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Mangrove Destruction Magnified Burmese Tragedy

tags: Environment, Cyclone Nargis, Myanmar, Burma, Mangrove, Rhizophora species, Shrimp Farming, Fish Farming Mangrove, Rhizophora species, in Cuba. [larger view]. I've written about the importance of mangrove forests before, and about the environmental disasters and human tragedies that result when they are wantonly destroyed. Unfortunately, as we are witnessing now, the widespread destruction of Burma's mangroves has magnified yet another human disaster in the wake of cyclone Nargis, a tragedy that might have claimed more than 100,000 lives, according to some news services' estimates…

Two Female Medical Researchers Kick Ass!

tags: Elizabeth Blackburn, Joan Steitz, Albany Medical Center Prize I learned this afternoon that America's highest prize in medicine, the Albany Medical Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, was awarded to two women for the first time in its history. The recipients, Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Joan Steitz of Yale University will share the $500,000 prize, which is second only to the $1.4 million Nobel Prize. The two medical scientists, who work independently of each other, study proteins associated with DNA and RNA, and their work will likely…

Manhattan, A Photoessay

tags: photoessay, Konza Prairie, Manhattan, Kansas, nature I know you all are wondering what happened to me since I have been so quiet today, and the truth is that I am doing all sorts of amazingly fun things as long as possible until my broken wing makes me exhausted from ignoring the pain. At the moment, I am sitting in my very own office (!!) next to Dave Rintoul's in the biology department at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. (It might interest you to know that this office is much larger than the first apartment I rented in the other Manhattan). I am uploading something close…

Occupational Health News Roundup

A fire last month at the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh killed 112 workers and injured many more.  Now it's being reported that the fire department had refused to renew the factory's certification, and that only five of factory's eight floors were built illegally. The New York Times reports: The Capital Development Authority could have fined Tazreen Fashions Ltd. or even pushed for the demolition of illegally built portions of the building, an agency official said, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. But it chose to do…

New study highlights need for workplace interventions that reduce depression risk

by Kim Krisberg It's often said that hard work never hurt anybody. It's a cliché with which occupational health folks and thousands of injured workers would undoubtedly disagree. And while tragic and often preventable physical injuries may be the easiest to see and document, other work-related health risks are much harder to pick up on. One such risk is depression. Exploring reliable links between work and depression, which is a significant health and economic burden for individuals as well as society, is somewhat murky, as such research is often based on self-reporting methods that can leave…

Access matters: U.S. lags behind in preventable deaths

by Kim Krisberg Another study, another support beam in the argument that access to insurance coverage matters — a lot. In a study published this month in the journal Health Affairs, researchers took a look at rates of amenable mortality deaths — in other words, deaths that shouldn't happen in the presence of timely and effective care — between the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Their conclusion? The U.S. — home to the world's highest rate of health care spending — is lagging behind. Between 1999 and 2007, amenable mortality rates among men fell by 18.5 percent in the U…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Earlier today, US Attorney Booth Goodwin charged Upper Big Branch mine superintendent Gary May with "conspiring to impede the Mine Safety and Health Administration's enforcement efforts" at that mine. Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia was the site of numerous health and safety violations leading up to the April 5, 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners. The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr. has the details on the charges against May: May, 43, of Bloomingrose, is accused of taking part in a scheme to provide advance warning of government inspections and then…

White House message: new regulations and election year don't mix

The Republicans' mantra about the burden of regulations seems to have cast a spell on the Obama Administration's attitude about promoting new regulatory initiatives. My observations about this were reinforced this week when I read the Administration's statement accompanying its Fall 2011 regulatory plan. The message is clear: new regulations and an election year don't mix. The tone of this new Obama Administration regulatory statement oozes caution. Let's set aside the fact that this "Fall 2011" regulatory plan was not released at all in the autumn, but on January 20, 2012. It seems the…

Billion dollar company and a broom handle implicated in death of two workers

[Updated 11/14/11 below] Barrick Goldstrike is the largest gold producer in the world, with a stock market value of $51.0 Billion. With that kind of wealth, one has to ask why workers at the company's Meikle mine near Elko, Nevada were compelled to use a broom handle to keep a reset button depressed, so tons of aggregate rock would continue to flow down a shaft. That jerry-rigging along with the mine management's failure to correct other defects, such as missing clamp bolts and load-bearing plates on the aggregate carrying pipe system, led to the death of Daniel Noel, 47, and Joel Schorr,…

Grain elevators, terror plots, and what's actually risky

American Public Media's Marketplace program is taking a look at "the economic legacy of 9/11" this week, and this morning's story focused on security spending in the private sector. Marketplace's Jeff Horwich highlighted an unexpected example: security for grain elevators. For you city-folk, grain elevators are America's rural skyscrapers. Farmers dump their corn, wheat, soybeans. Trucks haul it out to feed the country. Even though elevators are mostly in the middle of nowhere, Bob Zelenka of the Minnesota Grain and Feed Association says you never know. Bob Zelenka: It's on the edge of town…

A Year after Upper Big Branch Disaster, Legislators Doing Little while 29 Families Grieve

One year ago, an explosion at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch Mine in Montcoal, West Virginia killed 29 miners. The Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward Jr., who has covered the disaster and its aftermath extensively, writes today on his Coal Tattoo blog: Stay tuned today to hear a lot of political leaders talking about coal miners ... They're going to talk about how hard working miners are, and how they put their lives on the line to provide electricity and put food on table for their families. They're going to talk about how we need to remember and honor the dead, and about how these men (well,…

Jobs, Spending, and the Healthcare Law

This week, House Republicans are voting on whether to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Their bill, misleadingly titled "The Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act," has a good chance of passing the House but virtually none of passing the Senate or being signed by the President. It's a chance for House Republicans to show the public where they stand on healthcare - but they seem reluctant to engage with the actual projected impacts of the law. First, the jobs claim. The ACA does not kill jobs. Ezra Klein explains that what House Republicans are referring to is a…

More "severe violators" designated by OSHA

OSHA’s list of bad actors has two new members. I just happened upon an updated list on the agency’s website of the employers OSHA designates as "severe violators." It indicates the two companies were added in the four weeks following President Trump’s inauguration. The list is dated April 7, 2017. Mosier Industrial Services was involved in the gutting of a hundred year-old power plant in Columbus, Ohio. The project developers, Connect Realty and Schiff Capital Group, plan to convert the site into  offices and event space. OSHA inspectors issued citations on February 2 against Mosier…

Study: Disparities in occupational injury highlight need for greater focus on hiring practices

Fewer economic opportunities may be exposing black and Hispanic workers to an increased risk of workplace injury, according to a new study. Published this month in Health Affairs, the study set out to document differences in the risk of occupational injury and in the prevalence of work-related disabilities between white and minority workers. Researchers found that even after adjusting for variables such as education, sex and age, black and foreign-born Hispanic workers often worked in jobs with the highest injury risks and thus, experienced higher rates of work-related disabilities as well.…

Study: Where you live determines what you pay for medical care

If you’re pregnant and live in Cleveland, Ohio, it’s likely you’ll pay about $522 for an ultrasound. If you live about 60 miles south in Canton, Ohio, it costs about $183 for the same procedure, a recent study found. Why such a significant price difference? Researchers couldn’t single out one overriding factor. But the study does tell us this: place matters when it comes to how much you pay for health care. The study was published last week in Health Affairs and was based on data from the Health Care Cost Institute, a commercial claims database that includes nearly 3 billion paid claim lines…

More evidence that paid sick leave is good for working families and public health

It seems obvious that workers with paid sick leave are more likely to stay home and seek out medical care when they or a family member is ill. But it’s always good to confirm a hunch with some solid data. In this month’s issue of Health Affairs, researchers used data from the National Health Interview Survey to provide some clarity on the relationship between paid sick leave and health-related behaviors. They found that workers without paid sick leave were three times more likely to forgo medical care than workers who do get paid sick leave. Also, during 2013, both full- and part-time workers…

Zika research: Microcephaly, stem cells, and, Guillain-Barré

As I noted when I first wrote about Zika virus in January, researchers haven't definititively established the link between the virus and microcephaly  -- abornormally small brains now seen in thousands of infants whose mothers had (confirmed or suspected) Zika infections during pregnancy. Over the past few weeks, though, new published research has provided more evidence linking Zika virus to poor health outcomes. Here are a few highlights: Zika and microcephaly: Patricia Brasil of Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Karin Nelson-Saines of UCLA, and their colleagues published their findings in the New…

CDC: Rates of sexually transmitted diseases going up in the U.S.

For the first time since 2006, cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are on the rise, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency reports that while the sexually transmitted diseases continue to impact young people and women most severely, the recent increases were driven by rising disease rates among men. Released just today as part of CDC’s Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2014 report, the data finds that chlamydia cases are up 2.8 percent since 2013; primary and secondary syphilis (the most infectious stages of the disease) are up 15.…

Humanely treated: I care about chickens, but more about people

Our local grocery store chain, H.E.B., sells packaged poultry under the private label “Natural Chicken.” It’s meant to appeal to customers who want to know that the chicken they intend to eat was treated more humanely than your typical chicken. The package label on H.E.B.’s Natural Chicken says: No cages ever!! Unlimited access to feed, water, and freedom of movement No additives or preservatives Always vegetarian fed No added growth stimulants or hormones No antibiotics Raised cage free I stood in the refrigerator aisle and stared at the package for a while. I thought about the label and…

DeLauro and Murray re-introduce Healthy Families Act; Philly finally gets paid sick days

Last week, US Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) reintroduced the Healthy Families Act, which would allow workers in businesses with 15 or more employees to earn one hour of job-protected sick time for each 30 hours worked, up to 56 hours (seven 8-hour days) per year. DeLauro has been introducing this bill in every Congress since 2004, and Murray has been an original co-sponsor since then. What's new this time around, though, is that the legislation has the president's explicit support. Last month, President Obama urged Congress to pass the Healthy Families Act…

Hobbit Continuity Error

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his three main books in the order their contents happen in his fantasy world. But they weren't published in that order. Young Tolkien writes the various component works of The Silmarillion, middle-aged Tolkien writes and publishes The Hobbit, old Tolkien writes and publishes The Lord of the Rings, then his son Christopher and Guy Gavriel Kay posthumously edit and publish The Silmarillion. This means that the original readers of The Hobbit and LotR had no idea what Tolkien meant when he alluded to his unpublished mythology in those books. In fact, Tolkien doesn't seem to…

Storelvmo et al. by proxy

Disentangling greenhouse warming and aerosol cooling to reveal Earth’s climate sensitivity (T. Storelvmo, T. Leirvik, U. Lohmann, P. C. B. Phillips & M. Wild; Nature Geoscience 9, 286–289 (2016) doi:10.1038/ngeo2670) doesn't seem to have garnered much attention. I glanced at it, I think, thought "that told me what I thought I knew already", and thought no more. Life is so much simpler when you need think no more. But then a correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous (and before you start guessing, no, it isn't JA, he is quite forthright) offered me some thoughts, and I thought I'd share…

What shall we tell the children?

AKA me on Eli on Richard Betts on... well, you get the idea. The story so far: I wake up one morning a week or so back and hear some luvvie talking the usual kind of "me 'arts in the right place so you won't mind if I talk drivel, lord luv a duck, I 'ad that Lord Monckton in the back of me cab once, y'know, guv" stuff. It was clearly well over the top and not very interesting, so I shrugged and went back to sleep. ATTP posted something that appeared to amount to, yes she was wrong but lord luvva duck, 'er 'arts in the right place (DN says much the same in the Graun), unlike the Dork Side…

Tricking the Devil In 17th Century Norway

In the 90s, Norwegian death metal musicians were notorious for Satanism, violent crime and church arson. One of these twits burned down the stave church of Fantoft, which though moved in the 19th century had originally been built in about 1150. Any one of my atheist buddies could have told them that it's OK to like churches even if you don't like the Church. And by the way: which is the more evil world view from a Christian perspective: Satanism or atheism/materialism? At least the Satanists believe in a higher power that has the decency to fight with the Christian god over people's souls.…

What is the evidence that CO2 is causing global warming?

As you can imagine, the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide attracts a lot of comment from people who are less than inclined to agree with the general thrust of the material. Most can be easily answered with a pointer to another article or a rephrasing or expansion on one of the points in the post above it. (I'm not trying to claim that usually satisfies my skeptical visitors, but I don't often go to more trouble than that. I try not to bang my head too hard against any brick walls that come my way!). But I had one recent commenter who asked a very straightforward question that seemed…

Rowe Nails the Worldnutdaily

I saw this column by Tom Flannery in the Worldnutdaily and was planning on writing a critique of its many false claims, but Jon Rowe beat me to it. That's not a big surprise since we've done that often. Flannery attempts to make a common argument among the religious right, that the French revolution turned to despotism while the American revolution did not because ours was grounded in "Judeo-Christian principles" while theirs was grounded on the primacy of reason (or atheism, in some versions of the argument). The argument is quite silly and betrays some rather obvious historical ignorance.…

Paul Weyrich Expose`

Talk2Action has an interesting expose` on Paul Weyrich, the most important religious right leader you've likely never heard of. Weyrich has had an astonishingly busy and effective career in politics. He's probably the single most important figure in the religious right, though nowhere near as well known as Dobson, Falwell, Robertson and others. He's the power behind the throne, the prime mover behind the scenes. Among other groups he has founded: the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, the Council on National Policy, and the Free Congress Foundation. More than any other man, he is the…

Scott Adams wanks again!

Scott Adams makes his argument against atheism. Let's just say that Adams makes McGrath look like a brilliant, nuanced genius by comparison. All he's got is the cartoonist's version of Pascal's Wager, and his own profound misconceptions about what atheists are. In order to be certain that God doesn't exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity — the ability to be 100% certain. A human can't be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren't that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn't exist: God. Ummm, he forgot to…

Farah on Tiktaalik roseae

If the ID and traditional creationist responses to Tiktaalik roseae aren't quite ignorant and badly reasoned enough for you, might I suggest you look at the response from Joseph Farah, founder of the Worldnutdaily? It's delightfully wacky and full of nonsense. The ignorance begins to accumulate in massive amounts in the third sentence: Tiktaalik, they say, lived in shallow swampy waters and had the body of a fish but the jaws, ribs and limb-like fins of so-called "early mammals." Apparently, Farah doesn't know the difference between an amphibian and a mammal. There are just a few minor…

Basketball Awards and Next Season

As we head into final four weekend, they're starting to hand out the end of season awards. The US Basketball Writer's Association split their player of the year award between JJ Redick and Adam Morrison, while the AP gave it to Redick, with Morrison finishing second. I suspect the Naismith and Wooden awards may split as well, and that would be appropriate. They were clearly the two best players throughout the year and they both deserve it. The AP named Roy Williams Coach ot the Year and that is well deserved as well. No one imagined that after losing their top 7 scorers, Carolina would…

Catholic Art is Satanic?

I saw this article, titled Satanic Art in Catholic Church Exposed, a few days ago at the Worldnutdaily and made a note to write about it. The article details a new documentary called Rape of the Soul that claims that throughout the history of the Church, artists have been subliminally encoding "satanic and occultic imagery" in their paintings. The WND article begins with their standard breathlessness: Could the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis be tied to embedded Satanic and occultic imagery in its artwork - some of it hundreds of years old? The film, which is being released by Silver…

Beckwith Denied Tenure at Baylor

On Friday, Baylor University officially notified Francis Beckwith that he was not being granted tenure for his position as associate director of the JM Dawson Institute for Church/State Studies. This is causing a good deal of hullaballoo, with claims of bias and, inevitably, accusations that this denial has something to do with us evil "Darwinists". As someone firmly on the anti-ID side who is friendly with Frank Beckwith and relatively familiar with the politics at Baylor, I thought I should speak out on this one. The first thing that needs to be said is that the denial of tenure has nothing…

More on the UN Caricature Report

I'd like to comment on a few more excerpts from the translation of the UN report. It's stunning how morally myopic this report is and how thoroughly they manage to point all the blame in the wrong direction. To wit: The caricatures published are the result of a contest launched by the newspaper in answer to allegations according to which the Danish cartoonists were so frightened by fundamentalist Moslems that they wouldn't illustrate a biographical work on Muhammed. Thus the original motivation of the contest is the expression of a challenge and of an opposition to a group, the fundamentalist…

Evaluate This!

Timothy Burke, my go-to-guy for deep thoughts about academia, had a nice post about student evaluations last week. Not ecvaluations of students, evaluations by students-- those little forms that students fill out at many schools (not Swarthmore, though) giving their opinion of the class in a variety of areas. (Probably not entirely coincidentally, as this is the time of year when semester-school faculty fret about evaluation scores, Inside Higher Ed offers yet another RateMy Professor.com article, showing a positive correlation between "hotness" and positive evaluations there...) Those…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 98

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 97 Table of Contents Chapter 99 Chapter 98 The Second Day, March 21, 2061 On Monday morning, I watched the second session of Jon's trial alone in my office at CCU. I didn't have a class until mid-afternoon, so time was not an issue. Jon was led into the courtroom in shackles, his hands bound in front of him, his feet less tightly bound. He was wearing a bright orange one piece suit. As he moved I could see his hands and feet were wired to a metal saucer shaped connector that hung about his knees. He was deposited in a steel chair beside…

Holy editor resignation, Batman!

This couldn't be more damming: the paper by Spencer and Braswell [1] that was recently published in Remote Sensing... should therefore not have been published... I agree with the critics of the paper. Therefore, I would like to take the responsibility for this editorial decision and, as a result, step down as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing... I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions in public statements Spencer and the Mystery Journal refers, as does the eerily-similar von…

Footgloves

A running post I'm afraid. I don't think I promised to move them all across. Courtesy of the generous Maz the Merciless I have a pair of "footgloves" wot am all de rage, or at least they were all de rage a year ago or somesuch. Naturally, I'm late to the party. Today I gave them my first try-out, a 5 km run round the local "countryside reserve". They are really called "five fingers" (of VFF's, as the hip cats say); as they say: we recommend wearing Vibram FiveFingers for exercise, play, and for fun. Stimulating the muscles in your feet and lower legs will not only make you stronger and…

Breaking a butterfly on the wheel, part II

Part I refers, in which I take PZ to task for getting too carried away over some harmless minor piece of hydrodynamics. PZ didn't show up in the comment thread for his post after I criticised him there, which I took as an implicit admission of error, and was all ready to forget it. But no, PZ bites back: I have been chastised by William Connolley; he thinks I was too "strident" in condemning that lousy paper about Moses parting the sea with a fortuitous wind. I disagree, obviously. It was a bad paper, and I gave the reasons why it was so awful: it was poorly justified, it was not addressing…

And the Economist is rubbish too

Since the last of the CRU-email inquiries came in, a whole string of rubbish journo's have been queuing up to try to explain why, given that the inquires enhonerated the scientists, there was so much kerfuffle over the whole issue. Naturally, given that the journo's can't have been wrong, the scientists must have done something wrong, so a whole string of tedious "yes they were exhonerated but still, they could have done better" posts have come and gone. Pearce was trash. Monbiot was rubbish during the fuss and was rubbish afterwards though JA took the piss out of him better than I did. mt…

Talking to the layfolk

This from off in the comments at Slashdot, brought to my attention by planet3.0 (thanks VM). Yes, I know I'm a layperson now myself, but some shreds of the old knowledge still cling. Related thought: just about everyone knows they aren't able to understand, or make a meaningful contribution to, general relativity or quantum mechanics or number theory (except Cantors diagonal proof, of course, which every wacko knows is wrong). Somehow, however, people imagine that they understand climate science :-(. Being a scientist but not of the climate variety, I've got to say 'No'. In a lot of cases,…

On morality

Climate change seems to have gone a bit thin recently - James has got bored - and its distinctly chilly here, with snow in the air and a most glorious sundog. So lets talk about morality. Paul is discussing the argument is that atheism, if true, necessarily means that morality is an arbitrary personal opinion sparked by Dawkins on morality, where we find Dawkins agreeing to Ultimately, your belief that rape is wrong is as arbitrary as the fact that we've evolved five fingers rather than six. I see no reason to concede this, being an aetheist who believes that rape is wrong and who thinks this…

More sea ice

Nothing much going on with sea ice at the moment, but people are getting excited about it, so why shouldn't I contribute to the smoke? [A little concept I just created in the comments but am so pleased with I'm going to put it here: is 2007's Arctic sea ice like 1998's global temperature?] First up in the stupidity stakes is Tim Flannery, for his Words of warming in the Grauniad, in particular for by June 2008 signs of a great melt were emerging and a senior adviser to the Norwegian government was warning that this may be the Arctic's first ice-free year. Even in June, that was blatantly…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 14

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 13 Table of Contents Chapter 15 Chapter 14 The Clone Document, September 7, 2055 I was in the University library when a short innocuous looking fellow approached my carousel. "Are you Luc Pascal Fontaine, son of the late Robert Fontaine?" I looked at him warily, curious what he was about. "Yes." "I have a package for you." He lifted his briefcase, putting it on top of my books and papers. "I need a signature." "Fine," I said. He snapped open his case, removing a clipboard and a heavy manila envelope. "If I can just get you to sign for receipt…

Math Cranks

Mark Chu-Carroll beat me to this BBC story about a computer science professor in England claiming to have resolved a twelve-hundred year old problem. The story begins: Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading's computer science department, says his new theorem solves an extremely important problem - the problem of nothing. “Imagine you're landing on an aeroplane and the automatic pilot's working,” he suggests. “If it divides by zero and the computer stops working - you're in big trouble. If your heart pacemaker divides by zero, you're dead.” Computers simply cannot divide by zero.…

The Mobius Strip

A reader asked me, in response to yesterday's post, why I failed to make any mention of the Mobius Strip. Addressing that topic seemed like a good way to close the week's blogging. Imagine that you take a long thin strip of newspaper. Hold it at the top with your thumb and index finger, and let the bottom dangle loosely. Now grab the bottom and give it a half-twist. Take the narrow side at the bottom, and bring it up so the short edge meets up with the corresponding short edge where you are holding the newspaper. Tape these ends together. The result is a Mobius Strip. Click here for…

Mader on ID

Recemtly there was a bit of a kerfuffle over at Virginia Commonwealth University regarding the bioogy textbook Essentials of Biology, Sylvia Mader. An adjunct biology professor at VCU protested that the book gave short shrift to evolution and was soft on creationism. I've not managed to locate a copy of the book for mysel, but I note that Keith Pennock, writing for the Discovery Institute's blog, has this post up, in which he quotes two paragraphs from Mader's textbook. Pennock's intention is to show how silly the adjunct professor was being. Alas, I think there's a different message to be…

Long-Overdue Photo-a-Day Wrap-Up

During my sabbatical last year, I decided to try to do a photo-a-day project, taking and sharing at least one good picture a day of something or another. The strict photo-a-day format fell victim to my general busy-ness and disorganization, but I did eventually complete the whole thing. In the final post of the series, I said I might have some wrap-up thoughts in a few days; that was several months ago. Every time I need to clear some disk space, though, I'm reminded that I left that hanging, so I finally did something in the direction of a summative post, by uploading all the edited pictures…

198-212/366: Kid-Centric Photo Dump

A bunch of stuff happened that knocked me out of the habit of editing and posting photos-- computer issues, travel, catching up on work missed because of travel, and a couple of bouts with a stomach bug the kids brought home. I have been taking pictures, though, and will make an attempt to catch up. Given the huge delay, though, I'm going to drop the pretense of doing one photo a day, and do the right number, but grouped more thematically. This span included Easter, which meant a lot of family time, which means photos of the kids doing stuff. So here's a big group of those. The Sillyheads…

Toy Roller Coasters and the Energy Principle

One of the points I make repeatedly in teaching introductory mechanics (as I'm doing this term) is that absolutely every problem students encounter can, in principle, be solved using just Newton's Laws or, in the terminology used by Matter and Interactions, the Momentum Principle. You don't strictly need any of the other stuff we talk about, like energy or angular momentum. Of course, just because you can solve any problem using the Momentum Principle doesn't mean that you want to solve those problems that way. As an example of a problem that's really annoying to solve with just the Momentum…

Slightly Belated Star Talk TV Thoughts

Neil deGrasse Tyson's TV talk show had its debut Monday night on the National Geographic channel, something that's very relevant to my interests. It airs after I go to bed, though, so I set the DVR to record it, and watched it Tuesday afternoon. Then I was too busy yesterday to write about it... Anyway, given how regularly I comment on Tyson's other activities, I figured I really ought to say something. Really, though, my main reaction was "What a very odd format..." If you haven't already seen or read about this, the way it seems to work is that the show is taped in front of a live audience…