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Science and Science Communication: Self Correcting

Climate change has had a big impact in Africa. We can certainly talk about that some time. But when a David Attenborough BBC special mentioned one aspect of climate change impact they got the facts wrong. Leo Hickman of The Environment Blog at The Guardian noticed the error and wrote a very interesting blog post tracking down how this happened. The BBC, in response, has removed the specific reference from the special. This is important because it is important to get it right, but it is also important because it demonstrates that those whom climate science denialists incorrectly call "…

Top (mostly climate change related) Science Denialist Books

Top “Ten” Recent Books (focusing on 2012 but including the last few years) on Climate, Science denialism, Energy, and Science Policy are (including one Post Warming novel) are: Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us by Maggie Koerth-Baker Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand by Haydn Washington and John Cook Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise (Kindle Single) by Daniel Grossman, TEDx Books (Kindle Single) Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto Rising Sea Levels: An…

What If Romney's Bain was Saved by a Federal Bailout?

That would be funny. Tim Dickinson has some pretty amazing investigative reporting in which he notes that the origin story for Romney is that he ... ... took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain & Company, preventing the collapse of the consulting firm where his career began ... campaign aides spun Romney as the wizard behind a "long-shot miracle," bragging that he had "saved bank depositors all over the country $30 million when he saved Bain & Company." What really happened was…

Comparing mainstream scientists to the Unibomber is like ...

.... comparing holocaust survivors to Hitler? Hmong refugees to Pol Pot? Well, maybe not exactly but there is a structural similarity. People at the Heartland Institute have very little to do with science and very little experience in that area of academics. Otherwise they would remember the Unibomber days, when everyone was worried about the packages they were receiving in the mail, but especially those in mathematics. Now, the Heartland Institute has a billboard campaign with a picture of the Unibomber on it, making the claim that only very fringe people, such as the Unibomber, still "…

Facts about the Super Bowl

It is not a bowl, but rather, a football game. The 2010 Super Bowl would have been won by the Minnesota Vikings had the New Orleans Saints not cheated. It is not true that if your city is destroyed by an Act of God that you get to win the Super Bowl for that reason at a later time. Were that true, the Port-au-Prince football team would have won the Super Bowl by now, surely (hat tip: JAF). New Yorkers do not automatically like New York Teams. The New England Patriots were disowned by Boston, New Haven and all of the other cities of New England until the year they won their first Super Bowl…

Would you like a copy of Einstein's Famous Religion Letter?

Or even better yet, how about the original? It's going up for sale on ebay. Here's my copy of the letter: And the ebay site is here. The letter was written to the author of Choose Life The Biblical Call To Revolt, and includes this famous comment: ... The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and…

Pharyngula: the blog that brings you one step closer to the Old Ones

Michael Alan Nelson, writer for the Fall of Cthulhu comics from Boom! Studios, sent me a couple of copies of the comic today, for some dark, mysterious reason. For a little context to this page, the two heroes have just witnessed a horrible suicide, and are going through the dead person's effects and computer files to try and figure out why he blew his brains out. (click for larger image) The "why" is apparently that he's been reading Pharyngula, in part. I know a few people who have that kind of reaction. It's only a fleeting mention—he doesn't have me gibbering insanely and ripping open my…

EPA's Clean Power Plan: The Movie

Joe Goffman, Associate Assistant Administrator for Climate and Senior Counsel for EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, explains EPA's commonsense proposal to work with states, cities and businesses to cut carbon pollution from power plants. By looking across our whole power sector, the proposed Clean Power Plan will boost our economy, protect our health and environment, and fight climate change. This is OK, but I would seriously edit some of this text. For example, this is part of the text of this video: Global climate change can threaten our very way of life. Floods can destroy our homes and…

William Jennings Bryan, enemy of science and cephalopods

A new book titled Flock of Dodos (a book, not the movie, and apparently the two have nothing to do with each other) is coming out, and Glenn Branch of the NCSE tells me it mentions something vile about William Jennings Bryan, the defender of creationism at the Scopes trial. That's his campaign poster to the right. Look closely, very closely — it's a rather small image — down at the bottom left. There's a cephalopod defending the American flag, and some kind of crazed scullery maid attacking it with an axe. Obviously, Bryan was no friend of biodiversity. The description in the book of this…

Breaking News: Virginia Supreme Court on Academic Freedom at UV [UPDATED]

UPDATED: Interview with Michael Mann on this court decision (and other matters). An important Virginia Supreme Court finding came out today, related to the hugely complicated maneno that I feel totally unqualified to explain to you ... but Michael Halpern of the Center for Science and Democracy is: The Supreme Court of Virginia today found unanimously in favor of the University of Virginia in its attempt to protect its employees from unwarranted intrusions into their privacy through the commonwealth’s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA). In doing so, the Court rebuffed efforts by the American…

Shame on the BBC: False Balance in #ClimateChange discussion

The BBC stepped in it. First, they engaged in a totally absurd "false balance" presentation regarding climate change, then in response (link below) they aired very reasonable complaints by listeners, and to this, they responded officially that everything is fine, you can go home and lock your doors and windows, nothing to see here, our balance is in balance, thank you very much. Or words to that effect. If I was British I would be ashamed of the BBC for this, but since I'm not British I'm peeved. Should the Today programme have invited Lord Lawson, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and…

This transition can kill you

This video has been going around. If you are not emotionally reasonably well shored up at the moment, don't even think about watching it. Most societies that practice extensive warfare, have a fair amount of violence, etc. often owing to the concentration of resources and vulnerability of those resources and a fair dose of patriarchy also have strong age grading of some kind. Sometimes transitions from one grade to another involve significant and serious dangers, and not everyone survives those dangers. Americans and many others have "grades" in school that serve as age grades, but they…

Help NCSE Nail Down The Heartland Institute's Latest Trick

That nefarious leech of an organization, the Heartland Institute, the one that put up the billboards implying that people who think climate change is important are mad bombers, has done something really offensive, again. They made a fake packet of information with fake stuff about climate change and sent it to teachers and other educators, as well as graduate students, to try to trick them into passing the lies and deceptions on to their students. According to the National Center for Science Education: Around Halloween, thousands of science teachers, science professors, and graduate…

Pro Tip for Science Denialists: How to win a debate with a scientist

First, get a list of over a dozen things you want to say. They don't have to be true, and many, even most, of them can be versions of each other. Then, when you are in the debate, do this: Scientist: “If there’s one thing you should take away from this discussion, it’s... Denialist [interrupting]: Thing one, thing two, thing three, thing four, thing five. Scientist: “Actually, that thing four you said, that’s not really true .. Denialist [interrupting]: Thing six, thing seven, thing eight, thing nine, thing ten. Scientist: We can’t be sure of everything but one thing we are pretty sure of…

Two items related to the maneno in Wisconsin

Two Decades of Christian Nationalist Education Paved Way for Today's War on Labor While some religious leaders have come together to voice support for public employees in Wisconsin, others view the attack on the public sector and unions as a holy war. Fundamentalist textbooks and other media have been used for indoctrination into a worldview in which unregulated free markets are divinely mandated. In this sacralized model of capitalism, those who interfere with the invisible hand of the market are choosing "the state as provider rather than God." The Koch brothers may have helped finance…

Libyan Dictator Warns Against Facebook, Microsoft Bans OpenSource

These stories are closely related at a philosophical level: Both stalwart entities have similar philosophies about what they think they can tell other people to do, how they do things, and what they fear: Libyan dictator warns against use of Facebook, 40 protesters injured Many Libyan Internet activists have declared their support for the pro-democracy movements and revolutions in the Middle East. After seeing the power of the people succeed in Tunisia and Egypt, they created groups on Facebook to call for political and economic reforms in Libya. Libya's dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, has…

Hurricane victims face new microbial threat: mold

As if it wasn't bad enough already... Mold now forms an interior version of kudzu in the soggy South, posing health dangers that will make many homes tear-downs and will force schools and hospitals to do expensive repairs. It's a problem that any homeowner who has ever had a flooded basement or a leaky roof has faced. But the magnitude of this problem leaves many storm victims prey to unscrupulous or incompetent remediators. Home test kits for mold, for example, are worthless, experts say. Don't expect help from insurance companies, either. Most policies were revised in the last decade to…

Bad professor

To my students and advisees: I've emailed a few of you, but just in case, I'm also putting this here. You've been trying to get in touch with me, especially this week when registration is pending, but when I'm not in class I'm flitting off to somewhere else. I was away in Washington DC last Thursday afternoon through Sunday, and I'm about to do it again with trips to Mankato tomorrow, a long weekend at a conference in Oregon, and then zooming away again right after class on Monday to Fergus Falls. Trust me, though, you're not the only one feeling a bit tired of it all. Here's the deal, though…

August Pieces Of My Mind #2

Getting your fridge filled with rusty Medieval nails isn't actually as hard as many people think. Just marry an archaeologist! It's been decided that from now on the word is pronounced ever-yone or ever-yawn. Jrette joined me and Lasse for tonight's sailing mini-race. She steered throughout the race, she enjoyed herself and we finished in the middle third as usual. Cousin E admires Newton and Turing. I've lent him Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I run an academic job application web site through Google Translate. The gender box asks whether I am a human or a woman. The stereotype of the sandal-…

Metal Detectorist Tattoo #1 - Falck

Yesterday I learned about a cool new tradition among metal detectorists. They're having images of their favourite finds tattooed, often on the arm with which they hold the detector! Note that in Scandinavia these are generally objects that the finders have handed in to museums – they keep them only as tattoos. This is in line with the Danish way of regulating metal detectors: there the submitters of each year's ten best finds are invited to the Finds Oscars in Copenhagen and are publicly honoured by my colleagues. Hugo Falck found this beautiful brooch in 2014 while collaborating with a…

Medical Marijuana Policies Are Kind Of Childish

Medical marijuana is just a backward strategy to get recreational marijuana legalised. It's like the potheads twenty years ago who would praise hemp's excellent properties as a fibre and fuel source. They didn't care about any other fibre crops. It was a transparent ruse. A medical intervention's legality should be pushed by worldwide medical consensus, not by a regional cultural predisposition to enjoy the compound's recreational use. Medical marijuana is a non-issue in European medicine. That said, I believe the enormous public money put into the customs, legal and punitive systems to…

Reality: The Ultimate Downer

In light of this news, lots of people are wondering: "If bone marrow transplants 'cure' HIV, why not give everyone with HIV bone marrow transplants...?" Well, why not? Certainly the process is not easy or cheap. When I first wrote about this in 2008 (!!!), I mentioned that there is no way this would be a viable treatment option in the Third World (aka the places of the world that need a viable HIV cure the most). But if would could do it in the US, in Europe, maybe we could get the process down. Make it better, make it cheaper, optimize everything until it is cheap enough for Third World…

1800 gene therapy trials

I wish I wish I wish this article was open access! ARG!! Gene therapy clinical trials worldwide to 2012 - an update This article is a great review of gene therapy as a therapy, and how it has evolved from an experiment that killed children to an accepted therapy that is saving and improving lives. Here is a list of all the diseases that have been/are/will be treated with gene therapy: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23355455 These are trials in humans-- this list doesnt include all of the therapies that are still in the tissue culture/animal model segments of the pipeline.  Can anyone…

Long-term effects of CIA 'vaccination' ruse to find Osama bin Laden

Thanks to this, we now have this: Five female health workers vaccinating children against polio have been shot dead in Pakistan in a series of attacks blamed on Islamist militants. One victim was a 17-year-old schoolgirl volunteer. ... ... Pakistan, where there has been a severe backlash against immunisation for polio and other diseases since the CIA used a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to set up a fake vaccination programme as the agency closed in on the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in his hiding place in the town of Abbottabad, in the north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, last…

THUNDER UP!

In case you havent heard, the OKC Thunder is playing the Miami Heat for the NBA championship this week (until however long the series goes). And the entire state of Oklahoma is FREAKING OUT. EVERYTHING is blue/orange/navy.  If it aint, were painting it. This is the building my boxing gym is in. hehehehe "Durantula". But I cant make fun of anyone, Im freaking out too.  Hey, Im enjoying the fun while I can-- this might be the only time I live in Oklahoma while it is a Blue state: I hope other folks are rooting for the Thunder, as opposed to against LeBron.  Thunder are good kids, and theyre…

I thought I smelled something foul…John West is coming to Minnesota

As fellow Minnesotan Greg Laden warns, we're getting a visit from another dishonest hack of the Discovery Institute, John West. On Friday, 30 November, at 7:00 in Room 155, Nicholson Hall on the UM campus. I may just have to stop by. He's going to be babbling about an extended argumentum ad consequentiam: "Darwin's Dangerous Idea: The Disturbing Legacy of America's Eugenics Crusade". Yeah, once again, we're going to be told that reality is dehumanizing. One thing that greatly peeves me is the sponsoring organization. This is a parasitic religious organization that sucks leechlike on academia…

Happy Thanksgiving, my fellow Americans!

I did not drop off the face of the earth in the last 3/4 of a day — I joined the 47 million Americans who spend the day before Thanksgiving in an annual familial migration. I had to drive Daughter #1 and her sweetie-pie to Buffalo, Minnesota; then drive to Minneapolis to pick up Son #2, who'd had a long day on a bus from Madison, Wisconsin; then back to Buffalo to pick up Daughter #1 sans sweetie-pie; then to St Cloud to pick up Son #1; and finally, back home to Morris. For a time there I had my entire genetic output in a small car with me, in the snow, on a freeway (and I think all 47…

Shhh. The creationists are listening.

It's a little odd to find myself cited in a Polk County, Florida newspaper as evidence that their pro-ID activities have received "national attention." Otherwise, it's an article that testifies to the inevitability of a conflict. A majority of the school board members in Polk want to insert creationism into the curriculum, and they've got a few supporters in the schools. …an eighth-grade science teacher at Union Academy in Bartow spoke in favor of intelligent design, a belief that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by some kind of higher force. "When you talk…

How to Teach Physics to Your Polish Dog

I have a Google alert set up to let me know whenever my name or the title of one of my books turns up in one of the sources they index. This is highly imperfect, sometimes missing interesting articles, and often blorting out 57 different pages on which my name appears in a sidebar link. It comes in handy from time to time, though, such as this morning, when it coughed up a whole bunch of pages linking to the Polish edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Finally, dogs in the ancestral homeland of my father's family can learn all about quantum physics. I'm a little surprised to learn…

Glowbug Baby

How awesome is The Pip? So awesome he glows: OK, that's really just a phototherapy light because he's a little jaundiced (SteelyKid had the same thing when she was just born, though I don't remember the light being brought to the room with her). It makes him look like he glows in the dark, though. Possibly because he acquired superpowers through unwise experiments with comic-book radiation. All is basically well, here. Both SteelyKid and The Pip have thoroughly charmed all the nurses at the hospital-- her through cute chatter and general bounciness, him through eating like a champ and…

Thursday Monkeying Around Blogging 062311

SteelyKid is in a bit of a "no pictures" phase at the moment, which makes it kind of difficult to get weekly shots. Hence the run of Toddler Blogging pictures without Appa in them-- when we pick Appa up, she runs away. Thus, this shot with the color balance all wonky (I could do a better job of cleaning it up, but I'm lazy), because the flash hadn't warmed up yet, and she started freaking out before I could get a better shot. It does, however, show the finest balloon animal you can get from "Mr. Twisty," who does his act at the Greenmarket every now and then: That's a monkey climbing a tree…

Leap tomorrow!

The two most amusing explanations for why we have leap years that I've heard came from creationists: Those scientists can't even measure the length of the year accurately! They have to keep fudging their numbers every few years to make everything add up, so why should I trust them? We have leap years because the earth is slowing down in its orbit, which proves that the earth can't be old — a million years ago the earth would have been whirling around the sun so fast it would have flown out of orbit! Phil's detailed explanation isn't quite as funny. My simple answer: the earth goes…

All My Readers are Descendants of Royalty

Commenters on yesterday's entry broached the subject of being the descendant of European royalty. I'd say everybody alive today with even a vaguely europid complexion is such a royal scion. Do the math as you count generations into the past. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on through the centuries. Soon you reach a point where the number of ancestors in a given generation is larger than the population of the Earth at the time. (This is possible because as you move back, a single individual may occupy a large number of slots on…

Job Rejection Blues

I got another job rejection letter today. Five out of 79 applicants (6%) got research positions in Linköping, 2.5 hours by car from my home. The five are two chemists, one neurobiologist, one environmental scientist and one gender studies scholar. At least I wasn't beaten by any colleague. What bugs me is the way they trimmed those 79 candidates down to eleven that were interviewed. One criterion was that they only contacted people who have already had post-docs. This biased the selection heavily toward well-funded disciplines where post-docs are plentiful. It's much easier to get one in…

Consolidating Aard's Subscriber Base on Google Reader

Google Reader is an excellent blog reader, among whose strengths is that it resides somewhere off your computer. This means that you can read blogs from several machines without having to mark a lot of old entries as read. Nor do you have to subscribe to the same feed more than once. Looking at Aard on Google Reader, I've found that the blog has quite a number of subscribers there, but that they are spread across a number of different feed addresses. Dear Reader, I have a request for you. Could you please make sure that you subscribe to Aard on Google Reader with the following official feed…

Royally Furnished Cemetery Found in NE England

A royally furnished inhumation cemetery of the 7th century has been excavated at Loftus in Teesside, north-eastern England. The finds are sensational as they hail from the "final phase" of furnished burial, when England had already been re-Christianised and grave wealth was in steep decline. Among the remarkable finds are gold-and-garnet jewellery in a southern English style. The cemetery centred on a bed burial, which is exceptionally rare. Historical sources suggest an explanation: "The speculation is that the royals buried on Teesside are linked to the Kentish princess Ethelburga, who…

A Runic Farewell

From about 1845 to 1930, Sweden saw massive emigration to the United States. According to one estimate, about a third of the country's population left. In 1900, more Swedes lived in Chicago than in Gothenburg. Many factors conspired to send people on their way: population expansion, a lack of agricultural land, failed crops, economic recession, and the simple pull of the virtual population vacuum beyond the American frontier, the pull of enormous opportunity, as industrialised Europeans encountered the Stone Age societies of the native Americans. The emigration left its share of…

Doctoring My Spin

From today's issue of free subway paper Metro, I translate: Hey there... ... Martin Rundkvist, 35, the archaeologist who has found a unique 16th century sword in the woods. How did you make the find -- through cutting-edge methods? -- I sat down in the lotus position and took in the vibrations with my astral antennae. Astral antennae? -- You've got to have long hair to take in the vibes. All hair dressers are paid by the government to cut off the astral antennae. They've got a hidden agenda, them hair dressers. Really? So, how many lives do you think the sword has taken? -- Well, it really…

Ze Robots are comink

Via CIP what I agree is a rather nice story about robotisation, from the WaPo. The bit that seems interesting is that the robots are getting cheaper, and more flexible. You don't need to convert the whole factory at once; you can do little bits at a time. For the folk doing the work that the robots are going to push out, this isn't good news, except that they jobs are so mind-numbingly boring that perhaps it is good news, really. They're now free to do something better, in a slightly richer society. They even find one of the workers to say “It’s not a good job for a person to have anyway”.…

I am underwhelmed

Perhaps I'm not as disappointed as Greg, but I am unimpressed with the 'presidential' debate at the AAAS. What we had was two assistants to the Clinton and Obama campaigns (the Republicans were complete no-shows) pop in to run through some canned promises. There was no debate. There was no commitment from the candidates themselves. I think that the ScienceDebate2008 idea is a great one, and the failing is really on the part of the candidates and the parties themselves. Obama will happily leap to appease the faith-heads of an organization like Call to Renewal; Clinton thinks the Decorah First…

The Writing Process

9:30am Thursday, Starbucks Work steadily on the work-in-progress, researching a few points here and there, adding a bunch of words, making various line edits. 11:15am Thursday, Starbucks Realize that the stuff I added would work better if split off into a new subsection. 11:30am Thursday, Union College Meeting with the Dean. No writing. Sigh. 1:30pm Thursday, Barnes and Noble Revise material written earlier in the day to split new stuff off into its own subsection. Research some additional points, add a whole bunch of words. Struggle with transition between old stuff and new subsection. 5:…

An exercise for the readers

I and a diverse group of people got a question in email, one that we are supposed to answer in a single sentence. The question is, What is evolution? You know, Ernst Mayr wrote a whole book to answer that question on a simple level, and I'm supposed to have the hubris to answer that in one sentence? OK, knowing full well that it is grossly inadequate, here's my short answer: Evolution is a well-confirmed process of biological change that produces diversity and coherent functionality by a variety of natural mechanisms. Go ahead, you people try to answer it in one sentence in the comments.…

Windows Mobile Media Player is Crap

Since getting a smartphone, I never use my iPod anymore. (I handed it down to Junior who is now getting a psychedelic musical education. He's into the Marbles.) But the switch of course led to a huge drop in the ease of use. Here are the steps I have to go through to get my phone to play my mp3s in random order: Unlock phone. If need be, navigate to "Favourites" tab of start screen. Start Windows Media Player. Click on "Menu". Click on "Library". Select "Storage Card" from top-left menu. Click on "My music". Click on "Play". And the software is absolute crap at remembering where I was in a…

Norwegians Grade Archaeology Journals

The other day I took a look at how the European Science Foundation's ERIH project grades journals in Scandy archaeology. Dear Reader Ismene pointed me to a corresponding list put out by the NDS, "Norwegian Data Support for the Social Sciences". While ERIH recognises three impact grades plus ungraded journals, the NDS has only two grades plus ungraded. Here's the list of relevant journals. Grade 2 Acta Archaeologica Fennoscandia Archaeologica Norwegian Archaeological Review Grade 1 Current Swedish Archaeology Fornvännen Journal of Danish Archaeology Journal of Nordic Archaeological Science…

Why Am I Still Skinny?

I'm 36 and still as skinny as in my teens (BMI 20). Why is that, I have wondered. I have a desk job, I eat every three waking hours, I drink sweet tea and snack on cookies, I do no sports outside the marital bedroom, I scoff at gyms and jogging. Contributing factors to my skinny-assedness are skinny ancestors, no snacking between 3-hour meals and no alcohol. But I recently realised what's probably the capping factor depriving me of the beginning paunch that my contemporaries sport. I cycle to work. From my home to my dad's house where me and my books occupy one of the guest rooms, it's 2.6…

Jeff Medkeff 1968-2008

One of Aard's regulars, Jeff the Blue Collar Astronomer, died yesterday. He was diagnosed out of the blue with spontaneous ("cryptogenic") liver cancer in early June. Jeff was 39. I learned the sad news from Wikipedia contributor Kwix this morning. Derek of Skepticality confirmed it on the JREF forum: "Jeff started to have some internal bleeding a couple days ago and was taken to the hospital. He died last night while sleeping." I met Jeff at The Amazing Meeting 5.5 in Fort Lauderdale in January. We became friends and I read his blog within hours of each posting. He was a programmer, an…

Social Nucleus and Accretionary Matter

Once in the early 90s two Stockholm girls went to college to major in Chinese. They became friends: one was half-Chinese, the other had spent part of her childhood in China. They would one day become the Architect and the Sculptress. But first they went to China to pursue their studies, and made friends with an expat Chinese Stockholm girl who had come there for the same purpose. She would later become the Journalist. In China the Architect picked up a local Painter whom she brought along when all three girls returned to Sweden. In the end it didn't work out, but Architect and Painter…

Anthropogenic influence on recent circulation-driven Antarctic sea ice changes

Oh good grief I hear you cry, not more science. Yes. Sorry. And its even about sea ice, but the Antarctic kind. This is in the trail of Holland and Kwok and so on. Observations reveal an increase of Antarctic sea ice over the past three decades, yet global climate models tend to simulate a sea ice decrease for that period. Here we combine observations with model experiments (MPI-ESM) to investigate causes for this discrepancy and for the observed sea ice increase. Based on observations and atmospheric reanalysis, we show that on multidecadal time scales Antarctic sea ice changes are linked to…

Another year in stoats

Subtitled As the days of my life are but grains of sand. I've tried to not-choose the knockabout stuff, which is all great fun, but ephemeral. But some months were thin and I had little choice. * Jan: On happiness * Feb: The sleepwalkers * Mar: Man slumped after hitting wall (see-also) * Apr: North Korea ‘may not be performance art’, say experts * May: Syria: the West makes the usual mistake - which I drag out not because its brilliant, nor because time has proved me wrong. * Jun: Saturn’s hexagon. See-also Earth from Saturn. * Jul: Up three to nine. See-also Happy Birthday to Watts’ paper!,…

It's All About Science, Remember...

From Kathy Martin, Kansas State Board of Education who is pushing for inclusion of Intelligent Design in the state's science curriculum, making the folks at the Discovery Institute tear their hair out while she lays the smack down on their attempts to pretend that ID is just about science, not about religion: Some scientists claim that ID is thinly disguised creationism with a hidden Christian agenda at its root. Martin agrees that the agenda is not well disguised. "Of course this is a Christian agenda. We are a Christian Nation," said Martin. "Our country is made up of Christian…