Search Content

Displaying results 3951 - 4000 of 87947

Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards

This man, if you didn't already know, is a musical genius, and in just under a month he releases Orphans, a three disk compilation of unreleased material. Already available online is the seven minute ditty "Road to Peace," Waits' take on the Middle East and the current administration.

Some Sunday Reading

I have just been notified that the Spring edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review will feature articles on evolution and ID by Niles Eldredge, Michael Ruse, Thomas Eisner, Robert M. Sapolsky and David Quammen. To celebrate Darwin Day, the Review has put Eldredge's essay online.

Old-school medical wonders, from London Museum

Below, the "jugum penis," designed to prevent "nocturnal lincontinence" (aka masturbation). One of many wonders in a new London Science Museum online exhibit of historical medical objects called "Brought to Life," as featured in this New Scientist photo essay. Don't try these at home.

Projectile Motion with a Spreadsheet

Basically, the title says it all. Here is a short tutorial on projectile motion calculations with a spreadsheet. Record your screencast online I left out a lot of details, so maybe these links will help: Spreadsheet tutorial for numerical calculations (video) More details on numerical calculations Projectile motion

Yet Another E. Coli Outbreak. Yet Another Regulatory Failure.

By David Michaels This morningâs AP wire brings news of yet another E. Coli outbreak, this one resulting in 14 hospitalizations (so far) among customers of a âTaco Johnâsâ restaurant in Cedar Falls, Iowa. This follows the Taco Bell E. Coli outbreak, with more than 60 cases in 5 states. Which followed the spinach E. Coli outbreak that sickened 200 people. The FDA may be doing a terrific job investigating each of these outbreaks, but has failed in its primary mission: to prevent the outbreaks in the first place. The FDA is suffering from the effects of being part of a government that no longer…

Lazowska on the politicization of science and our uninspiring educational system

This is an excellent brief overview of the crucial problems in American education by Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Washington who also served on an advisory committee under GW Bush. From his first hand view, he does not seem kindly disposed towards Republican policies in science. Presidential scientific advisory committees have been politicized. I have seen this firsthand. The general denigration of science emanating from the White House, and the near completee failure of the President's Science Advisor, Jack Marburger, to speak out, is poisonous. Right…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Antony Williams

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Antony Williams from ChemSpider to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (…

Periodic Table of the ScienceBlogs, Part 2: Blogs A-C

The Periodic Table of the ScienceBlogs rolls on, with a brief description of every blog in the system. Use it to find your new favorite. A Blog Around the Clock Categories: Brain & Behavior, Biology Bora Zivkovic, better known online as 'Coturnix,' created A Blog Around the Clock as a fusion of his three old blogs: Science and Politics, Circadiana, and The Magic School Bus. Bora was born in the former Yugoslavia, where he trained horses, got his black belt in karate, and studied veterinary medicine. In 1991, he emigrated to the USA, settling in North Carolina and earning an MS degree in…

AIP Syllabus and a Quick Request

Just a reminder, my last Adapting-In-Place class for the forseeable future begins on Tuesday - here's the syllabus if you are interested in joining us. Week 1 - How to evaluate what you have. We're going to concentrate on figuring out what the major concerns are for your place and your community. We'll talk about your region and its climate, culture and resources, your house itself, your community and neighborhood - the challenges you forsee and maybe ones you haven't thought about yet, and your personal circumstances - how much money, time and energy you have to deal with it. How does…

ScienceOnline'09 - introducing the participants 8

Let's highlight some more of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference: Dixie-Ann Sawin is a Research Fellow in the Neurotoxicology Group at NIEHS. Amy Sayle is the Educator in the Adult Programs at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill, NC. Scicurious is a graduate student in Physiology and Pharmacology and my SciBling, on Neurotopia (v.2.0). She will co-moderate the session on the Web and the History of Science. Sciencewoman is, well, my SciBling and a Sciencewoman. Allison Scripa is a Science Librarian at Virginia Tech. Megan Scudellari is a freelance…

Hindawi Responds

Paul Peters, Hindawi Publishing The Scholarly Open Access web site says that Open Access journal house Hindawi Publishing may show some predatory characteristics. I've simply called Hindawi "dodgy". Their Chief Strategy Officer Paul Peters commented here on the blog and then swiftly replied to some questions of mine, showing that the firm realises that its on-line reputation is important to success. Here's what Mr. Peters says. MR: Why did Hindawi's Journal of Archaeology go on-line months before it had any papers? This is generally the case for all new journals that we launch, and I…

On the Need for "Short Story Club"

So, the Hugo awards were handed out a little while ago, with half of the prose fiction categories going to "No Award" and the other half to works I voted below "No Award." Whee. I'm not really interested in rehashing the controversy, though I will note that Abigail Nussbaum's take is probably the one I most agree with. With the release of the nominating stats, a number of people released "what might've been" ballots, stripping out the slate nominees-- Tobias Buckell's was the first I saw, so I'll link that. I saw a lot of people exclaiming over how awesome that would've been, and found myself…

Intro to ERVs: Why EVERYONE should care about ERVs!

I wasnt going to talk about this until later, but a commenter/troll left a comment on my last post: Umm, Do retroviruses have any clinical relevance whatsoever? Top ten killers in USA per CDC: Heart disease: 652,091 Cancer: 559,312 Stroke: 143,579 Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 130,933 Accidents: 117,809 Diabetes: 75,119 Alzheimer's disease: 71,599 Influenza/Pneumonia: 63,001 Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 43,901 Septicemia: 34,136 Do you see any retroviruses on this list? Do you now understand why you toil away at 10 bucks/hour? Your work has not an iota of relevance to…

Links for 2009-10-02

Physics Buzz: Space invaders: cosmic rays arrive for their 100th birthday "Cosmic rays constantly bombard earth's atmosphere at a rate of about 100 per square meter per second, but they don't make it through intact. They collide with atmospheric molecules, setting of a cascading shower of secondary particles, such as neutrinos and muons. Researchers probably wish there was less stuff between us and them; because they're messengers from the deep, so to speak, they could offer clues to black holes and supernova. But most of what eventually reaches the ground is very low in energy; above the…

National Academies to Host Seminar on Science Communication

Readers in the DC area will definitely want to check out the upcoming event on June 23 at the National Academies. Details are posted below. I hope to be able to attend and to report back on some collected remarks. It will be interesting to compare the thoughts of the assembled practitioners with the conclusions from the article we published last week at Nature Biotechnology, which synthesized relevant research in the fields of science communication, ethics, and policy and highlighted eight key recommendations. The National Academies Presents: An Educational Event on Science Communication The…

The (Wrong) Reason For Everything

There is a nice piece in The New Republic (Jan 16th, unfortunately not online) titled "A Reason For Everything" in which Alan Wolfe reviews Rodney Stark's book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random, 2005; Amazon). Stark is a sociologist (rather than an historian) at Baylor University, and has previously written such works as For The Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton, 2003; Amazon), One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton, 2001; Amazon) and…

Yes it is true, you can now make your own stem cells

Today three papers came out, two in Nature, and one in the inaugural edition of Cell Stem Cell, that basically confirm the results from last year's landmark manuscript by Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka (for details on this paper, see this post). Just to remind you, in that original publication Takahashi and Yamanaka describe how they reprogrammed connective tissue cells (called a fibroblasts) into stem cell like entities, by introducing four active genes (Oct3/4, Klf4, Sox2 and c-Myc). The resulting iPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) could differentiate into any number of…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Andrea Novicki

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Andrea Novicki from the Duke CIT 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? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your…

Good Writing Needs Editing

Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I've been re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they're great sickbed reading. Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are of, shall we say, variable quality, and riddled with typos, including one hilarious bit in which Rand is pursued by "Trollops." It's a little like reading the Wheel of Time as written by Matthew Yglesias. As a result, the re-read is also serving as a nice reminder…

Some Sunday Links

Here's some good links from the weekend. First, the sciency stuff: Radiolytically produced hydrogen gas powers subsurface microbial ecosystems. Coturnix links to three good posts about antibiotics In light of the discussion by my fellow ScienceBloglings about the state of scientific journalism, it's interesting to see what Cent Uygur thinks is wrong with political reporting (hint: it's not the reporters, it's the editors). When it comes to vaccination breakthroughs, read the fine print. From our own Benevolent Seed Overlords, an article about another fish/amphibian transitional fossil.…

Do You Read News About Science at Least Once per Week (poll)?

TheTimes Online had a poll on one of their blogs last month, asking their readers if science in their free time is a 'guy-thing'? Who is reading their blog? So I thought I'd also write a poll asking something similar. The poll (below the jump) was written quickly, but with the intention of gathering as much data as possible from answers to that one question (If you check their poll and mine, you'll find the data I am collecting is somewhat different from theirs). I am going to let the poll run for one month and will summarize the answers at the end. I admit that I am as curious as you are…

80% of US Electricity from "Clean" Sources by 2035?

The good news is that everyone was more or less happy about Obama's stated energy policy last night. The Republicans were happy because Obama was talking about a "clean standard" which actually means "let's burn fossil fuels in a barely less harmful way" - ie, let's switch some dirty coal to natural gas, and pretend that "clean" coal is a reality, and that nuclear plants will come online rapidly and without massive subsidies. The Democrats were happy because some Republicans might tolerate a "clean energy" standard that takes emphasis off solar and wind. And everyone was happy because we'…

ScienceOnline'09 - be a sponsor

Are you or your company/organization in a position to sponsor the conference? It is organized and run by volunteers, registration is free, but putting this together still takes some money and effort. For this, we rely on our sponsors and volunteers. There are several ways that you can sponsor the event: Provide a grant Cash grants provide us funds to pay for discussion leaders' travel and lodging, travel grants for students, tote bags and t-shirts (see below), wifi tech support, meals and refreshments, meeting supplies and more. Publicity Display ads placed in your magazine or newsletter,…

If you thought that OA-evangelism is an intellectual game - think again!

Yes, I know, Gavin is a dear colleague and a friend, but his latest article, Excluding the poor from accessing biomedical literature: A rights violation that impedes global health, is just brilliant. A must-read for all concerned with healthcare, medical information and OA publishing: In this article, I take a rights-based view of this current crisis of restricted access to the results of scientific and medical research. Such research is conducted in the interests of the public, and yet the results are largely kept out of the public domain by traditional corporate publishers who own them,…

Student Science Blogging, Part II

A few days ago I wrote about the Zoo School in Asheboro, NC. It is even better than I thought - I got in touch with their lead teacher and she told me that all of their students have laptops in the classroom with wireless access. Their classrooms also have Smartboards and other cool technology. And they are very interested in their students utilizing the Web in a variety of ways, including blogging. And obviously, some of them already are, as one of the students discovered the post on her own and posted this comment that I want to promote to the front page: I am a Senior at the North…

Weekly News Roundups

I would like to introduce to Scienceblogs a feature from the old Illconsidered site, the weekly "A week of GW News" posts. These posts are an accumulation of all the important global warming related news, science and blog content posted online in the preceeding week. I will post it at the beginning of each week, hopefully Sunday or Monday. This weekly post is a monumental feat but I wish to strongly emphasize that it is not a feat of mine! I do a very small amount of html massaging to get it into the blogging software but the lion's share of the credit for this service goes to H. E. Taylor…

Buckled Roads, Broken Buoys, and Doomed Satellites

Two related things came across my desk this morning that should concern anyone who sees climate change as an important issue. In Germany, the roads are buckling and breaking because of excessive heat, and there seems to be inadequate funding to re-engineer them. Here's a photograph from Spiegel Online of what happens when the rubber meets the road (where the rubber is global warming): "Crack on the A93 at Abensberg: Here the pad burst through the intense heat, a motorcyclist built so a fatal accident." (google translated) Meanwhile, over at The Guardian, John Abraham has a post describing…

Purse Torment Tavern

Dear Reader Dveej asked me to write some more about the Purse Torment Tavern south of Stockholm. Its name is Pungpinan which is pretty funny, as pung doesn't just mean purse or pouch, but in modern Swedish more commonly scrotum. The name might thus be translated "Purse Torment" or "Pain in the Ball Sack", or even "Scrotum Torture". (Boy am I gonna get hits from the S/M porn surfers now.) The heyday of the Purse Torment Tavern lasted from about 1670 to 1805. This was back in the era of horse-drawn carriages, when Sweden was covered by a dense grid of rest stops where you could change horses…

The most daunting numbers I've seen yet

This week's Nature has a horribly depressing article. If you're a graduate student, don't read any further. Really, stop. I hate to see young biologists cry. NSF data show that the number of students in US graduate programmes in the biological sciences has increased steadily since 1966. In 2005, around 7,000 graduates earned a doctorate. But the number of biomedical PhDs with academic tenure has remained steady since 1981, at just over 20,000. During that period the percentage of US biomedical PhDs with tenure or tenure-track jobs dropped from nearly 45% to just below 30%. 7,000 students per…

Can We Hit It and Quit?

We're back in town, and I'll schedule some science stuff for later today, but first I want to take a moment to note the passing of the hardest working man in show business. Much as we'd like to see him shake the cape off and run back to the mike one more time, James Brown is dead. It's difficult to overstate Brown's importance for modern music, though every media outlet in the country is going to give it a shot this week. He's probably more important than Elvis, though it'd be a near thing. He more or less invented the sound that became the basis of modern soul, hip-hop, and rap, and whether…

Kickin' Back

Made it home Friday evening after another bout of airline nonsense-- they had replaced the plane for my flight into Albany with a smaller aircraft, so my email boarding pass assigned me to a nonexistent seat. Which had been corrected in their computer, but was never communicated to me, or to several other passengers who found themselves holding boarding passes from online that had the same seat assignments as passengers who had printed them at the airport. To be fair to Delta, this was the only glitch out of four flights, but it was a doozy. Anyway, DAMOP was a lot of fun, but exhausting. So…

Will somebody please write a decent, university-level beekeeping textbook?

Time for a little rant. I've been assembling the syllabus for a summer beekeeping course here at the University of Illinois- the first time we've offered beekeeping as a regular class in over 30 years- and I've run into an annoying snag: the lack of a suitable textbook. There's no shortage of books about bees. From The Beekeeper's Handbook to Beekeeping for Dummies, hundreds of volumes have been penned for the starting hobbyist. Others are works of literary art, like Sue Hubbell's musings in A Book of Bees. The internet hosts online forums and thousands of how-to beekeeping videos. Many of…

For international ScienceOnline2010 travelers arriving at RDU: "Nobody was griping"

In the light of the Northwest Airlines "pantsbomber" episode and America's penchant for quick but poorly-thought out theatrical responses to such incidents, some international colleagues planning to attend ScienceOnline2010 have expressed some concern about the hassles they might encounter flying into our beloved burg in two weeks. Preliminary accounts from the RDU International Airport suggest, however, that our local TSA and customs officials have maintained reason and restraint while also keeping travelers as safe as possible: Paul Beach, an Air Force communications officer who flew into…

The case of the disappearing New Scientist essay on creationist code words

A couple of weeks ago, New Scientist published an insightful but hardly controversial little essay on the challenges a science book editor faces when she has to deal with creationist literature. Amanda Geftner's piece, "How to spot a hidden religious agenda" disappeared from the magazine's website last week (Of course, it's still available elsewhere, like here.) As of this morning, if you try to find it at the New Scientist site, you get a message from the editors: New Scientist has received a legal complaint about the contents of this story. At the advice of our lawyer it has temporarily…

Round-up: Dinos on display, soldiers at play, stereotypes at work, pharma ghosts, Iraqi snakes

Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables: Carl Zimmer, who clearly doesn't sleep, writes up a nice post about a Nature paper announcing Limusaurus, a newly discovered fossil that is, Zimmer notes, is "not -- I repeat NOT -- the missing link between anything"-- but nevertheless sheds some light on how dinos may have turned into birds (more or less). Bonus: Great pictures of Carl holding up three fingers. Ed Yong, who seems to be drinking the same strength coffee as Carl Zimmer lately, looks at an interesting correlation: Hidden…

Four Days to Go....Enter The 1st Annual CRASH THE INTERSECTION Contest

We have now gotten some good entries, but we still need more to make a completely, er, informed decision...and we're afraid some real Picassos out there are still holding back. So with just days left, Sheril and I want to remind everyone one last time about the The 1st Annual CRASH THE INTERSECTION Contest! Design an "Intersection" banner and have your art displayed atop our blog for at least one year where the world can be dazzled by your creativity and wit! That's thousands of views a day all credited to you! We like to mix things up so there are no guidelines as long as it's not rated NC…

New York Times Reviews Storm World, Wants More "Thingamabobbercane"

The infamous "Thingamabobbercane" off the coast of Oregon last November. I'm excited to say that my book is reviewed today in the Sunday Times Book Review, available online here. I think it would be fair to call the review itself lukewarm (not quite warm enough for storm formation, let's say). The reviewer, Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation, seemed to want a repeat of The Republican War on Science. Most of the Times review attempts to recap the book, but because we don't blanch from it at the Intersection, here is the paragraph of criticism: Mooney has written a well-researched…

Tool-use in wild crows filmed for the first time

New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) have remarkable tool-using abilities that are at least as sophisticated as those of chimpanzees, if not more so. To date, however, such behaviours have only been observed in contrived experimental conditions. Using newly-developed miniuatrized animal-borne video cameras, researchers have now filmed wild crows using tools. The footage they have obtained is the first to show the use of tools by crows in their natural habitat. Used in combination with conventional radio telemetry, the tail-mounted cameras provided the researchers with detailed…

Biosphere in decay

BldgBlog has a great post featuring Noah Sheldon's photographs of the decaying, abandoned Biosphere 2. From BldgBlog: "The structure was billed as the first large habitat for humans that would live and breathe on its own, as cut off from the earth as a spaceship," the New York Times wrote back in 1992, but the project was a near-instant failure. Scientists ridiculed it. Members of the support team resigned, charging publicly that the enterprise was awash in deception. And even some crew members living under the glass domes, gaunt after considerable loss of weight, tempers flaring, this…

New Sciblings, Book Club, and More

Lots of new things to tell you about. First, SB has reinvigorated the ScienceBlogs Book Club. The first book being discussed is "Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service" by Mark Pendergrast, who is participating in the book club himself, and already has a post up. Second, exciting news from SB headquarters: We here at ScienceBlogs are pleased to announce that beginning today, we will be helping to spark the next generation of research communications by introducing new blogs to our network from the world's top scientific institutions. The…

A Fungus Among Your Follicles

I think this is a great teachable moment: Scientists complete genome sequence of fungus responsible for dandruff, skin disorders from PhysOrg.com Scientists from P&G Beauty announced that they successfully sequenced the complete genome for Malassezia globosa (M. globosa), a naturally occurring fungus responsible for the onset of dandruff and other skin conditions in humans. Results of the genome sequencing are published in today's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [...] I mean, think about it. Kids in biology class have a hard time relating to size and…

Fame! (Article in Seed about Texas edition)

My article for Seed about what the new Texas standards mean for science education nationwide is now online! Check it out. Here's a taste: Given these stakes, my colleagues and I worked hard to influence the Texas School Board over the months of hearings, providing them with a statement signed by 54 scientific and educational societies opposing “any effort to undermine the teaching of biological evolution and related topics.” We worked with local activists to organize constituents and political honchos who educated board members about the importance of evolution to science education. But the…

HGDP Selection Browser

You know what the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) is implicitly, they're the list of populations you've seen in many human genetics papers already. Now the Pritchard lab has put up a nice browser to query the data in a manner analogous to Haplotter. One of the major improvements, aside from the fact that you're looking at 52 populations instead of 3, is that it uses GET to pass parameters instead of POST. That means I can link to the queries for KITLG and SLC24A5. Try it, it works! Under instructions it is laconically stated that: Search using a sequence name, gene name, locus, or…

Taboo, Sustainable Eating and Who We Are Not

Pha Lo has a wonderful piece at Salon on the ways that his family's history of locavorism was a source of shame and conflict for them, because it fit so badly into the American diet. He echoes a story I hear over and over again, both from immigrants and from Americans from traditional agricultural communities - we were embarassed about our diet, made ashamed or even punished for eating real food, told what we were eating was gross. He writes about his local, organic, sustainable diet: I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Victoria Stodden is a Postdoctoral Associate in Law and Kauffman Fellow in Law and Innovation at Yale Law School, a fellow with the Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School and a Fellow at Science Commons. She blogs and tweets. At the Conference, Victoria will lead the session on Legal Aspects of publishing, sharing and blogging…

Denialists' Deck of Cards: State and Federal Issues

Okay industry lobbyists in training, you've started just making up arguments to confuse everyone. That's a method of confusing issues. Now you should start confusing individuals' roles in the policy process. It's time to start playing government officials off each other. If you don't like what the federal government is doing, say that it is a state issue. Of course, if the states are active on the issue, you should argue that it is a federal issue, and that state action will create a "patchwork" of conflicting requirements. The "patchwork" argument is also an effective tool to…

Discover Your Summer in the Midwest

You know that I have a soft spot for Project Exploration (just see this for starters), so when Gabrielle Lyon asks me to spread the word about their activities, I am more than happy to oblige. Here is the announcement of their latest action - and you may be interested or know someone to forward this to who can find it useful: Are you running a science program for middle or high school students this summer in the Midwest? Project Exploration wants to know about it! Project Exploration is seeking Midwest programs to include in Discover Your Summer, a free resource guide of summer science…

Archaeology is Chocolate, not Potatoes

Back in February I posted snippets of an opinion piece I'd been asked to write about the current state and future prospects of Swedish archaeology. Now the thing has appeared on-line in Antiquity (behind a pay wall, but see below), though the journal's autumn issue has not reached subscribers on paper yet. For you nat-sci types, I should probably explain that Antiquity is my discipline's equivalent of Nature. So, getting to inaugurate a new recurring heading there, "Prospects", is something I'm very proud of. Archaeology should have a popular/populist slant designed to please tax-payers. We…

Going Broad with Terminator Salvation: Can McG Teach Us Something about Artificial Intelligence or Cyborgs?

So I scanned the reviews for director McG's Terminator Salvation at the Washington Post, New York Times, and New York Magazine, and it turns out not unexpectedly that in the words of my hometown Buffalo News' critic Jeff Simon that the film "is a remarkable looking piece of work. And you'll find gobs and gobs of action in it at least half of the time. Bullets fly, so do people. Things blow up and, yes the people do, too." But reading the reviews left me thinking: There's so much visual, so much wider audience engagement with a film like Terminator Salvation, that the underlying themes of…

Keeping Up with Michael Pollan

In the essay I wrote for the HSS Newsletter about blogging (here) I noted in passing that one virtue of the blog space was that it provided a place to store notes. It is an electronic version of note cards. This post is one example, a placeholder that I'll come back to. Let's hope. Pollan's Farmer-in-Chief essay in the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago brought together many of the points he's made in the past few years about the role of food and agricultural policy for environmental, political, and health outcomes. His overarching point: [M]ost of the problems our food system faces…