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Do someone else a favor; get a Bogo light

I heard about this on NPR last night and I think it's a great idea; Mark Bent has invented a solar-powered flashlight, and when you buy one someone in an impoverished area that lacks electricity for lights at night also will receive one (and you get to pick where your contribution goes). From what I heard last night the battery in the bogo lights last for about two years (considering you use it every night), so it's definitely a worthwhile investment rather than continuing to buy battery-eating flashlights. From what I've read it seems that solar-powered flashlights aren't the end of the…

3 year old buys ugly car on eBay whim

Reason #1 why children are not cute: A three-year-old boy has used his mother's computer to buy a £9,000 car on an internet auction site. Jack Neal's parents only discovered their son's successful bid when they received a message from eBay about the Barbie pink Nissan Figaro. Rachael Neal, 36, said her son was quite good at using the computer. Mrs Neal, of Sleaford, Lincolnshire, said she had left her eBay password in her computer and her son had used the "buy it now" button. The car is incidentally a Pink Nissan Figaro. I say they make him drive it when he turns 16 as punishment.

The Ten Million Dollar Shoes

Saudi offers $10m for shoes thrown by journo Iraq: Wednesday, December 17 - 2008 at 09:22 A Saudi man has offered $10m to buy the shoes that Iraqi journalist Muntadar Al Zaidi hurled at US President George W. Bush, according to a report carried by Al Arabiya net. Sixty-year-old Hassan Mohammad Makhafa, from Aseer, south west of Saudi Arabia, said he is ready to sell all his properties to buy Al Zaidi's shoes, which he described as a 'medal of freedom' to put them on offer at a public auction. HT: href="http://www.juancole.com/2008/12/al-zaidi-injured-pleads-guilty-mosul.html">Juan…

Biopunks and cultural change

Razib Khan has a good response to my post yesterday about biopunks, including this: I obviously support this movement and its intents (I've met a few of the people who are prominent in it). But we need to keep perspective here. This will probably be analogous to the free or open source software movement; the base of tinkers will be much larger than corporations and academic institutions, but it isn't going to expand to cover the majority of the public. But so what? Most us can probably agree that the ad hoc decentralized elements of the software engineering community have done good just by…

Shopping

In the last few months, American consumers have undergone a profound shift in their shopping habits. We've transitioned from being incessant consumers - the spendthrifts of the world - to reluctant savers. Here's the Times: American consumers and businesses are embarking on an era of thrift as the recession deepens, saving more money as they cut spending on purchases as varied as sweaters, new homes and office towers. Department of Commerce Report on Personal Income and Spending That was the picture painted by two government reports released on Monday. One showed that Americans cut their…

Favourite Science Books

Wow - this one is old: December 29, 2004. It is in a need of serious updating, not to mention providing amazon links so I can earn pennies if you click and buy. But, it is still a good list nontheless: I have picked my top ten books on politics and have posted a long list of books before, and now, as I promised, here is my list of best science books. As I struggled so much to restrict myself to just 10 books on politics, and left out so many worthy titles, this time around I decided to cheat a little. Instead of Top 10 Science Books, I will make a meta-list of my top picks of books in each…

Where Is Your Food Coming From? The Bullseye Evaluation

It has been a few years since I've done a really close examination of how much of our food we're producing/getting locally/getting from elsewhere. In that time, some things have changed at our place - some of our fruit trees have begun producing, we've gotten more and different livestock, we've built relationships with some new sources. On the other hand, foster children have meant we are required to provide some purchased milk and other items we didn't buy previously, and we also have been the beneficiaries of a lot of things given to us by our dumpster-diving buddy. I think it is time…

The means of production

U.S. Is Finding Its Role in Business Hard to Unwind: Between financial rescue missions and the economic stimulus program, government spending accounts for a bigger share of the nation's economy -- 26 percent -- than at any time since World War II. The government is financing 9 out of 10 new mortgages in the United States. If you buy a car from General Motors, you are buying from a company that is 60 percent owned by the government. If you take out a car loan or run up your credit card, the chances are good that the government is financing both your debt and that of your bank. And if you buy…

An overview of the Polymath projects so far

I've been fascinated by these projects, but I felt that I didn't have sufficient time to really do them justice here. Michael Nielsen has discussed them in several venues so it wasn't clear what I could add. Then I thought about it some more, and I realized that I probably do have different readers than Michael and my view is definitely different than his (plus he nudged me on friendfeed) so here's a discussion for you. After that rambling preface - you might ask, what's Polymath? It's the name of this project to do massively collaborative mathematics first suggested by Tim Gowers on his blog…

Audience Participation Friday: Pimp Me New Tunes

I'm getting a little sick of the current rotation on iTunes, which means it's probably time for another shopping spree. I've got a couple of albums on my list to buy already (the new Tom Petty, the new Richard Thompson), and I've heard a couple of good tracks on KEXP that I'll check out (new songs by Midlake and the Long Winters), but I'm always interested in new music. So, what's new in the music world that I ought to buy? Ideally, these should be tracks available through iTunes, though I will buy physical CD's if I have sufficiently good reason. My tastes are somewhat eclectic, as you can…

Un-American, anti-capitalist, eco-freak poseurs

Or not. The Compact, in San Francisco, shows regular people doing regular things to reduce consumption. They don't buy anything new. Except maybe shoe polish. Or a drill bit. This Washington Post article discusses the group, whose Yahoo group stood at 1800 strong before the article ran. (They also saw a spike in attention last winter after a similar article in the San Fransisco Chronicle.) "Some have called the Compactors un-American, anti-capitalist, eco-freak poseurs whose defiant act of not-consuming, if it caught on, would destroy the economy and our way of life." Other's haven't.…

Guest Book Review: Death From The Skies

A few weeks ago, I read, enjoyed, and reviewed Phil Plait's Death From the Skies. After I caught my daughter looking at the book a couple of times, I managed to bribe convince her to write a review of the book. The result is the following review. I fixed the formatting a little bit, but I had absolutely no role in the development of the text. Death From the Skies When I got death from the skies I thought that it would be about people getting an unpleasant visit from flaming meteors, I was wrong. It was about the ways the world will end. I then got depressed and then got an unsettling…

Death from the Skies, by Phil Plait: Guest Review!

Originally posted by Mike Dunford On March 6, 2009, at 8:24 AM A few weeks ago, I read, enjoyed, and reviewed Phil Plait's Death From the Skies. After I caught my daughter looking at the book a couple of times, I managed to bribe convince her to write a review of the book. The result is the following review. I fixed the formatting a little bit, but I had absolutely no role in the development of the text. Death From the Skies When I got death from the skies I thought that it would be about people getting an unpleasant visit from flaming meteors, I was wrong. It was about the ways the world…

10,000 New Ebooks, but Nothing to Read

In which we look at how the Brave New Publishing World makes it really hard to find something good to read. ------------ In a recent links dump, I included a link to this post about the current state of publishing, which is a follow-up to an earlier post about the current state of publishing. Elsewhere in my social media universe, this has come in for a lot of derision from anti-publishing friends, particularly the bit where the author complains that there are too many books published. "How can there be such a thing?" is the basic thrust of the thing. "The more books, the better!"…

Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?

tags: Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze?, New Scientist, book review, science, trivia Anyone who has ever claimed that science is boring has never spent any time talking with a scientist. However, some people have done so, and in the process, they ask lots of interesting questions such as; Why don't birds fall off their perches when they are asleep? How do you make transparent ice cubes like those in Scotch advertisements? What time is it at the North Pole? Why are traffic signals arranged red over amber over green whereas railroad signals are arranged green over amber over red? If you have…

Nature science writing paywalls are pissing me off

Please forgive me for the cranky. I am still confined to bed and am only writing between fits of coughing that still occasionally drive me near unconsciousness due to hypoxia. I'm stuck at home trying to read some research literature across the VPN and proxy servers from my three faculty appointments that give me access to much biomedical research literature. However, some journals are now no longer granting access if one's IP address does not come directly from the university, even if you are using the university VPN server. And then there's my love-hate relationship with Nature Publishing…

Diavolo!

This guy is Allo Diavolo: He was a circus daredevil. At the dawn of the 20th century he worked on a number of stunts dressed in his ominous horned outfit. These days a lot of people, including me, have heard of him as an example in the pages of physics textbooks. In my case it was Halliday and Resnick, a standard (and good) freshman physics text. Diavolo did a trick where he looped the loop riding a bicycle. It's pretty impressive: The breathless circus ad copy claims that this stunt is more or less certain death. It wasn't, of course. I wouldn't want to try it, but it's certainly a…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Scientists Clone Mice From Adult Skin Stem Cells: For cells that hold so much promise, stem cells' potential has so far gone largely untapped. But new research from Rockefeller University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute scientists now shows that adult stem cells taken from skin can be used to clone mice using a procedure called nuclear transfer. The findings are reported in the Feb. 12 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Manipulating Nature: Scientists Query Wildlife Birth-control Method: Professor Cooper also raises concerns that individuals that…

The pandemic flu risk market

If the number of emails I've gotten about the new "market" in pandemic risk were buy orders, I'd be doing very well. A market in pandemic risk? Of course. Is this a great country, or what? Is a bird flu pandemic coming? Health experts say there is no way to know, and especially no way to know when. But someone does know, or, rather, the combined experience of a lot of someones -- doctors and nurses treating the odd human patient, microbiologists studying virus samples and virus experts studying disease patterns. A new "market" launched on Thursday aims to take advantage of this combined…

Extra, Extra

Welcome to the weekly linkfest, August 28 edition. Science Brian Switek writes about one of the fastest mammals on earth, the pronghorn, and the complex ecology it lives in. Of Pronghorns and Predators. It's an interesting look into the predator-prey relationships between wolves, coyotes, and pronghorns. Another great post from Brian, in which he tells us about the mystery of the missing brontosaurus head. Yet another human falls prey to the illusion of attention. The guys at The Invisible Gorilla explain why there is just no safe way to text while driving. The dog-human connection in…

ScienceOnline'09 - interview with Russ Campbell

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Russ Campbell from the Fishtown University blog to answer a few questions. 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? Hi Bora. First, thank you for the opportunity to share with your readers. I'm a big fan of your blog…

Going for the pain of paying

For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit: Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared with credit volume of $203 billion. MasterCard reported that for the first six months of this year, the volume of purchases on its debit cards increased 4.1 percent, to $160 billion, in the United States. Spending on credit and charge cards sank 14.8 percent, to $233 billion. "Consumers are rational thinking individuals, and they're going to…

Random Ten

It's been a while since I did one of these: "Crush On You" by Bruce Springsteen from the album The River (1980, 3:11). "Carrot Juice Is Murder" by The Arrogant Worms from the album Gift Wrapped, The Best of the Arrogant Worms (2002, 3:29). "Might" by Modest Mouse from the album This is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About (1997, 1:31). "Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers from the album Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (1976, 3:51). "Brain Damage" by Pink Floyd from the album Dark Side Of The Moon (1973, 3:50). "Vegetable" by Radiohead…

How High Gas Prices Are an Income Transfer to the Very Rich From the Rest of Us

Dan Froomkin has a great article about the role that financial speculation plays in driving up gasoline prices*. Keep in mind that even Goldman Sachs, the largest oil trader, admits that speculation drives up oil prices. But what really disgusting is how this speculation-based rise in prices serves as a wealth transfer from, well, just about everybody to oil company executives (italics mine): By and large, the oil companies' profits are not finding their way back into the communities from which they came; are not being used to create more jobs; and are not being invested in new equipment…

The Science Blogging Anthology - the Great Unveiling!

Yes! It is finally here! What you have all been waiting for, impatiently, for three weeks! The Science Blogging Anthology is now for sale. Go to Lulu.com by clicking here (or click on the picture of the book to your right) and place your order! You can choose to buy a PDF to download (but do you really want to print out 336 pages!?) or order the book with its pretty cover - it takes only a couple of days to arrive at your doorstep. You can see here how it all got started, just three weeks ago, smack in the middle of the holidays when nobody was online and traffic was down to a third of…

Whats your Mann number?

John fleck has been having fun with degrees of separation. See Erdos, Lambert and Fleck and Eight Degrees of Separation (and the comments, where we discover that Steve McI has a "Mann number" of 4). Whats mine? I can do (C+Gregory) to (Gregory and Sexton) to (Parker and Sexton) to (Parker and Folland) to (Folland and M). So thats 4... there is probably a quicker way to get from Gregory for Mann, though. Entertainingly, John sets the challenge of a chain connecting me with Lubos Motl. And if you're wondering why you might want to do that, err, you haven't been paying attention :-) I'll buy a…

Are social networking sites doomed to failure?

Yesterday the preeminent socially generated news site, digg.com, nearly exploded. The way the site is supposed to work is that users submit links to stories (and web sites, photos, and videos) they think will be interesting, and others give those stories a thumbs-up (a "digg") or thumbs-down. If enough users digg a story, it will be promoted to the top of the front page, and this constantly-updated page will reflect a diversity of interesting stories from around the world. Ideally, this system is completely controlled by Digg's users, and the only interference from "management" is to remove…

Beer Keg Loft

And now for something completely different... Pirate flags are the first sign... Team Numb comfortably launched a fat rocket on a P7000 motor to loft a full beer keg over a mile high straight up. ⢠Keg: 175 lbs of beer. Roots. From Oregon. ⢠Motor: 60 lbs of Alumaflame solid rocket propellant (looks like gray styrofoam, but burns in a violet flame). This home brew P motor is twice as big as what you can buy, and you can buy a cruise missile booster from Cesaroni Aerospace in Canada. ⢠Altitude: 6,100 ft. Perfect flight. ⢠Results: Beer shaken, not stirred, and tapped at the…

I am in withdrawal

I need my laptop. Last week, the power input, which was getting loose, finally decided to become fully disconnected. It might have had something to do with the kitten hanging from the power cord. And sadly, when I consulted the repair people I am told the only solution is to replace the entire motherboard, rather than just reconnect or repair the jack. In the meantime I have become grumpy and withdrawn. I am unable to blog without my bookmarks and properly configured web-browser. I realize how fully dependent I have become on this machine. My reference database is on it, as well as the…

Perverting Conservation

Getting "buy-in" from an industry is crucial when attempting to regulate in favor of consumer protection or environmentalism. If the industry fundamentally does not accept the values embodied in the effort, it finds ways around it. After all, these companies have the brightest lawyers and engineers on their side, and if some public policy is supposed to do X, they'll find a way to make it do Y. A case in point is the popularity of hybrid cars and the conservation of fuel. Luxury car companies have found a way to pervert them from energy-saving devices to gas guzzlers with the patina of…

ScienceOnline'09 - Monday blogging and beyond...

Today, most of the ScienceOnline09 participants are either traveling home or trying to recover. While many managed to blog or liveblog during the conference, as well as discuss the conference on FriendFeed or Twitter and post pictures on Flickr, others have a different mode: taking some time to digest and then write thoughtful summaries later, once they are rested. First of those summaries are starting to show up online and I will keep updating you as others come in: Highly Allochthonous: ScienceOnline Day 2: generalised ramblings The Intersection: Echinoderms Emerge Victorious! White Coat…

Oh no, GMOs.

As SciBlogs resident cowgirl/GMO-shill, I feel an obligation to post a response to a few posts up at 'Whats New In Life Science Research' (Jan 8 through today). I dont want to start a blag-fight, I just want to correct some of their errors and start a conversation (LOL! BLAG FIGHT! BLAG FIGHT!) because I dont think they are anti-GMO green anarchists. I think they are GMO-phobic, and education fixes phobias :) Several authors made it clear they would like it if all GMO foods were labeled 'GMO'. I think that is silly. I can tell you what foods in your local grocery store are GMO: Basically…

Science, Hot off the Press

Bridging new media and old, The Open Laboratory takes the best scientific blogging of the year and prints it on actual paper. For 2010, forty reviewers narrowed down nearly 900 submissions to fifty of the very best. This year's edition also includes six poems and a cartoon! Editor Jason G. Goldman announces availability of the book on The Thoughtful Animal, suggesting you "buy one for yourself, buy one for your significant other, buy one for each family member, buy one each for as many neighbors, friends and colleagues you can think of, and buy a copy for the local library." In another…

Why Vendor Lock-In and Micropayments are Bad

A lot of people have commented on the fact that if you get an Apple iPhone, you have no choice but to get your phone service through AT&T. For a lot of people, this is a deal-killer. Why would Apple do this? Doubtless they got some sweet deal, but it doesn't seem to be a sweet deal for their customers. But, the hype surrounding the iPhone means that Apple is probably not really suffering much in the way of people not buying the iPhone because of this restriction. If there were a real competitor out there, perhaps things would be different. So, strike one. What about micropayments?…

You Have One Wish Left

The old riddle goes: you were granted three wishes, and you have one wish left.  What do you wish for?  Everyone over the age of 6 knows: more wishes. When we figured out that there was oil under the ground, and figured out how to use it, it is as though we had been granted three wishes.  Now the oil is running out.  It is as though we have one wish remaining.  So what do we do with it? What we have done in the meantime, is run around looking for more Genies.  Coal?  No, too dirty.  Nuclear?  No, can't figure out what to do with the waste.  Solar?  Wind?  Geothermal?  Tidal?  Biofuels?  No…

Reading Diary: The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada by Chris Turner

Chris Turner's The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada (website) is a book that absolutely must be read by every Canadian interested in the future of science and science policy in the country. And the Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government is wagering that that's a pretty low percentage of the population. If Susan Delacourt and Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson are to be believed, the strategy that the Prime Minister is using focuses on an emerging coalition of western Canadians and new Canadians and suburbanites in eastern…

how to buy a house

with all the turmoil, it is good to think about how houses are bought in the US Now We'll do a first order estimate, it scales linearly with changes in income and is an adequate approximation to understand how things work. Now. Unless you have a lot of cash, you need to get a loan to buy a house. This is typically a fixed rate loan, secured by the house as collateral, and we'll estimate an 8% interest. Simple interest will do as first order estimate. Doing the full compound estimate is trivial and an exercise for the reader. The loan term will be 15 or 30 years typically. Long enough that…

PepsiCo Food Frontiers blog did not have to be a #SbFAIL

Given the events of yesterday about corporate sponsorship in the objective landscape of science journalism, I found it ironic that my research collaboration meeting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill brought me to their beautiful FedEx Global Education Center where I enjoyed an iced pomegranate tea. However, I was feeling badly about midday from a combination of the high temperatures and, more significantly, high ozone levels that gave me some respiratory problems from my longstanding asthma issues that preceded LungMutiny2010. The dream So, I took a nap and had a dream. I…

The end is near: Time to switch to Linux

If the difference between success and failure in your business, as the economy comes crashing down around you, is money, and you have ID demands, consider this: With both people and companies having to squeeze a nickel's worth of good out of every penny, how long do you think people will be paying Microsoft for its imperfect operating systems and office suites? Vista Business SP1 'upgrade' has a list price of $199.95. Office 2007 Professional is $329.95. That's $529.90, or as much as a new low-end PC. Or, I could go with Ubuntu Linux for zero money down. if I wanted big business support, I…

#scio10 preparation: Is there a special problem of online civility?

Two weeks from today, at ScienceOnline '10, Dr. Isis, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and I will be leading a session called "Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents". In preparation for this, the three of us had a Skype conference last night, during which it became clear to us that there are many, many interesting issues that we could take on in this session (and that we come to the subject of online civility from three quite different perspectives). To try to get a feel for what issues other people (besides the three of us) might want to discuss in this session (or on blogs, of whatever),…

Bringing the War on Christmas Into your Very Living Room

I did a little (very little, very short) newsroom debate on Fox 9 with a guy named Tom who appears to represent conservative Christians regarding the question of "Does Christmas have place in schools?" I quickly add that even though that was the planned focus of the discussion, it was quickly revised to be "Oh, no, not just Christmas, but Kwanza and Hanuka and stuff too." That particular bit of backpedaling is, of course, ingenuous and annoying, because nobody from Hanuka or Kwanza is trying to force their religious holidays into public schools, only the conservative Christians. So if we…

Where to buy dichloroacetate (DCA)? Dichloroacetate suppliers, even?

Yes, I know that my blog buddy Abel wrote a post with almost exactly the same title as this. No, I'm not mindlessly aping him. I'm doing it because of what Abel revealed in his post: That most of his referrals lately have been Google searches looking for information on where to buy dichloroacetate, a.k.a. DCA. I, too, have noticed a lot of referrals to my original post on DCA, in which I tried to explain why it isn't the "cure" for cancer that some have been touting it as, most recently, a rather annoying troll going by the name of Robert Smith who's been infesting my blog lately in my posts…

Chiquita banana: not so perfect

I like bananas. But not that much. So when I buy them I usually buy little ones, called baby bananas in the market although I don't like to think of myself as eating defenseless little underage bananas so I just think of them as bananas. Yesterday Mrs. R. and I went shopping and I saw these little green bananas, labeled "Thai bananas." I bought them, but now I have o idea if they are meant to be eaten fresh" or cooked or fired like plantains. If you know, leave a comment. But there were some bananas I didn't buy there. The ones from multinational Chiquita fruit company. Why not? Multinational…

A dollar is now worth 2/3 of a Euro

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. A bit of each, I suppose. When I was a young man, traveling in Europe was great for Americans. For starters, everybody didn't hate us (thanks George!). For another, everything was cheap. The dollar was strong so the exchange rate favored us. Now the dollar is moribund and travel in Europe is becoming prohibitively expensive for Americans. And in some places the dollar isn't just moribund. It has already died: The U.S. dollar's value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell…

From the Archives: Reviews of Cory Doctorow and Mafiaboy

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 post, from April 4, 2009, covered two books: Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken by…

A game of Twenty Questions between a hungry HIV-infected, expectant Ethiopian mother, and an affluent North American, where it's clear that the North American isn't very good at the game and also (frankly) doesn't have a clue.

This has to be one of my favourites, written pretty much the day after I listened to Stephen Lewis talk. Anyway, it also ties in with the start of the International AIDS Conference this Sunday. I'm hoping our Canadian government has some choice announcements to make at the beginning, but I guess we'll just see. AMERICAN: Is it an animal, mineral or vegetable? ETHIOPIAN: Yes sir, I believe it is all three, sir. AMERICAN: Hmm... Can I get it online? ETHIOPIAN: I'm sorry, sir. I do not understand your meaning, sir. On where, sir? AMERICAN: Online... You know, like at eBay or Amazon? ETHIOPIAN…

Blog/Media Coverage of ScienceOnline2010 (Updated)

I am collecting all the blog and media coverage on this wiki page, but redundancy is always a good idea in the digital realm, so the links are also now posted here, under the fold: Update: the wiki page has reached its limit of number of links per page, so I am only updating this post from now on, adding freshest posts I can find on top. Please let me know if I missed yours. Also, read the interviews with ScienceOnline2010 participants Circle of Complexity: Importance of meatspace - session at Science Online 2010 Adventures in Ethics and Science: #scio10 aftermath: Continuing thoughts on…

California

I just got back from a week long trip to California. (You can hear me talking about Proust on KQED here.) The weather was awful - rain and more rain - but I still got glimpses of what I love so much about the Golden State. Consider the Hollywood Farmer's Market. It's a weekly gathering of a few dozen farmers, tamale stands and organic cheese makers. The crowd is an eclectic mix of dreads and Prada, birkenstocks and Tod loafers. But I can summarize my fondness for the place with a single conversation I had with a chicken farmer who sells eggs: Me: Are these eggs cage free? Farmer: Yes. The…

Can biotechnology be used to enhance the sustainability of our farms? Dont forget to vote

The online debate at The Economist Magazine continues. Dont forget to vote. My rebuttal is here: I agree with Charles Benbrook that "Bt crops have helped reduce insect feeding damage and lessened the need for toxic, broad-spectrum insecticides, and as a result, helped build populations of beneficial insects and promote above-ground biodiversity, two key sustainable farm-management goals." I also wholeheartedly agree with his statements that "Multiple-tactic systems composed of 'many little hammers' offer the best hope for sustained progress" and "Biotechnology can help create new hammers and…

CDC Director Gerberding and Republican talking points

I wasn't at the Women's Health Fair and Symposium at Onandoga Community College in New York so I didn't hear all of what CDC Director Julie Gerberding said there. I just know what was reported in the Syracuse Post Standard. But I wasn't impressed: "If I gave each of you $5,000 and said this is the money you can spend on health for yourself or for your children or family, how would you spend that money? she asked. "For a long time, many of us have been protected from thinking about the value of our health investments because our insurance took care of everything. Well, today more people don't…