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Australian Spends Two Weeks in a Home-Grown Self-Sufficient Submarine

Lloyd Godson, a 29-year-old Australian marine biologist, spent the last 13 days submerged in his local wetlands in a home-grown submarine. He was fulfilling a long-time dream. His submersible, a 9-cubic-meter metal box, was an experiment in self-sufficiency. Air, water, and electricity were all generated or recycled on board during his stay: he provided electricity by riding a bicycle connected to a turbine, and maintained his air supply with a coil of algae that Godson watered with his urine. The whole space was only slightly larger than the space required by the Geneva Convention to hold…

Finding influenza: the data are out there, let's get them, activity 3

I was pretty impressed to find the swine flu genome sequences, from the cases in California and Texas, already for viewing at the NCBI. You can get them and work them, too. It's pretty easy. Tomorrow, we'll align sequences and make trees. Activity 3: Getting the swine flu sequence data 1. Go to the NCBI, find the Influenza Virus Resource page and follow the link to: 04/27/2009: Newest swine influenza A (H1N1) sequences. 2. You'll see a page that looks like this: Each column heading is a name of a segment of the influenza genome. You can see there are eight of these. Each segment…

Dangerous chemistry: explosive experiments with junk food

Ole and Lena's hot dish on a stick probably is explosive if you like to ride on a tilt-a-whirl afterwards. But what do you do if you're far from St. Paul? Never fear. There is more to life than hot dish. I've always known that there were fun chemistry experiments that could be done with peeps, especially in the spring, but I never realized that so much fun could had with candy and soda pop. In this article, the Disgruntled Chemist tested the explosive properties of different kinds of soda products when combined with minty items like Mentos or peppermint gum. These results are way more…

It's still a DNA puzzle, but this is the answer

Although, I certainly didn't believe it. Truly in nature, it can be described as nonpareil. With all the years that I've heard (or taught) that all DNA is antiparallel, it was hard to believe my own eyes when I saw this structure. Yet here is, on the screen, parallel DNA. The image that I posted a couple of days ago came from this same structure. In that image, I hid the rest of the bases, to make it easier to see why this structure is so strange. Here are some images that show the landmarks a bit better. I hid the hydrogens and used different rendering styles to portray the backbone and the…

Pro-Science Gets Organized

Outrage at Donald Trump has coalesced around several political loci, including women's rights, immigration, environmentalism, and scientific endeavor at large. As Trump threatens to roll back regulations and de-fund universities, Mark Hoofnagle points out that science has always been political, increasingly so in an age when politicians control huge sums of money devoted to basic research. Despite major discoveries funded by taxpayer dollars, Mark says scientists have failed "to explain the benefits of basic science to the public and to our representatives in government, and failed to defend…

Spoiler Alert: Rogue One

Serving as an immediate prelude to the very first Star Wars film (A New Hope), Rogue One restores a measure of gravitas to the Star Wars canon that was seriously undermined by the goofiness of 2015's The Force Awakens. Rogue One is still a remarkable nostalgia trip, thanks to the digital recreation of familiar Rebel and Imperial hardware along with the likenesses of actors who first appeared in the original 1977 film. But without the need to consider future franchise opportunities for its stars, Rogue One is free to kill off all of its major characters, marking a narrative structure that is…

Well-Manicured Wastelands

On Pharyngula, PZ Myers doesn't just want cut your grass—he wants to tear it out by the roots and leave it to rot in the sun. He quotes J. Crumpler on The Roaming Ecologist, who calls lawns "sterile, chemically-filled, artificial environments [...] that provide no benefits over the long term; no food, no clean water, no wildlife habitat, and no foundation for preserving our once rich natural heritage." To make matters worse, lawnmower use adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, while beautiful bermuda grass requires a lot of H2O in a world that is increasingly insecure about water. During the…

More Brainless Science

In the 21st century, immortality beckons from several directions: cybernetics, artificial intelligence, telomere extension and cell therapy, maybe even an afterlife. But most of humanity's hope to transcend death revolves around the brain, as the manifestation of our memories and personality. On Pharyngula, PZ Myers considers the merits of new efforts to master the brain, such as a "cryonic brain preservation technique" that promises to preserve your dead gray matter for a future generation. PZ used to prepare tissue for microscopy in the same way: "I was chemically nuking all the proteins in…

No Rest for the Warming

Climate change denialists are apt to grasp at straws, which may explain their heralding of a global warming "hiatus" or "pause" that since 1998 has supposedly invalidated scientific consensus and its models of climate change. Clearer and more clever heads have renamed the hiatus a "faux pause," playing off the French faux pas which means false step or blunder. For one thing, the data showed only a relative slowdown in warming, not a pause; temperatures were still increasing. As Greg Laden says, "a hiatus or a pause in global warming is at present physically impossible." Now a new paper…

DNA: The Web Inside the Strands

Only 1% of the human genome codes for proteins, which might make you wonder what the rest of the nucleotide sequence is good for. In 2012 the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (or ENCODE) announced that a full 80% of the genome played a biochemical role, interacting with proteins in some way. But a new study says it takes only about 8% of our non-protein-coding genes to make us human. This is the percentage of genes that are 'conserved' by the human species: change one of these genes, and you'll alter the fitness of the individual. These genes evolve slowly (although not as slowly as protein-…

Discrediting Anti-GMO Propaganda

Not too long ago, when the media became excited about a study saying genetically modified corn causes tumor growth in rats, ScienceBloggers were quick to point out that the study featured some of the worst science ever.  Now the paper has been officially retracted by its publisher, but to what end?  On Pharyngula, PZ Myers speculates that the study authors avoided statistical analysis of their small, cancer-prone rat packs precisely because there was no statistically significant effect of being force-fed GMO corn.  PZ also says "journalists who got the paper in advance had to sign…

Standardization Walks a Fine Line

On Denialism Blog, Mark Hoofnagle argues that unless homeschooling is better regulated, it should be banned altogether.  He writes "universal primary and secondary education is part of why our country has been so successful."  While Rick Santorum can teach his kids that global warming is a hoax and the earth was created in a day, other parents can withhold sexual education, or, in one example, forbid their daughters from getting a GED.  Hoofnagle concludes, "for parents to say it's a matter of religious freedom to deny their children education, or a future outside their home, can not be…

VenomFangX vs. Thunderf00t

Ah, the weird, wild world of the interwebs, where one actually finds people calling themselves "VenomFangX" and "Thunderf00t" squaring off to do battle. VenomFangX is one of the lower denizens of Youtube, a creationist notorious for the arrogant confidence with which he states the ridiculous and ignorant. Thunderf00t is a calm rationalist and defender of science and evolution on Youtube, and they recently did battle. VenomFangX, unable to actually outargue and outreason Thunderf00t, made a series of legal accusations, that Thunderf00t was violating copyright, and convinced Youtube to briefly…

Cortical Hardware and Software

On Developing Intelligence, Chris Chatham shares a new study which demonstrates that performing new tasks actually reverses the accustomed workflow between different parts of the brain. Chris writes "Cole et al demonstrate that the causal influence is from [the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] to [the anterior prefrontal cortex] during the encoding and performance of a novel task. Practiced tasks, by contrast, were associated with a complete reversal of these effects, with APFC primarily influencing DLPFC activation during preparation and performance." These results invite a re-evaluation…

Extraterrestrial Seed

Earlier this month, NASA announced the discovery of DNA components in a meteorite. On We Beasties, Heather Olins writes that "while claims of meteorites containing DNA components have been made before, they may very well have been terrestrial contamination. This seems to be different, because the meteorite also contains similar molecules that are never found in biological matter." Specifically, the meteorite contains the nucleobase analogues purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-diaminopurine, leading Claire L. Evans to revisit the ancient concept of panspermia on Universe. Panspermia holds…

Incredible Animal Adaptations

Greg Laden reports that scientists have sequenced the genome of the Tammar Wallaby, which boasts "the longest period of embryonic diapause of any known mammal, highly synchronized seasonal breeding and an unusual system of lactation." The new research "provides a hitherto lacking understanding of marsupial gene evolution and hopes to have identified marsupial-specific genetic elements." Dr. Dolittle shares more amazing research on Life Lines, telling us seals can cool off their brains while diving to conserve oxygen. They do this by shunting blood "to large superficial veins allowing heat…

We are All Scientists

On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel differs with Neil Degrasse Tyson, saying that scientific thinking isn't that new, or that exclusive, and in fact has defined humanity from the very beginning. Chad describes science as "a method for figuring things out: you look at some situation, come up with a possible explanation, and try it to see if it works." We start with idle hands, move on to stone tools, furrowed fields, Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and now the pinnacle of our drive to master the universe, the iPad 2. In a follow-up article, Chad dismisses stereotypes of the scientific…

Still in the Dark

The universe remains a mysterious place, and one of the biggest mysteries confronting astronomers today is that "the amount of mass we can see through our telescopes is not enough to keep galaxies from spinning apart." Since the 1930's, this shortfall has been covered by dark matter, a hypothetical substance which has never actually been observed. On the Weizmann Wave, we can consider an alternative called MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) which "posits that gravity works differently on the intergalactic scale." In fact, University of Maryland researcher Stacy McGaugh recently published…

ScienceBlogs Under Attack by Zombies

Late Wednesday evening, a terrible disaster began to unfold in the ScienceBlogs universe: word emerged that a zombie attack was taking place in our bloggers' homes. While the attack was believed to have begun somewhere in the southeastern United States, with patient zero Scicurious, it has now spread across the continent and even as far as Martin Rundkvist in Sweden. But even while in pursuit of human brains, the zombies are still dedicated to the mission of communicating science—in this case, getting the word out about the real science of zombiekind. To read up on how zombie epidemics spread…

Eyjafjallajökull Eruption Irks Europe

Generally, it takes the threat of imminent death or disaster to get earth science onto the front page of newspapers, and today is no exception. A massive plume of ash emanating from the tongue-twisting Eyjafjallajökull eruption in Iceland has thrown a wrench into much of Europe's travel plans; the silicate particles in the ash can melt in jet engines and cause them to stall. Fortunately, resident geologist and volcano buff Erik Klemetti has been covering Eyjafjallajökull's activity since it began almost a month ago. The cloud of ash seems poised to stick around all day, so if you're stuck…

What's this? Pies?

Forget the chase, let's cut to the filling. Inspired by Harold and Maude, Matthew Rowley searched high and low for a Ginger Pie recipe before putting one together himself. Like the film, this custardy creation brings together young ginger and aged rum, but unlike the film, nobody has to die. If you already had pie for dinner, go ahead and have this savory Chicken, Leek, and Mushroom Cobbler for dessert. The recipe calls for dry cider and dry sherry, and while cooking turns all that fun into flavor, we won't tell if you sample the ingredients. Shelley mixes things up with the Haw Berry…

Open Laboratory 2009

The Open Laboratory 2009 is now available in print! This cutting-edge anthology of science writing includes many great ScienceBlogs posts as well as work from around the web. Editor Scicurious announces publication on Neurotopia, writing "we've got some fun stuff in there (hyenas and boobies and beer!) and some contemplative stuff in there (animal research and academia and much much more)." On A Blog Around The Clock, series editor Bora Zivkovic says "SciCurious did a fantastic job as this year's editor—and it shows." Bora also thanks Blake Stacey on Science After Sunclipse for "his…

Obligatory Reading of the Day - Femiphobia

NOTE: Bumped to top to draw attention to added links: Provocative and excellent post by Sara Robinson: There's Something About The Men. Most definitely read the comments as well. Then come back here in half an hour and read an old post of mine that I have scheduled for republishing at 11am. I know Sara likes Steven Ducat, so she may agree with my position, or perhaps not. I am expecting responses by Amanda, Melissa, Lindsay, Jill and Echidne among others. This may become an interesting discussion over the next couple of days on feminist blogs and beyond. Update: Shakespeare's Sister…

Interpreting DNA sequencing data: what can you get from quality scores?

Since DNA diagnostics companies seem to be sprouting like mushrooms after the rain, it seemed like a good time to talk about how DNA testing companies decipher meaning from the tests they perform. Last week, I wrote about interpreting DNA sequence traces and the kind of work that a data analyst or bioinformatics technician does in a DNA diagnostics company. As you might imagine, looking at every single DNA sample by eye gets rather tiring. One of the things that informatics companies (like ours) do, is to try and help people analyze several samples at once so that they can scan fewer…

Computer rage

The good news (for me) is I've been doing a lot of science lately. The bad news is that I have had to use some research software written in C# that uses Microsoft's .Net framework. Said another way, I, a long time Mac user, have been forced to use the Windoz operating system. It's not just extremely painful. It's infuriating. It assumes it's smarter than I am and insists on doing what it thinks I want to or should do (like install an update and then restart while I'm in the midst of trying to figure out a dataset). I am not a violent person, but I understand completely the growing genre of…

"Mama Africa": March 4, 1932 - November 10, 2008

In the 1960s, long before anyone ever heard of "World Music," a young South African artist by the name of Miriam Makeba made us fall in love with the music of her continent. Known throughout the world as Mama Africa, Miriam Makeba collapsed and died on Monday just after leaving a concert stage in Italy. I am glad she lived to see the United States, a country where she lived and performed for many years, just days before turn a corner on race. Miriam Makeba has a special place in the hearts and lives of so many of us she inspired then and continued to inspire through the many dark decades she…

Palin comparison, XII: McCain weighs in on Palin's qualifications

Brought to you without comment: WALLACE: Senator McCain, if I may -- Senator McCain, you didn't like it much when Governor Romney said recently that he spoke for the Republican wing of the Republican party. Who's more conservative: you or Mitt Romney? MCCAIN: I think it's pretty obvious that that statement was a paraphrase of Howard Dean's statement about the Democrat party. The fact is, I'm running on my record as a reliable conservative of 24 years. And the indicators of that, obviously, is that I've fought wasteful spending, I have had a strong and a long relationship on national security…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: debaptism

There are some things that cannot be undone. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. You can't flush the Holy Spirit once you have been Baptized. No, wait! Belief in God symbolically evaporated when more than a hundred atheists were "de-baptized" with a blow dryer yesterday. Organizers of the event in Westerville, described as a "coming out party" for atheists, agnostics and humanists, served root beer and crackers with peanut butter and honey to top off the late afternoon ceremony. "Do you agree that the magical potency of today's ceremony…

Melanie Mattson, friend, colleague, flu blog pioneer

Melanie Mattson was one of the founding Editors of the FluWiki, its initial "public face," the official publisher, and our colleague. More importantly she was our friend. We are grieved to announce her unexpected death. On her blog, Just a Bump in the Beltway, Melanie was among the first on the internet to understand and write about the significance of reported human cases of avian influenza as a potential harbinger of a pandemic. She joined forces with us to start the FluWiki in June 2005 where she was a dedicated and innovative practitioner of a new medium, collective information generation…

At least they admit it

Evangelists are suddenly experiencing rapid growth, and wow, are they happy about it! "It's a wonderful time, a great evangelistic opportunity for us," said the Rev. A. R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York's largest evangelical congregation, where regulars are arriving earlier to get a seat. "When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors." What, you might wonder, could possibly be driving more people into the shoutin' and yellin' and hellfire churches? Why, it's the economic downturn! "I found it very exciting, and I called up…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

The conference is starting in just a few days. Overwhelmed yet? Here are some tips - what to do while at the conference, as well as what to do if not physically present but interested in following virtually. Unless a few more waitlisters manage to squeeze in at the last moment, this post will be the last post introducing the participants - we expect as many as 275 people in one place during some events! Morgan Giddings is a Systems Biology Professor at UNC Chapel Hill. She blogs on Morgan on Science and is writing a book on Marketing Your Science. She is also on Twitter. Bill Cannon works at…

This is not an isolated incident, it's the product of a culture of wretchedness

While we're all feeling a bit shocked at the horrible event in Kansas, we can all turn to the Reagan legacy. Mike Reagan is giving away free copies of a book, Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, written by (or more likely, ghost-written for) his father, Ronald Reagan. The title is wonderfully ironic, since these people clearly don't have much of a conscience. Everyone order a copy, they're free; suck the money away from these enablers of killers, and put another copy of their trash into the trash. These are the people who fuel the kind of self-righteous ignorance that encourages people…

The intersection of public policy, economics, & evolution

Next Monday at NESCent: When: Monday November 16, 2009, 10-11:30am Where: NESCent, 2024 W. Main St., Durham, NC 27705, Erwin Mill Bldg, Suite A103 Directions: http://www.nescent.org/about/directions.php What do public policy and economics have to do with evolutionary theory? A lot, say participants in an upcoming meeting at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, NC. Nearly 30 scholars, policymakers, and entrepreneurs from both the academic and the business worlds will gather at the NESCent headquarters November 13-16, 2009. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss how…

Tweetlinks, 10-21-09

Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time (all my tweets are also imported into FriendFeed where they are much more easy to search and comment on, as well as into my Facebook wall where they are seen by quite a different set of people): Yale students call for OA. Open access: are publishers 'double dipping'? IHME/Harvard study wins competition for best open-access paper Statue of George Mason (drafted the Virginia bill of rights) dressed up to support OA. A Writing Revolution - almost universal literacy => almost universal authorship. NCSU graduate…

Martin Luther King, turning the page

Today is Martin Luther King's birthday. It is a holiday in the US but has a universal meaning. Because I am powerfully moved by music I could only commemorate it with music. There are three songs in the two videos that follow. The first is the great Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit. The "strange fruit" were the bodies of black men who had been lynched and were swinging from southern (and some northern) trees. It was not so long ago. I was alive then. A reminder. Then the page turns. A song of energy and hope and purpose. It keeps me going through the times I feel so very tired and wonder…

Future of blogs appears bright

From Ed Cone, via Steve Rubel, through Shel Israel, we find that Charlene Li published a new study of blog use and discovered that a quarter of Generation Y reads blogs, which is twice as much as Generation X and three times as much as Boomers (which generation was Generation F and, once the Generation Z of my kids grows up, will there be another generation after them at all, or do we start using the Greek alphabet instead?). MySpace is for highschoolers. Facebook is for college students (who tolerate, for now, a small number of highschoolers, grad students, faculty and staff, but may leave…

Did someone say “cognitive impairment”?

Alzheimer's disease is a serious problem that causes devastating and progressive mental deficits, and we need to have some of our best minds working on it. So what are these two jokers contributing? Dr. Michael Salla's work in Exopolitics seeks to inspire humanity to appreciate pathological conditions like Alzheimer's and Dementia within a broader context of Extraterrestrial activities, which have been repressed from a vital body of human knowledge. Dr. Salla and his colleagues seek to disclose insight and awareness of Extraterrestrial activities that are potentially having profound effects…

'Ask the ScienceBlogger' returns

Remember "Ask the ScienceBlogger" series? Well, it's back. And it is somewhat different now. Instead of putting the question out for everyone to respond to (or not) at their own leisure, this time one particular SB blog will be charged with answering the question, and others are free to chime in if they wish so afterwards. The first question is out of the box now: What's the difference between psychology and neuroscience? Is psychology still relevant as we learn more about the brain and how it works? And Dave and Greta Munger of Cognitive Daily were charged with answering it. They did the…

No matter how carefully you teach ABOUT religion...

...someone (guess who?) will feel persecuted: .... One student objected that I was singling out Christianity. Another objected to what I was implying about the religion. I'm not sure I even used the word "Christian" in my description of the above examples, but I certainly wouldn't argue it. But I found it fascinating that connecting Islam with 9/11 was acceptable, but for certain students (both born-agains), the idea of connecting Christianity with bad behavior was unacceptable. I also found it interesting that despite accusations of insulting Christianity, I never made a value judgment.…

When Yes means No.

When I ask a guy for something, I may get Yes as an answer half the time and No half the time. Yes mostly means Yes and No means No. If the answer is "Let me think about it", that means usually that within 24 hours or so I will get a definitve Yes or No answer. If I ask a woman for something, I rarely ever get a No. I may get Yes half the time and "Let me think about it" the other half. And moreover, Yes need not necessarily mean Yes, and "Let me think about it" ALWAYS means No - as in: I never hear about it again from that person. On the surface, that sounds like dishonesty and playing…

Reality will bite you if you choose to ignore it

Alan Sokal (famous for attacking the Lefty postmodernist abuse of science in the 1990s) and Chris Mooney (famous for attacking the Republican War on Science in the 2000s) sat down and wrote an excellent article in LA Times that came out today: Can Washington get smart about science? The article gives a historical trajectory of the problem, how it moved from political Left to the Right and what the new Democratic Congress is doing and still can do to bring back the respect for science, or for that matter, the appreciation for reality (which, no matter what the Bushies wish, they cannot make…

New Treatments

Which of the two I am interested in for entirely scientific reasons and which one for more personal reasons, you guess: Spray Could Offer New Front-line Treatment For Men With Premature Ejaculation: Patients with premature ejaculation who used a topical anaesthetic spray were able to delay ejaculation for five times as long, according to a study in the February issue of the urology journal BJU International. Researchers from the UK and Netherlands studied 54 men with premature ejaculation, randomly assigning them to a treatment and control group. Both groups reported that without any therapy…

My picks from ScienceDaily

From Hot Springs To Rice Farms, Scientists Reveal New Insights Into The Secret Lives Of Archaea: In the world of microbes, as in politics, some groups just can't seem to shake the label ''extremist.'' Another Boost For Stem Cell Research: In the wake of the Australian Senate's decision to pass the human embryo cloning legislation, another Australian research breakthrough is likely to strengthen the case for embryonic stem cell research. Microfluidic Device Used For Multigene Analysis Of Individual Environmental Bacteria: When it comes to digestive ability, termites have few rivals due to the…

Going back to our Puritan roots

The ACLU is suing Union Public School Independent District No. 9 of Oklahoma. The reason is bizarre: administrators at the school have harrassed and violated the civil rights of a young woman named Brandi Blackbear because — and I'm a bit ashamed to admit this can go on in my country — they accused her of witchcraft. They say she used a magic spell to make one of her teachers sick. In retaliation, she has been subjected to searches and public humiliation, and the school has banned the wearing of non-Christian paraphernalia. I'm pretty sure this is the 21st century, not the 17th. You would…

Blog memes

Some things spread like wildfire across the blogs. But, can an artificial meme, designed specifically to measure the speed of its spreading, spread as fast? If we know its speed, can we know its position at the same time, and vice versa? You'll know the answer (pretty soon) if you link to this from your blog. Perhaps it would be more useful to track the already existing and popular memes, like Beautiful Bird Meme, Random Quotes Meme, Silly Blog Meme, Four Meme, Zero Meme, Dirty Thirty Meme, States Meme, Obscure-But-Good-Movies Meme, Four Jobs Meme, The Blogging Blog Meme, Browser Meme,…

Afghanistan: Hope and necessity

Obama's election opened Pandora's Box and one of the things that flew out was Hope. No good change comes without Hope as one of its wellsprings. There is much justified anger at Obama's War on Afghanistan. You've seen it here and you'll see more of it as the Afghanistan debacle continues to take and spoil lives and sap our strength as a people. But Hope remains a necessary ingredient for those of us who oppose this war. We know it will draw cynical comments from those who see it as pie-in-the-sky utopianism (although pie-in-the-sky pushed by religion or politicians is OK?). Cynicism for them…

John Boehner's salmonella outbreak

by Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA A recent editorial in the New York Times, "Rolling the dice on food-borne illnesses," focused on just one of the many health dangers related to the federal government shutdown.  The editorial reminded me of developments in Vermont almost forty years ago, when I was the State Health Commissioner. Vermont's House Appropriations Committee was threatening to cut the Health Department's budget.  After telling the Committee members that they would be hurting the Department’s ability to protect the public, including from foodborne and waterborne illness, I suggested…

It's 42 minutes after 7

Approximately 563 minutes ago, I noticed this peculiar analysis of language use on Pharyngula that suggested that we use the phrase "N minutes", where N is 5 or 10, with a slightly greater frequency than the web population as a whole. This made me self-conscious for a whole 18 minutes, so I thought I'd better sleep on it for about 480 minutes before taking 4 minutes to make a short post about it. Go on and read the Language Log — it's short and will probably take you only 2 minutes to skim through it. Now I'm thinking, because I'm an evil and devious sort, that since this is already a low…

We don't?

Nick Spencer of the Telegraph says Americans don't do atheism. It's a weird piece that frets over the religiosity of American politicians, but somehow seems to find it reassuring that there are different ways to be religious, and that maybe the US is moving away from dominionist wackaloonery towards religously-motivated social activism — doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, in other words. There's a germ of hope there, that the country might get somewhat less insane — but at the same time it represents an opportunity to entrench superstition deeper into the republic. I really don't…

What Else Should I Write About?

Not promising anything - and definitely not promising anything until the book is done, but does anyone have topics they'd like your blogiste to cover? What do you want to hear me go on about? BTW, if you are interested in more in-depth going on (plus a whole lot of awesome other stuff), Aaron and my next farm and garden design class starts 1 week from today. I'll post details and syllabus up here today or tomorrow, or you can email at jewishfarmer@gmail.com for more info. Also, I've still got spots in my next apprenticeship weekend - come to my house in rural upstate NY and see how we do it…