "Anything that irritates the right, they want off," Myers told ABCNEWS.com "They…

Links for 2010-10-30

The Forever Blog « Easily Distracted "There's been talk that blogs are over and Twitter and Facebook are king. I meant to say something about this issue when the end of Bitch Ph.D was announced, since that was an important blog for me and many other people. I think it's only half-right to say that the day of the blog is done. No matter what alternative venues might come into existence, many blogs were going to have finite lifespans. Even group blogs are not really publications with an identity that stands apart from their authors, into which new authors can come and old ones depart while…

The Semi-Amazing Spider-Man

Anybody still read newspaper comics these days? I do, but sadly for the newspaper business I read them online. Worse, usually in the context of people making fun of them. On the other hand, there are a few gems out there. Is Spider-Man one of those gems? Uh... Well, Shakespeare it ain't. But is Spider-Man justified in his optimism about being able to catch Mary Jane? If Doc Ock just drops her instead of throwing her (as he seems to suggest), she'll start with zero velocity and immediately begin to accelerate at 9.8 meters per second squared vertically downward. As soon as Spider-Man…

How to stop a rhino in its tracks

Since a number of other ScienceBloggers have posted lists of science websites for kids (Science sites for kids by Karmen; Online sources for hands-on chemistry for kids by Janet; Cool science sites for kids by Zuska; and Brain science is child's play by Sandra), I thought I'd share this cool practical activity for a lesson about microbes. The activity is designed for schoolchildren at Key Stage 3 (11-year-olds); I gave it a go during my short time as a secondary school science teacher, and thought it was quite effective. Aim To demonstrate how colds can spread from person to person…

A cool science and engineering challenge for curious kids.

Speaking of science fairs, if you know of kids (grades 5-12) in the San Francisco Bay Area who are looking for a challenge, this one might be of interest: It is not too late to participate in this year's Tech Challenge. The Tech Museum of Innovation's 21st annual Tech Challenge is designed to get at the heart of innovation for young people and is geared to the California Math, Science and Language Arts standards. This year's Tech Challenge focus is on the need for safe clean drinking water. One in five people in the world do not have regular access to safe drinking water. The challenge:…

The 6% Solution to Human-Chimpanzee Divergence

This past summer, Matt Hahn presented a talk at the Society for Molecular Biology Evolution meeting and Evolution 2006 entitled "The 17% Solution: Gene Family Divergence Between Human And Chimpanzee". The basic premise was that, even though humans and chimps are ~99% identical at the DNA sequence level, they differ substantially in copy number variants. That is, the two species have different amounts of genes from certain gene families, which Hahn estimated as a 17% difference in genes between them. Given the amount of copy number polymorphism within humans, it should come as no surprise that…

What Could the Farm Bill Accomplish?

Kari Hamerschlag has a post up about the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential to move money away from large scale industrial agriculture and towards smaller producers. For most small farmers producing for local markets, the idea is heady - after all, the economics agriculture are tenuous for many of us - we get all of the burdens of regulation without any of the economies of scale that accompany large scale agriculture. Most small producers are driven, then, to serve communities that can pay, rather than necessarily their poorer rural neighbors (although all of us do some of that too). We…

Birds in the News 157

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Yellow-eyed Junco, Junco phaeonotus, Cave Creek Canyon AZ Image: Dave Rintoul, June 2008 [larger view]. People Hurting Birds The Greater Sage-Grouse, a species whose population has declined 93% from historic numbers and that is on the U.S. WatchList of birds of highest conservation concern, is facing a severe decline in the amount of suitable breeding habitat due to energy development. Oil and gas drilling in the region have been booming, driving the birds out of many breeding areas, or leks. In addition, wind farm…

More on the Republican War on Science

Fellow ScienceBlogling Chris Mooney comped me a copy of the second edition of his book, The Republican War on Science, and I have finally managed to get around to writing a review of it. Here's the short version: buy this book. It details exactly what the Bush Administration has done to U.S. science. Chris also does the truth a service; he refuses to engage in Compulsive Centrist Disorder. Yes, here are idiots on the Left who hold anti-science beliefs, but the predominant threat--one that holds the reigns of power in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches--is from the Right…

Happy Birthday to the hard drive

September 13, 1956 was an important date in computer history. That's when IBM shipped its first hard drive. As Steven Levy tells us in Newsweek, it was the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton. Lot figurately. Literally. Leasing cost $250,000 a year (2006 dollars). But it was considered a wonder: "It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running," recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-'50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims…

Reading Diary: Cooler smarter: Practical steps for low carbon living by The Union of Concerned Scientists

You know the old saying about the weather -- everybody complains but nobody does anything about it! Well, the same can be said about climate change -- everybody complains but nobody does anything about it. And that's partly because of political gridlock, denial and inaction at the highest levels across numerous jurisdictions around the world. But it's also because most of us really don't have a clear idea what we can do about it. In other words, what actions can we as individuals take to fight climate change? I think we all have a sense that if we could aggregate millions and billions…

Welsh Coal Miners Did it Their Way

Back in 1994, 240 coal miners in Hirwaun, Wales bought the Tower Colliery where they were employed.  The UK government was de-nationalizing the coal mines and the pit was scheduled to close.  The miners took charge of their own livelihood, used their severence-layoff pay and borrowed money, to buy the coal mine. "In its first year, one of the oldest continuously worked pits in the world made a profit of two million pounds (~ $1 million US) ...[and] provided jobs for hundreds of miners."  (Reuters here)] Last week, the miners and the community said their final goodbye to the Tower Colliery…

Who's Looking After the Cooks' Lungs?

OSHA? No.  It's Andrew Schneider and his colleagues at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  In "Flavoring Additive Puts Professional Cooks at Risk," the reporter describes a study commissioned by the newspaper to determine how much of the butter-flavoring agent diacetyl becomes airborne when used in a restaurant cook's work setting.  Exposure to diacetyl is associated with the severe lung disease bronchiolitis obliterans in microwave popcorn plant workers and others, yet Schneider writes: "Government indifference to the possible threat posed by breathing diacetyl is epidemic.  The CPSC…

Not all blogs are tech blogs

In one of those "if you like this you may also like this" e-mails from Amazon.com, I got a suggestion I may like a book called Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers. So, I took a look. I've been blogging since 2004, so I thought I knew who the top bloggers were and could find it interesting to see what they had to say. As it turns out, the title is a misnomer. It should be "......American Top TECH Bloggers". I recognize three names (Anderson, Scoble, Rubel). Perhaps they say interesting things in the interviews, as observers of the blogosphere. But, I am not…

Another Open Laboratory 2009 review

David Bradley read the book and liked it. Perhaps you'll like it, too. If you use the code "SHOWERS" in April during check-out you will get 10% off. Just go here right now and click on "Buy now" ;-) Under the fold - OpenLab2010 entries so far, and the submission buttons: ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird Anthropology in Practice: The Irish Diaspora: Why Even Trinidadians Are a Little Irish Back Re(action…

Academia, a test case for banking sector.

So, having established that Obama is NOT truly beholden to the financiers, what may happen to settle the financial world and straighten the economy. No, really, he is not: no more than he is beholden to, say UC or Harvard. I mean it is not like his administration is stuffed with academics from those venerable institutions... er, well, you know what I mean. But, clearly, with his #1 contributor, UC, having been sorted, we now have a guide for what we may do about the financiers. We furlough the banksters! Brilliant! Seriously. Note that in academia, the furloughs increase as you go up the…

True Lab Stories: Strangest Group Meeting Ever

This isn't the usual story about lab mishaps, but I'm not quite sure what other category to put it in. It is a true story about my lab in grad school, though, so we'll call it a True Lab Story. The mid-90's was not a great time to be working in a government lab, particularly NIST. I mean, it was better than being out on the street, but funding was kind of tight, and the "Contract With America" Republicans of '94 were making noises about massive spending cuts, and threatening to eliminate the Department of Commerce altogether (mostly because they hated Ron Brown, the first Secretary of…

You are old father William

'You are old', said the youth, 'and your jaws are too weak For anything tougher than suet; Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak - Pray, how did you manage to do it?' 'In my youth', said his father, 'I took to the law, And argued each case with my wife; And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw, Has lasted the rest of my life.' [1] Yes, yet another post with zero science but don't go away - there is some rowing later after the tedious bits. And so: exhibit 1 is the glasses, which you'll immeadiately note are varifocals. I have spent the past 2 years…

CDMS rumors: What they'll find and what it'll mean

Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell. -Shana Alexander Around the internet, blogs are all abuzz that an experiment searching for dark matter, CDMS, has cancelled all of their upcoming announcements and will be holding a special press conference on the 18th (this Friday!) to release their latest findings. Here's what you can expect. First off, here's how it works. They take a bunch of hockey-puck shaped detectors, shield them at the bottom of a mine shaft deep beneath the Earth (in Soudan, MN), and try to measure these very rare events of dark matter particles (which can…

Seipp on Fallaci

Cathy Seipp has an interesting essay in the LA Times about a visit to City Lights, the legendary San Francisco book store and why, despite its long history of proudly promoting banned books, they refuse to carry Oriana Fallaci's The Force of Reason: So, although my friend is no fan of Ward Churchill, the faux Indian and discredited professor who notoriously called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns," he didn't really mind seeing piles of Churchill's books prominently displayed on a table as he walked in. However it did occur to him that perhaps the long-delayed translation of Oriana Fallaci's new…

Why it matters that the US Olympic Team will wear Chinese made uniforms

There are all kinds of reasons why it does not matter, apparently, that the US Athletes participating in this summer's Olympics in London will be wearing uniforms made in China. These reasons are things like "Everything is made in China" and "They don't make clothing in America anyway" and so on and so forth. But there are also reasons that it matters and that team should, in fact, be wearing uniforms made in US shops. Union shops. Did you know that when a political party runs a candidate or pushes an issue, and they make t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other artifacts of rhetoric, they get…

Ethanol Falsehood Examined

Learning is easy. Getting it right is harder. Expunging falsehoods is hardest, but most rewarding. There is a "meme" (using the definition of a meme as something most people in a certain community think whether it is true or not) that to produce one gallon of Ethanol for fuel you have to use some larger number (I've heard two, and I've heard five) gallons of gasoline. In an ideal world there would be farms with giant solar collectors and wind generators. These devices would produce electricity to run distilling machines and hybrid tractors and such. On the farm would be grown GMO plants…

How do you save small town charm?

I've mentioned before that I grew up in Kent, Washington. It was a middling-sized town of 15,000 people way back then, and I rather like small town living, but I didn't like Kent, and I can trace my dislike to one specific event. The town had a classic movie theater, the Vale. As a kid, I loved that theater: we'd go out of our way on our walk home from school to check out the movie posters, anticipating the shows we'd see on the Saturday matinee. It was not an upscale theater, and we got a steady diet of "B" horror movie features — stuff like Die, Monster, Die and Frankenstein Conquers the…