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A movie review.

So I saw EXPELLED this weekend. My review is two words: Thats it? Thats it? Thats what caused a humagiganitisoid blagosphere hubub? OMG it was so boring! I got bored 15 minutes in, started cleaning the apartment while watching. Made it to 45 minutes in before just paused it and watched a documentary on Animal Planet 'Growing up Walrus' (really good, btw). Forced myself to watch another 30 minutes of EXPELLED, left to go see a documentary about Mardi Gras with some friends 'The Order of Myths' (really good, btw). Finally watched the rest of EXPELLED. EXPELLED was boring. I understand now…

AAAS Establishes Early Career Award in Public Engagement

The announcement of this award is an important step towards greater recognition of the need for public engagement on the part of scientists and their institutions. AAAS should be commended for their commitment to leadership in this area. Details below and here. It will be interesting to see the criteria by which nominations are judged. As I noted last month, how public engagement is ultimately defined, its goals and outcomes, remains an open question. (See also this comment.) There is more major news on this front coming in August including the launch of a new blog, and a special issue…

Gene Silencing Makes Female Mice Less Horny

RNAi, or RNA interference, is a rapidly developing and powerful tool to achieve gene silencing (turning a gene "off"). Gene silencing shows what happened in a system or organism when that gene is no longer functional. In a recent study, described in a story in Technology Review, female mice lose all interest in sex when a specific gene in the brain is silenced. (More, including a video of the un-horny mice, below the fold!) The mating behavior of female mice is heavily influenced by the hormone estrogen--up-regulation of estrogen provokes "lordosis," where the females arch their spines in…

SciComm Innovations at the Chemical Heritage Foundation

As I have traveled across the country over the past year giving talks on new directions in science communication, one of my recommendations to science institutions and organizations has been to launch blogs and podcasts as important strategic communication tools for engaging with audiences and stakeholders. There are a number of challenges a science organization faces when launching a blog. The first is staff time. In order to do a blog properly, you need to have a skilled staff person dedicated to the site at least half time, preferably full time. Moreover, to do a blog well, this staff…

43,000 Scientists: Bush Puts Schoolchildren At Risk

The American Geophysical Union just issued a press release in response to Bush's comments about intelligent design. It's not online at their web site yet, so I've posted it here. (Update: It's on line now.) This is not the first time that the 43,000 members of the AGU have spoken out against creationism. They protested the sale of a creationist account of the Grand Canyon in National Park Service stores, and condemned the airing of a creationist movie about cosmology at the Smithsonian Institution. But this is the first time they've taken on the President. American Geophysical Union 2 August…

Review of George Lakoff's "Whose Freedom?"

Over at The Quarterly Conversation, I've written a review of George Lakoff's book Whose Freedom? In case my personal politics haven't come through in my CogDaily posts (and I do make an effort to assume a neutral perspective here), you'll get a good sense of my views in this review, where I point out that though Lakoff's invocation of cognitive science in support of his claims is problematic, Steven Pinker, Lakoff's most vocal critic, is guilty of similar overgeneralizations: If Lakoff's cog sci-based explanation of how the Republicans spun their way into power is this unconvincing, then one…

Never underestimate your students

As I've mentioned, I have my upper division classes write openly on the web about the subject of the course. It's good practice for being comfortable with discussing the world of ideas outside this little sheltered realm of academia, but I've always had one reservation: the internet is a cruel place, and I feel a bit protective of my students, so I send them off with lots of warnings and reassurances that I will defend their open expression of ideas and they don't have to worry about differences of opinion affecting their grades. I've had students with whom I greatly disagree get online and…

Differences in brain activity of conservatives & liberals

Research suggests that liberals and conservatives have different personality traits and "cognitive styles": while liberals are more intellectually curious and tolerant of ambiguity, conservatives have a greater desire to reach decisions quickly and are more consistent in the way they make those decisions. A new study, published online today in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that there may be a neural basis for these differences in cognitive style. The study provides evidence that there are differences in the way the brains of liberals and conservatives respond to situations involving…

A new Cretaceous plesiosaur, Nichollsia borealis

The skull of Nichollsia borealis. Update: As Nick has aptly pointed out, this plesiosaur is going to need a new name. The genus name Nichollsia is occupied by an isopod, arthopods once again trumping prehistoric creatures. I wonder how many times this has happened; I'm sure an interesting review paper could be written if all the changes could be tracked down. According to a press release issued by the University of Calgary (and adapted for ScienceDaily and redOrbit, with another summary at Palaeoblog), Patrick Druckenmiller and Anthony Russell have just released a paper describing a…

Think Japanese March 18 æ¥è®ç³»è«¸å®æ´¾

Source. In a matter of hours, it will be exactly one week since the devastating earthquake struck Japan (Friday, March 11, 2011 at 12:46:23 AM (EST)). In honor of the victims and their families, let's think Japanese and offer whatever we can to help them through this tragedy so that they can emerge strong and resilient. Each of us has our own way to extend our thoughts to those in need. I have included below a number of ways, including the chant of Nichiren Buddhism (in the spirit of "think Japanese") that has touched my life, as well as a number of practical ways to give. æ¥è®ç³»è«¸å®æ´¾…

Stealthy librarian stories

My Stealth Librarianship Manifesto post from last month continues to gather comments and page views, albeit at a slower rate than before. Of course, that's very gratifiying to see. If you haven't checked in on the post in a while, there are probably a couple of new comments with librarians' stories that you might want to check out. To keep the idea going, I've decided to have occasional posts highlighting "stealthy librarian" posts and articles I see around the web. These are posts that highlight facutly/librarian collaboration in teaching or research, librarians integrated with business…

What Is Lab Lit?

From January 30, 2006, a look at the "new" genre and the hype around it... Lab Lit is all the buzz these days. Nature magazine had a recent article on it. Blogosphere is abuzz - see Hedwig's take on it. SEED magazine has a contest. This is what they are looking for - it explains what they think Lab Lit is: We are not looking for traditional Sci-Fi--we are looking for fiction that reflects the significant role science plays in our culture; fiction that uncovers the rich narratives in science; and fiction wherein scientists are fallible and human. We are looking for Science-In-Fiction,…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Today in Mother Jones, reporter Stephanie Mencimer writes a great piece previewing an upcoming Supreme Court case that could transform how pregnant women are treated in the workplace. In fact, the case has attracted the attention and support of some very strange bedfellows. Mencimer writes: It's a rare day when pro-choice activists, anti-abortion diehards, and evangelical Christians all file briefs on the same side of a Supreme Court case. But that's what happened recently when the National Association of Evangelicals, Americans United for Life, Democrats for Life of America, and the National…

Guest Blogger: Charles Darwin

In honor of the old man's 200th, Myrmecos Blog is proud to feature Charles Darwin writing prophetically about the problems posed by social insects for his theory of natural selection.   The passage below is from the first edition of On the Origin of Species, and in it Darwin anticipates the same answers- kin and group selection- that later generations of biologists converged on to solve the riddle. Not bad for a barnacle taxonomist... No doubt many instincts of very difficult explanation could be opposed to the theory of natural selection,âcases, in which we cannot see how an instinct could…

Autism Update

title="Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences">PNAS has an open-access article describing the current state of knowledge of the genetics of rel="tag">autism.  The authors looked at information from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange and two other databases; one from the University of Michigan, the other from the href="http://www.iancommunity.org/">Interactive Autism Network (IAN) Research Database.  Their findings indicated that most cases of autism can be explained by one of two mechanisms.  The concluded that most cases arise from spontaneous mutations, with a…

Inescapable trade-offs?

Because the three-dimensional world has had me in a headlock (and a heat-wave), I'm tardy in passing on the news that ScienceBlogs is hosting a new blog, Next Generation Energy, that is slated to run from July 9 to October 9. On this blog, Seed editors, ScienceBlogs bloggers, and outside experts will be discussing future energy policy and alternative energy solutions. Among other things, the folks at Next Generation Energy will have a weekly question they'll try to answer from their various perspectives. This week's question asks for predictions about the viable non-oil (and non-corn-…

Star Trek Space Jump

While I am still fresh on the Space Jump topic, let me take it to the extreme. Star Trek extreme. SPOILER ALERT But really, is this a spoiler alert if it is from the trailer of a movie that has been out forever? Of course, I talking about the latest Star Trek movie where three guys jump out of a shuttle and into the atmosphere. So, in light of the Red Bull Stratos jump, how would this jump compare? First, my assumptions: This Star Trek jump is on the planet Vulcan. I am going to assume this is just like Earth in terms of gravity and density of air. The jumpers in Star Trek have on stuff…

Suicide bombing is not about religion, it's about foreign occupation

The opening of Sam Harris's End of Faith, like several essays he wrote at HuffPo, focus on suicide bombing. He argues that suicide bombing is absurd, and only exists because of religion. A footnote to EoF acknowledges that suicide bombing was first deployed on a large scale by the Tamil Tigers, who were not fighting a religious war, but rather were part of an ethnic and nationalistic conflict. He waves this objection away at HuffPo by writing: "it is misleading to describe the Tamil Tigers as 'secular' ⦠While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who…

Brazil, the case of triracial white people

One of the problems with human genetics where it resembles economics are the ethical issues involved in experimentation. Luckily for science, but unluckily for individuals, medicine offers many "natural experiments." But in the area of population genetics and history analyses of pedigrees or family based studies centered around particular traits and genes have limitations of scale. Luckily for science again, and unluckily for millions of Amerindians and black Africans, Latin America offers a cornucopia of possibilities when it comes to exploring the outcomes ensuing from admixture between…

What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'?

If a publisher offered me a contract to write a book under a title that would be something like "Unscientific America", how would I go about it? I would definitely be SUCH a scientist! But, being such a scientist does not mean indulging in Sesquipedalian Obscurantism. Being such a scientist means being dilligent, thorough and systematic in one's reasearch. And then being excited about presenting the findings, while being honest about the degree of confidence one can have in each piece of information. I was not offered a book contract, and I do not have the resources and nine or twelve months…

No, COVID-19 Vaccines Do Not Cause Infertility - Not Getting It Might

Despite claims of anti-vaccine activists no different than groups that used to claim vaccines cause autism, COVID-19 vaccines do not impact fecundability—the probability of conception per menstrual cycle—in female or male partners who received the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, or Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The prospective study instead indicates that COVID-19 infection among males may temporarily reduce fertility— an outcome that could be avoidable through vaccination. Lead author Dr. Amelia Wesselink, epidemiologist at  Boston University School of Public Health, and colleagues analyzed…

How We Learn What Matters

When Aaron Newton and I conceived _A Nation of Farmers_ we began each chapter with a framing image from World War political posters about food, energy and gardening. We wanted to bring home the point I make in writing in _Depletion and Abundance_ - that at critical moments in our history, including times of war or great economic strain - ordinary daily acts are transferred from the private sphere into the public one. That is, the act of eating, or buying clothing, or travelling from one place to another becomes not a "personal choice" but part of one's basic participation in civil society…

The “Terrible Texts” of the Bible

Here's your quiz for the day. Who wrote this? There is no theistic God who exists to take care of you or me. There is no God who stands ready to set aside the laws by which this universe operates to come to our aid in time of need. There are no everlasting arms underneath us to catch us when we fall. Or this? When people question this theistic God in the light of the constant pain and trauma found in the normal course of human life, the pious rhetoric of theism's defenders becomes almost incoherent. One hears hysterical talk about free will, about how God allows us to bring pain upon…

"Clinical research" on dichloroacetate by TheDCASite.com: A travesty of science

I hadn't planned on revisiting this topic again quite so soon, but sometimes a piece of information comes up that's so disturbing that I can't ignore it and can't justify delaying blogging about it by very long. So it is yet again with the strange and disturbing saga of dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecular chemotherapeutic drug with a novel and scientifically interesting mechanism of action that could lead to a whole new class of chemotherapeutic agents and that has shown considerable promise in rat tumor models but has not yet been tested in humans. Not to belabor the story, which has…

Swine flu: how not to report a fatal outcome

I hate to take off on the press. I do it every once in a while, but not often. The slow and agonizing demise of the main stream press has major consequences for keeping the public informed about issues both big and small. It's also a personal tragedy for many dedicated professional journalists. Still, while newspapers-as-we-knew-them aren't dead yet, they are at least moribund, and like the famous definition of a statesman as a successful politician who is dead, there is more than a bit of a tendency to endow the working press with some virtues it doesn't have now and in general never did.…

The Fetish in relation to Skepticism

I was just glancing through the blog of Katheryn Schulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, a book about people who were wrong about stuff, often big stuff (for example, she talks about individuals who spent decades in jail owing to false convictions). Meantime, I'm working on posts related to the falsehoods and "Everything you know is wrong" series. And, as I do this, I'm thinking about a way in which people get things wrong that is often overlooked or, perhaps, not recognized as a specific category of irrational thinking. This has to do with the idea of a fetish.…

Bloggers Bioblitzing Across the Sphere

From Ontario to Greece to Panama, what are participating bloggers finding out in the field? This thread will be constantly updated throughout the week, blog carnival style, compiling all of the bioblitzes that are being conducted. Please contact me if you have something up; I'll make sure I add it to the list. Don't forget to check out all of the participant's photos at the Flickr group (over 300 photos now). For info about the Blogger Bioblitz, follow the links: Read more about the blitz Visit the forum See submission guidelines Join the Flickr group Find a field guide online Download a…

A quick history of tree-climbing dinosaurs

The idea that non-avian dinosaurs might have been able to climb trees is (I assume) not all that familiar to people outside the field of dinosaur research, but within the field of dinosaur research it has become an increasingly familiar idea within recent decades. Thanks to the discovery of such theropods as Microraptor and Epidendrosaurus, we do now have small forms exhibiting some features suggestive of a tree-climbing (or scansorial) way of life. Perhaps surprisingly however, the idea that dinosaurs might have climbed trees goes back a long way, and well pre-dates the dinosaur renaissance…

Join Us in a National Grassroots Movement to Enhance Science Education Through Outreach Satellite Networks

As a founder and organizer of the upcoming inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival, I'm in frequent contact with a wide range of teachers, students, innovators, community leaders, entrepreneurs and decision makers in science and technology across the country. One thing that I continue to learn from these experiences: There is a growing need out there, even a grassroots desire, among average Americans to understand and connect in meaningful ways with the vast array of science and technology impacting their lives today -- provided that this information is presented to them through…

Power outage

I'm sitting here in the dark and freezing. No, not really. It's not dark yet and it's hot and humid. But I have no power, except what's left in this laptop. Can't connect to the net because I use wifi at home and the router is electrical (if I get really desperate I'll crawl up to the study and huddle in back of my desk and connect with ethernet but I don't think even I am that much of a slave to being online. Actually I am, but I'm too tired). So what happened? Mrs. R. and I are sitting here together, each of us reading, on a very warm, sort of sunny Sunday afternoon and we hear a tremendous…

West Nile Virus in your kidneys? Really?

Long time readers may have noticed that the subject of West Nile Virus (WNV) pops up periodically here (and here, here, here, here, here). It's more than a passing fancy. I was professionally involved in public health measures around West Nile after its introduction to the US in 1999 and have maintained an interest, even though flu occupies much (too much) of my time. WNV is a mosquito-borne flavivirus of birds that occasionally infects humans (in this sense it is like bird flu, although only in this sense; bird flu is not passed from birds to humans via mosquitoes). The resulting infection…

Where is science blogging going? I don't know.

Blake Stacey, who is a good guy to have by your side in a firefight, has a wonderfully complicated post on this thing called science blogging. He's mostly stating the obvious: it's anarchic, it's very hard to pull out, say, introductory material on a specific topic in science, there are problems of accountability, we don't produce anything as coherently useful as a basic textbook, etc. Well, yeah. This is a general problem with solutions that bubble up from the ground rather than being defined from above — they do something very, very well, but it usually isn't the something that a planner…

The Island Project

As I promised the other day, I went to Carrboro Century Center this afternoon (right after meeting with Anton around the corner) to see the Island Projects designed by the Chapel Hill High School students of Rob Greenberg. I did not see all of them - they were doing this in "shifts" throughout the afternoon and I could only stay for an hour - but I saw several of the projects and talked to a number of students (and to Rob himself). I have to say I was really, truly impressed with their work, as well as with their enthusiasm as they explained the details of their projects to me and other…

Open Lab 2007 - the winning entries for you to see!

Well, The Day has arrived! After reading all of the 486 entries at least once (and many 2-3 times) and after calculating all of the judges' ratings of all the posts, Reed Cartwright and I are happy to announce which blog posts will be published in the second science blogging anthology, the "Open Laboratory 2007". First, I want to thank the judges (at least those who do not wish to remain anonymous - let me know if I missed one of you) for spending their holiday break reading, commenting on and grading all the submitted posts and making our job that much easier. Those are: Anna Kushnir,…

Science Blogging News

Several items showed up recently that may be of interest to science bloggers, their readers, and related science communicators of various stripes.... A) Today, Eureka, the science section of London Times, published a list of Top 30 Science Blogs. Every list that has me in it is a good list ;-) They say "Zivkovic, who studies circadian rhythms, is an often-provocative evangelist for new media who has probably done more than anyone else to inspire scientists to blog. He is also a must-follow on Twitter, where he posts as @boraz" They could have had a more diverse group (in sense of gender,…

the partitioning of my brain

1 47 48 22 1 58 3 0 842 I have remembered these numbers for 35 years. They are phone numbers. Those I would need to call if I needed my family to get me, or if I was in trouble. (Yeah, Iceland is small, and five digits were enough back then - I didn't list the other numbers that are still good... with the extra digits that when the number space was expanded a few years ago). In the last ten years, I have had occasion to memorize precisely three phone numbers - not, I think, because my brain is ossified, but because I don't need to memorize phone numbers. My phone remembers them. So does my…

The Birds of Chernobyl: Better Off Drab and Lazy

tags: researchblogging.org, birds, ornithology, evolution, radiation, Chernobyl Normal Barn Swallow (a), while the other pictures show signs of albinism (white feathers; b & c), unusually colored feathers (d), deformed beaks (e & f), deformed air sacs (g), and bent tail feathers (h & i). Images: Tim Mousseau. Twenty years after the Chernobyl reactor disaster, which released clouds of radioactive particles in April 1986, the uninhabited forests within the 19 mile (30 kilometer) "exclusion zone" around the disaster site are lush and teeming with wildlife, giving the appearance…

Good Government Programs: Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Units

Given how many complaints we've been hearing lately about wasteful government spending, I thought this might be a good time to highlight some lesser-known, worthwhile government-funded programs that promote public health. (Core agency functions, like EPA's Clean Air Act enforcement, are also crucial for public health, but I trust this audience is already fairly familiar with them.) One example - which comes immediately to mind because we have one affiliated with our department here at the George Washington University School of Public Health & Health Services - is pediatric environmental…

Responses to My Chocolate Archaeology Piece

My debate piece in Antiquity has proved popular (many people have asked me to send it over, and now I've received the journal's permission to place the paper on-line for free in PDF format) and controversial (several have offered criticism in comments here). Mainly replies seem inspired by the two paragraphs I quoted from the article in my blog entry. Both deal with my opinion that archaeology needs to be fun and popular, because boring archaeology that interests few people is effectively worthless. In the following I will reply to the most interesting comments. To see if I've sneakily…

There are two Sochis

The Winter Olympics are just around the corner. They will be held in "Sochi," Russia. But as is the case with so many things in life, it is not that simple. When we refer to the venue, we tend to mention Sochi in part because some of the events will be held there and in part because it is on most maps. But the Olympics will be held at more than one location, as is often the case. The 2014 Winter Olympics, aka the XXII Olympic Winter Games will occur from the 7th to the 23rd of February in Sochi proper, on the Black Sea, and inland at Krasnaya Polyana. Sochi is a resort city on the Black…

My Beloved Brontosaurus by Brian Switek

Back in January, thinking about science topics to add to the book-in-progress, it occurred to me that I would really be letting down SteelyKid (and pre-schoolers everywhere) if I didn't take the opportunity to include something about dinosaurs. The problem with that, of course, is that I know next to nothing about dinosaurs, especially discoveries made since, say, 1981 or so. I remembered, however, that blogger extraordinaire Brian Switek had written a book about the latest on dinosaurs, My Beloved Brontosaurus. Sadly, a quick trip to Amazon revealed that it wasn't out yet, and in fact won't…

The evolution of the past tense - how verbs change over time

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material. For decades, scientists have realised that languages evolve in strikingly similar ways to genes and living things. Their words and grammars change and mutate over time, and new versions slowly rise to dominance while other face extinction. In this evolutionary analogy, old texts like the Canterbury Tales are the English language's version of the fossil record. They preserve the existence of words that used to…

On Seeing Further

"All things move and nothing remains still" -- Heraclitus The history of astronomy can be read as a story of better and better vision. Over the centuries, we have supplemented our vision with technology that allows us to see further and more clearly; while Ancient astronomers, who relied only on their naked eyes to perceive the universe, managed to make star catalogues and predict comets, Galileo, pressing his to a telescope, saw all the way to the moons of Jupiter. Optical telescopes and the human eye are fundamentally limited; early astronomers were forced to gaze into telescopes for…

Study shows grad students want more balanced careers

A friend of mine posted this article to his Facebook page, and I thought it well worth pointing your attention to it. Researchers at University of California, Berkley surveyed over 8,000 doctoral students from the UC System about their career, family and life plans. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they found that "major research universities may be losing some of the most talented tenure-track academics before they even arrive. In the eyes of many doctoral students, the academic fast track has a bad reputation--one of unrelenting work hours that allow little or no room for a satisfying family life…

The Wit and Wisdom of Michael Fumento

Mike Hudson gets a whole column out of an exchange with Fumento: I decided to e-mail Fumento and gloat about his descent into ignominy. I told him that, given his positions on Love Canal and Gulf War Syndrome, it wasn't surprising to hear that he was bought and paid for by a chemical company. What sweet irony. "Time wounds all heels," I reminded him at the end of the brief message. Imagine my surprise when, nine minutes later, Fumento replied. He bragged about having "exposed" Hanchette for "lying about a perfectly safe place called Love Canal." The humorless quality of his post was…

Routine whole-genome sequencing of babies by 2019?

I'm slowly catching up on genomics news from the last week - this story in particular has been getting a lot of press. The executive summary: Jay Flatley, CEO of genomic technology manufacturer Illumina, predicts that whole-genome sequencing of newborns will become routine within a decade. Flatley has an obvious financial interest in this prediction coming true, since Illumina provides the most commercially successful next-generation sequencing platform currently on the market, the Genome Analyzer, and has recently invested heavily in emerging "third-generation" sequencing technologies (by…

Energy in an exploding water heater

The more I think about the last MythBusters' exploding water heater, the more cool things I see. How about I look at the energy of the explosion. There are three things I can look at: How much energy went into the water heater from the electric source? How much kinetic energy did the water heater have right after the explosion? How much thermal energy did the water and water heater have? How much gravitational potential energy did the heater have at it's highest point? Hopefully, I can show that the energy in from the electric source is greater or equal to kinetic plus thermal. Also, the…

Earthquake anniversary musings on what science doesn't give us.

One hundred years ago today, 18 April 1906, a major earthquake (estimated to be 7.9 on the richter scale) nearly destroyed the city of San Francisco and did some serious damage to other communities in the area. Here in the Bay Area, there are various commemorations of the event taking place, and the local papers have all hit the vaults to dig up accounts of the quake, and of the fires that followed. (See, for example, the Chronicle's "Great Quake" page. Of course, the U.S. Geological Survey has a page with great quake links, too.) So in a very obvious way, you could say there's lots of…

Pre-emptive strike at the "where are the women?" question

Regular blog readers are familiar with the rule of thumb that every three months or so there will be another outbreak of blog posts wondering where all the women are. Clancy at Culture Cat provides and extensive list of links to discussions of this question up to March 2005; I'm not sure this data supports the hypothesis of a three month period for the cycle, but then again, Clancy acknowledges that the list is not complete. The point is, the issue seems to come up a lot. There have been numerous hypotheses floated to explain the apparent absence of women bloggers (in terms of "visibility"…

Some Seriously Good Sh- er... Manure

Note: This is a repeat from ye olde blogge, brought about by the barn cleaning we're engaged in. From December to March or the beginning of April, we simply don't clean out the barn. This sounds as if it might be gross, but it really isn't - we keep layering on bedding, and sufficient carbon keeps it from smelling bad - earthy and barnish, sure, but not particularly icky. We don't just do this because we're lazy - this is good husbandry for our climate. The barn has cement floors, left over from its days as a garage, and those cement floors get cold in the winter. A very thick layer of…