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Unnecessary Bioterrorism Hysteria

A recent post about the looming specter of bioterrorism by William Lind due to 'biohacking' seems overblown to me. But before I get Lind, what I find particularly disturbing about hyping a non-existent bioterror threat is that it makes combating infectious disease--the stuff that kills millions worldwide--much harder due to unnecessary regulations and restrictions. Onto Lind: For years, I have warned in these columns and elsewhere that the future weapon of mass destruction we should most fear is not a nuke. Rather, it is a genetically engineered plague, a plague no one has ever seen before…

Dave Munger Gives the Inside Scoop on ResearchBlogging

As everybody's talking about, the snazzy new version of ResearchBlogging.org launched on Tuesday. Powered by Seed Media Group Technology, ResearchBlogging now has a host of new features, including multi-language capability, subject-specific RSS feeds, and profiles of registered users. ResearchBlogging was the brain child of Dave Munger, a writer, a science educator, and half of the genius behind our most popular psychology blog, Cognitive Daily. (That's Dave at right, hiking in Pasayten Wilderness in Washington State, the largest wilderness area in the lower 48 states.) We sat down with…

W. P. Scott Chair in E-Librarianship at York University

Here's an amazing and fairly unique opportunity for a research-minded librarian who wants to significantly advance her or his research program. The appointment is for up to three years and the starting date is somewhat flexible. Here's the terms of reference for the position: Each appointment to the Chair will be a limited term appointment for up to three years. A committee will be established to undertake a search for the Chair. The selection will be based on the quality of the proposed research program along with evidence for the successful completion of the research proposal. The…

Nanotubes: The Next Asbestos?

The story of asbestos in this country ought to serve as a cautionary tale: A seemingly miraculous fiber was widely introduced into common consumer products; only after it was already in millions of homes did the general public realize that it causes a particularly terrible form of cancer. Now, treating victims and cleaning up contaminated communities is costing billions of dollars, while thousands of people endure the toll of a debilitating and deadly disease. Nanotechnology is another innovation that promises to bring consumer products to a whole new level â and, once again, it looks like…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Virtual Smart Home Controlled By Your Thoughts: Light switches, TV remote controls and even house keys could become a thing of the past thanks to brain-computer interface (BCI) technology being developed in Europe that lets users perform everyday tasks with thoughts alone. Spectacular Deep-water Coral Province Discovered Off Ireland's West Coast: NUI Galway researchers, during a recent deep-water expedition, have confirmed the existence of a major new coral reef province on the southern end of the Porcupine Bank off the west coast of Ireland. The province covers an area of some 200 sq. km and…

Marriage, adultery, and the law

[MAJeff here. I'll remember this one of these times.] Apparently, John Edwards had an affair. I've been out of the news loop and haven't been following it other than what I see in a few blog comment sections. I'm honestly not all that interested in the sex lives of the powerful; I'm more interested in the social reaction. So, I'm going to talk about a few things that I've seen, and tie those into issues of marriage and sex regulation by the state. One thing I've heard is, "at least he didn't break the law." Well, depending upon where his trysts took place, Edwards may have broken the law.…

KITP: making planets stick

Exoplanets Rising continues theoretical rumination, as we contemplate formation, migration, water delivery and evolution Johansen and Lissauer on oligarchic models before lunch. Then Mayer on collapse of Too Big Too Fail blobs before Chambers and Raymond return to rocks bashing into each other. Finish with Mardling looking at the subtleties of tidal evolution. Ok, Showman and Dobbs-Dixon did the whole giant circulation thing early this morning, but I wasn't here for that. It is all online if you like that sort of thing. Good review by Anders on dust bunnies and the irritation dust causes.…

September Pieces Of My Mind #1

Google Play Music's randomiser has recently served me up with two songs about extremely talkative girlfriends. In the Spongetones' "My Girl Maryanne" the singer finds the woman's chattiness adorable. In Gap Dream's "Immediate Life Sentence" he finds it annoying and concludes the song "I don't need to get laid that bad, I'll just stay home and get high". The crappy one of Sweden's two big pop-sci monthlies has been using freebie trinkets in its marketing for at least 30 years now. They sent me the alarm clock I used in high school. Now they're trying to entice me to subscribe with a little…

Exit Pachi, pursued by no-one

We interrupt your regular diet of Willie Soon for a brief break (the S+B controversy, 2003 is seeing active work). IPCC agrees on Acting Chair after R.K. Pachauri steps down said the IPCC press on the 25th. That PR is not merely coy but completely silent as to the reasons why he stepped down; coy but uninformative is the letter he sent to Bankymoon on the 24th which shyly refers to "the current circumstances" without specifying them, and announces that he has "taken the decision to step down", which is what you say when you're forced to resign but don't have the courage to say "resign" (note…

The Problem of (Quantum) Moderation: On Many Worlds

I've written before about the problem of having in-between views on controversial subjects in blogdom. This is something that also comes up in Jessica's excellent entry on online culture, and has been scientifically demonstrated in political contexts. I'm somewhat bemused, then, to see the same thing happen in a physics context. A while back, I got an email asking about quantum foundations that read in part: I'm very keen to understand why you and Andrew Thomas reject [the Many-Worlds Interpretation of QM]. I'd be very happy if you'd take a few minutes to try to describe why you think MWI is…

Science Is Not Irreducibly Complex

The poor coverage of science in the media is an evergreen topic in blogdom, to the point where I've mostly stopped clicking on links to those sorts of pieces. This ScienceProgress post about newsroom culture bugged me, though, and it took me a while to figure out the problem. The author worked as a reporter in North Carolina over the summer, covering science topics, and writes about his dissatisfaction with the journalistic template: I had one editor who required that I give him my story pitches using six words or fewer. But the message wasn't even simply to shorten; it was to make it punchy…

ScienceOnline2010 - Saturday Night Banquet at the Radisson

Note: If you've read all of this at the conference website and just want to pay, CLICK HERE. For those of you attending ScienceOnline2010, I'm the one tending to the Saturday night banquet at the headquarters hotel, The Radisson at Research Triangle Park. The banquet will be held following the Saturday 16 January sessions beginning at 7 pm. The dinner was a great success last year with about 135 of the registrants attending and was a great way to unwind and continue some of the discussions we began. This year, the supper will be followed by the Ignite session. For those who don't know,…

A Brief History of Light

So what exactly is light, anyway? It's a tough question. Isaac Newton thought it was composed of streams of microscopic particles he called corpuscles. Really it wasn't a bad idea. Light rays travel in straight lines just like fast moving projectiles, light bounces off objects in a manner not entirely unlike a ricocheting bullet, and if you try hard enough you can even explain refraction in terms of particles being slowed in matter online the lines of a ball bearing sinking in molasses. But it's pretty hard for the particle view to explain diffraction and interference, which are both very…

Why Perfect Pitch isn't always perfect

There are lots of people who, with training, can identify musical notes when they know the starting point -- when they hear a song starting with "C," they can name the rest of the notes in the song. But much rarer is the ability to identify musical notes without any context. This is what people are talking about when they talk about "perfect pitch" or "absolute pitch." Let's do a quick test to get a rough sense of how many CogDaily readers have absolute pitch. Listen to this note: Now, what note is it? Obviously these results won't be perfect, but they should give us a general idea. I'll…

A simple toy, and what it says about how we learn to mentally rotate objects

One of Jimmy's favorite toys as a toddler was a simple little bucket of blocks. There were three shapes: a rectangular prism, a triangular prism, and a cylinder. The bucket's lid had three holes: a square, a triangle, and a circle (The picture at right was the only one I could find online -- this sort of toy has gotten much fancier in recent years). For an adult, it's a simple matter to properly sort the shapes by placing them into the corresponding holes, but for a toddler, it's a real challenge. It took months before Jim was able to put any of the blocks through the holes, despite…

Science Scout badge tally.

You may recall a couple years ago when the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique started issuing badges. Now, the Science Scouts have a spiffy new webpage and many new badges ... and there are rumors (or should I say rumours) that actual, physical badges, suited for stitching onto sashes or lab coats, will be available. So it seems like a good time to review the badges I have earned thus far as a Science Scout. The "talking science" badge: I don't need to explain this one, right? Even before I had a blog about matters scientific, I talked science. At…

Could Kos be more of an idiot? No.

The answer is no, given his position on the Kathy Sierra case and the death threats she received and the online savaging to which she was subjected. Kos attacks calls for a bloggers' code of conduct. This is actually the one point where I tend agree with him. It wouldn't help the situation and would be a muzzle on free speech, although I can understand why Sierra might have called for such a code. Unfortunately, it would not have stopped what happened to Sierra. If Kos had stopped there, I might actually have found myself in the uncomfortable position of actually agreeing with him on…

Lott claims NAS panels are biased

I've been reading Lott's new book, The Bias against Guns. Chapter 3 is entitled "How the Government Works against Gun Ownership". The heart of the chapter is on pages 53--55, where he argues that the National Academy of Sciences stacks its panels against guns. His first example is their panel on firearms research. He argues that the panel was set up "to examine only the negative side of guns". Lott writes: Rather than comparing how firearms facilitate both harm and self-defense, the panel was only asked to examine "firearm violence" or how "…

Obesity inversely correlated with European ancestry among African Americans

It is well known that different ethnic groups vary when it comes to diseases such as Type II Diabetes. Or, more specifically they vary in terms of risk, all things equal (if you use an online Type II Diabetes calculator you'll see immediately as they sometimes have a parameter for ethnicity). American blacks for example are heavier than American whites. This seems to be true even when you control for socioeconomic status (though as Oprah once said, "You don't need to do a 'study' to figure that out"). There has been research on genetic loci correlating to obesity in European populations…

Open Lab, Closed. Now the work begins...

And it is over! The submission deadline has just passed. No more submissions will be accepted for the 2010 edition of the Open Laboratory. I have lined up an impressive list of reviewers who will immediately start receiving their first judging lists and the complex process of winnowing down almost 900 entries into the final 50 essays/stories, one poem, one piece of art (for the cover) and one cartoon/comic strip. As usual, the book will be published with lulu.com and we'll try to have the book ready roughly in time for ScienceOnline2011 (we always say that, I know, but this time we'll really…

Reconsidering Climate Change Literacy & Communication

Last week I participated in a two-day workshop at NSF on climate change education. The meeting brought together researchers in science education, communication, and informal learning; representatives from government agencies such as NOAA, the EPA, and NASA; and organizations such as the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. The presentations and discussions focused not only on school-based settings but also on public engagement campaigns, the news media, and the role of science centers and museums. Among several participants, there was an emphasis on three…

Yet another misleading alt-med cancer testimonial

They call them Necromancers. Necromancers have an uncanny ability to resurrect an old thread by commenting on it months, even years, after the last comment. Unfortunately, as hard as it is to believe, the version of Movable Type used by Seed to power our blogs does not have a preference panel that allows us to turn off our comments on posts after a set amount of time, for instance three months. Consequently, every so often I"m plagued with Necromancers bringing long deceased comment threads back from the dead to the annoyance of all. Of course, the most annoying Necromancers are the one who…

Birds in the News 109

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Winter in NYC means the return of migratory White-throated Sparrows, Zonotrichia albicollis (this bird is in its first winter plumage). There are thousands of these birds in Central Park and in the other parks here, subsisting on grass seeds along with crumbs and other foods that people give them. Image: Kevin T. Karlson [larger view]. Birds in Science Divers exploring a water-filled sinkhole in the Bahama Islands recently recovered one of the world's largest and most pristinely preserved collections of animal and…

A Primate is Born

   Our newborn takes after his father.The following is something of an impromptu experiment in live birth twittering. It started out simply as a means to update friends and family, but as events transpired we received some unexpected international attention. The entire labor lasted 47 hours, involved three different locations and two surgeries. This after we had carefully planned for a natural birth with no interventions. Thank you to the hundreds of people in at least eight countries who followed our story and sent messages of support. Special thanks to Henry Gee, Senior Editor of…

It's that time again: "Broken" peer review

Having spent the last couple of days dealing with pure woo, such as germ theory denialism and naturopathic quackery, I think now's as good a time as any to move on to a more serious topic. One of the most important aspects of science is the publication of scientific results in peer-reviewed journals. This publication serves several purposes, the most important of which is to communicated experimental results to other scientists, allowing other scientists to replicate, build on, and in many cases find errors in the results. In the ideal situation, this communication results in the steady…

Deepak Chopra tries his hand at a clinical trial. Woo ensues.

Of all the quacks and cranks and purveyors of woo whom I’ve encountered over the years, Deepak Chopra is, without a doubt, one of the most arrogantly obstinate, if not the most arrogantly obstinate. Sure, a quack like Mike Adams wins on sheer obnoxiousness and for the sheer breadth of crankery to which he ascribes, which includes everything from quackery, to New World Order conspiracy theories, to Scientology-like anti-psychiatry rants, to survivalist and gun nut tendencies, but he's so obviously unhinged, as well as intermittently entertaining, that he doesn't quite get under the skin the…

The No-Waste Food Preservation Plan

40% of all food produced worldwide, and nearly half of all food produced in the US goes to waste.  When you break down the realities of food waste, you see that in the developing world, much of the waste is due to lack of ability to preserve food - no refrigeration means that sheep you slaughtered is waste if all of it isn't eaten or dried or otherwise preserved immediately.  Lack of energy to run grain dryers means that rain at the wrong time results in moldy grain, etc... In the Global North, however, the vast majority of food is wasted not in the field, but in the process of getting to our…

Aging in men: An evolutionary perspective

Many years ago, Mel Konner, Marjorie shostak, and Boyd Eaton wrote "The Paleolithic Prescription: A program of diet and exercise and a design for living." (It is hard to find these days. To find it and related titles on Amazon, look for this book first, and track the PP down via the author name Konner.) (Added: You can probably get the The Paleolithic Prescription here.) Richard G. Bribiescas is professor of anthropology and ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, where he also serves as deputy provost for faculty development and diversity. He is the author of Men:…

Keeping The Carbon In The Ground Elsewhere: Developing Nations

John Abraham has an interesting post up at the guardian called "Global warming action: good or bad for the poor?" It is a response to a post by a group of guys who tend to write annoying stuff about climate change (you can go to John's post for that information). Here, I want to make a brief comment related to John's excellent post. The crux of John Abraham's post is this, in two parts: 1) Some have argued that mitigation against climate change is bad for "the poor" (read: people in developing countries) because they have a right to go through the same phases of technological and social…

Trained Judgment and the Scientific Audience

Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion I wrote earlier (here, to be precise) that there are numerous ways a picture can manipulate its viewers, but most break down into two: a modification of an image after it's taken or staging an image before it's taken. The first way a picture can manipulate its viewers--modifying an image after it's taken--is mostly seen as downright deception and corruption. Someone takes a picture of Fabio and Photoshops George Bush's head on it. It is easy to dismiss and…

Mike Adams turns his mad science skillz to analyzing a flu vaccine. Hilarity ensues.

It's always jarring when I go to a scientific meeting, in this case the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting, imbibe the latest clinical science on cancer, and then check back to see what the quacks are doing. On the other hand, there was a session at this year's ASCO on "integrative oncology" (stay tuned for an...Insolent...discussion of it sometime in the next few days after I get a chance to watch the videos again and look up the papers cited in support of woo), so maybe it isn't as jarring as it once was to come back into the real world. Thus I saw in my Google Alerts…

The real way to prevent cancer

Long, long ago, seemingly in a galaxy far, far away, I first encountered quackery on the Internet. Because I am a cancer surgeon, naturally I gravitated towards cancer quackery at first. Believe it or not, it was quite some time after that before I started to take an interest in what has become a major focus of this blog, the antivaccine movement and the misinformation it spreads. Both are equally damaging in their own way. True, these were back in the deep, dark days when I used to cruise various Usenet newsgroups, ranging from alt.revisionism (Holocaust denial), sci.skeptic (of course!),…

Tales From the Front Lines in The Animal Research War

The Animal Research War by P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker Palgrave Macmillan: 2008, 224 pages. Buy now! (Amazon) In a dark room, buried in a nondescript building somewhere in London, an orderly array of new trainees sits silently, listening intently as a senior police official delivers a security briefing. Clicking through slide after slide of photos of activists, extremists, and terrorists, the official carefully explains who each person is, what organization(s) he or she is associated with, and what level of threat that person poses. All of this would probably look like business as…

The Power of Coal Is as Evident as Ever in Jeff Goodell's Big Coal

Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future by Jeff Goodell Houghton Mifflin: 2006. 352 pages. Buy now! (Amazon) Coal tends to inspire a few common images in our collective minds. Grizzled and hardened miners, working in deep, dark underground tunnels, piece by piece haul out the black feed needed to power the oversized, dirty, rumbling machines spewing out their noxious waste through tall smokestacks. In the process, these beasts power the rise of the world's up and coming superpower, the US. Dirty. Dangerous. Imprecise. Big.... Old school. In the Twenty-First Century…

The 1970s Ice Age Myth and Time Magazine Covers - by David Kirtley

This is a guest post by David Kirtley. David originally posted this as a Google Doc, and I'm reproducing his work here with his permission. Just the other day I was speaking to a climate change skeptic who made mention of an old Time or Newsweek (he was not sure) article that talked about fears of a coming ice age. There were in fact a number of articles back in the 1970s that discussed the whole Ice Age problem, and I'm not sure what my friend was referring to. But here, David Kirtley places a recent meme that seems to be an attempt to diffuse concern about global warming because we…

Perspectives on Biofuels

A friend and colleague of mine drives around in a cute little VW bug powered by biodiesel.  There's a peace sign on the front of it, which helps it get better mileage.  But peace sign or not, there has been an ongoing controversy about whether biofuels are worth anything. In this post, I provide a little amateur analysis of the whole topic of biofuels, and comment on the most recent study of the potential benefits. The controversy stems from the fact that it takes a lot of energy to plant, transport, harvest, and process the crops needed to produce biofuels.  Some analyses indicated that…

Cat-Blogging from Deep Time

As the proud owner of a fine cat, Tino, I'm happy to join the ritual of cat-blogging. I was inspired after reading a new study that sorts out Tino's kinship with other cats. Now I know that a cheetah is more closely related to Tino than it is to a leopard (right and left, respectively). The evolution of cats has been a tough nut to crack. While it's no great mental feat to tell the difference between Tino and a tiger, it's not so easy to figure out exactly which species are most closely related to domesticated cats and which are more distant relatives. The oldest cat-like fossils date…

The Evolution of the Modern Climate: New Evidence from Plant Remains

Things are just not like what they used to be. You know this. You know that the Age of Dinosaurs, for instance, was full of dinosaurs and stuff, and before transitional fossil forms crawled out of the sea to colonize the land, all animals were aquatic, etc. But did you know that from a purely modern perspective, the Miocene was the most important geological period? First, lets get one thing straight. We are not in the so-called "Holocene." The so-called "Holocene" is a totally bogus geological period. Saying "Hey, we're in the Holocene, not the Pleistocene ... the Pleistocene is over…

The grandmothers effect, paternal or maternal matters (?)

I've discussed menopause as an adaptation and the grandmother effect before. I was also pleased to see the responses of Larry Moran's readers when he presented his standard anti-adaptationist line of argument. I don't want to retread familiar ground here, I'm not sure if menopause is an adaptation, but let's assume so for the purposes of reviewing a new paper which has come out and offers a slight but fascinating twist on the grandmother hypothesis. Grandma plays favourites: X-chromosome relatedness and sex-specific childhood mortality: Biologists use genetic relatedness between family…

Electroacupuncture: The bait and switch of alternative medicine

At the risk of repeating myself (but, then, since when did such concerns ever stop me before?), I'll just start out by mentioning that, of all the non-herbal "alternative" medicine remedies out there, I used to give a bit of a pass to acupuncture. No, I never did buy any of that nonsense about how sticking thin needles into the skin at points along various "meridians" somehow "redirects the flow of qi," that mystical life force upon which so much woo, particularly woo based on Eastern mysticism and traditional Chinese medicine depends. However, because acupuncture involves an actual physical…

Hallo Auch aus Frankfurt am Main

A morning view of downtown Frankfurt am Main from the window of the building where I live in Frankfurt. You can also see a large passenger plane flying over the city. It is likely following the same flight path that my plane was on when I arrived on 20 November 2009. Image: GrrlScientist, 25 November 2009. This morning, I snapped the above image of downtown Frankfurt from the top floor window of the building where I live, whilst waiting for the elevator. Our flat does not have wireless yet, and likely won't have it until sometime around the 2nd of December. Of course, this has inspired…

The Nature paper on the 1918 virus and immune reaction

We've now had a chance to take a look at a new paper in Nature (advance online publication 27 September 2006 | doi:10.1038/nature05181) on increased host immune and cell death responses in mice infected with the reconstructed 1918 virus compared to other viruses with only some of the 1918 gene segments. It is a very interesting paper. The authors (Kash et al.) infected mice intranasally (through the nose) with four viruses, one a currently circulating human H1N1 virus, A/Texas/36/91, dubbed Tx91 for short, and three others, two produced by replacing first two of the eight gene segments of…

Young Innovators Appointed to Serve on Festival's Youth Advisory Board!

You could call them child or teen prodigies – wunderkinds, who at remarkable young ages have already begun making their mark upon science and technology as innovators and visionaries. The USA Science & Engineering Festival not only applauds such young achievers, but is recruiting some of the best of them to serve on its new Youth Advisory Board. The achievements of these recently-appointed board members will not only help us further excite, inspire and reach out to more students during Festival 2014, but will also call attention to the impressive cadre of young talent that is on the…

Say 'Hi' if you see him running - Interview with Dave Munger

Dave Munger is part of the numerous North Carolinian contingent here at Scienceblogs.com. He writes the Cognitive Daily blog and runs the ResearchBlogging.org blog aggregator. At the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago, Dave led a session on Building interactivity into your blog. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job? Hi, I'm Dave Munger. My background is in writing, editing, and publishing. I've written several textbooks, most notably, Researching…

How to Read Scientific Papers Without Reading Every Word

Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke's How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading assignments for the information that's really important. I've mentioned this before, but I don't think I've done a science version. I've been doing more reading of journal articles lately than I have in a while, though, and it occurs to me that similar…

Reed Elsevier caught copying my content without my permission.

Update: 13 Aug. I've added a new post that I think provides a clearer explanation for the reason that this sort of behavior is such an irritant when it comes from a company like Elsevier. Like most bloggers, I have an ego. I'm not mentioning that by way of apology, but as an explanation for why I was browsing through my sitemeter statistics last Friday. Every now and then, I head over to sitemeter, call up the view that lets me see what websites referred people to my page. If I see a link that's coming from a source I don't recognize, I browse over and look to see what people are saying…

South African Unions Prevent the Delivery of Arms to Unstable Zimbabwe

Now that the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang--which was delivering arms from China to Zimbabwe--has been turned away for good, there are two significant aspects of this story upon which we should reflect. The first is that the true heroes of this tale are the unionized dockworkers, who catalyzed this turn of events by their initial refusal to unload the cargo. The second is that there are deep political ties between Zimbabwe and China, which make this picture much less black and white than it would appear to be on the surface. It was reported on April 16 that a Chinese ship slated to dock in…

Bad news continues to accumulate for "pH Miracle Living" quack Robert O. Young

Last night was one of those nights where, for whatever reason, I ran out of steam. Whether it was residual effects from the change to daylight savings time this weekend or just a day in the operating room, I don't know, but I crashed on the couch hard, at least until lighting and thunder from the storms rolling through between 2 and 3 AM woke me up for a little while. Fortunately, I do have a little tidbit to post, a very good one as well. Remember, the "pH Miracle Living" quack, Robert O. Young? He claims to be a naturopath, but even that claim, like pretty much everything he claims, seems…

Video Analysis Tutorial and a cat

Cats can be entertaining - especially when they are someone else's cat and that someone made a video. Really, this post is about analyzing video with Logger Pro (in a tutorial type fashion). I just happens that I chose this cat video to analyze. Here is the video: I am going to look at the part where the cat gets on the fan. I will try to step through the analysis so you can do your own. Get the video Actually, the first step is to find a video. YouTube has tons of stuff. Also, you could make your own video with a camera. A couple of things to make your life easier: A non-zoom video…

A tragic afternoon in Tucson

President Josiah Bartlet: The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They're our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we're reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars. Today, Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head while meeting constituents…