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Community-based science, an introduction to finding opportunity

Getting kids involved in science, outside of the classroom. A conversation with a friend last night reminded me of some posts I wrote earlier about helping scientists connect to programs for helping students. My friend, as a parent, approached this idea, of connecting scientists with students, from a different angle. She wanted to know how you go about connecting students with science? What do you do if the science program at your kid's high school seems a little, well, uninspiring? If the teachers aren't interested, how do you help? How do you create opportunities for kids to get…

Sharing documents with others via the web using Google Docs

Poor PZ! Stranded without a working laptop in a strange town! This is the kind of situation that gives me nightmares, so I like to upload presentation materials to the web just in case. Lately, I've been looking at different methods for doing this to see which ones l like the best. A few days ago, I tested this with Scribd. Today, I'm going to see what we can do with Google Docs. TomJoe said that he started using Scribd because he couldn't share things with Google. I use Google docs quite a bit, but I haven't tried to share any documents with more than a few people, so I took at look…

ISB symposium: update 1

The first talk was by Irving Weissman, one of the pioneers in immunology and stem cell research. He talked about the stem cells that form blood, also known as HSCs or hematopoietic stem cells. These cells are great because they can self-renew, and they can divide and differentiate. That is, they can form new kinds of cells. Weissman talked about experiments that were done at different companies, Systemix, Cellerant, Inc., and others with using stem cells to see if certain types of disease could be cured (in mice) by repopulating the mice with new stem cells. Some interesting things - -…

what would JoePa do...

i am transiting a large city in the south of the us and in the recent past had two surreal conversations take place around me one involved a couple of people I am reasonably certain are prominent college football players, boasting to their buds about looking up this other guy (over a girl I gather) and "wham, wanna fight, wham" (impressive ability to deliver high speed sucker punches, with sound effects, I do admit) ok, whatever, except for the slightly fascinated and somewhat amused off-duty policeman sitting not a million micrometers from them... this might have repercussions the other…

VP candidate Palin

Sarah Palin, republican VP candidate, is, apparently a "teach the controversy" christian... This could get interesting: from the wiki entry "...Palin supported the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in schools,[31] however, she noted she would not use "religion as a litmus test, or anybody's personal opinion on evolution or creationism" as criteria for selection to the school board." [31] reference is Anchorage Daily News article: "...The volatile issue of teaching creation science in public schools popped up in the Alaska governor's race this week when Republican Sarah Palin said…

iPod iChing - Golden State

Warm, sunny, dry friday, and our thoughts turn to the West. So, oh Mighty iPod: how fares California? Whoosh goes the randomizer. Whoosh. The Covering: Billy Bragg Podcast #12 - William Bloke The Crossing: Hey You - Pink Floyd The Crown: Confessions - Violent Femmes The Root: Precious Pain - Melissa Etheridge The Past: Almost Blue - Elvis Costello The Future: If I Fall You're Going Down With Me - Dixie Chicks The Questioner: Still Can't - The Cranberries The House: Love Will Tear Us Apart - Joy Division The Inside: Erie Canal - Bruce Springsteen The Outcome: Hr. Reykjav&iiacute;l -…

GLAST blog and other NASA snippets

NASA is really getting into the blog thing... GLAST blog is up and running, with mission performance updates and near future action items etc. Steve Ritz himself is running it. GLAST seem to be doing fine, some minor glitches shaken out, I'm sure they gave the people involved a nice adrenaline rush, but in retrospect, from the outside, after they've been solved, they sound like the normal sort of glitches most missions go through that are sorted out by the rather good mission people... GAST has done some pointing observations and is now in survey mode - calibration is starting and the…

Friday Fun: So what Lovecraftian horror came down your chimney last night?

Now here's a question: What do you leave by the fireplace on Christmas Eve for a great old one to snack on? Probably your neighbours' kids. Anyways, Tor.com has posted an amusingly creepy Christmas story by Charles Stross, Overtime. It's certainly not every treacly Christmas story that has a passage like this one, describing the aftermath of an office party: Whoever sat on the copier lid that time didn't have buttocks, hairy or otherwise--or any other mammalian features for that matter. What I'm holding looks to be a photocopy of the business end of a giant cockroach. Maybe I'm not alone…

asteroids and earth ages

I am in an all day meeting with bio/geo types, as one does, and as I sit here a random thought struck me, since us astronomers will insist on asteroids as the universal explanation for all things we have a nice medium sized impact structure in Chesapeake Bay, the ripples seem to have come as far as Pennsylvania, possibly responsible for the rather bothersome acid rock that almost ruined our most recent local attempts to stimulate through the I-99 construction anyway, the Chesapeake Bay impact structure is about 35 Myrs old. In fact, at a glance from an outsider, it seems to coincide within…

Hubble: Good News/Bad News

Science operations have resumed. Servicing Mission 4 has been delayed even further. WFPC2 lives! Arp 147. Pretty! but... SM-4 is delayed beyond the current delay to feb '09 "NASA managers have announced that they will not meet a February 2009 launch date for the fifth and final shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. The decision comes after engineers completed assessments of the work needed to get a second data handling unit for the telescope ready to fly. The unit will replace one that failed on Hubble in late September, causing the agency to postpone the servicing mission, which…

Anting With Cigarette Smoke?

tags: rooks, cigarettes British commuters are noticing strange behaviors among rooks recently. It seems that these birds, which are relatives of crows, are using discarded burning cigarettes to remove parasites from their feathers, a behavior known as "anting" because the birds originally relied on ants to do this. Apparently, Rooks swoop down on to the tracks at Exeter St David's railway station in Devon, pick up discarded cigarette butts that are still burning and place their wings over the smoke to collect the fumes underneath. Commuter Jeff Jones, of Budleigh Salterton, said: "I noticed…

Mystery Bird: Indigo Bunting, Passerina cyanea

tags: Indigo Bunting, Passerina cyanea, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Indigo Bunting, Passerina cyanea, photographed at Quintana Sanctuaries, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Joseph Kennedy, 14 April 2007 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/200s f/8.0 at 500.0mm iso400. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: A blue bird. With a short tail. A moderately short wing. And a thickish bill. Not much else…

Mystery Bird: Eurasian Wigeon, Anas penelope

tags: Eurasian Wigeon, Anas penelope, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Eurasian Wigeon, Anas penelope (also known simply as the Wigeon in Europe), photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Richard Ditch, 2004 [larger view]. Date Time Original: 2004:12:11 10:29:27 Exposure Time: 1/319 F-Number: 11.00 ISO: 320 Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Starting at the rear of this handsome duck, we find a long, pointed tail and white-edged…

Mystery Bird: Northern Hawk-Owl, Surnia ulula

tags: Northern Hawk-Owl, Surnia ulula, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Northern Hawk-Owl, Surnia ulula, photographed in the Meadows Campground near Hart's Pass of the Okanogan National Forest, located above the Methow Valley of Eastern Washington [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Lee Rentz, 19 October 2008 [larger view]. Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: Even with owls it pays to start at the rear of the bird. Many owls are stocky and stumpy,…

Men, Women Divided Over Sex Bill

There is a bill pending in the Bahamas which would outlaw marital rape, and it is facing a lot of opposition. There is a common theme in the arguments against it: see if you can figure out what it is. "It is ridiculous for them to try to make that a law, because I don't think a man can rape his own wife. After two people get married, the Bible says that they become one - one flesh. How is it possible to rape what is yours?" asked Mr. Sutherland. "Even if a woman says no to her husband it still can't be considered rape because she is his wife. He already paid his dues at the church and she…

Secretariat's Belmont Stakes Victory and Triple Crown Win

tags: Secretariat, horseracing, Triple Crown, streaming video I hope that Big Brown wins today's Belmont Stakes here in New York, and in fact, I think he will win, especially since his only potential contender of note, Casino Drive, was scratched this morning. If Big Brown manages to win today, he will become only the 12th horse in more than 125 years to win the Triple Crown winner, and our first in 30 years. But do I think that Big Brown is of the same caliber as Secretariat? Not a chance. Big Brown is simply the best individual among a very poor crop of race horses (with the exception of…

Mama and Papa Bank Rock: Behind the Green Mesh (Part 2)

tags: northern cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis, birds, Central Park, Image of the Day Mama and Papa Bank Rock: Behind the Green Mesh. Image: Bob Levy, author of Club George [larger]. The photographer, Bob Levy, writes; I returned to the park two days later. It was raining lightly but steadily so my camera was tucked inside its case. The light was poor for both photography and bird-watching but from about fifteen feet away I saw evidence that Mama Bank Rock had indeed returned to her nest. A gleaming white object was tucked behind the fence where the Northern Cardinal and I had last met.…

The future is roaring your way…

Edge hosted an amazing session that described the looming future of biology — this is for the real futurists. It featured George Church and Craig Venter talking about synthetic genomics — how we're building new organisms right now and with presentiments for radical prospects in the future. Brace yourself. There are six hours of video there; I've only started wading into it, but what I've seen so far also looks like a lot of material that will be very useful for inspiring students about the future of their field. There is also a downloadable book (which is a dead link right now, but I'm sure…

Parrot Teaches Four-Year-Old Boy To Talk

From left: Barney, Michelle and Dylan. Dylan Hargreaves, four, is autistic and suffers severe learning difficulties. Until recently, he never uttered a single word. But several few months ago, his parents added a three-year-old blue-and-gold macaw to the family. They named him Barney, and suddenly, Dylan began to speak, repeating words that the parrot said. After being tutored by Barney the parrot, Dylan says "Night, night", "Dad", "Mum", "Ta", "Hello" and "Bye". "Barney has changed our lives. Before he arrived, Dylan would try to speak, but the sound came out as a noise," said Dylan's…

Federal Records of Prescription Meds versus Lost Emails

Curiouser and curiouser: I ran across a disturbing news story today about the Virginia Tech gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, that boldly states; Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government's files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search. [story] Um, excuse me? Since…

I'm Here, I'm Just Dealing with Some er, Challenges

Just a quick update. I am still dealing with the plumbing issues in my bathroom (still no water) and worse, the combination of mud and mold and mouse turds and cockroach dust have made my allergies and asthma flare up to the point where they are nearly impossible to deal with right now, even though I am taking every over-the-counter antihistamine that I can possibly get my hands on. Not only that, but when I got home last night, I saw a mouse running around my apartment -- I suspect it entered through the hole in my bathroom wall since I haven't had any mice in months now. Because the…

AAAS Joins Our Call For ScienceDebate2008

tags: ScienceDebate2008, AAAS, American Association for the Advancement of Science, presidential elections Hey, everyone. I know I have told you several times that things are really gaining momentum with regards to the proposed ScienceDebate2008, an idea that originated here on ScienceBlogs by my SciBlings, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirschenbaum, but here is yet more proof that the idea is gaining more appeal: the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced that it has joined our effort to mount a presidential debate on science, technology and the economy. "…

Antarctica: Others Think I'd do a Helluva Job, Too

Since I have recently developed quite a history of visiting cold and snowy places, often during the winter, I wish to preserve that tradition. I am competing for the opportunity to go to Antarctica in February 2010 -- a dream adventure that I've always wanted to pursue (and almost did pursue when I was an undergraduate researching Fin Whales and Crabeater Seals at the University of Washington). To enter, all candidates must publish a picture of themselves and write an essay explaining why we think we are the best choice, and solicit votes from the public. Whomever receives the most votes wins…

Thinking of Changing my Name to Hermione and Living in a Cave in Wookey Hole

Image: Wookey Hole. There are moments in a person's life where they sit back and ask themselves; was [fill in the blank] worth it? Was it really worth it? I ask myself this question often, especially when it comes to job hunting. There's nothing like a bout of unemployment punctuated with brief bouts as a below-poverty-wages throw-away worker to make a person contemplate the meaning of one's existence. So when an employment opportunity like this comes along for a job that actually pays a living wage, it makes me think that I should do something dramatic, like changing my name to Hermione…

For all the wrong reasons

Kristin Maguire, chair of the South Carolina State Board of Education, has resigned from her position for all the wrong reasons. She has been a shill for the religious right, and has opposed the teaching of evolution in the public schools; she has also promoted that worthless 'abstinence only' sex education. She should have been fired for basic incompetence. But no, that is not sufficient reason to kick someone out of office in America. What gets American politicians in trouble? You guessed it: sex. There were unverified rumors of inappropriate behavior, but what really got her was that she…

The bill from Bogalusa

A certain Brown University biology graduate has taken an unfortunate step, one that we asked him to avoid. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has signed a pro-creationism bill into law, all to pander to evangelical protestant hicks. We know this is a guy with national aspirations, so he's taking a big gamble that we aren't going to swing back towards a more sensible secularism, since the only people who could vote for him now are fundagelical god-wallopers who don't understand science. That may be a fairly big voting base, but I'm hoping that it's shrinking. Either Bobby Jindal is toast… or we all are…

Fatal work injury that killed Ascencion Medina, 44, was preventable, SC-OSHA cites G M Framing

Ascencion Molina Medina’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings from South Carolina OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, G M Framing. The 44 year-old was working in July 2015 at a construction project for a residential and retail development called Main + Stone in Greenville, SC.  The general contractor of the Main + Stone development is Yeargin Potter Shackelford Construction. The initial press reports indicated that Medina had “lost his footing” and fell about 30 feet.  I wrote about the incident but, at the time, I did not have the name…

Fatal work injury that killed Jeffrey Shannon was preventable, OSHA cites AECOM Technical Services

Jeffrey Shannon’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of federal OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, AECOM Technical Services dba Urs Corporation The 49 year-old was working in March 2015 at Sunoco’s Marcus Hook Industrial Complex in Delaware County, PA. The facility was being converted from an oil refinery to a natural gas storage and processing plant. AECOM was providing engineering and site preparation for Sunoco. The initial press reported indicated that Shannon was struck by a 1,200 foot pylon. I wrote about the incident shortly…

Old Uppsala: Big Dig, Standing Stone Alignments

Major excavations are taking place in Old Uppsala because of railway work. Old Uppsala was a political, religious and mercantile centre from about AD 600 to 1274. In fact it may be termed the central place of the Swedes – tribe and kingdom – during those centuries. My friend, author Kristina Ekero Eriksson, is the fieldwork's outreach officer and keeps a blog. So far there hasn't been much to report beyond what you might expect on a contract excavation in the region, but now some interesting stuff is popping up. How about some long lines of regularly spaced stone-filled pits? They're in the…

Respected Swedish Archaeologist Joins Cranks

To my horror, Ystads Allehanda reports that Wladyslaw Duczko has joined Nils-Axel Mörner on a project to excavate the famous Ales stenar stone ship. Why does this pain me? Because while (as I have reported here before) geologist Mörner and his collaborator homeopath Bob G. Lind are Swedish archaeology's most notorious cranks, Duczko is not. He is a respected senior archaeologist and known as an authority on Slavic silver jewellery of the Viking Period. If I had heard that Duczko was going to excavate Ales stenar, I would have said "Well done, Wladde, I'm looking forward to seeing your…

Why Malt the Barley for Beer?

Dear Reader, usually the deal here on Aard is that I tell you what to think and you reply, zombielike, "Yes... Master... Kill... Kill...". But today, let's turn the tables. I'm going to ask a question about a simple scientific-culinary matter that has baffled me for decades. And I hope someone out there knows enough about yeast to enlighten me. When starved of oxygen, yeast turns sugar into alcohol. When germinated, barley grains, by means of the enzyme amylase, turn some of their constituent starch into sugar. This process is called malting. In order to make beer, you must malt the barley…

Odin from Lejre? No, it's Freya!

So you're a metal detectorist and you find a silver figurine at storied Lejre in Denmark. It depicts a person sitting in a high seat whose posts end in two wolves' heads. And on either arm rest sits a raven. The style is typical for about AD 900. So when you hand the thing over to the site manager, he of course exclaims, "Holy shit! It's Odin!". And that's what he tells the press. Until somebody like me comes along and points out that it's a woman. She's wearing a floor-length dress. And a shawl. And four finely sculpted bead strings. This is a standard depiction of an aristocratic lady of…

5th Century Rune Stone Found

Most rune stones are written with the late 16-character futhark and date from the 11th century when the Scandies had largely been Christianised. Their inscriptions tend to be formulaic: "Joe erected the stone after Jim his father who was a very good man". But by that time, runic writing was already 900 years old. It's just that inscriptions in the early 24-character futhark are much less common. And when you find them, their messages are usually far less straight-forward. My buddy Frans Arne Stylegar reports in a series of blog entries [1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5] on the discovery, less than two…

Boris Johnson is a tosser

I haven't had a tosser for a while, the last was Quentin Letts, so it seems appropriate that this year's winner should be another joke Tory pol, Boris the Clown. For whom Satirists can’t f*cking type quick enough seems to have been written. Having joined "Leave" purely for his own stupid selfish political gain, the bozo has taken fright at what's happened and ducked out of the Tory leadership race like the pathetic low-grade coward he is. I suppose he was a useful idiot to head the Leave campaign... but, really, what was the point? He wasn't in "Leave" from conviction, he was in it for his…

No-one cares about Theon

Ages ago, John Theon had his five minutes of fame in the usual tedious manner; as blogged by me and others with too much time on their hands. Since then his wiki-life looks like: 2015-11-01T03:17:34 Acroterion (talk | contribs) deleted page John Theon (G4: Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John Theon) 2011-11-17T15:12:14 Prolog (talk | contribs) deleted page John Theon (G5: Creation by a blocked or banned user in violation of block or ban) 2011-09-07T06:17:17 David Eppstein (talk | contribs) deleted page John Theon (G4: Recreation…

Stern takes bleaker view on warming?

Says the FT, via DSB. Since I've already argued that Stern is over-bleak, Im surprised he has got more pessimistic. Whats up? Apparently "We underestimated the risks . . . we underestimated the damage associated with the temperature increases . . . and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases.... Stern said data published since the report came out had led him to change his mind. Aha! Interesting. What is this new data? He highlighted the publication last year of the most comprehensive study yet undertaken of climate change science. Conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel…

Pix from a trip

To Belgium, for Wouters thesis; and congratulations to him. Pix are on Flickr once you get past the bonfires. Now the new line from St Pancreas is in, it takes less than 2 hours to get there, and new posters are splashed all around, some of them quite good. The one featuring Thatcher, Major and Blair is fun and preserves the proper stereotypes. Major looks like a tw*t; Blair is looking to Major for approval; and only Thatcher is actually going to do anything. Dunno who this is. Being Belgium, the posters are also in Dutch, but I couldn't read those ones and neither could you :-) Looking at…

My To-Read Pile

I'm spending this week in a semi-vegetative state: sleeping late, taking walks at noon with my wife & kids, eating chocolate, drinking tea, and reading. Here's my late-2011 selection of reading matter. Svavelvinter. Erik Granström 2004. Swedish fantasy. Proggiga barnböcker - därför blev vi som vi blev. Kalle Lind 2010. About the pinko hippie children's books of the 1970s. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne 1870. Night Train to Rigel. Timothy Zahn 2005. Scifi. (Thanks Birger!) Kinarapport 2011 Yearbook. About China. Diktaren pÃ¥ tronen. Michael Nordberg 2011. About 13th…

Why do Science in Antarctica?

Nature, in the course of editorialising on the vast waste of money that is the US return to the moon plan (although they don't say that), sez, making the analogy with the return to the South Pole in the IGY: since humanity's return to the South Pole, Antarctic science has been central to the great project of understanding the changes that humans are inflicting on the Earth. An Antarctic component to the nascent global carbon dioxide monitoring effort was established in 1957. Since then the contributions have been legion: discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole; the extraction of greenhouse-gas…

Minnesota shouldn't be a problem this time around

Minnesota is going to be revising their science standards this year. Last time we went through this, it was a circus, with our education commissioner (the notorious Cheri Pearson Yecke) trying to pack the review committees with creationists and doing last minute swaps of committee-approved drafts with drafts edited by creationists. We had John Calvert show up at hearings, along with a few other home-grown kooks, including a guy with a replica of a giant leg bone that he claimed proved there were giants in the earth in those days. This time around, though, we have guidelines that will limit…

Global cooling: Inhofe talking sh*t* again

Now you may well say, Inhofe talking nonsense is nothing particularly notable. But in this case he is talking about my particular hobbyhorse, the global cooling stuff. The NYT has an Opinion piece pointing out Inhofe's nonsense. Unsurprisingly, this has pissed him off, which is all to the good. The main thing to notice about Inhofes cooling/warming stuff is the total lack of any references to the science - he sticks purely to the popular media. If you're interested in the newsweek 1975 article, there is more here (nb: I can't see any evidence from the article for Inhofes claims about…

Book Review: Palahniuk, Rant

A few words about a new novel I read half of and didn't feel like finishing. (Better say something or the publishers might strike me from their mailing list.) Rant is Chuck Palahniuk's eighth novel. It brings Nick Cave's Old-Testament grotesque And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) to mind in its preoccupation with the bodily exudations of rural Americans. But it isn't at all as absorbing or painful to read, mainly because of Palahniuk's use of innumerable narrators. They take turns saying brief and dry little pieces, neatly labeled with their names and relationships to the central character, Rant…

Real Climate on latest temperature reconstruction

Just as an addendum to this post, I wanted to point out that Real Climate has a discussion of the paper in question[PDF]. The authors include not only Mike Mann, but also Bradley and Hughes, so we have the whole infamous MBH cabal in one place again! Let the mud-slinging begin! But some useful stuff from RC's post includes noting the substantial increase in the number of proxy data sources: 1209 back to 1800; 460 back to 1600; 59 back to 1000 AD; 36 back to 500 AD and 19 back to 1 BC (all data and code is available here). This is compared with 400 or so in MBH99, of which only 14 went back…

DeVos and Intelligent Design

Dick DeVos, the Republican candidate for governor in Michigan, has confirmed what we already knew from the report of one of our MCFS members in a letter to the editor last week, that he advocates teaching ID in public school science classrooms. The Detroit Free Press reports: "I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory," DeVos told the Associated Press this week during an interview on education. "That theory and others that would be considered credible would expose our students to more ideas, not less."...…

Byrd's Secret Hold

It turns out that Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia also had a secret hold on the bill, not just Ted Stevens. That is no surprise to anyone who knows Washington. Byrd is the Democratic doppelganger to the Republican Stevens. His spokesman, amusingly, claims that Byrd didn't really want to stop the bill, he just wanted time to read it before signing off on it. Uh, yeah, right. And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to nowhere - named after Sen. Byrd, naturally - to sell you. If he really wants time to read the bills before he votes on them, why isn't Byrd supporting the Read the Bills Act…

That Compelling UD Logic

Dembski has a post up at Uncommon Descent about the series of critiques at PT of Wells' new book. He quotes an email from one of his anonymous colleagues: Like fresh meat tossed into a pit of jackels, Jonathan Wells' newest book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design has sent the Panda's Thumb crowd into a feeding frenzy. Right now there are at least 4 opening posts devoted to taking the book, apparently, chapter by chapter, and "demolishing" (or is it "destroying" or perhaps "eviscerating") nearly every sentence Jonathan wrote (or so it seems). I find it very…

Making French Fries French Again

3 years ago two Congressmen, Bob Ney of Ohio and Walter Jones of North Carolina, pushed through a rule changing the name of french fries and french toast in the Congressional cafeteria to "freedom fries" and "freedom toast" (liberty cabbage, anyone?). Now, the names have suddenly changed back, and no one is talking about why. Neither Reps. Bob Ney of Ohio nor Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, the authors of the culinary rebuke, were willing this week to say who led the retreat, as it were, from the frying pan. But retreat there has been, as a casual observer can see for himself in the House'…

Romney's "Tar Baby" Comment

I agree completely with Eugene Volokh that the furor over Mitt Romney's use of the term "tar baby" in a comment about the Big Dig the other day is a pointless tempest in a teapot. He sums up the reasons perfectly: "Tar baby" is one of many words that has a standard and common meaning that is not pejorative, and that isn't even derived from a pejorative concept or strengthened by its association with a pejorative concept, but at the same time has a completely different meaning than is derogatory. Using it in a context where there's no reason to think the speaker is saying something pejorative…

Yeah, That's What Jesus Would Do

The New York Times has an article about the situation in Indian River, Delaware where a Jewish family has filed suit over a long list of instances of Christian intimidation of their children. Some of the examples are absolutely stunning. Mrs. Dobrich, who is Orthodox, said that when she was a girl, Christians here had treated her faith with respectful interest. Now, she said, her son was ridiculed in school for wearing his yarmulke. She described a classmate of his drawing a picture of a pathway to heaven for everyone except "Alex the Jew."... A homemaker active in her children's schools, Mrs…

Ark inanity, yet again

Lots of people have been emailing me with this story of yet another Ark expedition. It's a routine lunacy that comes up all the time—probably the most irritating part of it all is the way MSNBC filed it under their tech/science section. It's nothing of the kind: it's mere pareidolia, the product of a loon biased by a desire to confirm a silly story from the Bible, a misplaced myth that claims a big boat landed on Mt Ararat, and a willingness to stare at satellite photos of rock and ice formations until one convinces oneself that a piece looks like a big boat. It also helps if one is willing…