Search Content

Displaying results 4951 - 5000 of 87947

Disinfecting keyboards

Fomites are inanimate objects that act as modes of transmission for infectious agents. You know. The doorknob or airplane armrest handled by someone who coughs on his hand or blows her nose. We know that some agents, like influenza viral particles, can remain viable (i.e., retain their ability to replicate in a host cell) for days or weeks. This doesn't automatically mean that fomites are an important mode of transmission, however. There is evidence those same viral particles lose their ability to replicate after only a few minutes on your hand. The apparent paradox is probably related to the…

It Comes Back to Food and Energy...Again

Stuart Staniford has a terrific piece that offers a little visual clarity about food, energy, unemployment and the Riots in the Middle East and North Africa: Tunisia is a minnow in the global oil market, Egypt slightly more important. Algeria, however, matters a lot as its oil production is probably close to total demonstrated OPEC spare capacity. Thus serious social instability in Algeria would have major effects on global oil prices. If instability spread to bigger oil producers than that (eg Kuwait or UAE), the effects could be very dramatic. Presumably, the regimes in those countries…

Music Mondays: David Gilmour on Chopping up Albums

Yes, that David Gilmour. Anyways, there was a post on Gilmour's blog a few months ago that provoked quite a little storm: Chopping up albums. Basically, the point Gilmour makes is that many albums are really meant to be listened to as a whole and shouldn't be split into individual tracks at record companies' whims. Read the whole thing to get the full sense of his argument, but I think the excerpt below gives a good sense: I'll go first: Blood on the Tracks' frenetic 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' by Bob Dylan. There, I said it. (Forgive me, Bob.) More often than not, it gives me an…

More DaveScot Stupidity

I know, that's hardly worth noting. But it's just amazing to watch someone be so completely disingenuous in making an argument. He can't be dense enough not to realize how weak the arguments are. In a new comment on the thread over at Larry's blog where he endorsed the bullying and intimidation of the children of the plaintiffs in Dover, he spews this crap too: Blaming the old school board for violating the law is hindsight. They didn't believe they were violating any laws and one lone district court judge's opinion is hardly the definitive word on whether or not they actually did violate the…

Dollars for Deniers: Big Oil Funds Climate Science Denialism

It has become increasingly difficult to understand the motivation behind climate science denialism. The Earth’s climate is changing, mainly in the form of increased temperatures of the oceans and the atmosphere, because of the release of copious amounts of previously trapped Carbon through the burning of fossil fuels. There is no longer a question that this is happening, and every year, the various details that one might like to see worked out, regarding the mechanisms or effects of climate change, are increasingly known. To state, with a straight face, that the jury is still out, or that we…

How wrong does Plimer have to be?

I had an open thread a couple of weeks ago about Ian Plimer's recent novel supposedly exposing the lie that is Anthropogenic Global Warming. I have not read it. A few commenter's defending the book asked how anyone can judge it if they have not read it. Well, no one can read every book that is out there, not even every book about global warming. We all have to choose. This of course introduces the possibility of bias confirmation. If I feel it in my gut that this particular book will be crap, I won't read it and I will assume I am right about it. But here's the thing, it is possible to…

Creationists and Deniers sittin in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

Creationists and HIV Deniers, gawd bless em. So like, remember a while back when Andy Schlafly, Creationist of Conservapedia wrote PNAS demanding raw data, reagents, etc from Richard Lenski? And if Lenski refused to deliver that stuff to Schlafly (and his crack team of home schooled children) for 'peer review', then PNAS should retract the paper and Evilution is a Lie? Well, HIV Deniers thought that was a friggen brilliant idea. Forty well respected HIV-1 researchers have gone and done the same thing, demanding Science retract a 24 year old paper of Robert Gallos because it doesnt suit…

Best Music of 2008

This is a much more idiosyncratic sampling than usual, for the simple reason that I bought very little music this year-- probably the least since I started buying my own records. This was a combination of pre-SteelyKid austerity measures (do you know what day care costs these days?), post-SteelyKid lack of time to listen to music, and, most recently, a nearly full hard drive on my home computer (which will be replaced soon-ish, so I'm trying to eke out a few more weeks with this one). Anyway, here are the five-star songs from 2008: "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You…

The questionable dark side of fructose

Consumption of fructose, usually in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), has been suggested as one of the underestimated causes of the increased incidence of obesity/metabolic syndrome in the U.S. Given the magnitude of the issue, Medscape covered this report, "Fructose but Not Glucose Consumption Linked to Atherogenic Lipid Profile," from a presentation at the recent meeting of the American Diabetes Association by Peter J. Havel, DVM, PhD, and colleagues at the University of California at Davis Department of Nutrition. In this small trial, 23 normal volunteers were first given an…

Food Inc Whets the Appetite of Film Critics...Will It Do the Same for the Public?

Framing food problems as a matter of public accountability and sinister corporate control. As I wrote earlier this week, the new documentary Food Inc. has the potential to significantly boost the public profile of a range of food-related problems, connecting them together under the perceptual umbrella of public accountability and corporate malfeasance. In achieving this goal, it appears that Food Inc. has cleared the first hurdle, garnering strong reviews from the film critics who tend to drive the media narrative about a film including those at the NY Times, New York magazine, the…

Where's Mao Zedong When You Need Him?

"Obesity now a 'lifestyle' choice for Americans, expert says" "Waistline grows along with economy" "Wealth and Waistlines - A new book explains how the obesity epidemic has been shaped by economics, and what we can do to reverse the trend" The Fattening of America, by Eric A. Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman, is a fascinating new book proffering an economic explanation as to why more and more Americans are obese - I think. I haven't read it but that didn't stop me from perusing the news stories coming out on Dr. Finkelstein's analysis of obesity and its relationship to our modern economy. If…

"R" statistical company gets new and important board members

Robert Gentleman and Donald Nickelson have joined the board of REvolution Computing. Gentleman is co-creator of this OpenSource statistical package which is widely used by researchers. The news was released moments ago, and here is a press release from the company: REvolution Computing, the leading commercial provider of software and support for the open source "R" statistical computing language, announced the appointment of R co-creator Robert Gentleman and investment-banking veteran Donald Nickelson to its board of directors. Gentleman and Nickelson join directors Norman Nie and Basil…

Labor

On Labor Day, we should remember the heroes of labor, the people who gave us weekends, overtime and safe worksites. Yes, people like Joe Hill People like my grandfather, who came to this country from the Ukraine in 1922, where he had trained as a typographer. He went through Ellis Island, and came ashore in Battery Park. After a life in Czarist Russia, hiding in the Jewish Pale, fleeing from pogroms and Army raiders seeking "recruits," he was astonished at the scene before him in New York. Men stood on soap boxes, ranting publicly against their government. Criticizing the president in…

Did Steve Jobs' flirtation with alternative medicine kill him? (update)

A couple of weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of Steve Jobs' death, I took issue with the claims of a skeptic that "alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs." At the time, I pointed out that, although it was very clear that Steve Jobs did himself no favors by delaying his initial surgery for nine months after his initial diagnosis, we do not have sufficient information to know what his clinical situation was and therefore how much, if at all, he decreased his odds of survival by not undergoing surgery expeditiously. To recap: Did Steve Jobs harm himself by trying diet and alternative…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Hope Leman

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. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Hope Leman 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 (scientific) background? Hope: I am 46 and Research Information…

Holy cow, yet another conspiracy theory!

This has been a year of some wonderfully crazy new conspiracies. Birtherism is actually looking pretty banal next to the "Obama is gay-married to a Pakistani" conspiracy, the "Obama is a Jihadist sleeper agent conspiracy, the Aurora conspiracies, job numbers conspiracies, polling conspiracy theories from America’s least-accurate pollster Dick Morris, and, my former favorite, the Obama is buying bullets for the Social Security Administration to kill all Americans conspiracy theory. Now the American Spectator is publishing a new crackpot conspiracy theory that I think rivals my former…

Hash Week! (Part 1)

Last week NIST anounced the winner of its Cryptographic Hash Function Competition. After five years of review and many rounds of discussion and elimination, the winner is a hash function called Keccak, and its developers deserve many congratulations. It's a shame hash functions aren't better known in the general public, because not only are they a vital part of keeping data safe online, they're one of the most interesting bits of applied math. Better still, their basic concept is not complicated at all. Hash functions are so cool, in fact, that I want to spend several posts this week…

Introducing Ida - the great-great-great-great-grandmother (or aunt)

Another super-cool day at PLoS (one of those days when I wish I was not telecommuting, but sharing in the excitement with the colleagues at the Mothership) - the publication of a very exciting article describing a rarely well-preserved fossil of a prehistoric primate in a lineage to which we all belong as well: Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology by Jens L. Franzen, Philip D. Gingerich, Jörg Habersetzer, Jørn H. Hurum, Wighart von Koenigswald and B. Holly Smith The fossil, named Ida (the scientific name is Darwinius masillae, a…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Beth Beck

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 Beth Beck from NASA 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 (scientific)…

A really nice write-up about the Conference

In the Inkling Magazine: Science Bloggers Avoid the Spinach Dip Brush-Off, by Eva Amsen. I am really happy to see how real-world conversations that started at the conference are now continuing online. Check the latest updates on the bottom of the posts here or here. Also, the people who have ordered the blooks first, have now started receiving their copies (and commenting about their beauty on their blogs). The updated list of people blogging abot it is at the bottom of this post.

What year is this again?

I am stunned that this t-shirt could be proudly displayed anywhere anymore. Now get this: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is running an online poll that is asking, "What do you think of the Obama t-shirt?", with two choices: "It's racist" and "it's fine". You might be wondering why the newspaper would even have to ask…but here's the kicker. "It's fine" is winning. Do you think maybe we can shift the balance there? Or should we just let this indictment of Georgia's racism stand?

Silly Science

Why is mainstream media obsessively focused, out of all the cool science out there, on silly titillating EvoPsych garbage, presented in a "shocked! shoked!" tone? Here is today's crop - feel free to savage them on your own blogs: 46% Of Women Prefer Internet To Sex, Says Intel Survey Fertile women more open to corny chat-up lines 20% of teens say they've put nude pics of themselves online Science Dweebs Often Virgins Orgasms During Childbirth? Are daughters-in-law to blame for the menopause?

Triangle Blogger Meetup

Next Triangle blogger meetup is this Wednesday at 6pm at Milltown (307 E. Main St., Carrboro). It is organized by our friends at Orange Politics, for several years the model for local political organizing online. It is likely some of the local politicos and candidates will show up. It is free and open for all and, heck, if you do not want to chat about politics, you don't have to - we'll chat about everything and anything anyway, as we usually do ;-)

Are You an Atheist?

You Are An Atheist God? No thanks. You're not buying into any religion. They're all bunk to you. You rather focus on what you know is true. You may be a passive non-believer or a rabid atheist activist. But one thing is for sure... no one's going to make you go to church! Are You an Atheist, Agnostic or a Believer? What did you think of this quiz? I thought it did a reasonably decent job covering the issues -- for an online quiz, that is.

Which of Santa's Reindeer Are You?

tags: santa's reindeer, online quiz Okay, this is a seasonally appropriate quiz that you all have to take, and yes, you have to share your results here, too! My results are below the fold; You Are Cupid A total romantic, you're always crushing on a new reindeer. Why You're Naughty: You've caused so much drama, all the reindeers aren't speaking to each other. Why You're Nice: You have a knack for playing matchmaker. You even hooked Rudolph up! Which of Santa's Reindeer Are You?

Anthro Blog Carnival

The eighty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Magnus at Testimony of the Spade. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is on 10 March. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro. And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!

Anthro Blog Carnival

The seventy-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology.net. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Colleen at Middle Savagery. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than four weeks, on 2 December. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro. And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!

Climate Science in the K-12 Classroom

Calling U.S. K-12 Science Education Professionals! GHF Online science instructor Madeline Goodwin is doing her Master’s thesis research on climate science in the classroom, and she needs your help! She is doing a survey of science education professionals to find the answer to the following question: What are the most important climate science concepts for students to ProfessionalPictureunderstand by the time they graduate high school? If you are a K-12 science education professional in the United States, Madeline invites you to take her survey. CLICK HERE

w00t! Top of the class!

The word "wOOt" - spelt with zeros instead of the letter 'o' - has just been voted as Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary's Word of the Year. Coined by internet users, and defined as an interjection "expressing joy", it's quite apt today, because my axon guidance essay was returned with a mark of 80%.  I posted the essay in 4 parts while I was away in Egypt. Here it is again: Part 1: The growth cone.  Part 2: A novel axon guidance mechanism. Part 3: The turning point. Part 4: New directions. wOOt!

Carnival of the Blue V

The Carnival of the Blue thing has really come together lately thanks to Mark Powell, the power of the blogosphere, and a dedicated online ocean public that includes you. Go see the latest line up of stories at Shifting Baselines-"the cure for ocean amnesia". Where else you gonna upload your migration tracks for bob-tailed godwits into Google Earth (DC Birding Blog), and set yourself "strait" on the meltdown in the Northwest Passage (Island of Doubt)? Lots of good stuff to see and read there.

Important reads you may be missing

Since the Pepsipocalypse, several excellent science writers (some of the best, really) have sought out new homes online. You really shouldn't miss them. SciCurious: special shout out to Sci who is one of the best pseudonymous science writers out there, and if she were under her real name would probably be one of the best non-pseudonymous science writers David Dobbs Brian Switek: Brian is one of the new "greats", and is far too talented for his age. Eric M Johnson Highly Allochthonous Alex WIld

Planet Earth airs 'Deep Ocean' episode

This Sunday (March 25) the Discovery Channel will be broadcasting the series Planet Earth at 8pm ET/PT. Footage of Davidson Seamount will be broadcast in the Deep Ocean episode at 10pm ET/PT. Expect to see some gorgeous gorgonians and some handsome fly-trap anemones. Discovery Channel put together a very slick flash website for the occaission, complete with a Google Earth tour, videos, and online games. Need we ask how this will compare to the incredible Blue Planet series five years ago?

Reference Assistant, Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University

Come work for me! We have an 11 month opening here at my library for a reference assistant. The position doesn't require the library degree but a science background will be necessary. The posting is here. Posting Number: YUSA-7393 Position Title: Reference Assistant Department: Steacie Science Library Affiliation: YUSA Band: 10 Salary: Annual salary of $51,439 will be prorated based on the number of weeks worked. Duration: Temporary Full-Time Hours: Fall/Winter (Sept to April): Mon. to Fri.; 9:00 am - 5:00 pm. Require to work a 12:00 noon to 8:00 p.m. shift one day per week. May be required…

eBooks and the Science Community: My ScienceOnline 2011 reading list

I'll be doing a session at the upcoming ScienceOnline 2011 conference on ebooks with David Dobbs, Tom Levenson and Carl Zimmer: Here's the description: Sunday, 11.30-12.30 eBooks and the science community - Carl Zimmer, Tom Levenson, David Dobbs and John Dupuis Ebooks are by far the fastest growing sector of the publishing industry. The New York Times is about to launch a best-seller list exclusively for ebooks. New systems, such as Amazon CreateSpace, allow writers to directly place their ebooks in the marketplace. In theory, they could do away with the need for a conventional publisher.…

Adapting-In-Place Class Starts Thursday

Just a reminder that Aaron Newton (my co-author on A Nation of Farmers) and I will be running our Adapting in Place Class online for six weeks, starting Thursday. The class is asynchronous - you don't have to be online at any particular time, just participate when you like. The goal of the class is to help people develop a coherent plan for how to create a good and viable low energy life with what you have. Previous participants have told us that the class was "life-changing." This class attempts to deals as clearly as possible in such a murky subject with the question of "how should I…

Ways to Connect

I've got a couple of speaking engagements and another class coming up, and I thought I'd let you know where I'm going to be and when. First, on Saturday, March 6, I'll be in Concord, NH at the NOFA-NH Winter Conference. The Northeast Organic Farming Association has been so powerful in creating conditions for small scale organic agriculture in our region that I'm thrilled to be doing the keynote for this conference. I'll be speaking mid-day on "Making a Place at the Table" and doing a workshop in the afternoon on low energy living with kids and teens. And I can't wait to attend other…

Student guest post: Cholesterol, a bacterium, and gallbladder cancer

It's time for this year's second installment of student guest posts for my class on infectious causes of chronic disease. Fourth one this round is by Kristen Coleman.  If you are anything like me, you have been told countless reasons over the years why we must watch what we eat, keep our cholesterol intake down, and try to work out. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise then that I, since I am a public health student after all, aim to convince you of yet another reason why a healthy diet and exercise are valuable. What is this huge reason to avoid Big Macs and think about taking the stairs…

A Free Taste of Royal Society Publishing's Content

Remember how I told you that, until 30 July, all Royal Society Publishing's online journal content is available for free in celebration of the Royal Society's 350th anniversary? I thought I'd mention some of the remarkable papers that you can get your hands on: papers by Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Edward Jenner, Alexander Volta and James Clerk Maxwell. Even though I am not a physicist, I've met these men several times by learning about their discoveries (and reconstructing them for myself) when I was in school, but never have I had the opportunity to read their actual papers describing…

In which Orac does Stanislaw Burzynski propagandist Eric Merola a favor...

Believe it or not, I'm going to do Eric Merola (who doesn't particularly like me, to the point of thinking, apparently, that I'm a white supremacist who doesn't like evidence but does like to eat puppies) a favor. Having been away at TAM, somehow I missed this. Well, actually, I didn't miss it, but somehow I forgot to post it. Then when I got home I still forgot to post it. Now there are only three days left (four, counting today) for me to do it; so I'd better get to it. My having forgotten to do this is particularly amazing given the subject of my main stage talk at TAM. Eric Merola, as you…

Creating a "blog-safe" icon for conference presentations: suggestions?

The rather contentious result of my live-blogging of the Biology of Genomes meeting last month made it very clear to me that the scientific community needs to do a better job of communicating in advance whether a presentation is off-limits to audience live-bloggers. I've since been involved in a number of discussions about this issue both on- and off-line. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (the host of the Biology of Genomes meeting) has clarified its own position, stating that potential live-bloggers (or tweeters) need to explicitly seek permission from speakers before writing about their…

Sport Science: Pulling and Power

I would like to continue my attack on the show Sport Science - ESPN. In this short episode, they are comparing the power of NFL player Marshawn Lynch with that of a truck. You can watch it here if you would like. There are two things that are not quite right with this episode, first, the power thing. I will save the friction problem for another post. So, if you didn't watch that clip, the basic idea is that Marshawn pulls some heavy tires. Sport Science then calculates the power needed to do this and then repeats a similar thing for a truck. Quick review. What is power? In short,…

Some thoughts on the IPS cell findings - genes and the power to create "souls"

Yesterday was an action packed day. I got to lab early and made a major discovery. Then last night we had an excellent NERD Club meeting. Then as I walked into the front door at 9PM last night, my wife asks me "Did you hear the news?" Sure enough they have been able to make induced pluripotent strem cells (IPS cells) from human cells. Fantastic. As a biologist, I consider the very first and second experiments on mouse cells to be much more important, and the extension of the technique to another mammalian cell as being secondary. Now a couple of additional points. 1) From initial rumours it…

Carbon reduction: Principle and politics

There's a lot of excitement about ethanol lately, and the President will undoubtedly tell us more about ethanol tonight. But stopping the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases will take more than just changing how we fuel our cars. A paper published in 2004 by Pacala and Socolow lays out a range of options for carbon reduction. The options span several major categories: promoting energy efficiency and conservation, shifting from coal to natural gas for electricity production, technological capture and storage of carbon dioxide, expanding energy production from nuclear fission, switching…

What is the Internet doing to our brains?

The article is here, but it is too long for me and my attention span to read through. I got a snippet, though: But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of…

What I Unlearned from the Great Recession

To his credit, economist Brad DeLong "who stands here repentant" lists "five things that I thought I knew three or four years ago that turned out not to be true." I would like to visit each of them, since I think highlights economics' need for 'economic natural history' and sociology. Over to DeLong: 1) I thought that the highly leveraged banks had control over their risks. My take on this is very different. First, my personal experience: back when I was a post-doc and living on Long Island, shortly after the turn of century (Eek....), I went to the bank for some other business, and they…

When commercial interests seep into OpenSource: Good things can happen, but usually don't.

The other day, Julia and I decided to install SimCity 4 Deluxe for Windows on one of our Linux boxes. Using Wine, the install went fine, but the program would not run. It would kind of start up but then die with no obvious explanation. With a bit of work I can probably find the reason and fix it, but first I went to the Wine site to see what it said there, and I found, do my disappointment, mostly Geeksnarkese blithering among the amateur IT experts who had been playing around getting the once-popular city-simulation game running with the Linux program that stands for Wine Is Not an…

The Canon by Natalie Angier

The Powers That Be at Seed were kind enough to send all the ScienceBlogs bloggers copies of the new book by Natalie Angier, The Canon, which is being pushed fairly hard by the publisher. I've been reading a lot more pop-science stuff recently, for self-interested reasons, and this was pretty attractive, so I carried it around for a while, reading bits and pieces in restaurants while Kate was away, and eventually finished it during our Michigan vacation. The book is subtitled "A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science," and Angier has set herself a large task: to present the…

Finishing up Homeopathy Awareness Week: It's not just homeopathy, it's quantum homeopathy!

Homeopathy Awareness Week is almost over, alas. I hope I've done a good job at making my readers even more "aware" of just how silly the principles of homeopathy are. To finish up, I thought I'd repost a bit of "classic insolence" from three years ago, because it's dedicated to one of the most amazing homeopathic woo-meisters I've ever seen: Lionel Milgrom. It was also the very first post I ever did for Your Friday Dose of Woo. Enjoy! While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on…

It's not just homeopathy. It's quantum homeopathy!

Unfortunately, as we have been dreading for the last four months or so since her relapse was diagnosed, my mother-in-law passed away from breast cancer in hospice. She died peacefully, with my wife and the rest of her family at her side. As you might expect, I do not much feel like blogging, and even if I did my wife needs me more. Because I foresaw this coming, however, I do have a series of "Best of" reposts lined up. If you've been reading less than a year or two, they're new to you. If not, I hope you enjoy them again. I don't know when I'll be back, other than maybe a brief update or two…

It's not just homeopathy, it's quantum homeopathy, which is so much better

Note: Orac is away somewhere warm recharging his Tarial cells for further science and skepticism. In the meantime, he is rerunning some of his favorite posts. Because it's vacation, he thought he'd rerun a fun post. He needs it; vacation is almost over, and it's back to work on Monday. So, here's one from 2007. I believe I reran it once a few years ago, but it's been at least three years, which means that if you haven't been reading at least that long it's new to you. Besides, it's the post that introduced me to the woo-tastic wonder that it Lionel Milgrom. While thinking about ways to make…