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Awww, poor widdle Ken Ham's feewings are hurt

Ken Ham is distressed that he gets no respect. This triggers a little litany of self-defense. Guess what's missing from Sunday's Cincinnati Enquirer's (our main Cincinnati newspaper) long articles about local Christmas/holiday activities? This long piece-plus other Christmas-related articles--appeared in the paper yesterday (Sunday). No mention of the Creation Museum and its Bethlehem's Blessings Christmas programs--not even the free day on Thursday (the museum is open to the public for free for Christmas Eve), even though through our publicist, we sent two news releases to the paper about…

William F. Buckely was a racist

Many are quoting this from an editorial by William F. Buckley Jr.: "The central question that emerges...is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." --William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957 I do want to put on the record that he recanted: Buckley said he had a few regrets, most notably his magazine's opposition to civil…

A Handy Transformation for Microbiome Data

When worked on the human microbiome, I regularly confronted a problem with the data. Species frequencies are almost never normally distributed ('the bell curve'), and if you want to use standard statistical techniques the data should be normally distributed. The second problem is that the data often have a lot of zero values. That is, if I look a bunch of gut samples from people (actually the data--the samples are VERY STINKY!), in many samples, a bacterial species* will be quite frequent (2-20%), but in other samples, it will be very rare (0.01%) or completely absent (i.e., 0%). Often,…

Why No Nation Can Endure Half Fox News and Half Free: House GOP Believes Pell Grants Are Welfare

A vote to resolve the debt ceiling political crisis failed last night because House Republicans--who hold a majority in the House of Representatives--opposed the bill. Here's a major reason why--Pell Grants, which are federal scholarships for low- and lower-middle income students: House conservatives who have stalled legislation to raise the national debt limit are angry that it includes $17 billion in supplemental spending for Pell Grants, which some compare to welfare. Legislation crafted by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to raise the debt limit by $900 billion would directly…

From the IOKIYAR Files: GOP Debt Negotiator Rep. Eric Cantor Shorts the Republic

It's OK If You're a Republican, I suppose: Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, had between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury EFT. The fund aggressively "shorts" long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, meaning that it performs well when U.S. debt is undesirable. (A short is when the trader hopes to profit from the decline in the value of an asset.) According to his latest financial disclosure statement, which covers the year 2010 and has been publicly available since this spring, Cantor still has up to $15,…

Down syndrome and abortion rates

The 90% rate of abortion upon prenatal discovery that a fetus likely has Down Syndrome is being quoted a lot today. Is it true? Seems like it. Termination rates after prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, spina bifida, anencephaly, and Turner and Klinefelter syndromes: a systematic literature review: ...Termination rates varied across conditions. They were highest following a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome (92 per cent; CI: 91 per cent to 93 per cent) and lowest following diagnosis of Klinefelter syndrome (58 per cent; CI: 50 per cent to 66 per cent). Where comparisons could be made,…

Who you have sex with....

Genetic and Environmental Effects on Same-sex Sexual Behavior: A Population Study of Twins in Sweden: There is still uncertainty about the relative importance of genes and environments on human sexual orientation. One reason is that previous studies employed self-selected, opportunistic, or small population-based samples. We used data from a truly population-based 2005-2006 survey of all adult twins (20-47 years) in Sweden to conduct the largest twin study of same-sex sexual behavior attempted so far. We performed biometric modeling with data on any and total number of lifetime same-sex…

"Brain drain" follow up - put great minds to use!

Is it me, or did Janet explode by the old 300 world barrier? :) In any case, she brings up some good issues in her expansive post, and there is one thing I want to follow up in regards to the "brain drain." Who is it good for? Who is being drained? This is a definitely "US centric" question. As an American, and a mildly patriotic one (or, more properly, US-egoistic one) I do look at this question through the "but is it good for America?" lens. Some people might ask, "but is it good for the world?" (that is, brain drain to the United States). That depends, but in general, I think yes…

Atheist racialism

Ed Brayton says: To see an atheist taking a position that is usually held by those who claim to be Christian, typically southern nationalists, is quite disconcerting. This is interesting. Here is what some might not know about: the racialist far Right tends to be populated by many individuals who have left Christianity. A substantial subset of these are atheists. Here is a quote from American Renaissance, the most highbrow of racialist publications, in regards to their subscriber base: Two thirds of respondents believe in God, a figure lower than the national average of well over 90…

The persistence of morphs

Science Daily has a summary of new fly research in behavioral genetics which puts the spotlight on deep time evolutionary dynamics. Here's the important bit: The researchers found that when the fruit fly larvae were competing for food, those that did best had a version of the foraging gene that was rarest in a particular population. For example, rovers did better when there were lots of sitters, and sitters did better when there were more rovers. In short the researchers here are pointing to negative frequency dependent selection, where traits/alleles exhibit a fitness as an inverse…

Who's afraid of nuclear power?

Just listened to an interview on NPR with the author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. She mentions how she had a reflexive prejudice against nuclear energy and generally opposed its use because of her environmentalist impulses. That's not surprising of course, people are terrified of nuclear energy because of its associations. For me an easy way to dispel this sort of terror in most of my friends is simply to point out that the two nations with the highest per capita consumption of nuclear energy (by far) are France and Sweden (Finland is #3, though there is a…

Shifting the balance on dogs

The post below on the genetics (and relaxation of constraint) of dogs has given rise to many good comments. I want to highlight one: ...Yet most feral dog populations quickly revert to a medium-sized, short-coated, yellowish dog - the so-called "Pariah Dog" that's found in so many places around the world - why don't the feral populations look more like their wolf ancestors? There are many issues mooted below. But this comment is a good one. Why do dogs "revert" into pariah dogs instead of the Eurasian wolf? Remember what is happening here: being as "cute" as a poodle doesn't matter once…

Why math?

The Austrian Economists and Dani Rodrik have been talking about the use of mathematical formalism in their field. I think Rodrik gets it right: In other words, we use math not because we are smart, but because we are not smart enough. The low level of mathematics that I am familiar with, calculus, linear algebra, statistics and probability, is an aid to clear thinking, not an enabler of scientific obscurantism. Most people of some intelligence can understand the logic behind calculus and linear algebra, and one doesn't need to derive proofs from first principles to obtain greater insight…

Size matters, or it doesn't....

Over at my other blog I reaffirm Richard Dawkins' criticism of Freeman Dyson's off the cuff opinions about evolutionary genetics. Dyson is basically asserting that the rate of evolution is inversely proportional to the square root of population size. In short, small populations evolve fast in his mind because of stochastic fluctuations, clearly drift. I've posted a fair amount about stochastic dynamics...and it's complicated. Science is complicated. That's just life. Now, Dyson is pretty much wrong. But his intuition is conventional; I've met many people who believe that somehow…

Scientism, huh?

Update: Chris has a follow up post. Chris leaves nothing unsaid. A sample: In that talk Dawkins sounds, at times, like a 5-year old with the vocabulary and factual knowledge of a world-renowned scientist.... I find it hypocritcal and, as an atheist, more than a little embarrassing that these fundamentalist, Dawkinsian, scientistic, self-styled free thinking atheists, who know jack about the history of religion, or serious philosophy and theology, feel that they can criticize religious fundamentalists for saying things about science (in the evolution-creationism debate, for example) when…

Dominance & recessive, is it worthwhile?

This is a shout out to the biologists out there: do you think the concept of dominance and recessive is worthwhile? In other words, does it help in conceptualization more than it hurts? Clearly the idea of recessiveness of deleterious traits helps in comprehending why such alleles exist in the ambient genetic background of a population and can reemerge via inbreeding.1 On the other hand, my own experience is that if you try to move the conversation to additive polygenic traits, which I think are interesting and need to be understood to really "get" population genetics you have to keep…

The Death of Monetary Policy and the Need for Less Income Inequality

By lowering its benchmark interest rate virtually to zerohttp://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2008/12/median_wages.html, the Federal Reserve has eliminated monetary policy as a financial tool to aid the economy. Good riddance, because this was never a financial crisis. What led to the whole crisis was the stagnation of wages combined with rising income inequality: people who didn't have a lot of money were competing for housing in an overinflated market (government policies to effectively make loans cheaper didn't help either). Wage stagnation is also maintaining the crisis. Who will loan…

NIH Funding: So What Qualifies As "Piddly Ass Little Chunks of Change"?

Over at DrugMonkey, ScienceBlogling PhysioProf comments on the lower funding rates for R03 (Small Grants) and R21 (Exploratory/Developmental Research Grants) NIH grants: What the fuck is the deal with using the traditional study section peer review mechanism for piddly ass little chunks of change like R03s and R21s?? What a massive waste of reviewer and administrative time and effort to use study section panels to review these punky little turds. NIH program should make funding decisions on these things administratively using the same system as NSF uses for many of its grants. Two or three…

Sunday Sermon: Reporters Need to Side With the Truth

While discussing the difference between spin and lying, I noted how the mainstream media is unequipped to deal with flat out lies. Jamison Foser has a suggestion (boldface mine; italics original): When a candidate makes a false claim, reporters can respond one of three ways: * They can ignore it, on the basis that a false claim is unworthy of attention. * They can adopt the false claim as the basis of their report, as they did with this week's stories about whether or not Barack Obama had made a sexist comment about Sarah Palin. * They can produce a report centered on the fact that the…

Chris Bowers Writes What I've Been Thinking...

...about Obama. Bowers (italics mine): When John Kerry goes on a Sunday show and says that he's 'in awe' of John McCain's service, but feels free to undermine Wes Clark's, and the Obama campaign thinks of Kerry as their top surrogate, it's shameful. When John McCain's economic advisor calls America a nation of whiners, and we don't hear anything more about that in ads or anywhere else, it's shameful. When the Iraqi PM endorses Obama's call for withdrawal, and McCain still leads on the issue of Iraq by double-digits, it's shameful. We all know that winning this election is not enough. It's…

All of Governor Walker's Gall Is Divided Into Three Parts

Mike Konczal put together this nice graphic of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's roadmap to a batshitloonitarian paradise: Konczal notes: There's a three-prong approach in Governor Walker's plan that highlights a blueprint for conservative governorship after the 2010 election. The first is breaking public sector unions and public sector workers generally. The second is streamlining benefits away from legislative authority, especially for health care and in fighting the Health Care Reform Act. The third is the selling of public assets to private interests under firesale and crony capitalist…

Democracy Doesn't Happen One Day Every Two Years: Thoughts on Wisconsin

By now, you might have heard about how the Wisconsin Senate Democrats have fled the state in order to prevent a bill from passing, supported by Republican Governor Scott Walker, that would cripple public sector unions (if it's about redressing the budget, then why does the bill deal with union dues, which have nothing to do with the budget?). Before I address the title of the post, I want to comment on the Democratic tactics. Despite conservative/Republican bleating, including one commentor on this post, the Democrats have done nothing illegal. They are playing by the rules, just as…

Why Tenure Matters

While there is a strong economic argument for tenure in higher education, let's not forget that the ability to speak freely is vital: This attack on academic freedom -- an adjunct hired to teach a course was fired by Brooklyn College [part of the CUNY system] administration after a state assemblyman sent a letter arguing that the syllabus and instructor were too critical of Israel -- is depressing. First of all, there's assemblyman Hikind: Hikind, who said he earned his master's degree in political science from Brooklyn College, told Inside Higher Ed that he reached these conclusions after…

Education 'Reformist' Math and the Teacher Gap

Over at New Economic Perspectives, William Black makes a good observation about the basic arithmetic skills of the educational reformers--specifically Obama's claim that we will add 100,000 new teachers: Obama correctly identified a critical need and stated that we must make dramatic changes to meet the need. Are we acting to add 100,000 (net) new teachers in those fields? Obama emphasized in his address that we need to respect teachers. So let's ask the teachers what is happening. On May 27, 2010, the National Education Association warned. Without $23 billion from Congress to keep public…

VA Schools Board: Don't Know Much About History...

Having grown up (or at least physiologically developed) in Virginia, this story about the totally awesome and rigorous history textbooks used in what are the wealthier counties in the state is not at all surprising, though depressing (italics mine): In the version of history being taught in some Virginia classrooms, New Orleans began the 1800s as a bustling U.S. harbor (instead of as a Spanish colonial one). The Confederacy included 12 states (instead of 11). And the United States entered World War I in 1916 (instead of in 1917).... Historian Mary Miley Theobald, a former Virginia…

After 40 Years of Wandering Through a Racist Desert...

...maybe it's time for Martin Luther King's promised land. Maha explains what I mean: Much of white America was still simmering with resentment over court-ordered school desegregation. Also, Lyndon Johnson had initiated New Deal-style programs aimed primarily at relieving poverty among African Americans. Suddenly, whites who had had no problem with "entitlements" before - when benefits went mostly to whites -- discovered the virtues of "self-reliance." ...The Right-Wing Narrative says that Democrats lost power because George McGovern opposed the Vietnam War, and the Dem Party was overrun by…

Sunday Sermon: "We Are Either a Nation or We Are a Subsidiary"

Hunter has a succinct summary of the Romneycare the proposed healthcare legislation coming out of the more conservative committees (italics original): But a trade of mandated purchase of a for-profit, private product in exchange for a meager promise to not abuse customers is -- let's all say it together, for good measure -- goddamned asinine. The government of the United States should not have to bargain to get an abusive industry to be slightly less abusive. What a fucking insulting thought. Especially when (1) the industry in question has a historical pattern of rampant customer abuse, and…

Anti-Abortion Means Anti-Birth Control

Nobody could have predicted this (italics mine): As the White House readies its plan for finding "common ground" on reproductive health issues and reducing the need for abortion, a major debate has emerged over how to package the plan's two major components: preventing unwanted pregnancies and reducing the need for abortion. Many abortion rights advocates and some Democrats who want to dial down the culture wars want the White House to package the two parts of the plan together, as a single piece of legislation. The plan would seek to reduce unwanted pregnancies by funding comprehensive sex…

Words As Weapons: The Slacktivist Edition

I've posted many times about how the theopolitical right and movement conservatives use words as weapons. They are not supposed to be taken at face value, but rather are meant to manipulate others. A good, although old, example is "evolution is just a theory." Any professional creationist who says that knows this is false--in fact, he is probably so familiar with the rebuttal, he could repeat it for you. The Slacktivist, a former anti-abortion activist, notes the same phenomenon regarding the rhetoric surrounding abortion: If you're confronted with an evil equal in magnitude to that of…

Oil Regulation and Why Obama and Many Progressives Need to Appreciate the Value of Losing

President Obama has been arguing that if he had tried to regulate the oil industry before the BP disaster, it would have gone nowhere and Republicans would have pissed and moaned about oppressive regulations: In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: "I think it's fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is…

JAMA: Vaccinating Kids Protects Unvaccinated Adults

I've argued many times on this blog that an influenza vaccination policy, as opposed to the non-policy we currently have, would focus on vaccinating the people who are likely to spread the disease. Or as Yogi Berra might have put it, you can't get the flu from someone who doesn't have it. So who are these germ dispersal units? Children, which why I've remarked that grandparents are being killed by their grandchildren. Theoretical work has suggested that vaccinating 80% of children could massively reduce influenza in the rest of the population. We've also seen the effect of child…

Saturday Sermon: It's the Congress, Stupid

As I say often (probably far too often), ultimately policies have to help the majority of voters, and when they don't people stay home. Outsourced to Gin and Tacos (italics mine): It is plainly obvious that Democratic candidates can't expect success without the voters who showed up in 2008, and they're not going to show up unless they're highly motivated by distaste for the GOP (which they aren't at the moment, given the results from 2006-08) or enthusiasm for the Congressional agenda. What we're seeing is not a schizophrenic electorate giving the GOP eight years to screw things up and…

Review: "The Effects of Circumsion on the Penis Microbiome"

It turns your bacteria Jewish*. Seriously, the strong finding of this article was completely ignored. Anyway.... A recent paper describes the effect of circumsion on the bacteria that live on the penis. The authors swabbed uncircumsized and circumsized penises, and then PCR amplified the 16S rRNA gene which is found in all bacteria, and can be used as a 'barcode' to identify bacteria. This article has received a lot of attention because of this speculation in the discussion (italics mine): The observed decrease in anaerobic bacteria after circumcision may be related to the elimination of…

"Supply Side Lite" and the Psychology of the New Normal

Over at Underbelly, Buce, in commenting on Bruce Bartlett's new book, makes a point about what he calls "supply side lite" that I'm inclined to agree with: First, supply side lite. How much extra income will we garner if we tax all incomes over $200,000 at 100 percent? The answer is none: no one will work for nothing. Taxes are incentives, and incentives change behavior. As Bartlett correctly argues, this is really nothing new. Taxes on heroin, shotguns, human trafficking, are designed not for revenue: they are designed to discourage disfavored behavior. But the devil is in the details.…

On Stupak, Demobilization, and the Failure of Conciliation

(from here) Needless to say, I'm disgusted by the amendment introduced by Democratic Congressvermin Bart Stupak which would effectively make most abortions not covered by health insurance, even though many are now. Given the tremendous numbers of women who have had an abortion, it's not like he's going to put a dent in the 'problem'--women will still become pregnant, still want to become unpregnant, and still have abortions. It's just some will have to go into debt. So I suggest, if you can afford it, hopping on over to Planet Parenthood, and making a donation in honor of Bart Stupak (…

"The Dog Ate Your Mortgage"

That's a great phrase that the NY Times headlined Gretchen Morgensen's article about judges who are backing borrowers when the mortgage documentation is non-existent (and you heard it first from the Mad Biologist). I know I'm beating this to death (a bit, anyway), but the potential for billions, many billions of dollars of housing loans to disappear is gaining steam. Morgensen (italics mine): One surprising smackdown occurred on Oct. 9 in federal bankruptcy court in the Southern District of New York. Ruling that a lender, PHH Mortgage, hadn't proved its claim to a delinquent borrower's home…

Why Pessimism About Healthcare Regulatory Reform Is Warranted: MA's Cost Control Clusterfoulup

Matt Yglesias writes the following about strict regulation of private health insurers versus a public option (italics mine): Another thing is that I've been pondering this and I actually think it's wrong, on "a wonk level," to conceive of effective regulation of private insurance as a second-best alternative to passing a public option. Unless you're going to totally marginalize private insurance with a Canadian- or British-style system, the first-best alternative is to effectively regulate private insurance as they do in the Netherlands. Trying to introduce a public option is a second-best…

The 'Pro-Life' War on Judaism Continues

By way of Digby, we learn that the anti-abortion movement has decided on a new tactic--declaring that a fertilized egg is a person: It is one of the enduring questions of religion and science, and lately of American politics: When does a fertilized egg become a person? Abortion foes, tired of a profusion of laws that limit but do not abolish abortion, are trying to answer the question in a way that they hope could put an end to legalized abortion. Across the country, they have revived efforts to amend state constitutions to declare that personhood -- and all rights accorded human beings --…

TB Did Not Acquire Resistance from GMO Crops

Before I get to the substance of this post, let me state that I'm not a big fan of genetically modified food crops (GMO crops). And there are few bloggers who have spent more time blogging about antibiotic resistance (never mind spending part of his professional career addressing the problem). But this claim that GMOs have led to multi-drug resistant tuberculosis is absurd: Instead of blaming multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis on patients and their alleged non-adherence to the prescribed drug regime, it would be prudent to investigate and eradicate the underlying cause for multi-drug-…

Sunday Sermon: Ethical Versus Legal Behavior

One of the disturbing trends over the last decade, give or take, has been how ethical behavior has become synonymous with "a conviction overturned on appeal." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's ethical. With that, I give you Matthew Yglesias (boldface mine; italics original): They're not actually saying that what they did was right. Rather, they're saying that it was selfish but also legal. ...one is within one's rights, under certain circumstances, to insist on one's ability to inflict suffering on vast numbers of people in order to make more money for your rich self and…

Too Big to Fail Is Now Too Big to Manage?

It looks like nationalization of failing banks is off the table. What bothers me are two of the reasons given by Treasury Secretary Geithner. Reason #1: Explicit nationalization of financial companies has little support among key Obama officials, sources said. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers think governments make poor bank managers and cannot efficiently manage a vast number of institutions, according to some of their associates. Given that the goal is to wipe out the shareholders and sell off Big Shitpile for whatever you might…

Scientific Consensus Is a Process, Not a List of Names

One of the rhetorical strategies that has been employed against science deniers has been the claim that a 'broad scientific consensus exists' to support a certain position (e.g., global warming, evolution). A problem with this strategy is shown by the blog belonging to this commenter (I don't give links to wackaloons) which provides lists of scientists that don't think global warming is partly due to human influences. This misses the entire meaning of scientific consensus: it's a process, not a list of names. This is not how a scientific consensus is reached: "Dude, the earth is kinda hot…

NSF Funding to Be Doubled?

According to the text of HR1 (pdf), NSF will be getting an additional $2.5 billion as part of the 'stimulus'* package. From HR1 (pp. 54-55): For an additional amount for ''Research and Related Activities'', $2,500,000,000: Provided, That $300,000,000 shall be available solely for the Major Research Instrumentation program and $200,000,000 shall be for activities authorized by title II of Public Law 100-570 for academic research facilities modernization: Provided, That for peer-reviewed grants made under this heading, the time limitation provided in section 1103(b) of this Act shall be 120…

Thankfully, I'm Part of the Amateur Left

Apparently, the Obama Administration is very upset with the "professional left": "I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy." Actually, when it comes to the expansion of presidential power, Obama has been worse than Bush. After all, never claimed he had the right to assassinate U.S. citizens at will. Seriously, between that and Obama's muddling on gay rights, Obama is to constitutional scholar as Newt Gingrich is to historian (Or intellectual. Or decent human being). Moving on: The press secretary dismissed…

A Dead Salmon: Bestest Control Experiment EVAH!

When analyzing data, understanding the limitations of your data is critical. One of the things we need to understand is significance: how strong does an effect have to be to considered not a result of random chance. Typically, we assume that if an effect has a five percent or less probability of occurring due to random chance, then it is "significant." But significance becomes very problematic when making many simultaneous assessments. If we make one hundred assessments (e.g., comparisons) and not a single one is actually different (assume that the Omniscience of the Mad Biologist is…

Narrative Versus Analysis: The College Costs Edition

Last week, I discussed the butchering by Stanley Fish of an economic explanation for why college costs are high--and, as importantly, where all of that money goes. Robert Archibald and David Feldman offer a good response to their critics in The NY Times, but this is the key point (italics mine): We would like to thank Stanley Fish for allowing us to respond to reader comments regarding his column about our new book. Reading them felt like working through the worst set of course evaluations a professor ever received. The power of the dysfunction narrative was on full display in the…

Sequencing Technology Adoption and the Power of Informatic 'Lock In'

Gabe Rudy, blogging at our 2 snps, has a really good introduction to sequencing technology and its history. It's worth the read, but I don't entirely agree with the reason given for why ABI SOLiD lost out to Illumina: Coming to market at the same time, but seeming to have just missed the wave, was the Applied Biosystems (ABI) SOLiD system of parallel sequencing by stepwise ligation. Similar to the Solexa technology of creating extremely high throughput short reads cheaply, SOLiD has the added advantage of reading two bases at a time with a florescent label. Because a single base pair…

A Question for Bob Herbert: What Do You Mean "We" Kemosabe?

Bob Herbert echoes the frustration many have felt with Republican New Jersey governor Chris Christie's decision to scuttle the plan to build a much-needed tunnel connecting New Jersey to New York City: The United States is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It's losing its soul. It's speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough. The railroad tunnel was the kind of infrastructure project that used to get done in the United States almost as a matter of routine. It was a big and expensive project, but the payoff would have been…

Mystery Bird: Say's Phoebe, Sayornis saya

tags: Say's Phoebe, Sayornis saya, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz [Mystery bird] Say's Phoebe, Sayornis saya, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow] Image: Richard Ditch, 2006 [larger view]. Date Time Original: 2006:12:27 13:35:48 Exposure Time: 1/319 F-Number: 8.00 ISO: 200 Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification. Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes: What a sweet, gentle little bird, perched alertly on a sunflower: attitude and habitat tell us we're looking at one of the open-country…

Birdbooker Report 99

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books "How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird literature." --Edgar Kincaid The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…