Search Content

Displaying results 6851 - 6900 of 87947

The Poisoner's Handbook

My new book - The Poisoner's Handbook - will be published next month (February 18). But it's already having this effect on my life: my husband has developed a nervous habit of moving his coffee cup out of my reach. When the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of the book (see link below) I promptly received the following e-mail: "Read the wonderful weekend section front in the Journal. But the coffee my wife just handed me tastes a little odd."  When the invitation was sent out for my book launch party, it read: "We promise that the beer, wine, and snacks will be completely…

PIGDID update

In case you haven't been following the vivisections of Wells' horrid book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, I thought I'd mention that there's more online at the Panda's Thumb. Wells' book is a collection of anti-science propaganda, brought to us by those friendly frauds at the Discovery Institute and Regnery Publishing, and the crew at The Panda's Thumb are slowly working their way through it, documenting the falsehoods, the distortions, the poor scholarship, and the generally atrocious crapitude of the book. It's great fun! The critiques of Chapter 3 (…

Dolphins: "I'd Totally Chase You Down, But My Tail Hurts"

Catherine Brahic reports on some interesting new research in an online article at New Scientist: ""There are certain limits on swimming speed that are imposed irrespective of power," explains Iosilevskii. One of these is the frequency at which the swimmers can beat their tails to propel themselves forward. The other is the formation of microscopic bubbles around the tail, a phenomenon known as "cavitation". According to Iosilevskii and Weihs, for animals such as dolphins that have nerve endings in their tails, cavitation can be the most important limiting factor. The bubbles form as a result…

Grades and Learning - poor marketing

This came in the mail. This is an ad for someone's online homework service (I am not saying who). The important part, that you might not be able to read, says: "Make Learning Part of the Grade" I think I can interpret this logo in two different ways. Both of these interpretations are not too helpful. Isn't that what a grade is supposed to be? Maybe you already know that I am not a big fan of grades (grades and obedience, the point of grades). So really, what is the purpose of grades? I think of a couple of things, but most people should be able to agree that they somehow (magically)…

Optimism

At DailyKos, known outpost of optimism, brownsox considers the National Review Online's argument that Obama is a Communist half-Jew and, rather than banging his/her head repeatedly into a wall, simply concludes: Well, at least they've abandoned the "Muslim" thing... This is the power of hope. It is undoubtedly bolstered by Senator Obama's fairly resounding victory in Hawaii (predictably) and Wisconsin (against longer odds). Turnout in Wisconsin was higher than it's been in four decades, despite fairly atrocious weather there. Meanwhile, Michael Berubé considers the Clinton campaign's…

Vegetarians Are Smarter

There are so many confounding variables here I don't know where to begin, so I'll just post the study, in the hope that it convinces somebody to eat some tofu or cheese instead of some ethically dubious meat: Children with high IQs are more likely to be vegetarians when they grow up, according to research reported on Friday. A British study of more them 8,000 men and women aged 30 whose IQs had been measured when they were 10, showed that the higher the IQ, the greater the odds of being a vegetarian. "People who are more intelligent as children, who will obviously keep that intelligence when…

Rabbit-fed Pigs and Farmers as Teachers

"It is funny, but not that funny." Eric's comment does not stop my uncontrollable giggling. My step-mother comes over to see why I'm hysterical. She agrees with Eric - it is funny, but not funny enough to explain why tears of laughter are literally coming out of my eyes. I'm reading a passage in Michael Perry's excellent book _Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting_. I gave the book to my step-mother for her birthday, and during a family visit (note blog silence) from which we returned last night, I finally read it. Now I read a lot of the "How We Done Moved to a Farm and Made Fools…

WIC on the Chopping Block

Over the years I've written a great deal about SNAP/Food Stamps and other hunger alleviation programs, but I've never written anything specifically about WIC, which I have tended to lump in with other food programs. I've been thinking, however, a lot about WIC lately, because it has come on the budget chopping block in the US - along with other food security programs including the CSFP which serves low income seniors and the emergency food program that provides commodities to emergency food pantries. While Republicans restored funds for military bands, they took them out, as is customary,…

Carbon tax now

I've finally been provoked into writing this post. Though actually it is going to be about something slightly different, or at least I'm going to go through a long rambling diversion, inspired by Idiocy on carbon permits by Timmy. But since I'm also rather conscious that many of my posts are (when looked back over the period of a couple of years) utterly incomprehensible due to lack of context, I'm going to do some context. If you look at the problem of Global Warming from an Economics point of view, then it is a perfectly standard problem, that of uncosted Externalities. Which is to say,…

How to understand the Trump-Russia scandal

To understand the Trump-Russia scandal, I believe it is necessary to step way back and take the very long view. I'm not talking about going back to early 2016, or even the year before. Much farther. I'm not going to make a claim in this post as to what happened and who did what. Rather, I'd like to present a hypothesis, a single interpretation of events, that may or may not be correct, but that is based on this long view. Whatever did actually happen, it did involve, or somehow exclude, Donald Trump and a number of individuals with whom he has had long term relationships, and Vladimir Putin…

The Republican War on Expertise

Chris Mooney has has a new article in The American Prospect about the Republican war on expertise. There are a lot of interesting nuggets, but Chris somehow manages to avoid making the really obvious point. First, let's set the tone: Increasingly, the parties are divided over expertise--with much more of it residing among liberals and Democrats, and with liberals and Democrats much more aligned with the views of scientists and scholars. More fundamentally, the parties are increasingly divided over reality itself: over what is actually true, not only about hard science but also social…

Conspicuous consumption and volunteering are mate advertising

I read this article in the Economist that summarizes a paper showing that men wanting to attract women spend conspicuously and women wanting to attract men volunteer conspicuously. All I could think about when I read it was, "Well, I guess Veblen was right about something." (I will get to the article at the bottom, but this is an interesting history lesson for those of you who haven't heard of Veblen.) Thorstein Veblen was a turn of the century economist and social critic noted for coining term conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is when you buy something really expensive so…

Friday Sprog Blogging: trust and the internet.

Regular readers will recall that this is not the first time the Free-Ride family has discussed skepticism and trust. Dr. Free-Ride: You two are both exploring the internet more lately, and you know that one of the things people use the internet for is to sell you stuff, right? Younger offspring: Yeah. Elder offspring: Yeah. Dr. Free-Ride: So how do you tell if the people selling you stuff are telling the truth about what they're selling? Elder offspring: Rave reviews about the item. Dr. Free-Ride: Rave reviews about the item from whom? Elder offspring: From ... people who bought the item. Dr…

Anti-vaccine activist Mark Blaxill pleads for a "sense of civil discourse" about vaccines. My irony meter explodes again.

Over the weekend, I saw a rather fascinating post by Sullivan entitled A Sense of Civil Discourse. The reason I found it so fascinating is because what was quoted in it utterly destroyed my irony meter yet again, leaving it nothing but a molten, gooey mess still bubbling and hissing in my office. Apparently last week, Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted, authors of the distillation of all the craziness that is the blog Age of Autism into book form under the same title, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, did a radio interview on the Leonard Lopate Show. During the…

"Holistic" versus homeopathy versus The Secret

"Holistic." How often do we hear that word bandied about by practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's increasingly called, "integrative medicine" (IM)? Lots. The reason is that CAM/IM practitioners seem to think they own the word. They've so utterly co-opted it that it has become meaningless, in the process perverting it. No longer does it mean "taking care of the whole person." Not really, at least not anymore. Thanks to quacks having taken possession of it as their own, "holistic" now has a connotation of woo, in which it is said to be impossible to be a…

Steve Novella on The Dr. Oz Show: Dr. Oz has become Kevin Trudeau

NOTE: Dr. Novella has written up a detailed description of his experiences on The Dr. Oz Show. Please read it. Also note that the online video for Dr. Novella's appearance is now available: Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 1 Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 2 Controversial Medicine: Alternative Health, Part 3 When I first learned that Dr. Steve Novella, Yale neurologist, blogger, and host of the popular skeptical podcast the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe was going to be on The Dr. Oz Show, I was concerned. After all, this is the same physician who had in…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Maria-Jose Vinas

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Maria-Jose Vinas to answer a few questions: Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific)…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 63 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Note: you may have noticed that today's papers were not published last night as you are used to seeing them. Starting today, PLOS ONE papers are published online on the same date as the official publication date (at or close to 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, I believe). That same date/…

Pure Jewish blood?

William Saletan has a piece up over at Slate, Jewgenics, which covers his reactions to a talk (you can view it online) sponsored by AEI around Jon Entine's book Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. I've read the book, though I don't have time to listen to the talk right now. But I wanted to offer a quick perspective on one point in Saletan's piece: According to Entine, the rate of Jewish "outbreeding"--procreating with non-Jews--is half a percent. That's the lowest rate of any population in the world today.... First, I don't know if that is the lowest rate…

Best Science Books 2011: Booklist Online Editors' Choice

Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Booklist Online Editors' Choice. The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President By Candice Millard Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon By Alfredo Quiñones-…

Sing Powers of Ten on 10/10/10: Meet science composer David Haines April 21

Come and meet Science Composer David Haines: Wednesday April 21st any time from 4.30 to 6pm at the Koshlan Science Museum, National Academy of Sciences, corner of 6th and E NW, across from the Verizon Centre. If you are a teacher at any level of the education system, a choral director, a member of any kind of chorus - religious, community, classical, ethnic - a scientist wishing to explore new ways of engaging our communities with the wonders of science, or if you're simply curious to know what songs about science sound like, come along and meet David. David is seeking choirs and schools (…

Nature Precedings

It is infuriating how stodgy biomedical sciences are in terms of information sharing. It's not clear how much of this is bred of inherent conservatism, the pressures of a very competitive field or just plain technobackwardness. But while mathematics and physics have had preprint servers for years, biomedicine has had nothing or virtually nothing (that last to cover myself in case I am forgetting something or just didn't know about it). What's a preprint server? A preprint is a version of your scientific paper prior to its publication. Maybe it hasn't been submitted yet and you are circulating…

Vaccines and autism--can we stick a fork in it now, please?

Last fall, I wrote about a new research paper which tried to replicate some of Andrew Wakefield's original results, which not only claimed a correlation between MMR vaccination and autism, but also the presence of measles virus in intestinal tissue. Wakefield had suggested that an inappropriate response to the presence of measles virus in this tissue may trigger conditions such as bowel disease and autism. The more recent study was unable to replicate any of Wakefield's findings--not surprising, since so many papers in the last decade have found no connection between vaccination and autism…

The puzzling migratory monarch--and using it to teach science

I've mentioned frequently how my kids are fascinated with bugs and things creepy-crawly, whether it's spiders, giant moths, or butterflies. On that topic, via Bitch PhD comes this article from yesterday's New York Times on monarchs, their endangered habitat, and what just about anyone can do to help out. (More after the jump...) Pinching a bright orange butterfly in one hand and an adhesive tag the size of a baby's thumbnail in the other, the entomologist bent down so his audience could watch the big moment. "You want to lay it right on this cell here, the one shaped like a mitten," the…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Practice Makes Imperfect: Restorative Effects of Sleep on Motor Learning: Emerging evidence suggests that sleep plays a key role in procedural learning, particularly in the continued development of motor skill learning following initial acquisition. We argue that a detailed examination of the time course of performance across sleep on the finger-tapping…

My picks from ScienceDaily

90 Billion Tons Of Microbial Organisms Live In Deep Marine Subsurface: More Archaea Than Bacteria: Biogeoscientists show evidence of 90 billion tons of microbial organisms--expressed in terms of carbon mass--living in the deep biosphere, in a research article published online by Nature, July 20, 2008. This tonnage corresponds to about one-tenth of the amount of carbon stored globally in tropical rainforests. Female Monkeys More Dominant In Groups With Relatively More Males: Female monkeys are more dominant when they live in groups with a higher percentage of males. This is caused by self-…

Nature mission (sic) statement

Maxine Clarke: In printing the statement verbatim every week as we have done, making it clear when it originated, we have hitherto assumed that readers will excuse the wording in the interests of historical integrity. But feedback from readers of both sexes indicates that the phrase, even when cited as a product of its time, causes displeasure. Such signals have been occasional but persistent, and a response is required. Suzanne Franks: Who needs outright discrimination? It's so much more pleasant and civilized to discriminate while pretending to be inclusive. It's just one tiny step sideways…

Michael Mann on Climate Scientists and Smear Campaigns

Climate scientist Michael Mann is no stranger to smear campaigns. Man has the distinction of having made important contributions to climate science, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize. He is famous to many of you for having come up with the "hockey stick" metaphor. Michael Mann is a good scientist who has done honest, important, and high quality work, but there are those who don't want to hear about the results he and other climate scientists have come up with. So, they hate him. And by "hate" I don't mean that they sit there not liking him. I mean, they actively hate him. They…

links for 2009-07-15

funny-pictures-cat-upsets-your-gravity.jpg (JPEG Image, 500x398 pixels) Finally, the problem with quantum gravity is revealed. (tags: pictures silly animals internet physics gravity quantum) Robert Wright: Why the "New Atheists" are Right-Wing on Foreign Policy "It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?…

Links for 2011-01-28

Promoting Science: MythBusters vs. Sport Science | Wired Science | Wired.com "So, is Sport Science good for science? Is it even science? What about MythBusters? You know it and I know it - I am biased. However, let me pretend that I am not and compare Sport Science and MythBusters in terms of scienceyness." (tags: science education television culture blogs physics dot-physics) How to Make Trillions of Dollars | Raptitude.com "I do encourage you to become a millionaire, if that's something that interests you. If it's billions you're after, I'm a bit suspicious but I'll give you the benefit…

FDA Public Health Advisory: Serious liver injury, pulmonary embolism with steroid-containing body-building supplements

We've spoken here every few months about so-called natural dietary supplements being adulterated with prescription drugs used for similar indications. The most common of these of late have been erectile dysfunction supplements which have been repeatedly found to contain the active compounds present in prescription E.D. products such as Viagra and Cialis. The latest public health advisory from the US FDA concerns what appears to be a much more serious case of adulterations, this time with steroids in body-building supplements marketed as containing "steroid-like" compounds: The FDA is…

Karl Iagnemma: World's Fair Advisory Board Nominee

The World's Fair's popularity has skyrocketed over the past few months, and all the more so in the post-Puzzle Fantastica Era. (Data: We have readers almost every single day now. Sometimes even more. Recent problems at the Sb server may have been our fault. Point made.) We've been brought by these circumstances to issues of governance, and we are now taking recommendations for members of our forthcoming Advisory Board. First up: Karl Iagnemma. Some might argue that Dave and I wish we were Karl Iagnemma. I might argue that. Dave might not. Dave is Dave. But I'm of diffracted identity,…

Canada's Minister of Science is a creationist?

Remarkable words from Canada''s Parliament Hill: Canada's science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won't say if he believes in evolution. "I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate," Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. A funding crunch, exacerbated by cuts in the January budget, has left many senior researchers across the county scrambling to find the money to…

Short's Algorithm for Factoring Sunshine

Andrew Landahl (who really should have a blog because he is certainly one of the most interesting people I get to talk to when I attend a conference) sends me a note about recent appearances of quantum computing on prime time TV which he has graciously let me post below. I thought you'd be amused to know that quantum information has finally made it to prime time. Using TiVo, I just caught up on back-to-back episodes of CBS's "Big Bang Theory" from the past two weeks that make prominent references to quantum teleportation and Shor's algorithm. The week before last, the episode opened with a…

Tangled Bank.... finally!!!!

Welcome to the latest edition of the Tangled Bank! We appear to have a smaller bank than normal this week, perhaps everybody is exhausted after the Valentine's Day festivities. As for me, well, 2006 ended on an extremely bad series of notes and that has unfortunately spilled over into 2007, but that's a post for another time. Coupled with some lovely computer issues, The Bank is a couple days late. Apologies all around and I'm swearing off hosting any blog carnivals until I get my life (and computer) in order. As a side note, when you submit articles to TB please make a conscious effort…

The Science of Mind-Reading: SVMs Extract Intentions from Neural Activity (video)

For the basics about multivariate fMRI "mind-reading" techniques, see the video below. Some of it is based on this 2007 Haynes et al paper from Current Biology, described in more detail following the video. What Haynes et al have done is to ask 8 subjects to freely decide either to add or subtract two numbers, and to select among 4 options an answer corresponding to the task they chose. After repeating this process many times, the authors ran a pattern classifier on the metabolic activity recorded in the brain. This pattern classifier was run on the unsmoothed fMRI data - smoothing is…

Building Better Armor: Lessons from Combat Shrimp

Mantis shrimp, or stomatopods, are the planet’s most powerful bare-knuckle boxers, armed with dactyl clubs that literally fly faster than a speeding .22 caliber bullet. Each strike boils the surrounding water and creates a tiny cavitation bubble, which then implodes with a sonic pop that can render targets unconscious. Consider that: if the strike itself doesn’t get you, its aftershock will. And that’s just the variety of stomatopod equipped with blunt fists -  others launch their lance-like arms to pierce prey. These little lobster cousins, usually between 4 and 12 inches long, are capable…

The Future We Create - Women in Science and Technology

Source: "Girls As Inventors," The Huffington Post on the MIT Media Lifelong Kindergarten Group. While science and technology may be complex and daunting, one thing is quite clear: we need more women to drive innovation and to provide different insights and perspectives compared to men. Tomorrow, March 1st at 11 am EST, The Dow Chemical Company and Scientific American are hosting a Virtual Conference to Engage Scientific Thought Leaders on the Future of Women in Chemistry. I invite you to listen, learn and add your voice. According to the website: 60 speakers. 60 minutes. 60 insightful…

The bogus stats keep coming

After reviving my first ever online post. I've dug up my first ever post on guns. Phil Ronzone posted this to soc.culture.australian: Of even more interest is the TREMENDOUSLY larger per capita rape numbers in the "non-violent peace loving" European counties. The Unites States at 26.30 is below such countries as Australia (90.82), West Germany (77.49), New Zealand (65.73), Netherlands (56.00), Scotland (44.69), Denmark (41.06), Sweden (40.52), Austria (30.42). Gee, it must be the USA system of mandatory penis registration & control that accounts for our per capita rate of rape being…

Men Just Want Amelie

One of my persistent problems with evolutionary psychology is its consistent lack of interest in the way culture affects human nature. Instead of trying to understand the way pop jingles, political systems and pulp fiction novels influence our behavior, evo psychers prefer to explain away our culture by referencing some innate congitive module or hard-wired habit. In other words, they see culture as just a secretion of our psychology, and only find it interesting when it signifies something about our evolutionary past. Too harsh a judgment? Take this example from Steven Pinker's How the Mind…

Another Week of GW News, November 16, 2008

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup (skip to bottom) November 16, 2008 Top Stories:Bailout, IEA WEO, Asian Smog, Next Ice Age Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Arnold's Meeting, Permafrost, Carbon Footprint Labels, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Carbon Cycle, Feedbacks, Paleoclimate, Glaciers, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Corals, Climate Refugees, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Transportation…

The Friday Fermentable: What's Your Favorite Local Wine Shop?

Local wine shops are to wine what ScienceBlogs.com is to science blogs - while perhaps imperfect, they are both good at directing you to unique sources and enriching flavors. With the proliferation of information and winemakers, we can all use some educated filtering guides. And that is how I view outstanding local vendors of wine. People who know a lot more than I spend their careers seeking out and stocking their stores with underrecognized offerings and low volume quality wines while also contributing to public education on this wonderful, life-enriching beverage. So I was delighted the…

August 2009 Scientiae Carnival: Summer Days, Driftin' Away

Welcome to the August 2009 edition of Scientiae, the blog carnival of "stories of and from women in science, engineering, technology, and math." [Apologies at the outset for missing the submission from ScienceWoman, co-blogger at Sciencewomen, entitled, "Unhurried summer mornings"] I'm honored to be the first man invited to host the carnival. The invitation means a great deal to me on a number of levels: my laboratory has run between 75% and 100% women during my years in the business, including all of my PhD students, and I have a brilliant physician-scientist wife who has given us a joyous…

Birds in the News 104

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Lesser flamingo, Phoenicopterus minor, in flight. Lake Natron in Tanzania, Africa, is the only site in East Africa where Lesser Flamingos reliably breed. Image: James Warwick[wallpaper size]. Birds in Science The changing of the seasons finds millions of birds migrating over thousands of kilometres. How they find their way is a question that has perplexed biologists for decades. It is known that birds have built-in compasses attuned to the Earth's magnetic field. But how those compasses work and what they are made of…

Egnor and the Creationists: Partying Like It's 1859

In the previous post, I described how Egnor, like many creationists, refuses to answer serious rebuttals of his foolishness. But what's truly odd is how Egnor argues about natural selection. Egnor repeatedly claims that 'Darwinism' is nothing except self-obvious: bacteria that are more likely to survive and reproduce because they are resistant to an antibiotic are more likely to survive and reproduce in the presence of that antibiotic. It is obvious--today. If I were to give a talk which had as its central thesis the concept that natural selection has given rise to antibiotic resistant…

Around the Web: Is algebra necessary, The challenge for scholarly societies and more links than you can shake a stick at

This is some vacation catch-up... Is Algebra Necessary? Mathematical Illiteracy in the NYT There Are Many Ways to Improve High School Education: Dumbing It Down Is NOT One of Them Does mathematics have a place in higher education? Abandoning Algebra Is Not the Answer It’s Not the Algebra, It’s the Arithmetic The challenge for scholarly societies Concrete Options For A Society Journal To Go OA Re-skilling for Research: An investigation into the role and skills of subject and liaison librarians required to effectively support the evolving information needs of researchers The future of…

Welcome to Yet Another Science Blogging Community: Popular Science Blog Network

Yes, another science blogging community among the many and yet another where an established print magazine enhances its online presence with a blogging network. And a bit more shuffling of the chairs on the deck as people with established blogs switch places or even some people start up whole new blogging personas. The Popular Science Blogging Network! Here's the welcome post and the list of blogs Welcome To The Popular Science Blog Network Today we’re unveiling 13 new blogs on PopularScience.com, each one home to a notable writer covering a specific area of innovation. We live in an era…

Science Documentaries You Can Watch Online to Get in the Mood for the Festival

We have a guest blogger this week. Documentary-log.com offers free online documentaries and wanted to reach out to the science community. Read more about their organization and the many science documentaries available to view below. As the Festival approaches and excitement continues to build we are delighted to present to you a collection of documentaries that tackle some of the scientific questions of our time. You're never too young to become obsessed with science. In fact, Einstein was barely into his twenties when he started working on some of the equations that still influence popular…

The Science Festival is Coming!

COPUS (Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science) organizers are thrilled to be supporting the USA Science and Engineering Festival effort, particularly by helping the scientific community connect to the festival in their own community through satellite events. The 2010 USA Science & Engineering Festival (USASEF), provides a great opportunity for COPUS participants to rally together in support of science. Through making this event truly national in scope, we can continue the great grassroots momentum we started with Year of Science 2009. Many COPUS participants and hubs are…

GOP copyright piracy

The Bush administration and Republicans in general have acted and talked tough about copyright violations. It's not just Republicans, either. Some scumbag Democrats are in bed with the RIAA and MPAA and going at it as much as they can as long as the Johns are paying for their services. But it's another case of "Do as I say, not as I do," for the GOP. The McCain campaign has now been tagged at least three times for using copyrighted material in campaign ads and events without the permission of the artists. Jackson Browne is suing them for $1 million for the unauthorized use of "Running on…