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Self-refuting headlines

The IDosphere (IDome?) is oddly enthusiastic about an article in the Christian Post about Paul Nelson's attempts to defend ID. The problem is, the title of the piece refutes itself: Intelligent Design Defended by Unsolved Genetic Puzzle. Set aside (at least momentarily) the issue of whether the author intended to refer to Nelson as an unsolved genetic puzzle (we have a pretty good idea of where his genes came from, after all). The problem is, an unsolved problem cannot be an argument for some theory positive statement about the world. If the problem is unsolved, it suggests that IDC doesn'…

Scientist Laureate

Great minds think alike, I guess. Like Razib and Stranger Fruit, my answer to this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger – "Who would you nominate for Scientist Laureate, if such a position existed?" – was going to be E. O. Wilson. His work on conservation alone would justify that status, if such a thing existed. His work on sociobiology is justifiably famous, and his early work on island biogeography. His work is iconic across the sciences. But … In an episode of the West Wing, the incoming poet laureate gives a reading of poets who were never chosen to be a poet laureate because they were too…

Be careful what you wish for: DCCC remembers the KS-2

A month ago, Jim Ryun's campaign planted a story about how Nancy Boyda wasn't a serious challenger because the DCCC wasn't putting any money into her campaign. Of course, she's been saying that she wasn't seeking DCCC involvement since she announced this campaign, but Ryun was desperate. In response to the charges, the Boyda campaign put a poll in the field. Using sound survey methodology and a Republican call-center in Utah, the poll showed that Boyda was in a statistical tie with Ryun. Two subsequent internal polls and a poll by the state party all tell the same story. That, combined…

Former Attorney General questions current AG's fundraising

Former Kansas AG Bob Stephan explains why he quit Phill Kline's office: Stephan said Tuesday he resigned because he was upset by Kline’s strategy of using churches to raise campaign funds. And he’s particularly upset about an instance where a church made donations to a business owned by Kline’s wife, Deborah. “When you use your faith to shuttle money into your for-profit corporation, that bothers me. Especially when you are there, certainly giving voice to your faith, but with the credential of being the attorney general,” Stephan said in an interview with the Journal-World. Kline argues that…

Barnett lagging in governor's race

Anderson: Poll shows Barnett not a household name - CJOnline Blogs: Overall, only one of the 10 people I approached this week in downtown Topeka for a random political poll could correctly identify Barnett as the Republican candidate for Kansas governor. Five said they'd never heard of him. Four said the name rang a bell but admitted, when pressed, that they didn't know what office Barnett was seeking. The one guy who was familiar with Barnett was a lobbyist. This comes around the time that Barnett is running his first ads, a convoluted attack on drivers licenses for undocumented workers and…

A brief recommendation

The other night I finally picked up Adrian Desmond & James Moore's Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist and I have found it to be one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read (even though I am only about 130 pages in). I would have proceeded much further already but I started reading it aloud to my wife and she has been enjoying it so much that I have been barred from proceeding further unless I continue to orate the contents of the biography. It's a hefty book, my voice may well give out by time I get to the end, but it is certainly worth a few summer afternoons if you have…

*Drool*

The American Museum of Natural History Research Library has recently put up a website ("Picturing the Museum") containing hundreds of black & white photos of museum exhibits, dioramas, and behind the scenes prep. It is a treasure trove of photographic information; I just wish I could have seen some of these exhibits first hand! The behind the scenes photos are some of the most interesting, though, like this photo of the cleaning of an elephant skin; American Museum of Natural History Library http://images.library.amnh.org Image # 280023 Here are a few links to some other favorites,…

Paleoanthropological poetry

This weekend I had a chance to get through a few shorter anthropology books that I purchased a few weeks ago, including Our Face From Fish to Man, The Leopard's Spots, and Adventures With the Missing Link. The last book, by Raymond Dart, is part autobiography and part popular science book, and the reaction of the public to his famous "Taung child" described within is quite interesting. Some hailed the discovery, others criticized or marginalized it, but for a time it entered the public consciousness as a representation of something ugly and brutish, yet inextricably connected to ourselves.…

Headed out of town

At about 2 AM tomorrow morning I'll be hopping in the car to head down to North Carolina for the 2nd Annual Science Blogging Conference (and I'll even be speaking with some other wonderful student bloggers), but never fear, dear reader; I'll be bringing my clunky old laptop with me to write about things whenever I can. My old rust-bucket of a car is fixed up, I've downloaded some new tunes for the 7 hour drive, and I'm all booked at the hotel, and I'm definitely excited for the events this weekend. I hope to make some time to head over to the natural history museum in Raleigh while I'm there…

I don't think my cats would like it if I brought home a pet dinosaur

I've already written something up about the infamous "Dinosauroid" previously, but it is funny how we're told that if the non-avian dinosaurs didn't become extinct 65 million years ago (preventing mammals as we know them from evolving, the clip says) humans would still have been around to take advantage of a warm Protoceratops omelettes, the dinosaurs themselves being essentially unchanged. Indeed, it seems that it's hard for us to imagine a world without something like ourselves in it, the dinosauroid being an extension of the somewhat teleological or vitalistic premise that humans are "…

Woohoo! I've been published!

Yesterday I wrote about an absolutely horrible opinion piece that appeared in the Rutgers newspaper The Daily Targum, the author suggesting that those he deemed stupid deserved to die. Although I gave a detailed response on this blog, I wanted to address the Rutgers community as a whole and I shot off an editorial reply to the paper. I didn't hear back from the Targum editors so I wasn't sure whether my piece would run or not (especially since I was critical of the editorial board for not checking Pironciak's piece), but lo and behold, it's been published. There's little in my response that I…

Photo of the Day #21: Plains Zebra

There are some animals that seem to exist in a bit of taxonomic confusion (at least in the literature; I don't think zebras lose sleep over their species names), the Plains Zebra being one of these. The animals pictured above are from the Philadelphia Zoo and listed as being members of the species Equus burchellii, but recent work appears to show that this most common of Zebra species should really be called Equus quagga. Burchell's Zebra, then, is relegated to the status of a subspecies with the name Equus quagga burchellii, itself taking precedence over the subspecies Equus quagga…

Deep thoughts for the day

Sir Charles has a Question for the Class: Do you think if Barack Obama had left his seriously ill wife after having had multiple affairs, had been a member of the "Keating Five," had had a relationship with a much younger lobbyist that his staff felt the need to try and block, had intervened on behalf of the client of said young lobbyist with a federal agency, had denounced then embraced Jerry Falwell, had denounced then embraced the Bush tax cuts, had confused Shiite with Sunni, had confused Al Qaeda in Iraq with the Mahdi Army, had actively sought the endorsement and appeared on stage with…

Turnout

Poll workers this morning said turnout was high. At 8:30, I was the 74th voter of the day. Great weather, which I suspect will help Hillary, but there's no way to know until this evening. If my sense that Hillary voters tend not to feel strongly, then good weather helps her. If my sense is right that undecideds will break for Obama, but may not decide until standing in the voting booth, good weather could help Obama. Maybe it's a push. Zogby's last polling sample puts Obama way up in California, but SUSA's last poll has Hillary way up. SUSA's polls have tended to favor Hillary, and…

Scienceblogging

At the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference today, I ran into Professor Steve Steve. Panda's Thumb denizens Tara Smith and Reed Cartwright accompanied various of Prof. Steve's avatars. As you can imagine, the presence of so much dogmatic (pandamatic?) Darwinism in one location unleashed pandamonium, and Prof. Steve Steve's dreaded nemesis, Department Chair Cthulu, burst through the resulting rift in the structure of space and time itself. As proof that the universe had lost its bearing after this cataclysm (pandaclysm?), a session on framing science, headed by Jennifer Jacquet and…

Bad ideas

Times Public Editor: Hiring Kristol the worst idea ever? I can think of many worse. Hanging someone from a lamppost to be beaten by a mob because of his ideas? … [I]t is not the end of the world. Is this what American journalism is reduced to? Not being as bad as a lynch mob or Armageddon? C'mon Gray Lady, aim a bit higher. The Times Op-Ed page is some of the most valuable intellectual real estate in the world. Surely the measure of a columnist is not how few things could be worse than him, but how few columnists could be better. For what it's worth, if I were the Times, I'd have given…

Michael Behe: Cunning linguist

In an interview with Point of Inquiry, the host asks Behe if he'll clarify whether, "just to be clear, you think the young earth creationists are completely wrong." "Uh, yes I do," Behe confidently replies. He pauses, the interviewer gathers himself for the next question, and Behe (reaching deep into his rhetorical bag of tricks) adds: "Well, it depends what you mean by "completely.'" He disagrees about the age of the earth, but agrees that "there is a God behind nature." The ID he advocates is religious, it does not implicate (as he's previously suggested) "an angel--fallen or not; Plato…

Leslie Orgel, RIP

Origins of life researcher Leslie Orgel died a few days ago. He was trained as a chemist, and had produced a number of important insights into the likely paths toward the origins of self-replication. His greatest cultural impact probably came from the promulgation of "Orgel's Rules," especially the second: "Evolution is cleverer than you are." The first is the decidedly less prosaic "Whenever a spontaneous process is too slow or two inefficient, a protein will evolve to speed it up or make it more efficient." The 80 year-old researcher passed away in San Diego, where he had worked for…

IDolators don't understand science

The Discovery Institute promotes a podcast in a post titled: William Dembski Addresses Forthcoming Intelligent Design Research that Advances ID and Answers Critics How lovely to know before it happens not only that this "research" will yield answers for his critics, but that those answers will advance his own particular beliefs. Watch him move in one paragraph from "It’s too early to tell what the impact of my ideas is on science" to "I think ID is finally in a position to challenge certain fundamental assumptions in the natural sciences about the nature and origin of information. This, I…

Richard Powers

This interview with the novelist from The Believer is a few months old, but it's well worth a read: Something truly interesting is happening in many basic sciences, a real revolution in human knowing. For a long time--centuries--empiricism has tried to understand the whole in terms of its isolated parts, and then to write out precise and simple rules about the controlled behavior of those parts in isolation. In recent decades, with the explosion of the life sciences and with a new appreciation in physics and chemistry of emergent and complex systems, a new kind of holism has emerged.…

Ian McEwan the Novel Neurologist

I discuss the neuroscientific sensitivities of Saturday, Ian McEwan's 2004 novel, in my forthcoming book, so I was happy to read this paragraph in Jonathan Lethem's review of McEwan's latest novel. Lethem is wondering why McEwan, despite his dabbles in modernist structure (Saturday is modeled on Mrs. Dalloway), doesn't feel like a late modernist: The answer may lie in the fact that modernism in fiction was partly spurred by the appearance of two great rivals to the novel's authority, psychoanalysis and cinema -- one a rival at plumbing depths, the other at delineating surfaces. McEwan, who…

Salty Tomatoes

From Harold McGee's charming new blog: Tomato lovers know that a sprinkling of salt enhances the flavor of even the best field-ripened specimen. Some recent news that bodes well for improved flavor in greenhouse tomatoes: you can enhance tomato flavor by salting the plant as the fruit grows! At the Institute of Vegetable Science in Freising, German scientists grew hydroponic tomatoes in a solution that was 0.1% sodium chloride, about one-thirtieth the salinity of seawater. The plants produced fruits with significantly higher levels of flavorful organic acids and sugars, and as much as a third…

Weak Teeth

Ezra Klein laments his dental inheritance: I have weak teeth. Always have. My father has weak teeth, my mother has weak teeth, and I, their dutiful son, possess weak teeth. My sister doesn't suffer from this malady. I remember a joint dentist appointment we had, where the doctor returned with our X-Rays, informed me that I had no cavities, and told my sister she had eight. But I had barely commenced my big brotherly gloating when he glanced back at the films and said, "Oh wait, nevermind. Lili, you have no cavities, and as for you, Ezra..." Well, today I beat my own record. I need eight…

The McDonald's Diet

In the 2004 documentary Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock decided to eat nothing but McDonald's for 30 days. He ended up gaining lots of weight, suffering liver damage, and enduring intense mood swings. But now Spurlock's movie has been repeated under experimental conditions. The results are good news for McDonald's: A Swedish researcher put 18 volunteers on the same diet that filmmaker Morgan Spurlock went on while filming "Super Size Me." To his great surprise, the researcher discovered that eating mass quantities of junk food affected each participant differently. While one volunteer gained…

Birds in Cities

The helter-skelter of urban life even affects birds. I swear my cockatiel is better behaved since I left London; now I know why: Rapid urbanisation around the world and the subsequent increase in ambient noise has proven problematic for animals which use sound to communicate. For birds in particular, city noises can mask the exchange of vital information and prevent males from attracting mates. To see how birds reacted to increased noise, Hans Slabbekoorn of Leiden University recorded the songs of great tits in 10 European cities including London, Prague, Paris and Amsterdam. He then compared…

Creativity and Neuroscience

Studio 360, a radio show on NPR (no affilation with Aaron Sorkin), did a show this week on the "Science of Creativity". The show featured a few nice segments - I especially enjoyed the riff on mental illness and artistic genius (Virginia Woolf wasn't the only one) - but I kept on waiting for the show to admit that science knows virtually nothing about human creativity. We don't know why it exists, or where it comes from, or how it works. But instead of admitting that the imagination remains totally ineffable, the show discussed silly fMRI studies connecting artistic creativity to increased…

Greetings, my friend, to the FUTURE!

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And here is a website that tells you everything that will happen…in the Future! You may be excited to know that we have a specific date for the imminent demise of Christianity: 2240. It's all based on this very scientific graph. Yes, my friends, in the future we will be able to predict complex sociological phenomena from a short sample of data by fitting it to a straight line. We cannot do this today without gagging, but in the Future, it will be easy! My friends, there is so much more…

A nation of laws

Martin Cothran, the perpetually benighted Disco. Inst. blogger, considers the tussle over Blagojevich's Senate appointment and sees it as a fight, The Democrats vs. the states: Whether Burris serves as Senator from Illinois is a matter for the people of Illinois to decide, not the U. S. Senate. Reid and the rest of the Senate need to keep their greedy hands off of Illinois's Senate seat. Sadly, no. A quick check of the owner's manual reveals: Section 5. Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members, No state involvement. Now, there happen to be…

Usurped!

Paging Dr. Orac! Your crown has, apparently, been usurped. The photograph above was taken at San Francisco's Green Festival, an over-all excellent event. I learned a lot about the state of green technology, from solar panels to composting, and more importantly I learned a lot about the state of the market for such technologies. I also learned that a lot of woo gets wrapped up under the heading of "green," and that's a shame. There weren't any anti-vaccine booths, but large sections of the conference center were devoted to homeopathy, herbal remedies, cupping, and related silliness. Among…

Drink deep, or taste not the perchlorate stream

In a move that would shock anyone asleep for the past 7 years, the EPA won't limit rocket fuel in U.S. drinking water: The Environmental Protection Agency has decided there's no need to rid drinking water of a toxic rocket fuel ingredient that has fouled public water supplies around the country. EPA reached the conclusion in a draft regulatory document not yet made public but reviewed Monday by The Associated Press. The ingredient, perchlorate, has been found in at least 395 sites in 35 states at levels high enough to interfere with thyroid function and pose developmental health risks,…

Cheers for the coming tech-war!

Google, Past and Future: Ah, but what about 2010? That, claim the editors at Smartgrid, will be the year that Google and Microsoft really roll up their sleeves and go to war. In everything from search to office apps and Internet browsers, the two behemoths will roll out fancy new services designed to erode their rivals' revenue streams. "Both companies are largely betting their collective futures on this battle, so the stakes are huge," said industry analyst Rob Enderle. "Microsoft is going to partner and try to starve Google out of content and partners. Google is going to work against…

Why science fiction was better in the past

Perhaps because we only remember the good stuff? Or only the good suff & famous authors get reprinted. I'm prompted to offer this hypothesis in response to Chad Orzel's commentary that there was a lot of bad space opera even during the "Golden Age" of science fiction. I recall that Zadie Smith once noted that 99.99% (or something to that effect) of Victorian fiction is forgotten and out of print. All that remains read are the "classics," so contemporary audiences have a biased perspective as to the median quality of Victorian-era writers. Of course the insight can be generalized to the…

Kansas Guild of Bloggers

The only actual submission to this week's carnival of Kansas blogging comes from emaw, who has found more creepy crawlies – a spider he has some interesting ideas about: Given the radon levels in our basement, this quite possibly could be the kind of radio active spider that gave Spiderman his powers. How cool would it be to go to work the next day fit and trim and casting webs all over the joint. Visit emaw's to find out whether it worked, and click through here to find out what else is going on in Kansas. Elsewhere, ...JustCara considers the soon-to-be female police officer in Kansas City.…

Identical by descent: catching cheaters at work

ThinkProgress reports that a pump bid for New Orleans may have been rigged: When the Army Corps of Engineers solicited bids for drainage pumps for New Orleans, "it copied the specifications — typos and all — from the catalog of the manufacturer that ultimately won the $32 million contract." The coexistence of these typos is strong evidence that the Corps of Engineers specifications were copied verbatim. In other words, like novel forms of genes spreading through a family tree, those specifications were identical by descent. Identifying such novelties is how we identify common descent not…

Want to boost investment? Cutting taxes may not be the right decision

Higher corporate taxes may attract foreign investment | Science Blog: A team of leading economists has challenged the current political drive to cut corporate taxes — with new research showing that countries with higher taxes and higher social welfare spending are more successful in attracting overseas investment. … After analysing data from 18 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries over a 14-year period, the team found that the countries which attracted the highest levels of foreign investment — a key economic target of most governments — were actually the…

The benefits of winning

Bart Gordon, chairman of the House Science committee, and Brad Miller, chairman of that committee's investigations subcommittee, will be digging into a memo restricting comment on polar bears and climate change. The memo told government scientists: Please be advised that all foreign travel requests (SF 1175 requests) and any future travel requests involving or potentially involving climate change, sea ice, and/or polar bears will also require a memorandum from the Regional Director to the Director indicating who'll be the official spokesman on the trip and the one responding to questions on…

Game Shows and Neuroscience

Ogi Ogas is a Ph.D candidate in neuroscience at Boston University. He was also a contestant on Who Wants to Be A Millionare, where he used his knowledge of neuroscience to win a cool $500,000. Learn about how he did it. If you're a true game show fanatic, then you might be interested in learning about the optimal strategies in Deal or No Deal. Economists have analyzed the decisions of contestants and found that their choices are rarely "rational". Instead of performing a few simple calculations, and figuring out if the deal is fair, contestants rely on their emotional instincts and impulsive…

Negative Ads and Adaptation

Adaptation is a well known principle of psychology, and yet political strategists have always ignored it. Simply put, sensory adaptation is why you don't notice your underpants: your mind has adapted to their presence. It's a way taking certain constants for granted, and focusing instead on the sensations that are actually changing. My hunch is that negative ads failed this year because there were simply too many of them. Our TV's were saturated with the same cliched allegations, tired montages, and ominous warnings, and so we just tuned it all out. The nasty ads became as noticeable as our…

Rove and Foley

Pardon my schadenfreude: Yesterday, a source close to Foley explained to THE NEW REPUBLIC that in early 2006 the congressman had all but decided to retire from the House and set up shop on K Street. "Mark's a friend of mine," says this source. "He told me, 'I'm thinking about getting out of it and becoming a lobbyist.'" But when Foley's friend saw the Congressman again this spring, something had changed. To the source's surprise, Foley told him he would indeed be standing for re-election. What happened? Karl Rove intervened. According to the source, Foley said he was being pressured by "the…

Air-Conditioning the Outside

Can we get any more self-indulgent? These desert dwellers have decided that the best way to survive the summer heat is to install gigantic misters and air-conditioners in their backyard. Not content to spend summers housebound, Berger and his wife, Eileen, decided to reclaim their backyard with a misting system, a device that cools outdoor areas through the evaporation of a super-fine mist. As Berger and I settle into chaise lounges with a view of his pool and palms, we chill to the whoosh of 50 tiny nozzles shooting out 3-foot-long plumes of fog from the periphery of the patio roof. The…

Seasonal experimentation (March 17th edition).

This being St. Patrick's Day and all, the elder offspring would like to conduct an experiment. However, we want to make sure it's above-board, ethically speaking. The device pictured above is a prototype of a leprechaun trap. The experiment, of course, involves determining the efficacy of the device. Here are the questions we're considering before launching the first trials: What kind of approval do we need for the protocol -- is this research with animals or research with human subjects? If we conduct the study at the university, we probably need official approval of the protocol. But…

Summer Food

Here are three food-related items I've been enjoying lately: 1) Fennel Pollen: Like all great spices, the flavor of wild fennel pollen eludes adjectives. It's like a fennel seed, only much more so. I sprinkle it on everything from roasted wild salmon to pasta with zucchini, basil and mozzarella. (The Tuscans use it on pork.) 2) John Cope's Dried Sweet Corn: This is the Platonic form of corn. It's intensely sweet and yet also deeply corny. Made according to an old Amish recipe, Cope's corn is nothing but August summer corn dried slowly, so that the sugars naturally caramelize. I use the dried…

Meat

Words of wisdom from Dario Checcini, the famous Tuscan butcher: "The most important thing is what the animal eats and that it has a good life . . . just like us," Cecchini says. "My philosophy is that the cow has to have had a really good life with the least suffering possible," he says. "And every cut has to be cooked using the best cooking method. It's a matter of respect. If I come back as a cow, I want to have the best butcher. On a related note, I've been really enjoying The River Cottage Meat Book, bu Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It's so much more than a cookbook: Fearnley-Whittingstall…

Book News

One of my resolutions for the new year was spending less time googling myself. (Such are the vanities of an insecure writer.) So far, I'm off to a bad start. I apologize for the self-promotion, but there have recently been some very nice reviews of the book that I thought I'd share. Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post review: Jonah Lehrer's smart, elegantly written little book expresses an appealing faith that art and science offer different but complementary views of the world. His main argument, that artists have often intuited essential truths about human nature that are later…

Huffpo. Creationist. Nazis. Mix together and flush.

I cannot stand the Huffington Post, that bastion of Newage folly. I really despise the Intelligent Design creationists. So when Huffpo gives space to creationist cretins, I'm done with them. Even worse, it's an idiot creationist parroting the same old story, that Hitler was Darwin's fault. I'll mention just one paragraph of this dishonest bunk. Hitler's ideas, Dr. Berlinski carefully notes, "came from many different sources but no honest account will omit Darwin." A reading of Mein Kampf makes that clear. Certainly, Berlinski says, the men who formulated Nazi ideology "weren't reading the…

Leaving comments

I know, dear readers, that some of you have been encountering difficulties leaving comments on this blog (and on other blogs in the ScienceBlogs galaxy). Indeed, I've encountered those same problems myself, trying to leave comments for my sibling bloggers. I'm confident that when our tech czar returns from vacation next week, all the problems will disappear. In the meantime, though, I still want your comments! The inelegant way around the problem (which manifests itself as an error message when you try to leave a comment) is to try another browser. (So, if you're on Firefox, bring up…

Eruptions is moving!

Big news from Eruptions (and me.) Eruptions has always been an evolving space - it started as a little side project on Wordpress that has grown over the last two-and-a-half years into a community of volcano enthusiasts. The blog has drawn over 2.5 million views and 1.5 million visits since I started it in May of 2008 - which, to me, is mindblowing - and I thank of all your for that. I also thank ScienceBlogs for helping more people find the blog over the last 18 months that I've been lucky to be hosted here. However, with all things, change is sometimes needed. I'm not going to go into the…

Mauna Loa returns to normal as inflation ends

Sunny and 80 here in Ohio today. That could mean only one thing that is likely on everyone's mind. (I suppose there is also this other bit of news that we've been following, too.) The low, broad shield of Hawai`i's Mauna Loa volcano. The USGS announced yesterday that inflation at Hawai`i's Mauna Loa appears to have ceased. This prompted the decision to move the alert status at Mauna Loa from "Advisory" to "Normal". This would signify the end of any current activity on the big island's largest volcano - the inflation that had been slowing since 2006 (since 2003 really) finally stopped in…

"Eruption" in Azerbijian

A 2010 mud flow from Lok-Batan, a mud volcano in Azerbijian. So, first there was all the Yellowstone talk. Then the unsubstantiated reports of a volcanic eruption in a decidedly unvolcanic part of Pakistan (what part isn't), then submarine volcanism off Japan. Now, we have a nrews report about an eruption in Azerbijian. Luckily, although the headline implies a magmatic event, the text of the article shows that this is, in fact, a mud volcano. The mud volcano is called Lok-batan (or Lokbata) and has erupted quite a few times over the last 150 years, as recently as 2005. Azerbijian has quite a…

Mystery Volcano Photos #7-8: Arenal and Eyjafjoll

So, the field still stands unblemished, having identified all 8 MVPs, usually within less than 7 tries. Nice job! Current MVP Standings: volcanista - 1 Elizabeth - 1 Ralph - 1 gijs - 1 Anne - 1 Cam - 1 gg - 1 The Bobs - 1 MVP #7 was Arenal in Costa Rica. It was initially going to be Rincon de la Vieja, but somehow I mixed up the pictures. I think a lot of you know a lot more about Arenal than I do, but it is one of the most active - and easily visited - volcanoes in the Western Hemisphere. Eyjafjöll volcanoHekla from the northwest in Iceland, not your MVP #8. MVP #8 was Eyjafjöll (or…