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Saturday Recipe: Home-Made Roasted Tomato Salsa

Lately, friday's have just been too busy for me to get around to posting a recipe. So I decided to switch my recipe posts to saturday. I'll try to be reliable about posting a recipe every saturday. I tried making homemade salsa for the first time about about two months ago. Once I'd made a batch of homemade, that was pretty much the end of buying salsa. It's really easy to make, and fresh is just so much better than anything out of a jar. When it takes just five minutes of cooking to make, there's just no reason to pay someone else for a jar of something that's not nearly as good. This…

One Reason Why Bankers Want Bonuses Explains Everything You Need to Know About Big Sh-tpile

By now, you might have heard about the growing outrage that bankers at banks receiving bailout money are drawing bonuses. It's reached the point where Sen. Claire McCaskill has proposed capping bankers' income at a salary equivalent to that of the president of the U.S. I didn't really have much to add about how ridiculous the arguments for paying the bankers bonuses when their firms have been nationalized (if, nothing else, most employees, who through no fault of their own, working in dying businesses are getting laid off--that is, no salary at all). But a quotes from a NY Times article…

Reading Diary: Nine algorithms that changed the future by John MacCormick

John MacCormick's new book, Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers, is very good. You should buy it and read it. Among all the debates about whether or not absolutely everybody must without question learn to program (pro, con), it's perhaps a good idea to pause and take a look at exactly what programs do. Which is what this book does. It starts from the premise that people love computers and what they can do but don't have much of an idea about what goes on inside the little black box. And then, what MacCormick does is take nine general types…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: an atheist Christmas

At least one correct answer to the question "What's the difference between God and Santa Claus?" is "There is no God." Some of you may object. What's the evidence for Santa Claus, Mr. Big Shot Atheist!? Just ask my daughter. OK, I admit she is now faithless. The scales have fallen from her eyes. She realizes there really isn't a Santa Claus. The only excuse I can make for her is that she is exhibiting what most people would call age appropriate behavior. After all, she's 30 and has two children of her own. But we believe the arrival of the little ones (the oldest isn't 3 years old yet) will…

Earth Day: Changes I Can Make

by Lindsay Wheeler Although today's the official Earth Day, I've been reflecting more and more on my own lifestyle and the efficiency with which I live.  It started a few months ago, when I was watching the BBC series Planet Earth with my brother, and I found myself almost to the point of tears thinking about what we, as a human race, have done to the planet.  I grew up spending summers in the backcountry of Wyoming and I have always considered myself as a person who has loved the outdoors.  However, living in Washington, DC, I often find it easy to forget the fragility of the world…

Harm to Communities from "Goods Movement" System

This month's Environmental Health Perspectives features an informative but disturbing article by Andrea Hricko entitled  "Global Trade Comes Home".  It describes the adverse impact on communities of the "goods movement" system, where imports to the U.S.---electronics, food, toys, furniture--- make their way from waterfront ports to trains and trucks, and into warehouses and to our neighborhood stores.  Hricko, an associate professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine, with first-hand experience working with families who live near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, paints the…

Mending Food Waste

Globally, almost half of all the food the world produced is thrown away.  This Global number hides some critical differences however.  In most of the Global South, food is lost to lack of preservation techniques.  Grain gets wet in the field, and instead of being dried with machines as it might be in the US, it molds and is lost.  Someone slaughters a cow, and what doesn't get eaten spoils in the heat.  Fruit is harvested but bad weather means that it doesn't dry adequately....you get the idea.  The majority of food is lost shortly after harvest, globally. In the Global North, the picture is…

Popeyes, KFC’s supplier has sanitation problem, Senator takes notice of unsafe conditions

Drivers honked and waved. They gave thumbs up to the 30 people on the sidewalk. The group was holding signs outside a North Carolina poultry plant. “El baño” – the bathroom – was the word catching the drivers’ attention. The scene on August 14 was a demonstration in front of the Case Farms poultry plant in Morganton, NC. The company supplies chicken to KFC, Popeyes, and Taco Bell. Alisa Olvera outside of Case Farms poultry plant in Morganton, NC. The reason for the peaceful protest? The Case Farms plant has a sanitation problem. Workers don’t have access to the bathroom when they need to…

What It Takes

In the ongoing string theory comment thread (which, by the way, I'm really happy to see), "Who" steps off first to ask an interesting question: One way to give operational meaning to a theory being predictive in the sense of being empirically testable is to ask What future experimental result would cause you to reject the theory? I think what worries a lot of people about string thinking is that it seems so amorphous that it might be able to accomodate any future experimental measurement. In fact I am not aware of any string theorist's answer to this basic question. It's an interesting…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 5

The Bottleneck Years Chapter 4 Table of Contents Chapter 6 by H.E. Taylor Chapter 5 FabNet, May 18, 2055 I sat at the window watching Matt roll away in his electric chariot. When he was gone, I stared at the lake musing how different we were. We were identical and yet we weren't. Matt definitely had a unique way of looking at things. It started when he was a teenager. He picked up a second hand 3-D printer for next to nothing at a yard sale. 3-D printers, or fabs, short for fabricators, were capable of building any desired object layer by layer out of plastic or ceramic goop. "They're…

Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for Soon

A few days ago I suggested that Willie Soon's career may be taking a nose dive soon. I was right. Tomorrow's New York Times has a story that has as many leaks as an old canoe, so we can see it now in various outlets. The story is out and linked to below. Before going into detail I just want to note that Justin Gillis is doing a great job at the New York Times. Anyway, you can read the following items, the most recent listed here: Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for a Doubtful Climate Scientist Willie Soon Gate Willie Soon, will he soon be fired? It really looks like Willie Soon has been paid…

Weekend Diversion: Celebrating Science and Believing in Yourself

"She said believe in yourself and believe in your dreams. I took away those words and will keep them in my memory for a lifetime." -Dominique Dawes Every weekend, I try to come to you with a story that is a break from the regular physics and astronomy stuff I write about. This weekend, I was listening to a sweet song by Alison Krauss, I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby, and looking at a picture of the Elephant Nebula. Why is it called the Elephant Nebula? Well... it kind of looks like... well... Yeah. It's an elephant. Maybe a snuffleupagus, but probably an elephant. And one of the first…

Buying or Selling a Home in the Twin Cities, Minnesota?

If so, I have a recommendation for you. We recently sold our old house and bought a new one, and moved. The main reason we did this: to get closer to Amanda’s place of work. We managed to turn a commute that ran from 35 minutes to 1.5 hours (on really bad winter days) each way to one short enough that Amanda will usually bike, with about a five or six minute drive on non-biking days. Probably a ten minute drive on the worst winter days. The main reason we did this now rather than a couple of years ago: our house was under water thanks to the GB Economic Crisis. In fact, we weren’t sure if…

The Love of a Good Dog

Natalie Angier has a piece in the Times this morning about the loss of a beloved pet cat: Cleo was almost 16 years old, she'd been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief -- not so much its intensity as its specificity. It was very different from the catastrophic grief I'd felt when I was 19 and my father died, and all sense, color and flooring dropped from my days. This was a sorrow of details, of minor rhythms and assumptions that I hadn't really been aware of until, suddenly, they were…

Charity, Mission Trips, and Mandatory Service

Not long before the Matthew Nisbet post about uncharitable atheists crossed my RSS feeds, I had marked a Fred Clark post about mission trips that has some really good thoughts about the mechanics of charity: But the point of these mission trips is not only to get [a rural school in Haiti] built. That's part of it, but it's not the only goal. The mission trip is also designed to give the American youth group a tangible, visceral stake in the fate of the Haitian community. This is vital for the people in Haiti too. The problem with the calculus above is that it presumes that the total level of…

Campus Visit Season

It's college application season, and the New York Times style section ran a nice article Sunday about parents touring colleges with their children. It's mostly about the bonding that goes on on such trips, which is probably instantly recognizable if you're the sort of wealthy Northeasterner who is the target demographic of the Sunday New York Times. I'm sort of on the fringes of that demographic, so what really resonates for me is a different part of the story: Tom Likovich of Bronxville, N.Y., who was at Hamilton College with his wife, Ellen, and daughter, Alex, on a recent weekend morning,…

Roy Varghese and the exploitation of Antony Flew

I have not been shy about my contempt for the crackpot, Roy Varghese — he's one of those undeservedly lucky computer consultants who struck it rich and is now using his money to endorse religion. He's a god-soaked loon who pretends to be a scientific authority, yet he falls for the claim that bumblebees can't fly and therefore there flight is evidence for a god. Really. He's that deluded. I've been too kind, however. You must read this New York Times article, The Turning of an Atheist, in which it turns out that Varghese is also a contemptible manipulator. It's the story of Antony Flew, the…

XMRV: Im not so positive youre positive, but Im positive theyre positive.

When scientists are creating tests to detect viruses, they need to balance two factors: Sensitivity Specificity A 'sensitive' test is no good if it cross-reacts with other proteins/viruses/antibodies. A test with high 'specificity' is no good if you miss 3 out of 10 infections. Of course, then you need to worry about cost (a perfect test is unusable if no one can afford it) and speed (acute diseases need fast diagnoses, and who wants to wait 3 months to find out if they have a life-altering chronic disease?), and other factors. So scientists normally use tests that view a putative disease…

Liar, Lunatic, Lord

Meanwhile, over at Town Hall Dinesh D'Souza serves up yet another steaming pile of religious idiocy. His subject is an exchange between Rabbi Jacob Neusner and Pope Benedict. He opens with a gratuitous slap at Richard Dawkins: Even so, Neusner's treatment of Christ could not be more different than that of Dawkins. One of the main differences is that Dawkins is a biologist and Neusner is a scholar of ancient texts and history. Consequently Dawkins' historical and literary understanding is at the eighth grade level, while Neusner brings to his work a depth and sophistication worthy of a man…

Links for2009-07-30

The missing research program for space colonization -- KarlSchroeder.com "No amount of data about how the human body reacts to zero-G is going to answer the important question, which is: how does the human body react to extended periods under fractional gravity--like the moon's 1/6 G or Mars's .38 G? If there's a potential show-stopper to colonizing other worlds, it's going to be how our physiology responds to fractional gravity, not zero gravity." (tags: space science medicine blogs physics planets technology) ...My heart's in Accra » Fun and games with human misery "The best $50…

Libertarian Paternalism?

Ilya Somin from the Volokh Conspiracy has this post on a resurgent paternalism -- using as its justification new findings from behavioral economics: "Libertarian Paternalism" is all the rage in law and economics circles these days. To slightly oversimplify, libertarian paternalists claim that people systematically make mistakes as a result of cognitive errors and biases. Afterwards, they end up with outcomes that they themselves consider inferior to at least some of the alternatives they could have gotten by making a different decision in the first place. As a result, third party intervention…

Zombies get philosophical

You may not think of our flesh-eating diseased brethren as being the thoughtful types. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. As Sci mentioned, I'm gonna be holed up in the Costco for a while so I got time to think about it. They're the slow-moving-undead zombies, not those ultra-quick "infected" (I hate those creepy bastards). I rolled down those big steel doors, barricaded them with anything heavy I could find here, gathered up all the lighting supplies for when the power goes out, bandaged up that bite on my arm, and I've taken to making jerky out of all this meat I've got laying around…

Cramer/Stewart, The Right, The Wrong, and Democratic Loyalty.

(Fair warning: I usually keep the language clean in this blog, but I didn't manage it this time. Below the fold may be NSFW.) OK, I admit it. I've still got last night's Jon Stewart CNBC Massacre (with full orchestration and five part harmony) stuck in my mind. I think that's going to be the case for at least a little longer, because I'm still trying to wrap my mind around some of the things I've learned over the course of the whole mess. One of the (several) things I keep coming back to is just what some of the criticism of last nights production demonstrates. Some critics follow the…

Economics as Evolution

The Economist has an article about an economist using evolutionary ideas. To wit: ...Eric Beinhocker, of the McKinsey Global Institute, has undertaken his own 500-page haj, entitled "The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics". In places (such as its headline call for a "paradigm shift" in economics) the book may irk Mr Krugman and other gatekeepers of the profession. But it is good enough, and scholarly enough, to warrant their attention rather than their scorn. Indeed, Mr Beinhocker is himself critical of "loose analogising" between biology and…

Alliteration improves memory performance

I've always been a fan of literary studies -- I was an English major in college and I continue to blog about literature on my personal blog. But when I first learned about the concept of alliteration (I must have been in middle school), I was unimpressed. Obviously making a poem rhyme requires some serious skill, since not just one sound but a series of sounds must be repeated at the same point in the poem's meter. Alliteration, by contrast, only requires the repetition of a single consonant sound at the beginning of a few words. Clearly, creating clever combinations of consonant sounds wasn'…

Some Unfounded Alarmism Regarding Compact Fluorescent Lamps

Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), or "energy saving light bulbs", are much more energy efficient than conventional light bulbs, and they have a significantly longer lifetime. On top of that, replacing your conventional bulbs with CFLs won't just save energy, but will also save you money. Most importantly, this is one small action that we can all contribute to the fight against global warming. However, yesterday's New York Times included an article by Leora Broydo Vestel entitled "Do New Bulbs Save Energy if They Don't Work", which hypes up concerns about compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) not…

Don't be a Closed Source Moron

Morons are so annoying. Even the ones that are just passing by, the ones you don't really have to talk to. These days I often have lunch in a public dining area where most of the patrons are scientists or geeks, or students learning to become scientists or geeks. The other day two geeky scientist guys were walking by my table talking to each other too loudly for me to ignore. So one guy, he says: "You know we can solve this problem. I have a lot of faith in our Open Source solutions." (hmm, cool, I thought). The other guy responded: "Yea, well, I guess it all depends on how much…

Sizzle is a fizzle

I'm a fan of Randy Olson. Don't get me wrong about that. His Flock of Dodos makes a valuable point about science communication, and goes beyond the trite standard narrative of brilliant scientists battling ignorant creationists. There's a real problem, and caricature won't solve it. Randy set aside his career as an academic marine biologist to become a filmmaker. His decision to pursue a career in science communication is admirable, more scientists should take the time to learn how to communicate effectively and find ways to communicate with a general audience. That said, I didn't care…

Lessig for Congress

It's immensely exciting to see Larry Lessig thinking about a run for the House, filling the vacancy left by the passing of Tom Lantos. As Lessig notes, the other candidate in the primary is an exceptional politician, and he isn't considering the run because of any animus against her. I've no doubt they will work together as colleagues if she wins the primary. If he runs, and I suspect he will, it will be to fight against the corrupting influence of cash on politics. A political system where individual citizens giving small donation dominate the race for political office is a far better…

Market Analysis

There was a telling moment yesterday on the NYTimes.com website. It was just after 10:30 in the morning and the top of the site featured a breaking news article about the S&P 500 heading into higher territory. The article offered the usual litany of explanations, from better than expected news on housing starts to a surprising uptick in retail sales. But here's the catch: by the time I glanced at the article it was already obsolete, with the Dow and S&P down by a significant amount. A few hours later, a new article made its way to the top of the NYTimes site, explaining why the market…

On Food

Slacktivist talks about politics in Delaware, concluding: the state's governor-elect … ma[de] a shrewd, surprising and encouraging announcement of his own regarding his upcoming inaugural celebration: "Markell: Give time for your neighbors." Gov.-elect Jack Markell proposed an alternative to the traditional inaugural ball. No expensive gown or tux rentals necessary. But get ready to roll up those sleeves -- and the sooner, the better. Standing in the volunteers' room at the Food Bank of Delaware, Markell and Lt. Gov.-elect Matt Denn launched a fresh effort to help Delaware residents give…

Bones, museums, and First-Class Relics

Denyse "Buy my book" O'Leary thinks that evolutionary biologists are just like religious folk. Among the deep parallels she finds: Scientists and the religious both give booklets to children, celebrate birthdays of important figures, claim that certain things are facts, and seek official recognition. Finally: - sacred bones. Christian churches have the bones of the saints; Buddhist stupas the toe-nail-clippings of Buddha; evolution is built on sacred bones, that the evolutionists read meanings into in the way that the pagan priests of Caesar's time read meaning into scattered bones. What is…

Bad idea, putting me on a poll

It's just a silly online poll, and I don't have a stake in how it comes out one way or the other, except for one thing: I must defeat Brad Pitt. I like the guy, and I've enjoyed his movies, and I'm happy that he's come out as an atheist, but you know…I'm looking forward to being able to go into the bedroom and tell the Trophy Wife™ that I'm better than Brad Pitt at something. And she will say, "I know, baby, I know," no matter what, but it would just be nice to have some statistical backing for the claim. Atheist of the Year 2009 Richard Dawkins 32% Bill Maher 15% PZ Myers 17% Greg…

Vitamin D deficiency makes you dumb?

Vitamin D Important In Brain Development And Function: McCann & Ames point out that evidence for vitamin D's involvement in brain function includes the wide distribution of vitamin D receptors throughout the brain. They also discuss vitamin D's ability to affect proteins in the brain known to be directly involved in learning and memory, motor control, and possibly even maternal and social behavior. The review also discusses studies in both humans and animals that present suggestive though not definitive evidence of cognitive or behavioral consequences of vitamin D inadequacy. The authors…

Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, Spring 2011

As usual, a wealth of interesting articles in the latest ISTL: Faculty of 1000 and VIVO: Invisible Colleges and Team Science by John Carey, City University of New York E-book Usage among Chemists, Biochemists and Biologists: Findings of a Survey and Interviews by Yuening Zhang and Roger Beckman, Indiana University, Bloomington Look Beyond Textbooks: Information Literacy for First-Year Science Students by Gabrielle K.W. Wong, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology The Changing Role of Blogs in Science Information Dissemination by Laksamee Putnam, Towson University Life Science…

Around the Scholarly Communications Web: The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access and more

The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review Scholarly Communications: Less of a market, more like general taxation? “We don’t need OA in our field, everything is on arXiv”. Nope. >When is the Library Open? and the PS Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much Open Access: the beast that no-one could – or should – control? Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it? Why embargo periods are bad for academic publishers Infrastructure is Invisible / Infrastructure is…

Betting on summer research for undergraduates

It's not too late. You can do research on cool topics, get paid, and even live in Las Vegas for the summer. If I were a student, I'd go. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is still taking applications for students to come do research in the desert. The microbiology faculty at UNLV and the Desert Research Institute have received NSF funding for a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in Environmental Microbiology. This grant will provide students with the opportunity to work on a research project for a 10 week period with a faculty mentor. Students will receive a $…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Beatrice Lugger is a freelance science journalist and consultant, one of the founders of ScienceBlogs Germany and a twitterer. At the conference, Beatrice will co-moderate the session on Science online talks between generations. Danica Radovanovic is a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute, a blogger and a twitterer. I interviewed her a couple of months ago -…

Sunday Night Links

A bunch of new links on the Basic Concepts and Terms in Science list (or my 'enhanced' list, if you prefer). Bitch PhD has a new (paying!) gig at Suicide Girls News Blog and starts out with a post explaining the Plan B: How Does This Plan Work? Revere on Effect Measure: Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: the Edwards blogger dust-up Ezra Klein, in an op-ed in The Guardian (online only): We want a divider, not a uniter, and more on the topic on his own blog: More Shamefaced Obama Skepticism Chuckles1 puts it even better: The OTHER Abraham Lincoln A comment by Elizabeth Edwards - Response to a…

Video Science

You may remember when I mentioned the announcement of the new open-source online journal JoVE, a peer-reviewed journal of scientific methods in which submissions are provided in video form. Pimm, Eva, Jonah and Nick have also commented on it and Pimm prvides a look at the rate at which the news about the journal spread over the internet. I have been thinking about this a little and I am wondering if we can predict what kinds of techniques are most likely to be found there - and what kinds will not. I am assuming that showing how one uses a standard kit with no alterations of the protocol…

Poor Stanley and Terry

Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish get another drubbing, this time at the hands of Matt Taibbi. I'd almost feel sorry for them, except that I'm still feeling the trauma of being trapped on a plane with Eagleton's book, so I say…sic 'em. This latest salvo is fired by author/professor Stanley Fish, a prominent religion-peddler of the pointy-headed, turtlenecked genus, who made his case in his blog at the New York Times. Fish was mostly riffing on a recent book written by the windily pompous University of Manchester professor Terry Eagleton, a pudgily superior type, physically resembling a giant…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

First Bacterial Genome Transplantation Changes One Species To Another: Researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) have announced the results of work on genome transplantation methods allowing them to transform one type of bacteria into another type dictated by the transplanted chromosome. The work, published online in the journal Science, by JCVI's Carole Lartigue, Ph.D. and colleagues, outlines the methods and techniques used to change one bacterial species, Mycoplasma capricolum into another, Mycoplasma mycoides Large Colony (LC), by replacing one organism's genome with the other…

Science Blogging Conference - who is coming? (Public Scientific Data)

There are 99 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already 85 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). Between now and the conference, I am highlighting some of the people who will be there, for you to meet in person if you register in time. Xan Gregg is local. He works for SAS (in the JMP division - a statistics software I have used a little bit back in the day) and he…

The Morning After

Times Square celebrates Barack Obama's presidential victory. Image: GrrlScientist, 4 November 2008 [larger view]. Well, it's nice to be noticed, and I was noticed today, by Seed Magazine (online). I know this doesn't sound like much since Seed should notice those who write for ScienceBlogs due to our close affiliation, but I am rarely noticed by anyone (including Seed) for any reason and worse, because my moods have been causing me tremendous anxiety and grief recently, I have felt absolutely invisible. Recently, my mood had deteriorated to the point where it was nearly impossible for…

Who Should You Vote For?

This online quiz might explain why I am not very excited about any of the candidates who are running for president this time around; Okay, I've never heard of Mike Gravel until this moment, have you? What were your results? Updated later: Okay, I am working on a beer at the moment and my results have changed -- I am becoming more aligned with the space alien guy, which leads me to ask, what did they put into my beer?? YIKES! Christopher Dodd 80% John Edwards 79% Hillary Clinton 79% Barack Obama 75% Joe Biden 74% Ron Paul 58% Rudy Guiliani 34% Fred Thompson 33% John McCain 30% Mike Huckabee…

Not an “accident”: Rick Simer, 64, suffers fatal work-related injury in Denver, CO

Rick Simer, 64 suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Tuesday, August 9 while working at KBP Coil Coaters. The Denver Post reports: "he was caught in an aluminum splitter machine." The company’s website says: “KBP Coil Coaters, Inc. is a leader in supplying pre-painted aluminum and steel coil, using state of the art coil coating equipment and methods. KBP rigorously tests and certifies every coil before it leaves our coil coating facility.” Using OSHA’s on-line database, I did not find a record of an OSHA inspections at the KBP Coil Coaters, at least dating back to 2006. The AFL-CIO’s 2016…

Not an “accident”: Henry William Gray, 56, suffers fatal work-related injury in Denver, IA

Henry William Gray, 56, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, May 2 while working at an excavation site in Denver, Iowa. The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reports: The incident occurred at about 11:30 am. "Crews were doing excavating work when a wall collapsed.” The location is a “historic two-story brick commercial building…which has been under renovation the past couple of years.” KWWL indicates: "Snelling Construction was excavating a long foundation wall.   ….A portion of the foundation wall tipped over…” Using OSHA’s on-line database, it does not appear that the Iowa State OSHA…

Fatal work injury that killed Alejandro Anguiana was preventable, OSHA cites Markman Peat

Alejandro Anguiana’s work-related death could have been prevented. That’s how I see the findings of Indiana OSHA in the agency’s citations against his employer, Markman Peat. The 41 year-old was working in March 2015 at the company’s operation in Kingsbury, IN. The initial press reports indicated that Anguiana was pulled into a piece of machinery when his sweatshirt got wrapped around the power takeoff shaft. I wrote about the incident shortly after it was reported by local press. Inspectors with Indiana OSHA conducted an inspection at the workplace following the fatal incident. The agency…

Neufeld on Slavery and the Bible

My old friend Henry Neufeld has written a response to all of our discussion of slavery and the Bible, as I actually hoped he would. Henry is a Hebrew scholar, a Christian and the director of the Pacesetter's Bible Institute in Florida. He was among the first people I encountered online about 13 or 14 years ago, in the Compuserve religion forum, and he was a big influence on my thinking about religion. Until I met him, I really thought that all Christians were fundamentalists as that was pretty much all I was raised around. Henry showed me that are other ways to look at things. On the subject…

The Aska Barrow Is A Huge Building Platform

It's been a busy couple of days with a lot of publicity. Monday morning a paper I've co-authored with my friend, geophysics specialist Andreas Viberg, was published in the on-line version of Archaeological Prospection. For reasons of scientific priority (which I myself like to establish by spilling everything I do onto the blog immediately) I've been sitting on this since April of 2013, so it feels real good to finally blog about it. Here's a brief summary. There's a huge weird barrow at Aska in Hagebyhöga near Vadstena in Östergötland. It's oval and flat instead of round and domed. My old…