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How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Categorization

We're once again in the "things are in the pipeline, but nothing has been posted recently" mode, which is a good excuse for some Amazon neepery. Since the AP review came out, and was printed in 20-odd papers, the sales rank has climbed back into the four digits, and has spent the last few days hovering around 2,000. This is pretty respectable, and Amazon proudly touts it as being "#1 in Books > Science > Physics > Quantum Theory," which sounds nice. Of course, what does that really mean? If you click through to the "Quantum Theory" subcategory, you'll see that it's a weird…

DeVos Contributed to Dominionists

Except I think it was a different DeVos.  As linked by href="http://markmaynard.com/index.php/2006/09/27/devos_the_domionist" rel="tag">Mark Maynard, the irascibly analytical frontman for the href="http://www.monkeypowertrio.com/" rel="tag">Monkey Power Trio, Rolling Stone has href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7235393/the_crusaders/">an article that states: ...The godfather of the Dominionists is href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._James_Kennedy">D. James Kennedy [link added], the most influential evangelical you've never heard of... ...While the…

News.

So what would the elementary quantum of solace be? The soliton? I haven't actually seen Quantum of Solace yet, but I'm going to make a point to go at some time this week. The last Bond flick was great, and I have high hopes for this one. Most sequels don't quite live up to their predecessors, but by most accounts this one comes quite close. And this is the year that gave us The Dark Knight, after all. Wall-E is about to be out in a few days, and that is probably the best or second best film of the last year. Seen it yet? If not, for shame. Go buy it. (That's the Blu-Ray version, but…

Sunday Function

...you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk? - Dirty Harry The laws of probability, like most of the mathematical rules that govern the world, are a relatively recent discovery. Ancient people like the Romans loved to gamble as much as we do, and they had at least some idea of how certain kinds of odds worked, but they'd probably have been flummoxed by many of the mathematical tools we use today to study chance. But then again, how many people at your average casino understand how to calculate the probabilities that govern the flow of their money? Well…

Can soccer goalkeepers influence penalty kicks?

Penalty kicks are nearly universally reviled among soccer fans, yet they remain an important part of the game. The sport is so exhausting that extending it beyond 30 minutes of extra time in a playoff game could be dangerous for the players. Typically in playoff or championship matches, tie games get decided by a penalty kick competition. But penalty kicks offer such an advantage to the shooter that it often seems like dumb luck when a goalkeeper manages to make a save. The usual strategy is simply to dive randomly to the left or right, and hope you guessed right. Why not just flip a coin to…

Chimpanzees Are NOT Pets!

You've likely already seen this story all over the news: Chimp's owner calls vicious mauling 'freak thing' STAMFORD, Conn. (AP) -- The owner of a 200-pound chimpanzee that viciously mauled a Stamford woman calls the incident "a freak thing," but says her pet was not a "horrible" animal. Sandra Herold told NBC's "Today Show" in an interview aired Wednesday that Travis, her 14-year-old chimpanzee, was like a son to her. Herold tried to save her friend by stabbing the chimp with a butcher knife and bludgeoning it with a shovel. I have extremely strong emotions concerning this particular issue…

Sex & Science At Sixteen

If you watch prime time tv, music videos, or walk past a magazine stand, it would appear that the average adolescent male has sex on the brain. I never gave it much thought, although regular readers know by now I'm not particularly comfortable with any kind of generalization. We humans are a diverse bunch. If we're to assume the guys are most motivated in pursuing a relationship because of sex, there sure are plenty of anomalies. And isn't our reality hugely the result of cultural norms? Family experience? Social expectations? So uh, no, I don't quite buy research that attempts to…

Sell ScienceBlogs To Microsoft?

Steve Ballmer tells reporters that href="http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/10/ballmer-microso.html">Microsoft will buy 20 companies a year for the next 5 years, paying "between 50 or 100 million to a couple hundred million each."  He also gave his email address, for anyone to use if they have something to sell. So, I went out to my garage to see if I had any old companies laying around.  Nope.   Then it struck me: we could sell ScienceBlogs!   What would Microsoft get in the deal?   A modicum of favorable attention (nobody has ill will toward ScienceBlogs), some positive…

Mommy Monday: Lazy weekends

I think my colleagues are sometimes incredulous that I have lived in Mystery State for almost 5 months now and still have seen nothing of its natural environment.I haven't been to the Mountains or the Water. I haven't even been to State Just to the South, despite it being a mere 30 minutes away. I'd love to go to Mountains, and I'd love to go to Water. I'd love to get out of metropolitan Mystery City for once. My hiking boots still have Northwest mud on them, for crying out loud. Not getting to know the land around me is affecting me personally (I'm having a hard time realizing that this…

The Tao of Revisions (for a Young Author)

Back at the beginning of the month, I boldly announced my intentions to finish all the reviewer comments on a revise-and-resubmit paper. In that post, I calculated that with ~25 comments to address " if I just average one a day, it should be easily manageable." Now look over at the left hand column where the InaDWriMo button is displaying my status. (For the record, as 11/13/2007 it says "1 of 21 completed.") By the count of my ticker, I have hardly made any progress. But I swear I have been working on the revisions. I spent a couple of hours yesterday, and worked on things off and on last…

What Do Iran and California Have in Common?

Answer: they are the top two producing areas in the world of a foodstuff that is getting lots of attention lately for its health benefits. What is this item? Well... ...it originated in the Holy Land and was a favorite of the Queen of Sheba. ...it was first imported to the United States in the 1880s, but didn't really become popular until the early 20th century. ...the first seed planted in America was by a California scientist in 1930, but it didn't mature until twenty years later and wasn't able to be harvested here until 1976! Can you guess what this amazing member of the Sumac family…

Energy Scales

Bacteria are tiny. Compared to our cells, they can seem insignificant. There are about ten times more bacteria cells in your gut *right now* than there are human cells in your entire body, but they only make up about 5% of your mass. They're tiny, but they're successful - they live in places we can't, they can metabolize things we can't, and they're everywhere. Despite this success, there's some things they don't do, like multicellularity, but why? PZ has a great review of a recent paper in Nature that tries to answer that question, so I don't need to recapitulate it, but I have just a couple…

Rep. Bachmann, Leeches And Other Cures

Photo: Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine. When the leech begins its work - using its 360 minuscule teeth to scissor in - he laughs, "Now we are into business!" (Andrew Plucinski, hirudotherapist.) Could leeches help Rep. Michele Bachmann's affliction? This is not a joke, and is not intended in any way to be disrespectful towards Rep. Bachmann's challenge of dealing with migraine headaches, recently reported in the context of her candidacy for President of the United States. Migraines affect an estimated 36 million Americans, regardless of their political opinions. How an…

More details emerge in Texas nurse whistleblower affair

The story of the Texas nurses who were fired and prosecuted for reporting a flaky doctor just keeps getting better. This case was surprising in that it at first seemed to be a clear abuse of power by local officials but on deeper exploration involved a whole army of unorthodox medical thinkers (my prior coverage of the case is here).  This case was surprising in that it at first seemed to be a clear abuse of power by local officials  but on deeper exploration involved a whole army of unorthodox medical thinkers. In Kermit, TX, two nurses at a small community hospital registered complaints…

"I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do! I do! I do!"

Actually, I don't believe in "spooks," ESP, alien abductions, or much of the other paranormal rot that crops up so often this time of year, but apparently 24% of 1,013 polled adults do. While I take issue with surveys asking a relatively insignificant amount of people their opinion and then projecting those numbers on the whole of the population, I have run into many people who have some, erm, interesting ideas about rather ordinary phenomena. I've been told that cats can detect human souls, that saber-tooth cats were aquatic predators and bit their prey sideways, that there are living…

On rating risk

In discussions of the subprime mortgage crisis and the CDS crisis which grew out of it, a lot is made of the failure of federal regulators, and a bit is made of the failure of securities rating firms (who blew it by giving disastrously risky products very safe ratings). The latter failure is often excused on the basis that there wasn't enough background data to accurately model the risks of these new products, though it is rightly noted that the firms had a financial interest in turning a blind eye to any data which would have led them to produce less rosy estimates of risk. Similar…

Thoughts from Kairo

From Nadia El-Awady's twitter feed on this first full day of freedom in Egypt: An amazing thing happened yesterday. My country is free. For the first time in its history it is free. (cont) This came about in the most wonderful way. We did not have a military coup. A foreign country did not invade us to bring us democracy (cont) Normal people like you and me went out to the streets peacefully and demanded their freedom. An amazing thing happened yesterday. Those normal people were faced with tremendous hardship in the process. At times they were attacked with brute police force and some died…

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

I saw the newest Transformers movie today. In terms of the cast, there were really only two who I felt were necessary in any way to the development of the film. Optimus Prime and Megan Fox.* Slate has a spoiler filled review which hits many of the aspects which I think are relevant. I don't watch many films in the theater, on average about 1 every 6 months. I've loaded up this spring since I saw the Star Trek reboot. I'm not a huge Trekkie, I've seen most of TOS & TNG episodes, but not so much of Voyager or DS9, and hardly any of Enterprise. I also didn't watch many of the films. But I'…

What Not to Wear, Farmer Edition

A reader, who asks to remain anonymous writes me that her graduate school boyfriend (soon hopefully to be fiance) has decided he wants a farm. He's looking for jobs in rural areas, and wants them to buy land together. The boyfriend grew up in rural Albania and is apparently pretty comfortable in agriculture. My reader, who grew up in suburban Michigan, is not. This is all new to her - she thought she was marrying a plain old potential academic (botany). The thought, as she puts it, that he might look at real plants in the dirt, rather than under a microscope and that said dirt might come…

Friday Fun: We all believed in science at some point...or did we?

The world is going to hell in a hand basket. But at least we can laugh as we're sucked relentlessly into the Hellmouth. Maybe if we all collectively understood science and evidence better, the path to Hell wouldn't be quite so straight and narrow. So maybe that's what's making me think of these particular funny bits today. And by funny I mean so funny in hurts. First up, we have retired basketball superstar Shaquille O'Neal, who apparently really and truly believes the world is flat. He has a doctorate in Education, by the way, which I just can't even.   Shaquille O'Neal agrees with Kyrie…

Fish owls in reverse

By popular request, in this and in a few later articles I'll be reposting the rest of the Ten Bird Meme text originally posted at Tet Zoo ver 1 in 2006 (where appropriate, I've added corrections and updates). The 'Ten Bird' birds I've covered so far are Ifrita, Shoebill, Tibetan ground-pecker, and Flying steamer duck. And here we continue with... Blakiston's fish owl Bubo blakistoni [images from here]. If you think evolutionary convergences are cool, then you'll love reversals. Morphological features or aspects of behaviour that have been modified during the evolution of a lineage don't have…

It had wool, and armour plates, a massive beak, horns, and it smelled veeeeery bad: whatever happened to the Tecolutla monster?

Yay for day.... (counts) ... four of sea monster week. This time another familiar carcass image... well, familiar to me anyway. This remarkable object/shapeless hunk is the Tecolutla monster, collected from Palmar de Susana between Tecolutla and Nautla, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1969. Initially encountered by a group of farmers who chanced upon it in the dead of night* (apparently when it was still alive), they kept it secret for a week but eventually informed the Tecolutla mayor, Professor César Guerrero. Believing it to be a crashed plane (this story gets better and better), he organised a…

The Big Monty Hall Book Gets Reviewed in Science

And mostly favorably, too. You might need a subscription to read the review, alas. The reviewer is Donald Granberg, a sociologist (now retired) at the University of Missouri. He published several papers on the MHP during the nineties. I liked this part of the review: The author does a masterful job of tracing the problem back to its origin. And this part: One difficulty with word problems is their ambiguity. Rosenhouse does a superb job of reducing, if not eliminating, this source of endless argumentation with his canonical version. Not to mention this part: The Monty Hall Problem…

Does the demographic transition have a biological cause?

The demographic transition -- the tendency for richer societies to have fewer rather than more children -- is, I think, most often attributed to social causes. For a variety of reasons -- because each child costs more, because they are more likely to survive and take of parents in old age, because of social stigma associated with large families, because of birth control, etc. -- couples in richer countries often choose to have 2 children rather than 10. This demographic transition accounts for the increasing age of the population in Western countries, as I discussed in an earlier post. I…

Entertaining ENGINEERING.COM Returns as Festival Sponsor!

ENGINEERING.COM, with its mission to inform, inspire and entertain the world's engineers -- and future engineers -- is returning as a key sponsor of the USA Science & Engineering Festival and Expo in 2014. Widely known for having its fingers directly on the pulse of the fascinating, ever-evolving realm of engineering innovation, ENGINEERING.COM will help expand the scope and reach of Festival excitement, education and inspiration by serving once again as the event's official videographer, which will include capturing the bevy of high-profile activity taking place during Expo finale…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Wage theft – when employers fail to pay workers what they’ve earned – has been in the news lately: In a lawsuit that could become a class-action suit, two former Apple store employees allege that the company failed to pay employees for time spent waiting for bag searches – time they say the employer required them to spend at the worksite, but for which they were off the clock and not paid. In California, a joint enforcement action by the California Labor Commissioner’s office and CalOSHA (part of the multi-agency Labor Enforcement Task Force) at a Holiday Inn Express construction site has…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Interaction Of Just Two Genes Governs Coloration Patterns In Mice: Biologists at Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego, have found that a simple interaction between just two genes determines the patterns of fur coloration that camouflage mice against their background, protecting them from many predators. The work, published recently in the journal PLoS Biology, marks one of the few instances in which specific genetic changes have been linked to an organism's ability to survive in the wild. More... Birds Learn To Fly With A Little Help From Their Ancestors: A…

Good News for Endangered Species

Klamath River, Oregon. Photo by Dave Menke, USFWS. Click on image for a MUCH larger view in its own window. Do you wonder what happened with that online letter to the US Senate that I posted to my blog awhile ago, soliciting scientists' signatures regarding the upcoming rewrite of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA)? I finally have some good news to share with you. As some of you might remember, the 1973 ESA is currently being considered for reauthorization by congress, and a rewrite by California Congressman Richard Pombo, a Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee,…

The Ultimate Proof of Creation!

We're in big trouble on our trip to the Creation "Museum", people. We're going on 7 August, and on that very same day, they are planning to present… THE ULTIMATE PROOF OF CREATION!!! What is the Ultimate Proof of Creation, you might ask? There is a defense for creation that is powerful, conclusive, and has no true rebuttal. As such, it is an irrefutable argument--an "ultimate proof" of the Christian worldview. This presentation will equip you to engage an unbeliever, even a staunch atheist, using proven techniques. Holy crap! It's a trap! I'm going to be bringing along a whole mob of young…

Birding Babylon: A Soldier's Journal from Iraq

Birding Babylon -- does the title of this book sound familiar to you? If so, then you, like me, are one of thousands of people who have been reading the author's blog with the same name. Birding Babylon: A Soldier's Journal from Iraq by Jonathan Trouern-Trend (2006, Sierra Club Books), is one of only a handful of published books out there that began as a series of entries "posted" on a public blog instead of a proposal sitting on an agent's desk. But even when it was "only" a blog, excerpts were quoted in the media and the author was interviewed at least once (by National Public Radio) while…

Obsolete lab skills are what we teach best

Bora had an enjoyable post yesterday on obsolete lab skills. I can empathize because I have a pretty good collection of obsolete lab skills myself. These days I'm rarely (okay, never) called upon to do rocket immunoelectrophoresis, take blood from a rat's tail, culture tumor cells in the anterior eye chamber of a frog, locate obscure parasites in solutions of liquid nitrogen, or inoculate Kalanchoe leaves with pathogenic bacteria. (Wow! It sounds like I worked for the three witches in MacBeth! Fire burn and cauldron bubble!) I don't entirely think that my lab skills are "obsolete." I…

Book Review: Erotic Refugees

I'll tell you two things up front: this book is my friend's first published novel; and I would have read it with great enjoyment even if I had no idea who the guy was. Paddy Kelly classifies it astutely as “Dick lit / Romantic comedy”: it's Bridget Jones or Sex and the City, only from a male perspective. The plot revolves around the love lives of two young Irishmen in 00s Stockholm: one a neurotic recent divorcé and part-time single dad, the other a carefree ladies man. They've both ended up in Sweden for love, as “erotic refugees”. And here's a freebie for future literature scholars trying…

Grunty man

[Warning: more boring fitness-related content. This is the penultimate post on such, before moving the misc trivia over to wmconnolley.livejournal.com/. The science will stay here.] Saturday-before-last James E said that the Grunty Fen half marathon was on the 12th; and being a little unsober I signed up online an hour later. Next morning I thought I'd better check that I could actually run the distance, and it turned out that I could. Or at least, nearly. I accidentally ran 20 km instead of 21.1, because I forgot the true distance. Oops. Anyway, that took me 1:51, which seemed fair enough…

“Crazy” is when you start regarding the crazy as normal

I have mixed feelings about this article in Inside Higher Ed on the issue of approving an ICR degree program in Texas. On the one hand, it's clear that the Texas bureaucracy is being cautious and thorough and working its way through their official protocols. Raymund Paredes, the commissioner of higher education, has raised concerns about the proposed program—online graduate degrees in he sciences are problematic because they lack the laboratory component; the proposed curriculum is not equivalent to other graduate programs in Texas; they haven't documented that the ICR is a research…

Keith Windschuttle on Post-Modernism

A week ago, Australian historian Keith Windschuttle gave a talk in Sydney under the heading "Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History". The full text is on-line, highly recommended. "The argument that all history is politicised, that it is impossible for the historian to shed his political interests and prejudices, has become the most corrupting influence of all. It has turned the traditional role of the historian, to stand outside his contemporary society in order to seek the truth about the past, on its head. It has allowed historians to write from an overtly partisan…

Cambridge half; and misc

Today was the anniversary of my glorious 1:36 in the Cambridge Half Marathon. Today, alas, I only managed 1:41 so at that rate Jules will be steaming past me before many more years have passed. I remain fairly confident of out-erging her over the distance though. Here I am with other folk from our rowing club that were running. You'll notice that most of them are female. Maggie in the background, if you were wondering. Onwards, to Brighton. But other things are happening. You'll have to wait just a little longer for my deeply valuable thoughts on the Ukraine crisis; this post is Misc. Last…

Axions and the Problem of EurekAlert

I have a couple of EurekAlert feeds in my RSS reader, because they sometimes turn up interesting things-- I got the Bill Wootters item there, for example, and they had a piece on strontium clocks that I keep meaning to say something about. Of course, there's also some total garbage, such as the kookery from the "Quantum Aether Dynamics Institute" that crossed the feed yesterday (though it appears to have been taken down, to their credit). This makes it difficult to really trust anything I see there that claims to be a really new development. Such as, say, this press release from Buffalo…

If It's Not Boring, It's Not Art

One of the PDF-only studies that I complained about earlier is a hand-wringing report from the NEA on how public appreciation of art is on the decline. As summarized by Inside Higher Ed: Compared to the NEA's 1982 survey, the steepest decline was in ballet, which that year was seen by 11.0 percent of college-educated adults, but in 2008 was seen by only 6.3 percent. Declines were seen in every type of art considered: jazz (from 19.4 percent to 14.9 percent); classical music (33.1 percent to 20.1 percent); opera (8.0 percent to 5.2 percent); musicals (40.5 percent to 32.7 percent); non-…

links for 2009-04-14

EDSBS » Archive » CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS COVERS THE NATIONAL TITLE GAME "Like the tyrant who conjured a territory whole from the aether, so have we on this field two imaginary kingdoms wrenched forth from geographic oblivion. Florida, were it not for the intervention of a few real estate scamsters in the â20, the discovery of insecticide, air-conditioning, and the generous slathering of federal pork upon the stateâs snake-infested swampwaste, would have descended into a kind of Sun Belt Lord of the Flies scenario, I think. I must also admit this may have happened despite all the best…

Wired posts Amy Wallace love/hate mail compiled from Twitter feed

Just a quick follow-up from our last two posts about Amy Wallace's article, "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All," in Wired magazine about vaccine developer Dr Paul Offit and the anti-vaccination movement: Wired has now compiled Wallace's tweets from the last two days into blog-readable narrative. Only a week after Wired published "An Epidemic of Fear", we've received more reader responses than any other story in memory. Journalist Amy Wallace has received hundreds of messages, weighing in on all sides of the issue, and posted some of those comments on…

DonorsChoose: Support My Fellow Bloggers for Now

I can't believe October's here already and it's time again for our annual social media challenge to raise money for US science teachers. Last year, eight generous, erudite, and good-looking Terra Sig readers donated at total of $1,972 to impact the lives of 1,865 students. DonorsChoose.org is "an online charity connecting you to classrooms in need." I wrote about Terra Sig's support last year and you can read my personal statement about Why We Donate to DonorsChoose Projects. For example, my heart was broken last year when I read of a project for students a mere 35 miles from a major state…

Explaining plummeting belief in anthropogenic climate change

Another depressing poll result from one of the more reputable sources: The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones [excellent!] and landlines, finds that 57% think there is solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades. In April 2008, 71% said there was solid evidence of rising global temperatures. Why the drop? According to the experts that appear in the Guardian's story, it's the economy and corporate propaganda: Michael…

Water Intoxication Update: Radio Show Stopped, DJs Fired

Earlier this week, a woman who was a contestant (for a Nintendo Wii) in a water-drinking contest died, ostensibly of water intoxication. There has been a lot of debate in the comments as to whether the radio station was culpuable and should be sued. Well, as reported today on Yahoo, the radio station fired the three disc jockeys as well as seven other employees who took part in the contest.The radio show was suspended, and the station has announced an investigation into the exact circumstances of Jennifer Strange's death. It was also revealed that the amount of water that she drank was in…

My Music

Since we now know that a person's music says a lot about what that person's like, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about myself by sharing some of my music. I can't give you a list of my ten favorite songs (the data Rentfrow and Gosling used in their study), because to be honest, my favorite songs change on an almost daily basis. So instead, I'll give you one song from each of the last ten albums I've listened to. They're not necessarily my favorite songs from those albums, because I was restricted to what I could find freely available online, but I do really like each of these songs. Most…

Evolution's Path May Lead To Shorter, Stouter Women Who Give Birth Earlier

From a Yale press release: Yale University researchers have detected the effects of natural selection among two generations of contemporary women and predict their descendents will be slightly shorter and chubbier, have lower cholesterol and blood pressure and have their first children earlier in life. The predictions, which were made in the Oct. 19 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were based on an analysis of women who have participated in the famous Framingham Heart Study, that began in 1948. The results illustrate the medical value of evolutionary…

The dolphin with extra fins, 2 years on

AO-4, from the Marine Mammal Science announcement. (arrow added) On October 28, 2006, fisherman that were capturing individuals of a group of 118 bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) near Taiji, Japan for exploitation in aquaria noticed something peculiar about one of the captured individuals. While the vast majority of dolphins have only two front flippers one particular female had a set of small pelvic flippers. Many whales (particularly baleen whales) have the vestiges of hips and leg bones inside their bodies but a whale with external pelvic fins is an even rarer find. A new paper…

Japan quake, tsunami, nuke news 07

Ana's Feed Starting March 21 3PM Radioactive iodine 126.7 times higher detected in seawater near nuke plant - kyodo news Radioactive cesium 24.8 times higher detected in seawater near nuke plant - kyodo news Too early to assess contaminated seawater's impact on fishery product: TEPCO - kyodo news Gov't orders 4 prefectures to suspend some food shipments Tidbits from NHK's morning broadcast: Spraying of reactor buildings and restoration of power remain suspended - all workers remain evacuated form the area Grey smoke from reactor no.3 and white vapor from no.2 are being investigated - both…

Creationism, Accreditation, and Higher Education

ScienceBloging Greg Laden reports that the Texas Board of Higher Education is considering accrediting The Texas Based Institute for Creation Research so it could offer an online course in Science Education. ScienceBlogling PZ offers one solution to stop the inanity (or at least limit the damage if Texas proceeds): I hope Texas scientists can slap that Board into wakeful reality before that meeting, because if this goes through, the trust I can give Texas-trained teachers is getting flushed right down the sewer. And if Texans can't fix this, the rest of the country has to step up and deny…

OK, We Really Are All Post-Keynesian Chartalists Now

A while ago, I was pleasantly suprised--and stunned--to read a Marketwatch columnist (the online market site for The Wall Street Journal) point out the obvious, yet rarely recognized, reality that we are no longer on the gold standard. As I noted: One of the key innovations of the last century--and unappreciated, not to mention unknown, by most--is fiat currency: we are not on the gold standard anymore. The total amount of money we can have isn't fixed by how many shiny pebbles we can pull out of the ground. If we need to print more money so we [can] eliminate idle capacity (human and…

The Surprising Viruses in Our Gut

We were just getting used to the idea of our digestive tract as an ecosystem. There are 10 times as many bacteria in our gut as there are cells in our bodies, and the ecological balance between the different types might affect everything from our tendency to gain weight to our general health and susceptibility to various diseases. Now, a Weizmann Institute researcher has exposed a whole new layer of this ecosystem: the viruses – called phages – that infect our gut bacteria. Dr. Rotem Sorek and his team identified hundreds of these phages in the human gut. They were able to find them thanks to…