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The Oldest Human Bones, Jebel Irhoud, Morocco

You've heard to story. I'm here to give you a little context. A pretty typical early handaxe, made by a Homo erectus. This was a big flake made from a bigger rock. The big flake was subsequently flaked to make this handaxe. The word "handaxe" can be spelled about nine different ways. But in case you haven't heard the story, this is from the press release which is, so far, the only information generally available: New finds of fossils and stone tools from the archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, push back the origins of our species by one hundred thousand years and show that by…

EU will ban neonicotinoid pesticides to save the honey bees

Being a bee is hard. I'm speaking specifically of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, the one that produces the honey you buy in the store. Many insects, and other critters, eat by finding food and then eating it, and then they do that for a while and now and then reproduce by finding a mate, laying eggs that they perhaps put in a good location but thereafter leave alone, etc. etc. But honey bees do all of these thing in a way that makes it seem like they are trying to make it harder for them than it is for everyone else. Much of the food that honey bees eat is gathered at rare and hard to…

On Framing, Part One

My SciBlings Chris Mooney and Matthew Nisbet have created quite a stir recently, first with this article in Science and later with this article for the Washington Post. The basic premise is that scientists need to become more effective communicators, especially on controversial issues like evolution and global warming. In particular, they need to “frame” scientific issues in a way that will have resonance with specific groups of people. In some cases this might mean eschewing a discussion of the scientific minutiae in favor of discussing more practical ramifications of the issue at hand.…

John Edwards embraces enviro politics, a little too warmly

Every campaign it's the same thing. The editors and their reporting staff vow to pay more attention to the issues and focus less on the horse race. And every campaign that promise turns out to be as hollow as the campaign promises of the candidates the journalists are covering. So it is with the mountains of attention paid to the fundraising efforts of the presidential contenders. The latest has Barack Obama pulling in a mind-boggling amount of... but there I go, sucked into the vortex of distraction. What I want to explore is John Edwards' environmental platform, which I think is remarkable…

Casey Luskin vs. Homo naledi

The Intelligent Design Creationists are always getting annoyed at the third word in that label -- they're not creationists, they insist, but something completely different. They're scientists, they think. They're just scientists who favor a different explanation for the diversity of life on Earth than those horrible Darwinist notions. But of course, everything about them just affirms that they're simply jumped-up creationists with airs, from their founding by an evangelical Christian, Phillip Johnson, to their crop of fellows like Paul Nelson and William Dembski, who happily profess their…

Race, ethnicity, diversity - the saga continues

On Monday, I posted two parts to my ethnic story as a white person in the US, and they prompted a variety of comments. Rather than respond in the comments, I thought I'd write another post. First, I want to thank the people who took up the challenge to write their own stories. DH, grad student, Eric Lund added their stories to the comments, Academic wrote about hers on her blog, as did Ginger Peach, and Makita. Sciencebloggers took up talking about race/ethnicity/diversity and science too including ScienceWoman, razib, Janet, Greg, DrugMonkey, and Maria, and anyone else I missed. If you'…

Ortega y Gasset On Science

Here are two pretty lengthy passages from two Ortega y Gasset essays, both published in History as a System (one of my favorite books), and translated by Helene Weyl. I'm posting them because I think they're relevant to our recent discussion on religion and science. Specifically, I think they're relevant to the attitude towards science that some atheists take. The essays were written in the 1930s (most of them during the Spanish Civil War), but as is often the case with Ortega y Gasset, they're infused with a prescience that insures that they're still relevant today, and will continue to be…

Expanding Medicaid can improve birth outcomes

Earlier this week, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed legislation that accepts the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion for his state, and Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has signaled his intention to do so if the federal government approves his proposed program changes. Wonkblog’s Sarah Kliff notes that if Pennsylvania does expand its Medicaid program, that will mean the majority of the states have adopted one of the main aspects of the Affordable Care Act. This is good news for the millions of low-income uninsured US residents who will gain health coverage from Medicaid. Another…

Building the Infrastructure for a Local Food System

Last Sunday's New York Times had an article about the shortage of slaughterhouses for those raising non-industrial and local meat. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the number of slaughterhouses nationwide declined to 809 in 2008 from 1,211 in 1992, while the number of small farmers has increased by 108,000 in the past five years. Fewer slaughterhouses to process local meat means less of it in butcher shops, grocery stores and restaurants. Chefs throughout the Northeast are partnering with farms to add locally-raised meat to their menus, satisfying a customer demand.…

The CIA’s Vaccination Ruse

By Anthony Robbins, MD, MPA The Journal of Public Health policy has just published my editorial “The CIA’s Vaccination Ruse” on an open-access basis on the journal’s website. The editorial deals with the CIA’s use of a sham vaccination program as a cover for spying operations in Pakistan. As I have studied vaccines and vaccine policy for almost forty years, The Pump Handle has invited me to provide its readers with some big-picture background on vaccines and vaccination policy in the US and around the world to accompany the link to my editorial. School Entry Laws In the 1970s, public health…

Houston, we have a workers' rights problem: Profile of a worker justice center in Texas' biggest city

by Kim Krisberg Last month, more than 70 ironworkers walked off an ExxonMobil construction site near Houston, Texas. The workers, known as rodbusters in the industry, weren't members of a union or backed by powerful organizers; they decided amongst themselves to unite in protest of unsafe working conditions in a state that has the highest construction worker fatality rate in the country. The workers reported multiple problems with the ExxonMobil subcontractor who hired them, including not being paid on time, not having enough water on site and no access to medical care in the event of an…

After GOPcare collapse, how will Trump administration respond?

Many of us breathed sighs of relief on Friday when House Speaker Paul Ryan announced the withdrawal of legislation to roll back the Affordable Care Act. The bill, the American Health Care Act, would have resulted in 24 million people losing insurance and $880 billion less for Medicaid over the next 10 years -- while giving an $883 billion tax cut targeted to the wealthiest. At town hall meetings and over the phones, members of Congress heard from constituents urging them to leave the ACA’s coverage expansions in place. Yet the bill’s defeat doesn’t mean that the idea of healthcare coverage…

On Time, Space, and Metaphor

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: conceptual metaphor theory sucks. Why does it suck? Well, because there's no experimental evidence for it (and plenty of evidence against it). Except, that is, in one domain: time. Specifically, the work of Lera Boroditsky, along with Dedre Gentner and her colleagues, has provided interesting demonstrations of the influence of the way we talk about space on the way we conceptualize time. I've talked about their work before, and now Dave's talking about Gentner's work over at Cognitive Daily, so I won't go into a lot of detail. Instead, I'll give you…

Prediction: self-promoting hype meets interdisciplinary ignorance

There is a maddeningly vague press release floating around, and I think everybody has sent me a link to it now. It contains a claim by some chemists that they have discovered a new organizing principle in evolution. A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution. The research, which appears to offer evidence of a hidden mechanism guiding the way biological organisms respond to the forces of natural selection, provides a new perspective on…

Lightweight dinosaur, heavyweight publishing event

SciBling Bora (aka coturnix) at Blog Around the Clock has scored a major coup for Open Access publishing today. Fittingly the subject matter is a dinosaur, an apt symbol for the new nail in the coffin of traditional scientific publishing that the paper represents. Bora is the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science), one of the leading Open Access science publishers. PLoS ONE is unusual even among OA publications in that it concentrates on rapid publication after a baseline technical review by Editorial Board members. It covers all areas of science and medicine and…

Cato is shocked, shocked! To find wait times for care in the US.

The NYT reports on the differing wait times between high-cost cosmetic procedures in dermatology, and low-cost potentially life-saving screenings for melanoma and other skin cancers. Patients seeking an appointment with a dermatologist to ask about a potentially cancerous mole have to wait substantially longer than those seeking Botox for wrinkles, says a study published online today by The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. Researchers reported that dermatologists in 12 cities offered a typical wait of eight days for a cosmetic patient wanting Botox to smooth wrinkles, compared…

Pathological Stack Hell: Underload

Our pathological language this week is [Underload][underload]. Underload is, in some ways, similar to Muriel, only it's a much more sensible language. In fact, there are actually serious practical languages called *concatenative languages* based on the same idea as Underload: [Joy][joy] and [Factor][factor] are two examples. [underload]: http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Underload [muriel]: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/friday_pathological_programmin… [joy]: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy.html [factor]: http://www.factorcode.org/ Underload is a remarkably…

A Different Kind of Handshake: Interview with Vanessa Woods

Vanessa Woods is a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group which recently moved to Duke University - just in time for her to be able to attend the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago. Vanessa is the author of four books (three of those are for kids, the latest one, It's every monkey for themselves just got translated into Hebrew, and is aimed at adult audience). She is a feature writer for the Discovery Channel and she documents her research on her blog Bonobo Handshake (and what it means? Check the blog!) Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my…

Fun times in the Big City

So … this weekend, we had an odd and informal secret meeting of the SciBlings in New York City. This was nothing official, it's like a whole bunch of the bloggers here decided they ought to get together some time, and a plan slowly crystallized and the precipitate settled out on NYC. It was decided to keep it informal and in-house, or I would have advertised our presence further ahead of time — but with about 3 dozen of us present it would have been too much to invite in a lot of others, even though there were lots of other NY bloggers and readers I would have liked to have met. I flew in…

The World Doesn't Need More Promotional Blogs

Over at the Book Publicity blog, Yen takes up the question of Internet publicity (via SF Signal): Yesterday I spoke at an AAR / Association of Authors' Representatives panel together with Connor Raus (who runs digital advertising agency CRKWD) about understanding social media and how to use it effectively -- as you know, a favorite topic of mine here on The Book Publicity Blog. I don't have time to summarize the entire panel here (and you don't have time to read a summary of the entire panel), but I did want to tackle the issue of timing, a common question among book publicists, authors,…

Forget Twitter: Slow blogging is the future

The "whither twitter" debate is irrelevant. Evidence hinting that its popularity may be short-lived is not hard to find, but I wouldn't place any money on it either way. It's just too hard to predict what will take hold in the ever-shifting sands of the semi-arid intellectual desert that some still call cyberspace. I doubt tweets will go away any time soon, and I'm not sure that they should go away, despite the legs my "Twitter is Evil" parody have acquired. Rather than dwell on the merits or shortcomings of the 140-character medium, I'm more interested in doing my part to improve the signal-…

Clozapine Augmentation with Lamotrigine

It is refreshing to see something like this.  Both drugs are available as generics, so the financial motivation for a study like this is not great.  But the clinical benefit could e substantial, albeit for a small subset of patients. Clozapine is considered to be the most efficacious antipsychotic medication, in that it is the drug to which the highest percentage of persons with psychosis have a positive response.  It is, however, considered a third-line drug.  The reason is that about 1% of patients will develop severe granulocytopenia.  So, in general, a patient will be tried on at least…

Communicating Science Through Science Museums & Centers

Two weeks ago, I spent my spring break at the Exploratorium, as a visiting Osher Fellow. One of the projects I consulted on was the Exploratorium's "evidence" project, an exciting initiative that will provide Web and floor content introducing the public to how science works as a process and how science develops as a body of knowledge. In June, a special expert workshop will be held on the topic at the National Science Foundation, and there is likely to be proceedings published. I hope to have more to report come summer. Among the other topics I discussed with staff were the themes presented…

Reading is fundamental

I have had two experiences in quick succession that have made me seriously wonder what kind of reading education kids these days are getting. (Jeez, did I just go over into old geezer territory? I think that's the first time I've used the phrase "kids these days" in a blog post. Next I'll be telling people to get off my lawn...) (Note: for simplicity in telling the stories, I'm just going to go with "him"/"he" to avoid the whole him/her s/he awkwardness.) In the first case, a student is helping me get materials ready for one of my classes. This involves setting up a particular piece of…

Nature Sticks One Toe In the Early 20th Century

By way of the daily Chronicle of Higher Education, I learned that Nature has made a quantum leap into the...well...sort of into the early part of the 20th century. In an editorial published online this afternoon, the journal announced that it would amend its mission statement, which appears each week next to its table of contents. The original statement, which dates to 1869, says that Nature's mission is, among other things, "to aid scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of natural knowledge throughout the world." In these tres modern times…

Is showing only part of the post as bad as breaking articles into pages?

One of the most hated practices on the Internet is the breaking of articles into pages. Jason Kottke swearingly rants against it here, and Mike Davidson denounces the practice here. I don't much like the practice either, especially when a short, pointless article is broken into four or more pages (Davidson mockingly points to this extreme example). Davidson argues that only extremely long articles -- more than 20 screens long -- should be broken up into pages, and these pages should correspond to logical divisions within the article, which he calls "acts" (I'd call them "chapters" or "…

Paleontology references: Read this, not that

The December 2009 issue of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach has just been released, and among the new offerings is a paper on "Print Reference Sources about Evolution" by Adam Goldstein. It seems to be a spinoff of Goldstein's paper on evolution blogs published in the same journal earlier this year, and it stresses the importance of print references during a time when online resources are becoming more widely available. While I agree that print references are still very important for anyone who wants to educate themselves about evolution, though, I don't think that Goldstein made…

Seamount biogeography

We don't mention it often, but Craig and I publish regularly outside Deep Sea News, in the public arena of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Craig authors ~3 scientific journal articles per year since 2004. I author ~2/yr. The last two years were above average for both of us. This is amazing to me, because we spend so much time writing for DSN. Either our cups runneth over, or the glacial pace of scientific publishing obscures the impact of our extra-curricular reporting activities here at DSN. I tell you this so you know we are contributors to the field, not only journalists. We make the…

Health care blogger survey

I got this request the other day and finally decided to take the survey that it asked me to. It was relatively painless and it might gather useful information (although obviously it's not a scientific survey); so I thought I'd help publicize it. If you're a health care/ medical blogger, this survey is looking for you. This poll is co-produced by Envision Solutions and The Medical Blog Network (TMBN). WHY WE ARE CONDUCTING THIS SURVEY Over the past few years, the healthcare blogosphere has grown in size and importance. This means that more people are blogging about medical issues, healthcare…

Why ScienceBlogs is So Important

I am delighted to be part of ScienceBlogs, the largest online community dedicated to science. I accepted this challenge because I believe that most in my profession are far more focused on making the next discovery rather than explaining to the public the value of what they do. I invite you to join me on this journey and to share my articles with anyone who has that curiosity that each of us had as a child - remember discovering your first ladybug, seeing your first rainbow? You will be an important part of an ongoing discussion about the beauty and fascination of science. So it begins: "…

Extra, Extra

Science Someone had to ask it. Why do squirrels masturbate? Obviously, it's a piece by Ed. Sentiment-sensing software could aid in weeding hostile online comments. If this comes to pass, I imagine most of Physioprof's comments will be weeded out, sadly. An important new study of mirror self-recognition in Japanese macaques, explained by Carl Zimmer. And BPS Research Digest weighs in on the validity of the mirror self-recognition test in the first place. Lots of news this week about the discovery that the exoplanet Gliese 581g could be hospitable to life. Brian Romans explains the important…

A River Runs By It: Children growing up with science all around them

Look at this map, of a small part of the state of Minnesota: See the wide channel that runs from left to right with the windy river in it? You are looking at one of the most amazing stories in geological history ever. I'd like to tell you about it. When not in flood, the meandering river is little more than a slow moving stream in a wide marsh, with thickets and stands of pioneer trees dispersed among reeds and pools of open water. Largely bypassed by farm, rural and urban development, it is in this channel that the state's rare cougars live, and where some of the best birding in the…

In which antivaccine activist J. B. Handley thinks attacking Andrew Wakefield's movie "backfired"

Nearly two weeks ago, a story that I had been blogging about almost nonstop for a week reached its conclusion when Robert De Niro decided to pull the antivaccine movie Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe from the Tribeca Film Festival, of which he was one of the co-founders. Before that, he had revealed that it was he who had bypassed the festival's regular selection procedures and asked that the film be shown. All of this happened after an uproar over a film so full of antivaccine quackery, conspiracy theories about William W. Thompson (a.k.a. the "CDC whistleblower" in antivaccine circles…

Open Laboratory 2010 - submissions so far

The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far, as well as buttons and the bookmarklet. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections here. You can read Prefaces and Introductions to older editions here. ============================ A Blog Around The Clock: What does it mean that a nation is 'Unscientific'? A Blog Around The Clock: My latest scientific paper:…

The Information Diet - five ways to improve your data consumption [SciencePunk]

Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most people. Not because he was well connected or rich, but because he made it his life's mission to tour the forgotten, the hidden and the forbidden places of the world. I mention this because if there ever was a man to take life advice from, it is this one, and he put into words something I've been…

What if climatologists reversed the null hypothesis?

Kevin Trenberth's latest paper, which appears in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is uncharacteristically and refreshingly blunt right from the first few words of the introduction: Humans are changing our climate. There is no doubt whatsoever. There are arguments about how much and how important these effects are and will be in future, but many studies (e.g., see the summary by Stott et al.1) have demonstrated that effects are not trivial and have emerged from the noise of natural variability, even if they are small by some measures. So why does the science community…

From the Archives: Tor.com & Globe and Mail Books: What can library websites learn

During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from January 13, 2009. It ended up being pretty popular and was the reason that ALA Editions initially contacted me about doing a book. ===== This was a hard post to title, in that I wanted it to be reasonably short yet pack in a lot of information. The real post title should be: What can library web sites learn from commercial book-related web sites such as Tor.com and the brand new Globe and Mail Books site? First of all, a brief note…

ACTION: let's kill this anti-OA bill before it's even born!

You probably remember the wonderful new NIH law that passed last year: On Dec 26th, 2007, President Bush signed the Bill that requires all NIH-funded research to be made available to the public. The bill mandates all NIH-funded research to be made freely available to public within 12 months of publication. You probably also remember that the big publishers opposed the law, using some very unsavoury tactics. Well, guess what? They are at it again. They are trying to sneak through Congress a new bill that is, in essence, the repeal of the NIH open access law. The bill, dubbed in a typical…

Evolution of median fins

Often, as I've looked at my embryonic zebrafish, I've noticed their prominent median fins. You can see them in this image, although it really doesn't do them justice—they're thin, membranous folds that make the tail paddle-shaped. These midline fins are everywhere in fish—lampreys have them, sharks have them, teleosts have them, and we've got traces of them in the fossil record. Midline fins are more common and more primitive, yet usually its the paired fins, the pelvic and pectoral fins, that get all the attention, because they are cousins to our paired limbs…and of course, we completely…

The Other Panda's Thumb

If you could travel back to Spain about ten million years ago, you'd have no end of animals to watch, from apes to bear-dogs to saber-tooth tigers. With so many creatures jockeying for your attention (and perhaps chasing you down for lunch), you might well miss the creature shown here. Simocyon batalleri was roughly the size and shape of a puma, although its face looked more like a raccoon's. If anything were to draw your attention to Simocyon, it would probably be the animal's gift for climbing trees. Most big carnivorous mammals of the time were restricted to the ground; some may have been…

Hooters and breast cancer research fundraising: Part 2

Welcome feminist bloggers and commentors from Coturnix's guest post at Echidne of the Snakes. Howdy, folks. Let me introduce myself. I'm the guy who got this discussion started at Terra Sigillata, where Coturnix's home blog is hosted by ScienceBlogs.com. Short story is that I asked a rhetorical question about a single Hooters establishment (on the San Antonio, TX, Riverwalk) that sits within two blocks of the world's largest international breast cancer research conference held every December, the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS). My wife is a medical oncologist specializing in…

What's Jimmie Walker's favorite arthropod?

"TRI-LO-BIIITE!" Oh, no, that was a terrible opening. You'll only know what the heck I'm talking about if you remember JJ from the television show Good Times, and it's such a pathetic joke it's only going to appeal to grade schoolers. So if you're a time-traveling 8 year old from the 1970s, you'll appreciate the reference. How many of those are reading this right now? Maybe this will work better. Here's a small chip of shale I keep at my desk. My son Alaric and I collected that on a trip to Delta, Utah over 20 years ago. We had permission from the owner of a commercial dig site to rummage…

Pat Michaels: "fraud, pure and simple"

In Paul Krugman's May 29 column he wrote about Pat Michael's "fraud, pure and simple" that James Hansen's 1988 prediction of global warming was too high by 300%. (Michael's fraud was described earlier by Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Hansen again and me.) Michaels has posted a denial, so I'm going to go back to the original sources so that everyone can see what Michaels did. In Michaels' 1998 testimony he stated: Ten years ago, on June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the House of Representatives that there was a strong "cause and effect relationship" between observed…

Baldness genes: one old, one new

From a geneticist's point of view, male pattern baldness - also known as androgenic alopecia - is a tempting target. Baldness is common in the general population, with a prevalence that increases sharply with age (as a rule of thumb, a male's percentage risk of baldness is approximately equal to his age, e.g. 50% at age 50, and 90% at age 90), so there are no shortage of cases to study. It's also a strongly heritable trait, with about 80% of the variation in risk being due to genetic factors. Finally, baldness has been reported to be associated with a wide range of diseases such as prostate…

The Information Diet - five ways to improve your data consumption

Last week I had a visit from a friend of mine, who was on something of a farewell tour. After several years of planning, he'd packed in his dependable but much-begrudged corporate job, and was setting sail for Asia, to see more of the world. He's already seen much more of the world than most people. Not because he was well connected or rich, but because he made it his life's mission to tour the forgotten, the hidden and the forbidden places of the world. I mention this because if there ever was a man to take life advice from, it is this one, and he put into words something I've been…

From the Archives: Open Access and the Democratization of Science

It looks like it's going to be a pretty busy day for me, so here's a post from the archives. I picked this one because it's still very timely (the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 is still in committee in the Senate) and it's related to my recent post on open peer review. (4 May 2006) As society slowly shifts toward more participatory forms of democracy, science policy will increasingly be subject to the will of the general population. The creation of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine via voter-initiated Proposition 71 in 2004 stands as a significant example of…

Another Week of GW News, July 26, 2009

Sipping from the internet firehose... This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... July 26, 2009 Chuckle, Clinton in India, Clouds, Pachauri, AMS on Geoengineering, Upcoming Meetings, Carbon Tariffs Melting Arctic, Arctic Geopolitics, Antarctica, Desertec, Aerosols, Grumbine, Noctilucent Clouds, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO,…

The Food Experience Meme

I found a fun meme via Rev. BigDumbChimp, involving food. I'm a sucker for anything involving eating. Venison: Nope. Nettle tea: yes. Didn't like it. Huevos rancheros: Yes, yummy. Steak tartare: nope. Crocodile: Yup. Mediocre. Not a bad flavor, but it had a nasty texture. Black pudding: Gads, no. Cheese fondue: Yup. Carp: Yup. Borscht: I'm an Ashkenazi Jew, of course I've had borscht. Out of a jar, it's absolutely, mind-bogglingly horrible. Cooked fresh, it's at best mediocre. Baba ghanoush: Yum! Calamari: Tried it once. Turned out that I'm violently allergic to it…

Want Black Lives to Matter? Want to Help End Racism? Read.

I don't know a single person on any end of the political spectrum who doesn't want to see an end to police shootings of black folk. I don't know a single person who doesn't want to make sure that shootings like the Charleston one never happen again. But most ordinary white people also don't have a clue how they could help with that, other than posting the occasional facebook meme or generally feeling it would be a good thing if something were done. Or maybe they'd like to do something, but are nervous about it - how will other people feel if they just show up to a protest or meeting? The…

The Fukushima Disaster, Hyperbole, Credibility, Skepticism, and the Future of Nuclear Power

I honestly think that it is too early to have this conversation, but alas, the conversation has been forced. I have yet to express my opinion about the efficacy or safety of the future use of nuclear power, or any way in which that opinion may be affected by the current tragic events in Japan. I did report (link to, really) with little comment on the current failings of the Fukushima nuclear plants (very much underway at this time), and when commenters took the opportunity to explain how nuclear power is totally safe and that this was demonstrated by how nicely things are working out at…