Search Content

Displaying results 9951 - 10000 of 87947

Jubilee!

Brian Davey of FEASTA argues that we could do debt cancellation ethically, while leaving the larger financial system intact, and that OccupyEverything should focus its message on the idea of Jubilee. Instead we need a scheme with a pattern of rewards and incentives that is more appropriate to the times that we live in. This could be achieved by giving people the wherewithall to reduce their debts if they have debts, but also giving the same amount to people who have no debts, or have low debts, which they could use too - not on a consumption binge, but on green investment to bring down our…

Getting Your Family On Board With Food Storage

I imagine after the last few weeks, the idea of storing food isn't seeming quite so crazy to a lot of folks in the country, but still, I hear all the time "I want to start building up a reserve but my husband/sister/mother in law thinks this is nuts." So I thought I would repost this piece, on how to get your family on board (and what not to say). Ok, I've convinced you - you need a reserve of food, you want to learn to can and dehydrate, you want to start eating more local foods. But you haven't done anything yet, because, well, the rest of your household isn't on board. Before you go…

You Will Never Die

If I ever decided to abandon any pretense of integrity or credibility, and just shoot for making a bazillion dollars peddling quantum hokum, the particular brand of quantum philosophy I would peddle has already been laid out, in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity. In the story, the narrator is given a copy of a "crank book" by Carl G. Soziere, titled You will Never Die, which makes an argument that is essentially a variant of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics: And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the…

Links for 2010-08-05

Judge Walker's decision to overturn Prop 8 is factual, well-reasoned, and powerful. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine "It's hard to read Judge Walker's opinion without sensing that what really won out today was science, methodology, and hard work. Had the proponents of Prop 8 made even a minimal effort to put on a case, to track down real experts, to do more than try to assert their way to legal victory, this would have been a closer case. But faced with one team that mounted a serious effort and another team that did little more than fire up their big, gay boogeyman screensaver for two…

Movies

Time for lighter fare. There are some really good movies out there... Warning: A few minor spoilers ahead. First up, of course, is The Dark Knight. Superhero movies just keep getting better and better, but this one is going to be hard to top. It's two and a half hours long, but I wanted to go on for another two and a half. Heath Ledger is surely going to get a posthumous Oscar for this. If you've ever wondered what it means to commit to a part, this is it. But even more than his performance, the writing for the character was really first-rate. There are so many scenes that do a really…

Dawkins: Need I say more?

Why is it that one of the top critics of religion should be a biologist? Could it be that a deep understanding of biological evolution through natural selection really does lead one inexorably to atheism? If so, creationists might actually have reason to fear the inclusion of evolution in school curricula. Better not let them read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion then, because that's one of the core messages of the book. Which is funny, because Dawkins writes that he very much would like to reach those raised in a religious environment, but are a little unsure about the whole thing. "If you…

People who think they are more restrained are more likely to succumb to temptation

Will you have that extra chocolate bar when you're worried about your weight? Will you spend that extra hour on the internet when you have other things to do? Will you have that extra drink with an attractive colleague when your partner is waiting at home? Our lives are full of temptations and some of us are better at resisting them than others. But unexpectedly, the very people who think they are most restrained are also most likely to be impulsive. Their inflated belief in their own self-control leads them to overexpose themselves to temptation. In a series of four experiments, Loran…

Marjorie Grene, In Memoriam: The Passing of an Intellectual Giant

This post was written by guest contributor Jody Roberts. Follow this link for his most recent contribution to The World's Fair. The philosopher Marjorie Grene passed away on Monday, 16 March, at the age of 98. Grene's life is difficult to sum up in a few words, and I don't want to do that anyhow, since plenty of others have and surely will in much better fashion than I can muster. But since I imagine most will be unfamiliar with her work, I quote here from a letter composed by Richard Burian, a dear friend and colleague: Marjorie Grene passed away March 16 at age 98 after a brief illness…

One culture, two culture, three culture, four

The recent upswell in two-culture talk around Scienceblogs is driving me nuts (here's a good jumping in point -- oh wait, this one's better). One might question the so very many unquestioned assumptions in the current conversation about "what is science" and "what are the humanities" and "what does it mean to *know* science" and "what does it mean to *know* a poem," but instead I'll repost below something I contributed to The Education of Oronte Churm earlier this year. Call it the problem of the 13 culture divide. _________________________________________________________________ I've never…

Impediments to dialogue about animal research (part 1).

In a post last month about an animal rights group targeting a researcher's car with an incendiary device, I closed by expressing my profound pessimism at the prospects of having a serious dialogue about animal rights: As a philosophical position, the case for animal rights is not completely empty or indefensible. However, as it's being propagated "in the wild", as it were, the case for animal rights is being made with lies and intimidation. Among rational people, this is a bad way to make a case for your position. Thus, it seems to me, people arguing in good faith for the animal rights…

Arthur Allen on conflicts of interest in the mercury militia movement

Those arguing the "conventional" view that sound science and epidemiological studies have failed to find a link between vaccines and autism are often tarred with the "pharma shill" brush. Meanwhile, researchers who have ever taken drug company money (particularly if it's from a drug company that makes vaccines) are castigated for having a serious conflict of interest, even to the point where conflicts of interest are invented or exaggerated beyond any reasonable recognition to tar the investigator with the dreaded "pharma shill" label. Don't get me wrong. Possible conflicts of interest should…

Intellectual curiosity at its finest

Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 15, 2005. Enjoy! One of the criticisms of "intelligent design" (ID) creationism is that it doesn't really offer any new theory or even hypothesis to replace the theory of evolution, which it seeks to supplant (at least in the public schools). It merely exaggerates perceived weaknesses in evolutionary theory and misrepresents…

Today's Guest Blogger Reviews: The Lucifer Effect

This week I think we could all use a brief reprieve from me and my opinions, so I'm running a review of Phillip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect, written by the wickedly smart (and just plain wicked) writer Carey Bertolet. Bio Kid-friendly version: Carey Bertolet is an avid reader because she enjoys challenging concepts and sitting on her caboose. When not at work, Carey is the host of her own imaginary cooking show as well as the co-producer of "the Boo Radley Show," her miniature pinscher's imaginary late night talk show. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband who is recapturing his…

The anti-vaccine movement strikes back against Trine Tsouderos and The Chicago Tribune

One week ago, The Chicago Tribune added yet another excellent addition to its recent series of articles exposing the dark underbelly of the anti-vaccine movement and, more importantly, the quackery that permeates the "autism biomedical" movement promoted by anti-vaccine groups such as Age of Autism. The first installment in the series, written by Tribune reporters Trine Tsouderos and Pat Callahan, examined Mark and David Geier's Lupron protocol for autism (which I had written about three years ago under the title Why not just castrate them?), and the second shone a light under the rock…

Publisher hits new low: Suing librarian for criticizing their books

So here's the rather strange story. Way back in 2010, librarian Dale Askey, then of Kansas State University, wrote a blog post critical of the humanities monograph publisher Edwin Mellen. Basically, he stated that the publishers' low quality did not justify their high prices. No big deal, really, librarians have lots of opinions about publishers and share them all the time around the water cooler, at conferences and online. But perhaps foreshadowing what was coming, Askey remarked in his post: "Given how closely Mellen guards its reputation against all critics, perhaps I should just put on my…

Woo: The future of American medicine?

If you're a physician, there comes a certain point in your career when you start caring a lot more than you did about the next generations of physicians in the training pipeline. While you're in the middle of training, you are the next generation; besides, you're too worried about just getting through medical school, residency, and Board certification to be all that concerned about those behind you in the pipeline, anyway. Then, when you're early faculty, you're concerned about establishing yourself, getting your career on track, and, if you're in academics, getting promoted. True, physicians…

Clocks in Bacteria V: How about E.coli?

Fifth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria, covering more politics than biology (from May 17, 2006): In the previous posts in this series, I covered the circadian clocks in Synechococcus, potential circadian clocks in a couple of other bacteria, and the presence of clock genes (thus potentially clocks) in a number of other bacteria. But what happened to the microbiological workhorse, the Escherichia coli? Does it have a clock? Hasn't anyone checked? Believe it or not, this question is colored by politics. But I have to give you a little background first. Latter half of the 19th…

Here come the ticks: is global warming leading to an increase in Lyme disease?

This is the last of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Jessica Waters.  Climatologists have been warning us about the ongoing and impending consequences of global warming for years. But the results of climate change affect more than just polar bears and penguins  - if you live anywhere in the northeastern, north-central or west coast states of the U.S.., you could be at a greater risk for contracting Lyme Disease. Lyme disease is an infection of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium that is spread through black legged ticks (otherwise known as deer ticks) who feed on the white footed mouse…

A Chrome-Plated Controversy

By David Michaels According to a report in the Wall Street Journal published last December (by Peter Waldman, 12/23/05), product defense experts at ChemRisk pulled off a particularly audacious scam on behalf of Pacific Gas and Electric, the California utility that was being sued for contaminating drinking water with hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen. ChemRiskâs scientists went to China to obtain the raw data of a 1987 study that had implicated chromium-polluted water in high cancer rates, paying the lead author $2,000, re-analyzing his data, changing the results to exonerate chromium and…

Matamata: turtle-y awesome to the extreme

Over the weekend my family and I visited Amazon World Zoo Park on the Isle of Wight. I saw tons of new stuff and had a great time, but what might have been my favourite creature is one that would have been all but ignored by the vast majority of visitors. I'm talking about the Matamata Chelus fimbriatus*, a bizarre South American river turtle that is as amazing in biology and behaviour as it is in appearance. Amazon World had two of them... * The name is sometimes written (incorrectly) as Chelus fimbriata. Matamatas are freakishly weird: they've even been referred to as "one of the…

Clocks in Bacteria V: How about E.coli?

Fifth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria, covering more politics than biology (from May 17, 2006): In the previous posts in this series, I covered the circadian clocks in Synechococcus, potential circadian clocks in a couple of other bacteria, and the presence of clock genes (thus potentially clocks) in a number of other bacteria. But what happened to the microbiological workhorse, the Escherichia coli? Does it have a clock? Hasn't anyone checked? Believe it or not, this question is colored by politics. But I have to give you a little background first. Latter half of the 19th…

So this is what a witchunt looks like…as a target

It actually feels kind of good, considering that my job is secure, and that these critics are looking increasingly rabidly insane. I just sit back and watch their hysteria grow. Case in point: Rod Dreher, who seems to be crawling the walls and screaming right now. In his 'review' of the desecration issue, nowhere does he mention the cause: the violent over-reaction of Catholics to a student in Florida walking away from Mass with a communion wafer, and the subsequent uproar calling for expulsion and punishment from Bill Donohue. His parting shot to believers: "Nothing must be held sacred." He…

Father's Day Repast Repost

(From five years ago!) There is a restaurant called Pelagos.  The name means "from the sea," in Greek.  It is underground, but has a patio open to the sky.  A staircase leads from the sidewalk to the subterranean patio.  The is a metal fence along the sidewalk.  On the patio, there are tables with umbrellas.  Large windows provide a view of the patio, from inside the restaurant.  Looking out, a person might be fascinated by the geometrical shapes formed by the window frames, the the tables, the steps, and the fence; that person might also be happy to glimpse a bit of sky. Except now it…

Bioethics of--and in--the Brain

When George Bush quietly dismissed two members of his Council on Bioethics on the last Friday in February, he probably assumed the news would get buried under the weekends distractions. But ten days later, its still hotsee, for example, two articles in Slate, and an editorial in the Washington Post, as well as Chris Mooney's ongoing coverage at his blog. Bush failed to appreciate just how obvious the politics were behind the move. The two dismissed members (bioethicist William May and biochemist Elizabeth Blackburn) have been critical of the Administration. Their replacements (two political…

The Problems with One Laptop Per Child

They are cultural, philosophical, and political. Not even John Lennon can overcome the flaws, given their deep cultural basis. Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, introduced the idea for the $100 laptop in 2005. The laptop would be geared towards children in "developing nations." Its intent was to help education in those countries. The project's goal, to be specific, is "To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves." The technical accomplishments of the laptop project were swift--low power…

Text Versus Subtext

(Warning: this post contains some journalistic/blogging inside-baseball material.) Back in the dark ages (otherwise known as the 1990s), writing about science felt a bit like putting messages in a bottle. I'd write an article, a few weeks or months later it would appear in a magazine, and a few weeks or months later I might get a response from a reader. In some cases, an expert might point out an error I made. In other cases, she or he might explain the real story which I had missed. The delay could make for some disconcerting experiences. The first time I met the late Stephen Jay Gould, to…

Friday Bookshelf: Women in Science: Meeting Career Challenges

I'm going to cheat a little on this week's Friday Bookshelf. Women in Science: Meeting Career Challenges is a book I have reviewed in the past for NWSA Journal (vol. 12, no. 3, 2000). So I'm going to quote my own review. My review was originally combined with a review of a film about women scientists called Asking Different Questions: Women and Science. To understand the end of this review, you need to know something from that film. One of the scientists, Ursula Franklin, offers a metaphor of women as earthworms working to prepare the soil for a better way of doing science. She says…

#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on "Talking Trash: Online Outreach from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch".

Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.) Among other things, this panel took up the article panelist Lindsey Hoshaw wrote about the garbage patch for the New York Times and some of the reaction to it (including from panelist Miriam Goldstein). Lindsey's article was interesting because of the process. To get a spot on the ship going out to the North Pacific gyre, where the garbage patch is, she had to come up with funding. (We learned during the session that ship time on some of…

PBS' March of Progress

A female Lowland Gorilla at the Bronx Zoo in a familiar pose. The other day I hyped the NOVA special "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial," a documentary that I have been looking forward to for quite some time. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I visited the official website for the program to find that old "icons" die hard, the infamous "March of Progress" still firmly established in popular treatments of evolution. It's strange how we pay lip service to great popular books about evolution yet often forget the lessons between the pages. Such is the case with Stephen Jay Gould's…

The wind giveth a little and taketh away a lot

I ride my bike and mostly the wind makes me unhappy. On a very few days the wind is with me on the way to work and then changes so that it is with me again. But most days the wind is fairly constant. So, if the wind is constant then shouldn't everything even out? (Even Stephen). Assumptions: Let me start with the assumption that I (a mere mortal) can output at a constant power (but not 57,000 Watts like some people). I will also assume an air resistance force that is proportional to the square of the relative air speed. Here is a diagram. A couple of quick things to point out. First,…

Not Exactly Rocket Science Review of 2008

Phew. Another year almost over and it's been a really good one. This time last year, I was still blogging at Wordpress, and it was only in late February that I beamed aboard the mighty ScienceBlog mothership. It's been a great experience and all in all, I've managed to rack up about 190 posts on new research (excluding reposts and random stuff), over 1,500 comments and over 400,000 page views in a year. Elsewhere, I published a book based on this blog, I wrote about 2% of another book called "Defining Moments in Science", and I wrote three features and several news pieces for New Scientist.…

Blue Dog Dems, Healthcare, Viral Marketing, and Quantifying the Unquantifiable

One problem with the Blue Dog Democrats is that they're corrupt, venial, and cowardly. Sadly, there's not much to be done about that. Another problem, and usually much less noticed, is that many of them are dumber than a fucking sack of hammers, with a good dash of ignorance to boot. Certainly, they have never heard of viral marketing. More about that in a bit. When thinking about reelection, most Blue Dogs still seem to be focused on traditional fundraising, although a couple probably realize that they could get some money through the intertubes. Let's not be naive about the role of…

How to Destroy a Bank

By way of Yves Smith, we come across Eddie Braverman's (a blogging pseudonym) advice on how to take out a major bank (Warning: the link is to an article in Playboy (really); half-naked women in the sidebar are probably not work safe): Step one: Give the plan a recognizable name. Like many ex-commodities brokers, Eddie appreciates action. A few months after he published his plan, he told me about it from the security of a Parisian café: "You could call it Tank-a-Bank or Flashrun or Bankbusters. Give it a name that tells people they're signing up for direct action, with one bank chosen to…

From the Archives: Here comes everybody by Clay Shirky

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, is from May 28, 2008. I have also read Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and mostly like it quite a lot. A review is still brewing for that one and I…

New study finds link between mass job losses and teen suicide behaviors

Previous research has documented a link between downturns in the economy and suicide among adults. But how do those downturns ripple throughout families and communities, and in particular, how do massive job losses affect the mental health of teens? A new study has found that, sadly, many teens are not immune to the stress of a struggling economy. Published online last week in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers found that increases in statewide job losses are associated with heightened suicide-related behaviors among adolescent girls and black teens. Specifically, the study…

Interpreting OSHA's on-line data

Last fall, Mr. Rosaulino Montano, 46, a worker on my campus at the George Washington University, died when he fell seven stories while installing windows on a new $75 million residence hall.  Mr. Montano was an employee of Engineered Construction Products,  and because his work-related death occurred at my place of employment, I was particularly interested in tracking the OSHA investigation until the case was closed.  I wondered whether there was a "controlling employer," such as a general contractor or even if my employer, GWU, and whether they had some responsibility for safety at…

Hell yes: Komodo dragons!!!

Without doubt, one of the coolest living animals on the planet is the Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis, a giant flesh-eating lizard that kills water buffalo, eats children, harbours noxious oral bacteria and is impervious to bullets (ok, I made that last bit up)... Unknown to western science until 1912 (when it was 'discovered' by J. K. H. van Steyn van Hensbroek, and described in the same year by P. A. Ouwens), it reaches a maximum authenticated length of 3.5 m and can weigh about 250 kg (Steel 1996). In contrast to most other monitors, its legs and tail become proportionally short and…

Beware the spinal trap

(Note: this is the infamous article on chiropractic that got Simon Singh sued. It is being reposted all over the web today by multiple blogs and online magazines.) Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results - and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh. You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that "99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae". In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal…

MuscleMaster.com "voluntarily" recalls 17 steroid-laden dietary supplements

It seems that bodybuilding supplement makers are challenging erectile dysfunction supplement makers to see who can recall the greatest number of products adulterated with undeclared, unapproved drugs. In this case, an internet retailer of the following supplements has issued a voluntary recall of the following supplements sold between June 1, 2009 and November 17, 2009. The recall follows an FDA warning letter on detection of undeclared, synthetic anabolic steroids in these products: Advanced Muscle Science Dienedrone, 60 caps Advanced Muscle Science Liquidrone, 60 ml Anabolic Formulation M1…

Sizzle? Call for Papers on Documentary Film and Its Impacts

Director Randy Olson's Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy has already shaped the agenda and framed the discussion among scientists and the science media, a key impact of a successful documentary film. I haven't had a chance to weigh in yet on the blog debate that has been raging over Sizzle. Needless to say, it's already one of the most talked about science-related documentaries of the year, even though very few people have actually even seen it. I will be writing a column about the film for Skeptical Inquirer Online, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here's something that will likely interest…

Networked Science: Who's It Good For?

Diane Rhoten writes in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education about the concept of networked science. The Manhattan Project, she says, brought us the era of Big Science: ambitious projects, organized in a "top-down, hierarchical, vertical" manner, requiring lots of cash, fancy equipment, dedicated facilities, and a long-term outlook. Next we got Team Science, fueled mostly by the life sciences. Big Science was shaped by instrumentation - what kind we do with this nifty supercollider? - while Team Science is "tailored to the parameters of the specific investigation" - hey, let's…

Focusing on how little time you have left can make you happier

Jim and Nora each attended summer camps that they enjoyed tremendously this past summer. When we picked up Nora from her camp, she was completely exhausted. Why? She and her new friends had only gotten 30 minutes of pretend sleep the night before. This was to fool their counselors before sneaking into a pre-determined room for a vigil during their precious last few hours together. Jim, it turned out, had stayed up all night his last night too, but without the pretense of tricking the counselors, who had by that time pretty much given up on enforcing a curfew. Despite their exhaustion, we…

An Inconvenient Assessment

Folks: The latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now on newsstands, and online you can also read, in PDF, my cover story. Entitled "An Inconvenient Assessment," it's about the biggest Bush administration climate science scandal that you've never heard of. Let me repaste the opening paragraphs to get you into the story: Global warming is definitely happening. That's the easy part. But it's no cinch to dramatize the phenomenon, or to personalize it. As scientists repeatedly caution, climate change can't be cited as the direct cause of any individual weather event, no matter…

"Yes, but what do you *do*?" A new response.

I've been spending the past week or two trying to get my groove on with respect to work. I scared myself quite badly with how overwhelmed I got at the end of last semester, and how quickly. I vowed to myself not to let myself get sucked into such unhealthy patterns, and then beat myself up over and over because of how often I tell myself not to get sucked in, and then how I get totally sucked in again. However. It is a new year. So I have another chance to start over. And am apparently trying to do so publicly, as what else would a blogger do? Besides, I don't want to give anyone the…

Some resources on implicit bias

Some of the comments to this post brought up the topic of implicit gender bias, and I thought the time might be ripe for a couple of pointers on the subject. Although I'm changing the context a little (from ethics training to search committees), the comments on reducing bias remain the same. The first is that, in general, but with considerable caveats,* BOTH women and men are biased against women's applications, papers and such. The issue of gender bias is NOT just a problem of men being biased against women. In fact, let's be clear - in all of these stories about gender, there are some…

The sound of dots moving: A new form of synaesthesia

SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway evokes sensations in another sensory modality. This may occur because of abnormal connections between the brain's sensory systems, or because the flow of information between those systems is not inhibited as usual. First described in the 1880s by Francis Galton, synaesthesia is known to exist in several different forms. Galton described "persons who almost invariably think of numerals in visual imagery". This form, now known as grapheme-colour synaesthesia, was experienced by the physicist Richard Feynman,…

Ignorance Leads to Pictograph Destruction

I'd planned to spend the day discussing ancient rock art, but this isn't how I wanted to start. Earlier this month in Fruita, Colorado (located on the I-70 corridor on the western slope) a group of graduating high school seniors took a can of spray paint and marked their legacy on a couple of rocks outside of town. Kids will be kids, right? The trouble is, they weren't the first to leave a legacy on those rocks. Someone else had left their mark there, about a thousand years before. Petroglyphs and pictograms, left by a people known collectively as the Fremont Culture, are scattered across…

Scholarly legitimacy

I had the honor to participate in a futurist exercise by ALA's Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. The short essays they solicited have been placed online; they are well worth perusal. I wish the discussants at ALA's Midwinter gathering a pleasant and stimulating exchange. With ALCTS's permission, I include my own entry here as well, as it is (at least in part) relevant to this blog's theme. A distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman raised his hand politely after my talk. "Libraries," he said, in a grave and judicious voice, "are known and valued for their…

Yoink!

Today got off to a pretty bad start, so I'm experiencing a bit of blogger's block. In lieu of anything original, I liked Janet's questions about science blogs so much that I've decided to steal them and put up my own answers. John has done the same, and I expect others to soon follow suit. (Abel has now joined in, as has Greg.) 1. Why do you consider this blog a science blog? I didn't initially set out with the goal of creating a science blog; it emerged as an outpouring of what I've been learning about and trying to understand about evolution. Some of what I write involves new papers,…

Is Matt Entenza really from outstate Minnesota? No, he is not.

[Updated: Letter to the Editor, Worthington Daily Globe.] This is a followup on my earlier post (see "How do you say “Surprise” in Norwegian? The word is “Entenza.” I am not making that up" also reposted here) on Matt Entenza’s bid for the DFL (Democratic Party) Primary candidacy for Minnesota State Auditor. Entenza claims he is from Greater Minnesota, and thus, would do a better job representing the interests of Greater Minnesotans. This implies that highly acclaimed sitting State Auditor and candidate for re-election Rebecca Otto is not doing well in this area. In fact, she is doing very…