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What Am I Up To?

Re: Video programs Inbox UNARIUS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE to me Dear Claire: We would be most happy to meet with you at the Unarius Center when you have the opportunity to make the trip from Los Angeles. We are open from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Saturday. As you may have discovered on our web site http://www.unarius.org/, we have classes on Wednesday and Sunday evenings from 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM May we suggest that you participate with us online for Sunday evenings past-life therapy classes that are being audio-streamed live from about 7 to 9 PM PDT. To listen, go to the Unarius Web…

Mighty Mite Sex Returns!

If it's about spiders and sex, it's gotta be Live Science! Well, to be accurate, the critters are not spiders, but mites from the family Crotoniidae. These mites reproduce sexually, which is not much of an eyebrow raiser until one considers that their close relatives, the Camisiidae, reproduce by parthenogenesis. From Tiny Creatures Rediscover the Joy of Sex Evolutionary biologist Katja Domes at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and her colleagues examined genetic sequences in two Crotoniidae species and a diverse range of 13 other mite species. Their calculations show the…

The World Science podcast/forum: May Berenbaum - DDT vs. Malaria: The Lesser of Two Evils?

The World is a radio show co-produced by WGBH Boston, Public Radio International and BBC. You can probably hear it on your local NPR station - if not, you can find all the shows recorded on the website. You may remember that I went to Boston a few months ago, as a part of a team of people helping the show do something special: use the NSF grant they recently received to expand their science coverage and, in collaboration with Sigma Xi and NOVA, tie their radio science coverage to their online offerings. The result is The World: Science website, a series of weekly science podcasts with Elsa…

Song of the Science Policy Successes

ScienceBlogger asks: "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?" Um, errr... Ok, since the place is full of bio/med/geo types, lets narrow the field to astro and space. Astronomers have been extremely successful in guiding space science policy, at least through to 2005, through the little know advisory committees and various NRC, AAS and APS small, high prestige, ad hoc committees that make recommendations like "the decadal survey" and how astro and physics should interplay their priorities, like Quarks to Cosmos. These are major…

Evolution: Education and Outreach dedicates issue to Genie Scott

The latest issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach (volume 3, number 2) is in honor of -- if a few months in advance of -- the sixty-fifth birthday of NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott. Edited by NCSE's deputy director Glenn Branch (who contributed "Three wishes for Genie" by way of introduction), it contains essays by Nicholas J. Matzke, Robert T. Pennock, Barbara Forrest, Raymond Arthur Eve with Susan Carol Losh and Brandon Nzekwe, Lawrence M. Krauss, Robert M. Hazen, Kevin Padian, Jay D. Wexler, Kenneth R. Miller, Brian Alters, and Carl Zimmer. Plus there's a biographical…

That Nightline Debate About God

If you have any interest, clips from the big Nightline God debate are now online at the ABC News website. Mostly what you'd expect, though I think things went a bit better for the atheists than I had anticipated. Representing the forces of darkness and ignorance were Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort. Having seen their staggeringly dopey infomercials on television, I was not optimistic that they would have anything intelligent to say here. They are, however, very polished in their presentation, which made me worry they might come off as persuasive. As it happens I needn't have worried. The…

"What makes you so special, Genome Boy?"

A very nice surprise greeted me this morning on the local page of my AP News iPhone app: an interview in the News & Observer with Dr. Misha Angrist of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy by freelance journalist, T. DeLene Beeland (also on Twitter @tdelene). Angrist is perhaps best-known as the fourth of the first 10 people whose genome was sequenced for George Church's Personal Genome Project. Not surprisingly, his work focuses on the societal implications of the personal genomics movement and what knowing one's DNA sequence means today and will mean in the future. We last…

My Day

Wake up, make breakfast. Espresso, two slices of bread from a French batard from Clear Flour Bread with some mouhamara spread from Arax. In the newspaper I read about the primaries, the financial crisis and nothing too important. I waste an hour with email, signing up to some HHMI online system, reading teh intertubes and blogging. Time to work on the grant. I read the background and significance section ... did I compose that crap? After rewriting a bit I move down to preliminary data. Not so bad. I add some clarifications here and there ... man I have to finish the methods section and it's…

Around the Web: On Naming Names and Calling Out Trolls, Not so tech-savvy millennials and more

On Naming Names and Calling Out Trolls Gawker, Reddit, Free Speech and Such Millennials: They Aren’t So Tech Savvy After All Project Information Literacy: Inventing the Workplace and How College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the Workplace The Philosophy of Open Access Impostors, Performers, Professionals - I and II (feeling like an academic imposter, pt II on the job hunt) The Teaching Track? Really? Teaching them to fish… (on higher ed "disruption") Zeitgeist: On Ditching the Monograph and Digital Print Culture The B-School Twitter-Free Zone The future of higher…

Around the Apocalyptic Web: The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats

The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats Facebook's massive psychology experiment likely illegal Facebook and Engineering the Public College graduates earn more, but that doesn't prove college is worth it Mirrortocracy: The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture Google’s latest empire-building tactic: cheap phones How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media Education’s war on millennials: Why everyone is failing the “digital…

Pixel-Stained Technopeasants Unite!

SFWA, your source for train-wrecky goodness on the Internet has indirectly caused International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day: On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn't matter if it's a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn't matter if it's already been published or if it hasn't, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood. Here's the central index of free stuff, which doesn't include everything-- for example, Kate has posted her law review article-- but does include more than enough free professional-…

Linkfest: Earth Science Week, AWG's new website, and annual meetings galore

Earth Science Week 2009 will be October 11-17 (ending on the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake!). This year's theme is "Understanding Climate." There are photo, visual arts, and essay contests, and Thursday is going to be the first "Women in Geosciences" day. (And then Friday will be "frantically put posters together for GSA" day. Maybe the people who prefer AGU can make this year's Earth Science Week happen...) The Association for Women Geoscientists has a new website (at the old address). They're now collecting dues online, but the transition to a paperless world has been…

A Moving Box for My Face?

My mother uses Lancome for skin and make-up. I use Lancome. I sense Lancome knows that brand inheritance helps build brand loyalty. They also make very nice products, which helps. But Lancome is about to lose me as a customer. I decided to order a few things online last week and they arrived yesterday. Products that weigh less than a pound packaged in glass, packaged in plastic, packaged in a fancy box, in a plastic bag, in another box, wrapped in paper and sent in a moving box. I actually blushed when I picked it up at the post office. This mountain of packaging in an era of over-…

"Gen Ed" Relativity: Pondering Books

This coming fall term, I'll be teaching Astronomy 052, "Relativity, Black Holes, and Quasars," because the guy who has traditionally taught it (a radio astronomer who studies active galactic nuclei) has to do other courses instead. But I said "Well, hell, I've written a popular audience book explaining relativity. I can teach that." And since I get to make teaching assignments (the one and only positive feature of being department chair), well, I put myself down to teach it. Now, of course, I find myself thinking about ideas for that class, months in advance, when I ought to be working on…

ScienceOnline2010 - what to do while there, what to do if you are not there but are interested?

ScienceOnline2010 is starting in three days! If you are not excited yet....well, I think you should be! And perhaps I can help you....with this post. First, see the complete list of attendees, or, if you want more details about everyone, browse through these introductory posts. It is always good to know more about people you are about to spend two or three days with.... Then, check out the Program to see which session in each time-slot you want to participate in. Go to individual session pages right now and join in the discussions, or ask questions. Start shaping the discussion online before…

Joint Sponsors Return: C&EN and the American Chemical Society

Two well-respected members of the science community-C&EN and the American Chemical Society (ACS) -have made commitments once again to participate as media partner and exhibitor/sponsor, respectively, in the USA Science & Engineering Festival. The Festival will be held for the second time on April 27-29 in Washington, D.C. C&EN, the flagship weekly newsmagazine published by ACS, will help convey information about the festival nationally and internationally through both its print and online editions. With 163,000 primary member subscribers worldwide together with pass-along and…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Antisocial Behavior May Be Caused By Low Stress Hormone Levels: A link between reduced levels of the 'stress hormone' cortisol and antisocial behaviour in male adolescents has been discovered by a research team at the University of Cambridge. Gas From The Past Gives Scientists New Insights Into Climate And The Oceans: In recent years, public discussion of climate change has included concerns that increased levels of carbon dioxide will contribute to global warming, which in turn may change the circulation in the earth's oceans, with potentially disastrous consequences. Adolescent Insomnia…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

Tuesday - let's take a look at 4 out of 7 PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Disrupting Circadian Homeostasis of Sympathetic Signaling Promotes Tumor Development in Mice: Cell proliferation in all rapidly renewing mammalian tissues follows a circadian rhythm that is…

RIN’s Use and relevance of web 2.0 for researchers

The announcement is dated January 6, 2010, but the report itself is dated July 2010. In any case it's new to me, so I thought I would run through some interesting points. Here's the citation (as much as I can tell): Proctor,R., Williams,R. & Stewart, J. (2010). If you build it, will they come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0. London: Research Information Network. Retrieved July 6, 2010 from http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/web_2.0_screen.pdf It often seems like people are very negative about the adoption of web 2.0 stuff in science; that is, when they're not hyping…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Why do I blog?

I've been giving some thought about the value I as an assistant professor find in blogging in part because it's the current Ask a Blogger question, in part because I just gave this presentation on blogging at the Inclusive Science conference, and in part because I have some blogger meetups scheduled and chatting about why we blog is always part of those conversations. So why do I blog? I've blogged pseudonymously as well as as me, and each kind of blogging has served a different purpose. When I was blogging pseudonymously, I used my blog to find community, to keep track of my progress on…

Citizen Science projects on-line

On Saturday afternoon, at ScienceOnline2010, the science goddess, the chemspider, and I (Sandra Porter) will be presenting a workshop on getting students involved in citizen science. In preparation, I'm compiling a set of links to projects that involve students in citizen science. If you know of any good citizen science efforts, please share them here in the comments. And, you want to see a really interesting set of projects, be sure to check out the comment section on the original post. Here we go! Before I start listing links, I am limiting my list to projects that allow both students and…

Friday Recipe: Chicken and Bean Sprouts

This is a very simple, authentic chinese dish. It's a great example of what real chinese food is like - it's a lot lighter and more delicate than what's typically passed off as Chinese food in the US. You should really go to a chinese grocery store for the bean sprouts: you'll get them fresher, and a hell of a lot cheaper. (My local chinese grocery sells bean sprouts for under $1/lb; at the local grocery store, I can buy one-half a pound of sprouts for $4.) Like most real chinese food, a this isn't a full meal by itself - a real chinese meal has several contrasting dishes served together.…

The Ghouls of Wall Street

Just when I thought that after six years of Little Lord Pontchartrain, I just couldn't be shocked anymore, I find a heart warming story of profiting from the Sept. 11 Massacres. By way of The Big Picture comes this Wall Street Journal report (italics mine): On Sept. 21, 2001, rescuers dug through the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Across town, families buried two firefighters found a week earlier. At Fort Drum, on the edge of New York's Adirondacks, soldiers readied for deployment halfway across the world. Boards of directors of scores of American companies were also busy that…

The anthrax drug boondoggle

And I thought my prescription drugs were expensive. The US government has just announced it was exercising its option to buy 20,000 treatment courses of ABthrax (raxibacumab) from Human Genome Sciences. That's $8250 a pop. It will go into the Strategic National Stockpile. This drug is for inhalational anthrax, a disease practically no one in the world ever gets. Its only use would be the consequence of a massive bioterrorism attack. It is a monoclonal antibody directed against the anthrax organism's protective antigen, the protein that grabs onto the cell and forms a channel allowing another…

Murray cares about the chickens, the workers? Not so much

Earlier this month a federal judge upheld citations issued by OSHA to Murray’s Chicken. The company, located 100 miles north of New York City, was cited by OSHA in June 2012 for repeat and serious violations of worker safety regulations. Among others, Murray’s Chicken failed to provide information and train its workers on the hazardous chemicals used in the plant to disinfect the chicken carcasses. OSHA inspectors found that workers in the “kill, evisceration and other poultry processing areas” were routinely exposed to bleach and Perasafe, an antimicrobial agent containing peracetic acid,…

What Is In Your Seed Order?

Buying seeds here is not a quick process. First there's the perusal of all the seed catalogs, the dreaming and fantasizing with my garden porn. Then there's the marking of all the things I'd like to try this year, which would get me a seed order about 4 times bigger than I could possibly plant, even on my farm. Then there is the actual ordering, and the occasional banging against reality, like the fact that I waited too long to get that variety or this one. I'm winding up the process now, and starting to get to open the boxes of seeds. For those of you who have ordered or at least…

The Changing Fortunes of a Labour Monument

Vår Gård in Saltsjöbaden is a conference venue and training centre whose history illustrates political trends in Sweden over the past century and more. 1892. The Thiel brothers, two of Sweden's wealthiest art patrons, buy a property by the sea in the new fashionable resort of Saltsjöbaden and build two luxurious summer mansions. They name the place Vår Gård, “Our Farmstead”. 1899. The Swedish Cooperative Union is founded. 1924. The Cooperative Union buys Vår Gård and adds a number of buildings to the property to house its new training centre and its art collection. 1932. Sweden's first Labour…

The aggravation of Trek

Ars Technica has an article on bad science in entertainment, with a list of items that were particularly annoying: Any time Star Trek tried to do biology. They may have been awful with all the other areas of science, but I'm a biologist, and I know they were awful with this. Note to film and TV producers: science grad students work for peanuts. Buy one. Quixote follows through with a specific example: Take an example from an episode of Star Trek- The Next Generation. There's a big disaster as everyone evolves backward into insects (small problem right there…) and Beverly Crusher is saying…

Gun Ownership is Way Down in the US

Gun ownership rates in the US have been declining in recent decades. The National Rifle Association has started to produce denialist rhetoric to obscure this well documented fact. One of the reasons there is less gun ownership is because of changes in the demography of the US population; Angry white men whose recent ancestors were angry white men are declining in numbers and less paranoid and less violent browninsh people often with recent ancestors from other, non gun-happy countries are becoming more common. You've heard about the rush to buy guns that happens every time Obama mentions…

New Teaching Evaluation Study

Inside Higher Ed, in their "Quick Takes" points to a new study of teaching evaluations that they summarize thusly: Students care more about teaching quality than professorial rank when evaluating professors, and professors who receive good evaluations from one group of students typically continue to do so in the future, and to have students who earn better grades than those in other courses, according to new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research. None of that sounds all that shocking, and the abstract of the paper itself doesn't add much more detail. The key sentences would…

At least it's not more lead...

My wife just reminded me that PharmKid wanted us to buy her Aqua Dots a week or two ago. The WSJ Health Blog nicely summarizes a New York Times article on the recall of the toy beads because their ingestion releases the CNS suppressant, GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), from a precursor present in the bead adhesive. Yes, the product was manufactured in China, but it was distributed by a company in Toronto. A recall has been ordered by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. The NYT article by Keith Bradsher has a great angle on how a scientist identified the GHB and GHB precursor after a case…

Why does it cost so F'ing much to live in NY?

I live in Manhattan, and it has always been a source of fascination how prices got so exorbidant. While I am somewhat protected from market forces -- I live in school-subsidized housing -- even with the help I have a room only slightly wider than my mattress and a shower just about big enough to stand sideways in. Anyway, Free Exchange had this great post on why is so ridiculous here in Manhattan: The problem, after all, is just as pronounced in New York's the rental market. The current vacancy rate for apartments in Manhattan is less than 1%. Rents of several thousand dollars a month for…

The Genesis II Spacecraft & Its Intrepid Arthronauts

Late last month the Genesis II Pathfinder spacecraft was delivered into orbit and along with it went a bold group of unwitting arthropods. Bigelow Aerospace was founded in 1999 with the vision of creating orbital hotels for "space tourists." In an equally lucrative move, this Space Camp for bugs was conceived by Robert Bigelow, the company's founder and namesake, while on vacation. In the middle of last year, he called his payload team into a room and showed them five dirt-filled containers. Inside each one was an entire colony of ants that he had coaxed, prodded and pried from the ground…

Davy Mooney Hits It Big; Profiled in New Orleans Times Picayune

My brother Davy, a talented young jazz guitarist, is the subject of a lengthy profile in today's edition of the New Orleans Times Picayune. The occasion? He got through a grueling competition and so became the first of seven students admitted into the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance's 2007 class at Loyola University, which has just been established. Here's an excerpt from the article, outlining my brother's story: By the summer of 2005, he had graduated from UNO and settled into a comfortable life as a working musician, performing at least five nights a week. He and his wife…

Does TV advertising work?

KC Buzz Blog asks the question, having observed: Claire McCaskill and Jim Talent will probably spend $18 million, combined, on TV before Tuesday -- yet their race is roughly where it was a year ago. Nancy Boyda, by contrast, hasn't spent a lot on TV -- but has pulled close to Rep. Jim Ryun in Kansas 02. Perhaps some of the cognitive scientists here at Sb will take up this answer from an academic perspective, but I've put some specific comments on those two races below the fold. Two things make a difference here. First, Claire McCaskill just finished running for Governor and holds statewide…

Mallard Rape

Reposted from the old TfK. Over at Death's Door, there is a certain degree of consternation about the possibility that mallard ducks would be gang raping each other. There is a bunch of confusion wrapped around that so let's start slow. I also wasn't aware that duck's had duck cocks to gangbang with. I never eaten a duck but I've eaten a lot of chicken, and when you buy the chicken in the store and pull out that little pouch of giblets and shit, I've never seen a tiny chicken cock sittin off in there. So, what do duck dicks look like, and why don't you see genitalia in chickens from the store…

Thinking, Feeling and the Cognitive Revolution

I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section today on the cognitive revolution, and recent research demonstrating the relationship between cognition and emotion. Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel. "Because we subscribed to this…

Text of Remarks on "Re-Imagining University Science Media"

Tomorrow morning at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, I will be addressing the annual conference of the University Research Magazine Association. I have pasted the text of my prepared remarks below with relevant links embedded. I will post a follow up on Friday highlighting questions, comments, and reactions. Readers are strongly encouraged to weigh in with their own reactions. As professional science communicators and journalists, you are living in an era of convergence between two major trends in society. The first trend is a dominant focus of this conference: Technology, audience…

America's Electrical Monster: Weekly Hiroshima-sized Bombs?

"An explosive power the size of a Hiroshima bomb - once a week." Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Like most Americans, I would love to be able to drive without having to fill up with increasingly expensive gas - costly not only to our wallets, but to the environment and to geopolitics. Why not switch to a hybrid vehicle or even better, an electrical vehicle? Wouldn't an electrical vehicle offer a better, cleaner approach? I imagine parking my new electrical vehicle in the garage, plugging it in overnight to recharge for a new day, unfettered by gas and oil, sleeping soundly. If only it could be so…

Around the Web: Patent system as a threat to innovation, Google Master of the Universe, The status of science and more

The Patent System Is The World's Biggest Threat To Innovation Today How Google Dominates Us The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves Resilience vs. Sustainability: The Future of Libraries Getting first sale wrong College Students: The Gadget Generation Our kids' glorious new age of distraction Study this: E-Textbook readers compared Academic E-books and their Role in the Emerging Scholarly Communications Landscape "Librarians" -- An Endangered Species? What Students Don't Know The Library, it's academic Why it matters how faculty view librarians Three Reasons We Struggle…

Around the Web: Transliteracy & Libraries (or not), Loving the iPad, Scholarly Googlebombing and more

Commensurable Nonsense (Transliteracy) and Why Transliteracy? Bobbi's Two Cents (or less) http://arielneff.com/personal/weighing-in-on-the-ipad/ Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar's Resilience Against it Kno Tablets Shipping To Select Faculty and Students Publishers take note: the iPad is altering the very concept of a 'book' Research intelligence - Rip it up and start again A Curricular Innovation, Examined Scientific accuracy in art The line between science and journalism is getting blurry....again Some Lessons From Our Reactions to Wikileaks Mark Waid on Delivery, Content, and…

Around the Apocalyptic Web: Why thinkpieces on STEM education are dangerous and more

Why America’s obsession with STEM education is dangerous Science Is Essentially Human; Or Why Better STEM Education Isn't A Threat Why thinkpieces on STEM education are dangerous STEM and the "Liberal Education" STEM Education Promotes Critical Thinking and Creativity: A Response to Fareed Zakaria Pearson admits to monitoring students' social media use during its online tests The church of TED Learning My Lesson: Marina Warner on the disfiguring of higher education The College Amenities Arms Race The customer isn't right when it comes to higher education Marketing Lessons From Sweet Briar…

ScienceBlogs Is Getting Some Beauty Rest

If you've been running into time-outs and submission errors while commenting lately, you're not alone—our system has been suffering some growing pains and it's time for a network-wide rehaul of sorts. Tonight we'll be transferring over to shiny new servers, and we hope that this will make things run more smoothly for everyone. To make this transition, however, we'll need to shut down the system overnight, and we've asked our bloggers to refrain from posting as well. Starting at 7:00 pm EST, commenting will be disabled. It should be back when the system resumes running tomorrow morning. We…

So...Who Won?

For two weeks I posted about the Spirit of Innovation Conrad awards and all of the cool stuff that these students were inventing. I urged all you, dear readers, to go vote for the people's choice award. Maybe you are now asking yourself: Well...who won? The following recipients were announced to be the 2010 Pete Conrad Scholars: Falcon Robotics (aerospace), Green MAST (green schools), ACWa (renewable energy) and AM Rocks (space nutrition). And the the People's Choice Award was bestowed on the team with the largest percentage of votes cast during the online, public voting period. The top vote…

College Major

What should you study in college? I think I gave this on-line quiz a run for its money, as you will see from my scores (below the fold). Did you earn a different major than the one the quiz diagnosed for you? If so, what was the major you did get and the major the quiz says you should get? What did you think of the questions they used to determine your major? I think this is a fairly decent quiz, all things considered. You scored as Biology. You should be a Biology major! You are passionate about the sciences, and you enjoy studying cell growth and evolutionary concepts which enable…

Golf Gear?

John McCain's website is puzzling: The "Decision Center" shows a four tab banner: Decision Center General Election Obama & Iraq Golf Gear It really is a link to on-line sales of "McCain Golf Gear" It is still there, eight hours after TPM noted it. Strangely the John McCain Store, linked to from the top bar, does not appear to have the Golf Gear. Even more interestingly, the style set at the top of McCain's web site is Skins/Black and Skins/Black2. subliminal. Source code for the Barack Obama web site is much cleaner, very nicely structured. h/t deLong Since I'm there: McCain has…

Fornvännen's Summer Issue On-Line

Fornvännen 2013:2, last summer's issue, is now on-line in its entirety on Open Access. My friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell on the Stockholm area's earliest post-glacial settlement site, covered here on Aard during fieldwork in 2010. Tony Björk and Ylva Wickberg on an early-1st millennium linear monument related to a cemetery and a river ford in Scania. Svante Fischer et al. on how mid-1st millennium sword fittings were re-used and deposited. Magnus Green on a 17th century angel on the run from its job as embellishment on a nobleman's sarcophagus. Olov Gibson on the unresolved…

I keep telling them that I have a voice and face for blogging

It's a bit of a switch from doing the Minnesota Atheists radio show last Sunday to what I'll be doing on Thursday: I'll be on the Jeff and Lee Christian talk radio program (they told me 4pm, but their schedule says 3; somewhere around there, anyway). Their guest is Geoffrey Simmons, and I'm supposed to "debate" him — he gets 5 minutes to present the evidence for ID, then I get 5 minutes to present the evidence for evolution, and then follows a 50 minute free-for-all. I already told them the format wasn't fair. I need weeks of air time just to summarize the evidence for evolution, while…

Anthro Blog Carnival

The thirty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Archaeology and anthropology, and this time dealing exclusively with koryÅ«. Explains Wikipedia: "KoryÅ« is a general term for Japanese schools of martial arts that predate the Meiji Restoration (the period from 1866 to 1869 which sparked major socio-political changes and led to the modernization of Japan). While there is no 'official' cutoff date, the dates most commonly used are either 1868, the first year of the Meiji period, or 1876, when the HaitÅrei edict banning the wearing of swords was pronounced." The next…

Jenny-Rita Næss Honoured On-Line

Around the time when a senior academic retires, she will, if she's lucky, receive a Festschrift. The word is German and means "celebration publication": typically, it's an anthology put together by her colleagues and students. The contents of a Festschrift often vary wildly in quality and level of ambition: solid research papers occur alongside humorous reminiscences of travels and travails endured while the august old professor was still a lanky undergrad. Now, here's something unusual from Norway: archaeologist Jenny-Rita Næss's Festschrift is being published as a web site. So far, seven…