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More Incompetence....or Worse?

Several months ago there was a story on NBC that claimed that the Bush administration knew about Al Zarqawi's terrorist training camp in the Northern no-fly zone in Iraq long before the war started and that they and that they had decided not to take the camp out because it was more convenient to have a terrorist training camp in Iraq as a way of selling the war. Administration supporters, naturally, thought the story was absurd and just another example of that darn liberal media. Alas, it looks like it may be true. In this morning's Wall Street Journal (about the furthest thing from liberal…

A Prediction on Gay Marriage

Don M. sent me a link to the Discount Blogger and I came across this post on gay marriage, which includes the following statement: I wish conservatives would just understand that this is something they're going to be remembered for 50...100 years down the road. When gay people are allowed to marry and when we're raising healthy, productive families and are full members of society, we'll look back to the early part of this century and wonder how anyone could have done what conservatives tried to do. I agree completely, and was just saying this to Lynn last night. I don't think it will take…

More Dissembling from ID Advocates

This is a repost of a comment I left on The Panda's Thumb in a thread concerning Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost and the Leiter/VanDyke situation. Joe Carter wrote: "I dont really know since Im not a defender of ID theory but a defender of the idea that the theory should be given a chance. If it doesnt work, then fine, well move on." There are three problems with this claim. First, it's false. Anyone who goes to his blog archive labelled "intelligent design" can see that Joe IS a defender of ID. Second, if there is no model to test and no means of testing if it there was one - and Joe has…

Scalia Debates Strossen

Justice Scalia participated in a televised debate with Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU's board of directors, last night. The AP has a report about it, and there's one statement in it that caught my eye, and the eye of STACLU as well. Arguing that liberal judges in the past improperly established new political rights such as abortion, Scalia warned, "Someday, you're going to get a very conservative Supreme Court and regret that approach." Which prompted this response from Jay at STACLU: Bingo! Scalia slams them here. To put things in context, he said this after speaking about what he…

Weekend Diversion: Down the Ant Hole

"When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all." -E.O. Wilson Sure, there are entire worlds within our world that we never even give a second thought to. There's an entire subterranean Universe to explore, and you might get the feeling to do it if you listen to Mecca Bodega's rumbling sound, in Underground. But as soon as those tiny critters begin invading your house, the wonder goes right out the window. In fact, you probably haven't thought much about them in terms other than how-to-poison-them in a long time. Image credit: © 2013 Cool Exotic Pets. But as a…

The Academic Physics Job Market

In the neverending debates about the current state of physics-- see, for example, Bee's thoughtful post about The trouble With Physics, you will frequently hear it said that the academic job market in physics sucks. But what, exactly, does that mean in quantitative terms? It's job hunting season in academia now-- still a little early in the season, maybe, but most places that are looking to make a tenure-track hire are probably accepting applications already. So I did a little poking around the Physics Today job listings to see what the numbers look like. This is the central clearing house…

The Magazine Experiment: Analog, November 2007

At the recent Worldcon, there were several rounds of the usual Save the Magazines Chorus: short fiction is the lifeblood of the genre, it's where we get our new writers, etc. With the usual subtextual implication that I am a Bad Person because I don't read or subscribe to any SF magazines. (The most annoying version with a rant-by-proxy at the Hugo Awards. This bugged me all the more because the author in question didn't make the trip, and it really doesn't seem right to make somebody else deliver your mini-tirade about the state of the short fiction market. If you can't make the ceremony,…

Consider the vacuum (I)

While I'm sure there will be a lot of chatter around here in the next few weeks about the vacuum (or, God help me, vacua), I feel like I should lay the groundwork by talking about laboratory vacuum. I know I'm here to talk about cold atoms and the hot stuff going in in experimental physics right now, but I've spent a lot of time in the last couple days dealing with vacuum, and I want to tell you about it. If you want to do most sorts of atomic physics experiment, it's essential that you isolate what you're interested in studying (atoms) from stuff that will either knock those atoms away,…

Top of the Pops

Friday's a good day for silly pop music lists, so here's a couple adapted from a "meme" via Jamie Bowden: Go to http://popculturemadness.com and find the Greatest USA Hits of the year you turned 18. I refuse to spend a bunch of time dinking around with typefaces, and I'm not going to list all 75 of the songs they provide for each year, but if you'd like some insight into my formative pop culture experiences, here's the top 20 from the year I turned 18: 1. Love Shack - B-52's 2. Funky Cold Medina - Tone Loc 3. Bust A Move - Young MC 4. Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler 5. Like A Prayer…

Changing the Rules

Saturday's Georgetown- Ohio State game was hyped as featuring a clash of two seven-foot centers, but failed to live up to that billing, as Greg Oden picked up two quick fouls, and sat for most of the first half. Roy Hibbert of Georgetown didn't fare much better. This has prompted a bunch of pinhead commentators, most notably Dick Vitale and Billy Packer to start agitating for changes in the rules so that star players won't have to worry about foul trouble. Vitale wants to move to six fouls before disqualification, but he doesn't stop there. He thinks that you should be able to continue…

Guy Gavriel Kay, Ysabel [Library of Babel]

I read Guy Gavriel Kay's newest book, Ysabel a while ago, but I've been dithering about what to say in the booklog entry. I've been dithering long enough, in fact, that Kate beat me to it, so now I have to post something. Kay is best known for a set of very loosely connected pseudo-historical fantasy novels, which re-cast important bits of European history in fantasy worlds. My favorite of the lot is probably still Tigana, but the "Sarantine Mosaic," consisting of Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors is probably the most polished of the lot. For whatever reason-- he can't have run out of…

Charlie Huston, No Dominion [Library of Babel]

The last booklog post was about an author who made a name writing urban fantasy, who is trying to write in a different subgenre, so it seems somewhat appropriate to have this post be about an urban fantasy by an author who made a name writing something else. OK, Charlie Huston might object to having No Dominion called "urban fantasy," as that carries some connotation of woo, but the science babble underlying his explanation of vampires is so dopey, it might as well be magic. Huston made a splash with his dark and bloody noir series of crime novels featuring Henry Thompson (Caught Stealing,…

Kij Johnson, Fudoki [Library of Babel]

Kij Johnson's The Fox Woman, the story of a fox in Heian-era Japan who becomes a woman for the sake of love, was a beautiful and moving book, so, of course, I bought her next book, Fudoki immediately. And then, it took me three years to get around to reading it... There's no real good reason for the delay-- I just kept passing over it for other things. Now that I've finally got around to reading it, I wish I had read it sooner. It's another marvelous book, and richly deserved its World Fantasy Award nomination. Fudoki tells two stories. The first is the story of a cat who turns into a woman…

The Morning After

Some commentary on the night just past. This will be somewhat scattered, as I stayed up until 1 to hear Obama and read the celebratory postings at my favorite left-leaning blogs: -- As much as I believed what folks like Nate Silver were saying, I was still afraid that it would somehow all go wrong, and we'd be subjected to another four years of lunatic governance from the right, and lunatic conspiracy theorizing from the left. It's hard to express how happy I am to put all of the lunacy on one side of the political spectrum, the side that's out of power. -- I guess people aren't as down on…

Science21 Highlights: Inclusive and Exclusive Definitions

One full day of the Science in the 21st Century meeting wound up being devoted to what might be characterized as defining what we mean by Science. This started off with a talk by Harry Collins (microblogging, video), a sociologist of science who has done a great deal of work on the nature of expertise, then there was a remote presentation by Steve Fuller (no video, alas, but here's the microblogging), followed in the afternoon by Lee Smolin on "Science as an Ethical Community" (microblogging, video). The talks by Collins and Smolin have a high information density, but are well worth a look.…

What's the Difference Between Physics and Chemistry?

An off-line question from someone at Seed: Fundamentally, what is the difference between chemistry and physics? There are a bunch of different ways to try to explain the dividing lines between disciplines. My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based on what level of abstraction you work at. The question really has to do with what you consider the fundamental building block of the systems you study. At the most fundamental level, you have particle physics and high-energy nuclear physics, which sees everything in terms of quarks and leptons,…

Why I Can't Take Doctor Who Seriously

It was miserably swampy for most of the day today-- when it wasn't actually raining, it was so humid that you expects water to condense out of the air at any moment-- so I spent a while sitting on the couch watching tv with SteelyKid. The best kid-friendly option seemed to be an episode of the new Doctor Who on BBC America, which was pretty much a perfect distillation of why I can't take the show seriously, despite the rave reviews of many people I know. It's not just that every single episode introduces an alien menace that the Doctor knows all about already, either because it was featured…

My Wednesday at DAMOP

I was pretty sedentary on Wednesday, going to only two sessions, and staying for most of the talks in each. I spent most of the initial prize session getting my bearings in the conference areas, and talking to people I know from my NIST days. In the 10:30 block, I went to the session on Alkaline Earth Quantum Fluids and Quantum Computation. Tom Killian of Rice opened with a nice talk on work his group has done on trapping and Bose condensing several isotopes of strontium; somebody near me pooh-poohed it as just a technical talk on evaporative cooling issues, but I thought Tom did a nice job…

"Subtle Is the Lord..." by Abraham Pais

The APS now gives out an Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics, which gives you some idea of how influential his work was, in particular "Subtle Is the Lord..." The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, which won prizes and sits in a prominent position on the bookshelves of many physicists. Like a lot of influential works, though, it's kind of odd to read it much later than some of the works it has influenced. The ordering of the subtitle is very deliberate, and accurate. This is first and foremost a book about Einstein's science, with a biographical structure and occasional biographical…

Links for 2010-04-23

Don't ignore the Tea Party's toxic take on history. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine "And it suddenly occurred to me that Tea Partiers really should read this pamphlet, because it would teach them something about what "tyranny" is actually like. It would teach them something about what "communism" was really like. It would make them ashamed of themselves for whining about a health care bill turning America into a tyranny, for slandering liberals as communists who want to impose tyranny on them. It might snap them out of the intoxicated hysteria they whip themselves into. " (tags: history…

Classic Pielke

Nature magazine recently published a paper showing that Antarctica has actually been warming about .1oC/decade since the 1950's. It was the cover story: A new reconstruction of Antarctic surface temperature trends for 1957-2006, reported this week by Steig et al., suggests that overall the continent is warming by about 0.1 °C per decade. The cover illustrates the geographic extent of warming, with the 'hotspot' peninsula and West Antarctica shown red against the white ice-covered ocean. That the antarctic seemed to be slightly cooling despite elevated greenhouse gas levels has been a…

The problem with appeasement of creationists is ...

..that even when you try diligently to separate the politics of religion vs. creationism and to say again and again that religion can go along its merry way as long as it stays out of the science classroom, people like Casey Luskin will still find the words in your rhetoric to accuse you of attacking religion. Back in May, Genie Scott appeared with me and Lynn Fellman on Atheist Talk Radio, where we discussed science education. Genie is the director of the National Center for Science Education. In a recent posting on the Discovery Institute web site, Casey Luskin makes the contrast between…

Evolution vs. Creationism by Eugenie Scott, Second Edition

It's out! Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction Second Edition is now available on line and in bookstores (or at least it is being shipped out as we speak). This is the newly revamped edition of Genie Scott's essential reference supporting the Evolutionist Perspective in the so called "debate" over creationism vs. evolution. The original version of this book was excellent, but this updated version is essential. There is quite a bit of new information in this volume reflecting the fact that quite a few things have happened since the publication of the prior edition. Scott's book…

We now know what went wrong with the Large Hadron Collider

What went wrong was exactly the kind of thing that used to go wrong for me almost every time I tried to build something like the LHC in my secret laboratory when I was a kid. The electricity got the better of part of the machine and ... ZAP ... a bunch of parts got ruined. We now know, from a report dated two days ago and coming to light over the last 24 hours or so, the following: An electrical connection between two of the all-important magnets arced. Sort of like a fuse blowing, but it was not a fuse and was not supposed to blow. The arcing of the circuit was sufficiently strong to…

Michele Bachmann Meltdown: Jesus-Loving Frankie Vennes, Tom Petters, and Pardongate II?

Michele Bachmann Three born again Christians ... a member of the US Congress, the President of the United States, and a convicted felon now under investigation ... have been caught in a complex conspiracy involving money and a Presidential Pardon. At the very least, this is an excellent example of how religion distorts and corrupts personal and professional judgment, governance, and one's sense of justice. In 2008, Craig Howse contributed $3,000 to the Michele Bachmann campaign, in four installments. Howse is or was a lobbiest for Frank Vennes. Frank Vennes is a convicted felon who…

Technology News and Stuff

U can haz KDE 4.1 ~ Javascript ~ Would apple mess with your music? ~ When pseudonymous trolls get out of hand. If you want KDE 4.1 and you want it now, have a look at this guide to installing it on your LInux Ubuntu 8.04 box ahead of its appearance in the Ubuntu repository. For those who don't know what that means: A given distribution of LInux may use a particular method of installing software that in turn uses on line repositories. Individual software items may be added to this repository at the discretion of the maintainers of the distribution. Some distributions are fairly…

An Amusing Example of Scientific Thinking In Action

It's finals week around here. Over the last two days I have graded just over a thousand calculus problems (many of them, let's face it, not worked out properly). So let's unwind with lighter fare tonight. There are plenty of books and websites explaining the basics of scientific thinking. Riveting reading, certainly, but as a simple illustration of what's involved I've always liked the following piece of dialogue. It comes from Agatha Christie's novel Murder on the Links. This was the second Hercule Poirot novel (the first being The Mysterious Affair at Styles). It will help to know…

It Has Always Been Thus...

Today's reading is from Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943. Okay, just calm down. Yes, I know, she was crazy. She took some good ideas about freedom and indviduality and took them to absurd degrees. In her novels, characters say things to each other that no human beings have ever said to one another. All true. But she certainly had her moments! I started reading the novel on a whim, and I was surprised by how gripping and suspenseful I found the story. It's actually pretty hard to put down, as long as you don't mind that the action is occasionally interrupted so the…

WTF EFVs?? More endogenous non-retroviruses

One of the scary things about filoviruses (eg Ebola, Marburg)... is that we dont know where they comes from. We know how polio is transmitted. We know how HIV-1 is transmitted. We know how influenza is transmitted. We know how rabies is transmitted. Even if you dont have good vaccines or good therapies, if you know where a virus comes from or how it is transmitted, you can take steps to prevent illness. But filoviruses....? One hypothesis is that small mammals are the natural reservoir. A way to look for that would be to study the immunology of lots of small mammals-- Do they have…

Our vaccines are clean

I dunno if you guys know how good we have it today with vaccines. Let me try this analogy-- Lets say you want to bake some bread. You have a basic recipe, so you know you need flour, yeast, water, and you make some really basic bread. Except the bread that comes out of the oven is a loaf of cinnamon raisin walnut bread. So, youre happy, cause you got bread, and its good, but you dont know how the hell the cinnamon/raisins/walnuts got in there. Thats kinda how old-school vaccines worked. Scientist made a vaccine, it worked, yay!... but there was other stuff in that end batch they didnt…

Drug resistant prions via quasi-quasispecies. LOL.

I love it when a research paper makes me laugh. This paper makes me laugh. It is AWESOME!! Continuous Quinacrine Treatment Results in the Formation of Drug-Resistant Prions Okay, heres the deal: Prions cause disease by making 'normal' proteins fold wrong. When they fold wrong, they clump up together to form amyloid fibrils (wrote about this in the context of HIV-1 a while back). These amyloid fibrils are super stable. They build up and build up... and cause neuronal damage. Now, weve got drugs that work super to stop the formation of amyloid fibrils, thus prion progression, in tissue…

Rabies: Flushing viruses out of the forest

Like any curious pup, the second Arnie encounters hedging/bushes/shrubbery, his first instinct is to dive right in in the hopes of flushing out some yummy yummy bunnies/kittens/boars. Like any over-protective owner, I run after him screaming "GET OUTTA THERE YER GUNNA GET BITTEN BY A SNAKE!!!" Cause when you start poking your nose in places you arent supposed to be-- you dont always find yummy squirrels. Sometimes you flush out bad things... like rabies infected vampire bats. Thats exactly what logging/mining expeditions in Venezuela have done. Theyve displaced colonies of vampire bats...…

Maddow States it Plain

So far I'm really liking Rachel Maddow's new MSNBC show. She reminds me a lot of what Keith Olbermann used to be (and sometimes still is). On last night's edition she had a nice summary of precisely how pathetic the McCain campaign has been recently: See, saying “It's not fair the way I'm losing,” translates to the American people roughly as, “I'm a loser.” That's the dilemma facing Barack Obama's campaign right now, as the McCain campaign keeps lying over and over and over and over again. No, Sarah Palin did not say thanks but no thanks to that bridge to nowhere. People making $42,000…

The Vatican Eliminates Limbo

From the Catholic News Service: After several years of study, the Vatican's International Theological Commission said there are good reasons to hope that babies who die without being baptized go to heaven. In a document published April 20, the commission said the traditional concept of limbo -- as a place where unbaptized infants spend eternity but without communion with God -- seemed to reflect an “unduly restrictive view of salvation.” The church continues to teach that, because of original sin, baptism is the ordinary way of salvation for all people and urges parents to baptize infants,…

Summer for the Gods

I've just finished rereading Ed Larson's book Summer for the Gods. I first read this book in graduate school, before I had developed any serious interest in evolutionary biology. The book is about the Scopes' trial and its aftermath. As an account of the trial itself, it pales in comparison to L. Sprague de Camp's much better book, The Great Monkey Trial. But Larson does provide more historical context than Sprague de Camp. It is striking how many of the themes of the Scopes trial still have resonance today. Local control of school curricula vs. the establishment clause of the first…

Metaphors and Style

Two language-related items crossed in the Information Supercollider today: the first was Tom's commentary on an opinion piece by Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, the second Steven Pinker on the badness of academic writing. All of them are worth reading, and I only have small dissents to offer here. One is that, unlike Tom and Crease and Goldhaber, I'm actually just fine with the popular usage of "quantum leap" for a particularly dramatic change. Yes, I realize that the canonical "quantum jump" is the smallest possible change, but I think that's putting too much emphasis on only one aspect…

Annals of Condescension

As a way of easing our way back into regular blogging, let's take a quick look at what Michael Ruse has been up to. This was posted at HuffPo on October 28: Neither I nor the well-known philosopher Philip Kitcher believes in the existence of God or in the claims of the major (or minor) religions. I don't know how he would describe himself, but I say I am an agnostic or skeptic. In truth, when it comes to the basic claims of Christianity and the others, I am an atheist. Yet both Kitcher and I persist in trying to make a space for people who are religious, in the sense that we both want to…

Atheists Invited to Interfaith Breakfast

Here's an encouraging story: Ken Bronstein was excited to notify us of a great coup: six members of his organization, the New York City Atheists, attended Mayor Bloomberg's annual Interfaith Breakfast this weekend. It's believed to be the first time nonbelievers have been invited, as nonbelievers, to the event. We asked Bronstein why atheists would even want to attend an Interfaith Breakfast, seeing as they don't, in point of fact, have faith. “Oh, we have faith,” Bronstein told us. “Just not in God.” A spokesman from the Mayor's office confirmed that the Mayor had invited the guests as…

Inevitable Humans?

Jerry Coyne has a post up on the subject of whether a highly-intelligent, self-aware species is the inevitable end result of the evolutionary process. He begins: Over at that hilarious goldmine of accommodationism, Francis Collins's BioLogos website (generously supported by The Templeton Foundation), they have posted an answer to the question, “Did evolution have to result in human beings?” Now if you know anything about this history of faith/science accommodationism, you know that the answer has to be “yes”, at least if you construe the question to mean “Did evolution have to result in a…

Pope Ratzi: climate change denialist?

IRONY OVERLOAD! The pope opened his mouth again. Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology. You've got to wonder — does the pope think this is a good general rule, that we should use evidence rather than ideology to guide our lives, or is he only going to apply it selectively? There's also a subtle double-irony here, because global warming is an evidence-driven conclusion (there is no ideology that thinks major climate change is desirable),…

An Oral History of the Bush Administration

If you have some time this weekend, be sure to read this magnificent article from Vanity Fair. It presents excerpts from intervies conducted withhundreds of Bush administration officials and other politically important individuals, going through the entire eight years of the presidency. If a fiction writer devised a short story along these lines, no one would believe it. The article is quite long, so be certain you are in a comfy chair and have a nice beverage before starting. It's hard to capture the spirit of the article in just a few quotes, but here's a taste: February 14, 2002 The…

Kennedy and Nixon

One of the most remarkable things I've ever seen was the posthumous rehabilitation of Richard Nixon about fifteen years ago. Here was a man who resigned as President before Congress could throw him out, whose whole term in office was characterized by an all-consuming arrogance and a contempt for the law that wouldn't be matched for at least thirty years, and yet all the news-network obituaries somehow managed to airbrush that out, and talked about his greatness as a statesman, etc. It was bad enough that Hunter Thompson's over-the-top anti-eulogy was actually kind of refreshing. The only…

Why the Silent Majority Is Silent

Chris Mooney has found new digs, and, revitalized by the more congenial atmosphere, has been taking up the science vs. religion fight again. Yesterday, he had a post asking what can be done to get moderate scientists more involved in the argument over whether science and religion can coexist: At the same time, though, let's face it-in the science blogosphere, we don't hear a lot from the "silent majority." Rather, and admittedly with some important exceptions, we hear from the New Atheists. Yet I am arguing on behalf of the silent majority, and that is what keeps me going. So my question is…

Hurry Up and... Do What You Were Doing Already

As mentioned previously, I sprained my ankle last Thursday. Just to be safe, I went to the doctor on Friday, to make sure it wasn't anything worse. He poked it a little, sent me to get an x-ray, and gave me a prescription for crutches. The x-ray took a while, and the crutch prescription could apparently only be filled at a surgical supply store half an hour away, so I didn't bother. Saturday, it felt dramatically better, and Sunday it felt better by enough that I was able to take SteelyKid food shopping as usual, after strapping on one of the ankle braces I use playing basketball (having…

Links for 2010-10-18

The Trouble with Scientists | Speakeasy Science "Scientists won't talk to journalists; they don't want to waste their time "dumbing it down"; they don't see it as "making us smarter." So many of the good stories in science don't get covered at all. Or the stories get covered only for an already science-literate audience - explored in publications like Discover or Science News - rather than for that far larger group, the science disenfranchised. Last week's editorial by Royce Murray, the editor of Analytical Chemistry, "Science Blogs and Caveat Emptor" brought home the point that while the…

Zitterbewegung!

One of the few sad things about the recent American domination of physics (says the American physicist) is that new physical phenomena are now mostly given boring, prosaic American English names. Don't get me wrong, I like being able to pronounce and interpret new phenomena, but when the pre-WWII era of European dominance faded away, we lost those awesome German names. Like, for example, zitterbewegung, a word that just demands an exclamation point: Zitterbewegung! The phenomenon it describes, ironically, comes out of work by the great English physicist and odd duck Paul Dirac. Dirac's…

Links for 2010-01-07

slacktivist: Genie in a bottle "Saudi Arabia's laws against sorcery, it seems to me, are incompatible with its laws against heresy. The heresy laws are based on the idea that there is one and only one true religion. The sorcery laws are based on the idea that other religious beliefs may be powerfully true, but yet forbidden. The state cannot condemn a person for sorcery without thereby taking the official position that sorcery is true and real and powerful. And thus the state cannot enforce its own anti-sorcery law without itself violating its own anti-heresy law." (tags: religion…

A Statement of Fact Cannot Be Unconscionable

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean's been taking a beating over his negative comments on an atheist anti-Christmas sign. There's no small irony in this, given that Sean is a vocal atheist. His sentiments, which basically boil down to "it's good to promote atheism, but there's no need to be a dick about it" strike me as perfectly unobjectionable, but as he's learning first-hand, that's not enough for a lot of people on the Internet. The difference between an unjustly accused "accommodationist" like Sean and a real one like myself is here: The problem with accommodationism isn't that its adherents…

Feminine complaints and masculine emissions

Tild uncovers a real treasure: a book from the heyday of patent medicines, full of advice specifically for women, and loaded with testimonials for Dr Pierce's ‘prescription’. When you find out what was in the concoction, you'll understand why all the accompanying photos show women looking both cheery and glazed. The results were startling. Richardson’s Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters had 47.5 percent alcohol; Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, 44.3 percent; Boker’s Stomach Bitters, 42.6 percent; Parker’s Tonic, “purely vegetable,” 41.6 percent. Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound had relatively…

Links for 2009-09-29

YouTube - LittleDog Clips and Outtakes Very cool walking robot footage. (tags: robots video youtube technology gadgets science) Essay - Why Good Writers Can Be Bad Conversationalists - NYTimes.com "Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I'm writing. I don't claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I'm expressing opinions that I've never uttered in conversation and that…