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The whereabouts of Buckley's Basilosaurus

A restoration of the Warren mastodon entombed in sediment, from Popular Science. In 1841 S.B. Buckley was the first to mount a skeletal restoration of Basilosaurus, but his efforts to do so have generally been forgotten. The skeleton changed hands several times during the 1840's and Buckley's more accurate restoration was overshadowed by Albert Koch's monstrous "Hydrarchos", a fantastical creature made from Basilosaurus bones.* *[I have to admit that that I have not seen any illustrations of Buckley's restoration. My statement regarding its accuracy is based upon his technical papers in…

Asia's "Missing Link"

Eugene O'Neill's short play, The First Man, is a tale of birth, death, scandal, and family infighting, all involving an anthropologist set to scour Asia in search of the earliest humans. Collected with two other plays (The Hairy Ape and Anna Christie) in a 1922, the play contains a fleeting reflection of the scientific consensus at the time. For a variety of reasons, from the pattern of fossil finds to racism and "pithecophobia", Asia was the preferred place to look for the earliest humans. (See Peter Bowler's Theories of Human Evolution for a survey, and Constance Clark's God - or Gorilla…

Science is hard

Yesterday we tried to replicate the effect that John Eastwood, Daniel Smilek, and Philip Merikle observed -- that negative facial expressions distract us from even the simplest tasks more than positive facial expressions. Hundreds of our readers watched one of two videos and were charged with counting the number of "upturned arcs" or "downturned arcs." Here's a sample video: In this video, the "faces" formed by the arcs are smiling, but in the other video they were frowning. Both clips showed the identical number of upturned and downturned arcs -- six. Yet we weren't able to replicate…

Book Progress #38

I have been hacking away at the chapter on birds & dinosaurs for the last few days, but it is still overgrown with tangles of excess material. It stings to cut out some of the great quotes and concepts I stumbled upon during the course of my research, but 41 pages is about 15 too many for the chapter I have in mind. The task at hand right now is one of editing. I need to inject a little more information about some of the arguments I employ, but my main task is to chuck out as much material as I possibly can without watering down what I am trying to describe. A lot of the excess material…

Fred Thompson's Ethics

Fred Thompson's campaign site has the following quote on the home page: "We are steeped in the tradition of honor and sacrifice for the greater good.  We are proud of this heritage.  I believe that Americans are once again ready to achieve this greater good, which is nothing less than the security, prosperity, and unity of our country." In contrast, there is a rather damaging article about Fred Thompson on the ABC News site, The Blotter. href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/10/nixon-on-thomps.html">Nixon on Thompson: 'Dumb' but 'Friendly' October 09, 2007 9:06 AM Fred…

Burzynski Clinic: the domain of scoundrels and quacks

Billie Bainbridge is four years old, and she has an inoperable brain tumor, and her prognosis is not good. Her family is desperate, and has been frantically trying to raise money from the community to cover the costs of a treatment they've been told might cure her. They need £200,000. They are asking the public to contribute. Unfortunately, the treatment they want to give her is antineoplaston therapy: it's pure bunk. The clinic that is trying to suck large sums of money away from the family of a dying child is the Burzynski clinic. So in addition to being a quack, Burzynski is now a vampire…

Friday Night at ScienceOnline

I'm sitting at the edge of the auditorium at the Sigma Xi Center, comfortably sandwiched between Scicurious and Christina Pikas. I'm listening to Rebecca Skloot describe how a creative writing class assignment to write about a place and her response about the freezer in the Colorado State University Veterinary School morgue launched her on a career in science writing. Now, she's introducing the main topic of her talk (as well as the topic of her new book) "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks" And we're getting to hear world-premiere excerpts from the book to be published next year. Skloot'…

Scavenger Hunt

One of the perks of blogging at ScienceBlogs is that our overlords send us free copies of Seed magazine. In fact, Seed loves me so much that they send me two free copies of every issue, even though I've asked them to stop. This is an especially interesting issue, with profiles of global science funding and education, a survey of 1000 scientists, and an interview with Craig Venter. So, what to do with the second copy? One for upstairs and one for down? Wait, I've got a better idea...I'll send it to a blog reader. But who to send it to? I know, I'll do a scavenger hunt. Below the fold, I've…

Open Lab 2008: Help us nominate the best posts!

Open Lab 2008 is a printed anthology of the best science blogging of the year. We're now only two weeks from the deadline (December 1) for nominating posts for inclusion in this year's anthology. The fifty best posts, plus one poem and one cartoon, will be chosen by a panel of judges, and the winners will be printed in a book published by Lulu.com. That's right, time spent frittered away on blogging could earn you the right to (truthfully) say "I'm a published author." As usual, Bora's got all the details. Open Lab is now in it's third year, and the last two years had wonderful writing about…

Shock

I just got back home after driving from West Lafayette. I heard on the radio about YET ANOTHER HORRENDOUS SHOOTING on a university campus. My breath caught in my throat as I heard the NPR news staff interview the faculty advisor for the student newspaper at Northern Illinois University. I couldn't stop myself from actually crying in the car as visions of Virginia Tech ran in front of my eyes. I interviewed at Virginia Tech the week before the massacre there, was so terribly shocked by how close my visit had been, felt so terribly awful for the colleagues I met there during my visit. A…

Let's get the politicians talking about science

Sheril Kirschenbaum and Chris Mooney at The Intersection are spearheading a push to get the candidates running for president to address issues of science and public policy. Their goal: Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment,…

Insect-robot interfacing

The Los Angeles Times reports on "Robo-moth", a cleverly designed contraption, built from cheap off-the-shelf parts, which was presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego earlier this week. Robo-moth is a 6-inch-tall wheeled robot to which attached tobacco horn moth has been attached. A microelectrode inserted into the insect's brain records the activity of a single visual motion detection neuron, which exhibits directional selectivity and which is involved in steadying the visual field during flight.  The moth is immobilized inside a cylinder covered with vertical stripes…

Punch drunk

A new study in the British Medical Journal concludes that "there is no strong evidence to associate chronic traumatic brain injury with amateur boxing,"  The authors systematically reviewed 36 observational studies of amateur boxers published over the past 50 years. But they acknowledge that the general quality of the studies is very poor, so, despite the conclusion, their findings are actually inconclusive. In an accompanying editorial, neurologist and sports physician Paul McRory notes that boxers' careers are much shorter now than they were in the first half of the last century. Boxers…

16th Century mechanical artificial hand

This mechanical artificial hand, with fingers that could be moved individually by means of tiny internal cogs and levers, was designed and made almost 500 years ago by Ambroise Pare. Pare (1517-1590) began working as a battefield surgeon in 1536. When treating gunshot wounds on the battlefield, he often amputated limbs. Pare treated many amputees during his career. He developed safe and effective methods for amputation, and closely followed the progress of all his patients. He therefore recorded many first-hand accounts of phantom limb syndrome, and, in 1551, provided the first medical…

Pat Buchanan go home

It's sad. The terrorism in Norway was by a right wing nationalist extremist of the pale-skinned, Christian variety, and it's like we broke our home-grown right-wingers' small, feeble, crumbly hearts with that news. But have no fear! They are dogged and single-minded, and they will find a way to blame the desired targets of retribution one way or another! Latest case: Pat Buchanan. He regrets that the terrorist was a cowardly, murdering punk, but we are supposed to recognize that Breivik may be right. But, awful as this atrocity was, native-born and homegrown terrorism is not the macro-threat…

The Miracle of Copulating Late

Hot. This is article is too funny: From bonobo chimpanzees to fruit flies, many female animals mate with multiple partners that often queue up for the event. Studies have shown that the the last male to mate with a female is the most successful at impregnating her. Nobody has understood why. The last male can take advantage of a more "sperm-friendly" environment created by males that have copulated before him, according to a new model put forth by David Hosken and David Hodgson of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. Males ejaculate hundreds of millions of sperm into the female…

Using art to teach math (and vice versa)

Annalisa Crannell, a professor at Franklin & Marshall, has a great essay at Inside Higher Ed on the math of perspective. Crannell, who thinks her students are generally more scared of drawing than they are of math, uses the "fencepost puzzle" to get her students working through the proportions that create realism: We mathematicians tend to stare at the paper, hoping an answer jumps off the page at us. Artists pull out their pencils and start doodling, often stumbling upon a solution almost by accident. The artists have learned to overcome their fear of drawing something that is "wrong,"…

Long-Term Effects of Crack Baby Syndrome

A recent study published in J.Neuroscience by Stanwood et al. may help explain the long-term neurological effects associated with cocaine use while pregnant, the so-called "crack baby syndrome" which was of great concern in the 1980s. Prenatal exposure to cocaine is known to cause a range of cognitive impairments ranging from attention deficits to severe emotional problems to mental retardation. However the precise way that cocaine abuse disrupted proper cognitive development was unclear. Stanwood et al reported that prenatal cocaine exposure in pregnant rabbits caused a long-lasting…

Sony and Microsoft Will Have Your Brains and Souls

Two little gems from Bob Abu this morning (thanks!): First is the Allen Brain Atlas, so named after the Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, whose goal is to create... ...a detailed cellular-resolution, genome-wide map of gene expression in the mouse brain. The completion of the sequencing of the mouse brain and the availability of techniques to probe gene expression amenable to scale-up and automation have made this an achievable, albeit ambitious, goal. The Allen Brain Atlas has created an automated platform for high-throughput in situ hybridization (ISH) that allows a highly systematic approach…

A Lot of People in White Coats

Dave over at Cognitive Daily beat me to this (curse you, Dave!), but I wanted to point everyone to an article in Seed Magazine by Paul Bloom, titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain." If you can't tell from the title, the article is on the lure of imaging studies, and the sense that many have that simply taking a picture of the brain makes any experiment more scientific. (The title reminded me, specifically, of one reporter looking at pretty colored brain scan pictures and noting that the people in the study "didn't even fire up the thinking parts of their brains.") If you've…

Africa: our past, perhaps our future

The story about the ranking of evolution support in Western nations did not include any data on Africa. America's standing might have looked a little better if it did; the news from Kenya is not good. Evangelical churches want to suppress the Kenya national museum's fossil collection. This includes some of the most impressive examples of humankind's ancient history, such as multiple australopithecine specimens and Turkana Boy; it's arguably one of the world's foremost collections of hominid fossils. This is where many of Richard Leakey's finds are stored. Who wants to hide away in back rooms…

Framing Project: A Long Overdue Update

I'm sure you've all long forgotten about the framing project that I discussed on this blog late last year, but in case someone out there remembers it, I wanted to give you an update. I still want to collect the category norms that I discussed. That is, I want to have people list features of political concepts like abortion, social security, war, etc., along with concepts related to Lakoff's framing analysis such as family, nation, and the like (if you'd like to help me write the code for this, let me know). However, not long after I discussed the project on this blog, my perspective changed…

People Prefer Curves

Last year, I wrote two really long, boring posts about V.S. Ramachandran's ten principles of art. Those principles, mostly drawn from research on vision, included things like peak shift, symmetry, and contrast. It turns out Ramachandran may have missed a much simpler principle: people dig curves. At least, they prefer them to sharp angles. Why curves? Well, Moshe Bar and Maital Neta1 hypothesize that "sharp transitions in a contour might convey a sense of threat, on either a conscious or a nonconscious level, and thus trigger a negative bias" (p. 645). This preference, they argue, should show…

To Roughly Generate

Ovation Pharmaceuticals obtained the rights to a drug developed by Merck, Indocin IV.  It is used as a medical treatment for href="http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/pda/pda_what.html">patent ductus arteriosus.  PDA is a type of birth defect in the heart.  It is serious.   It is helpful to have a medication that is an alternative to surgery. The following year, they obtained the rights to Neoprofen, a similar drug used for the same purpose. Then, they raised the price.  Instead of $108 for a course of treatment, it now costs $1,500.  I suppose that you could say that it…

Scientists Turn to Politics

There is an interesting article put out by Associated Press, authored by Seth Borenstein.  Mr. Bornstein suggests that scientists are increasingly expressing an interest in running for office. The involvement of scientists in politics is not new.  Think of Ben Franklin.  But many have been involved from the sidelines.  Franklin, for example, did not hold an elected position until the end of his life.  (He was President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania 1785-88.) From the href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080509/ap_on_sc/campaigning_scientists;_ylt=…

Ideological Reasoning

I won't rehash the distinction between faith-based and reality-based reasoning, figuring that most blog readers -- at least the progressive ones -- know the meaning and context. However, I would like to make one point.  Reasoning that is not reality-based can come in different flavors; not all are linking specifically to faith.  Some are linked to ideology.  This is an insidious kind of cognitive error to which we all are susceptible.   Here's an example from a recent Washington Post article: href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/17/AR2007021701334.html">…

The Myth of Compassionate Conservatism

OK, so it is not totally a myth; there are plenty of compassionate conservatives out there.  But the phrase can be used to whitewash policies that are just plain mean. Florida is illegally imprisoning mentally ill persons, repeatedly, systematically, and is doing nothing to try to solve the problem.   This is a gross violation of civil rights.  It is an astonishing affront to our notion of a free society.  It is comparable to warrantless wiretapping, or suspension of habeas corpus. href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/us/15inmates.html?ei=5090&en=2044af625fc663bd&ex=1321246800…

VNS for Alzheimer Disease? Imagine the Profit!

Imagine what kind of money you could make, if you had a $15,000 device that could slow the progression of Alzheimer disease.  The following clip is from a Medscape news article.  (Free registration is required to view it, but that is better than the original journal article, which requires a subscription.) Vagus Nerve Stimulation Shows Promise as Alzheimer Disease Treatment By Will Boggs, MD NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Sept 28 - Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is safe and beneficial for some patients with Alzheimer disease, according to a report in the August Journal of Clinical Psychiatry…

Resurection of My Super Duper Theory?

Wow, last week was memorable. Not only did I sign my contract with the University of Toronto, but it appears as if my super duper theory that I thought I had killed, might have been resuscitated. To remind you, the last time I wrote about my trials and tribulations, I thought that I had ruled out my super duper theory because of a simple straight forward experiment. The experiment involved microinjecting a dominant negative protein that blocks a complex from working. What I failed to tell you is that I was waiting for my positive control, a protein whose distribution would be altered if that…

The Trip Part I - Normandy

In the next couple of posts I'll quickly recap some parts of my trip. (Hey it's my freakin' blog and I get to post on whatever subject I want!) The story begins when we landed at Charles de Gaul Airport. From there we met up with old friends and drove off to Caens, Normandy, birthplace of Guillaume le conquerant (aka William the Conqueror.) The term Normands is derived from the words "north men" and refers to the fact that this area was settled by viking tribes in the times of Charlemagne. Besides October 14th 1066, another important date in Normand history is June 6th, 1944 aka D-Day. And so…

The Shakespeared brain

In the July issue of the magazine Literary Review, Philip Davis discusses the effect of William Shakespeare's use of language on cognitive function. Davis, a professor of English at the University of Liverpool, and editor of The Reader is working with psychologist Guillaume Thierry and cognitive neuroscientist Neil Roberts to explore how the brain responds to a linguistic trick called functional shift, or word-class conversion, in which the structure of a sentence is changed so that one part of speech (say a noun) is transformed into another (such as a verb). Functional shift was often…

Sigmund Freud, cocaine & the birth of big pharma

SciCurious has written an interesting post about Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was also a pioneer of psychopharmacology; as well as being one of the first to scientifically investigate the properties and effects of cocaine, he also played a key role in the growth of the pharmaceuticals industry. In 1884, Freud read a paper which described the effects of cocaine on Bavarian soldiers. The author, a German physician named Theodor Aschenbrandt, reported that the drug suppressed the appetite and increased mental powers and endurance. Intrigued,…

Elephants "Phone" Each Other Using the Earth

When elephants become separated from their group they can use their keen senses of smell and sight to locate their brethren, OR they can use the Earth like a giant telephone and call their herd with rumble vocalizations. A new study by Katherine Leighty and a team from the...wait for it....wait for it...Disney Animal Kingdom in Florida (yes, seriously!) has shed light on how elephants use these infrasonic sounds to communicate through the ground over distances of up to 1.5 miles. Thank you for calling 1-999-HOTTUSK, the steamiest place to rendevous with Africa's most eligable, randiest…

Random bullets and programming notes.

Happy 2008! Let the bullets commence: *I am now to the point of totally refusing to acknowledge this interstitial period between semesters as a proper break. Far too much of it has already been taken up with matters from last term, and there's no end of that in sight. Meanwhile, certain details of the upcoming semester are still sufficiently unresolved that I cannot yet do things like updating my course calendars. *A piece of free advice to students: If you are emailing your instructor during an official break and would like a prompt and helpful response, avoid being abusive in that email…

Ask a Pirate Blogger.

Avast, ye bloglubbers! We be starin' down the crow's nest at another International Talk Like a Pirate Day, a holiday marked in these seas by the seizin' o' this bucket by the Dread Pirate Free-Ride. Aye, it happened last year, and by the beak o' the squid guardin' Davy Jones' locker*, it's happened again. What's that ye be sayin'? Pirates didn't really be sayin' "Arrrr"? Shove some hardtack in that mouth or I be usin' it to scrape the barnacles off this bucket! Me deckhand Smee be askin', "Why is it we seafarers be callin' each other scurvy dogs? Do dogs be gettin' scurvy?" A fine…

Chemistry fans get excited as second round games in MORTAR AND PESTLE bracket draw near.

PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS Even given a weekend to come back to equilibrium, some chemistry fans are still perturbed by some of the results of first round play in the MORTAR AND PESTLE bracket. FTIR's upset win over NMR has many a Monday morning spectroscopist splitting his peaks trying to analyze what went wrong. And while Ethanol is a perennial powerhouse in this conference, many tournament watchers had anticipated celebrating Caffeine at their Monday morning lab meetings. Friday's games were just the first step in a mutli-step synthesis of a tournament champion. Tomorrow, just…

And the nerdiest is ...

The entries have been gathered, the aspects of geekiness quantified, and the composite scores calculated. While computer-love made a positive contribution in the nerd index, the development of knowledge in other venues (and frequently, in multiple areas for the same nerd) was factored in as well. After all, the thing about nerds that made those beautiful people in high school so scared is that nerds enjoyed learning things for the sheer joy of learning them. That this is learning for learning's sake is pretty evident from some of the areas to which the formidable brain power on display was…

Neurogenesis and the Neocortex

Jake over at Pure Pedantry links to a recently published article which shows that the adult neocortex has roughly the same number of neurons (but more glial cells) than the neocortex of a newborn. This is an interesting study and deserves a brief comment. As I wrote in Seed earlier this year, neurogenesis - the idea that neurons in our brain are constantly dividing - is no longer controversial. Thanks to the persistence of Elizabeth Gould, Fernando Nottebohm and others, the paradigm has finally shifted. But the details of neurogenesis remain hotly debated, especially when it comes to the…

Gladwell and Freud Again

My post comparing Gladwell and Freud seemed to provoke a few defenses. Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily offered a guarded defense of Gladwell, while Mixing Memory offered a defense of Freud. I'll respond to Cognitive Daily first. Here is Dave on me on Gladwell: Jonah's problem with Gladwell's method is that Gladwell doesn't parse the data the way Jonah wants him to. Jonah would like to see Gladwell explain all the data he discusses in the context of showing how the mind works. But that's not what Gladwell's doing in Blink: Gladwell's goal is to show how we respond to a particular type of…

Friday Sprog Blogging: planning our (science-y) summer.

It's June already, and we still have not finalized summer plans for the Free-Ride offspring. (Hey, my semester just ended, and it was only yesterday that I wrapped up the Large Administrative Task That Shall Not Be Named Now That It's Finally Done. I've been a little distracted.) Anyway, given that we're at the stage of summer planning where there are a lot of ideas still on the table, I decided to ask the Free-Ride offspring to muse on any science-y aspects of the possible summer activities they are considering. Here's the younger Free-Ride offspring's list: Sailing lessons. We might want…

Rabbit update: the great outdoors.

When last we checked in with Snowflake Free-Ride, our intrepid white rabbit had not yet found the courage to venture all the way to the end of the drawbridge from her hutch. Well, on Tuesday, Snowflake got the bunny equivalent of a screened porch. This seems to have been enough to convince her to come on out. Indeed, Snowflake was so enthusiastic about having free access to grass and dandelions (along with sun and breezes), that the very same day she also decided she was brave enough to hop out the open door of the bunny run into the wide expanses of the yard. At first she would just hop…

Question for the hivemind: where in the blogosphere do you find mentoring?

Yesterday in my "Ethics in Science" class, we were discussing mentoring. Near the end of the class meeting, I noted that scientists in training have a resource nowadays that just wasn't available during my misspent scientific youth (back in the last millennium): the blogosphere. What does the blogosphere have to do with mentoring? For one thing, it can give you a glimpse of the lives of people who are working out how how to become grown-up scientists, or how to combine a scientific career with a life outside of that career. The wide array of scientists at different career stages working out…

Pi Day pie #8: Chocolate-almond meringue finale.

Of all the Pi Day pies I have offered to you here, I'm pretty sure this one is my favorite. It has a fabulous mix of flavors (sparingly sweet chocolate, almonds, a hint of cinnamon) and textures (creamy custard in a crisp meringue shell). And, since people have been telling be that pi are squared, this one is, too. Meringue shell: Line an 8 inch square pan with parchment paper. Beat 6 egg whites and 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar until foamy. Continue beating at high speed while gradually adding 1 cup granulated sugar. Keep beating until the whites are glossy and form stiff peaks. Fold into…

Pi Day pie #4: Tea-time cheesecake pie.

The wet weather in these parts led to an almost (but not quite) predictable cancellation of soccer games on the weekend that we were supposed to provide snacks. This means I ended up staring at a surplus of navel oranges and thinking, "What am I going to do with these?" Marmalade presented itself as an option, except I'm still in Pi Day pie (a la) mode, so I don't want to be distracted with canning. Then I thought, "I wonder whether a marmalade topping would work well on a tea-flavored cheesecake pie?" Let's find out, shall we? Marmalade topping. It takes some time to draw the pectin out of…

Cloud Gate Link Cloud!

You all know about the latest dustups and new research related to climate change, including the resignation of the Editor-in-Chief of a major journal as well as some new papers about global warming. There has been so much activity over recent days that I thought a new link farm would be a good thing. So, here it is. Please let me know if I've missed anything! 07-29-2011 On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance 09-02-2011 Opinion: The damaging impact of Roy Spencer's science In his bid to cast doubts on the seriousness of…

Hockey Stick Data Tampering Investigation Concludes

The Inspector General of the National Science foundation has completed an investigation into falsifying research data, concealing or deleting emails or other data, misusing privileged information, and seriously deviating form accepted practices in relation to climate change research by climate scientist Michael Mann. This investigation, just completed, confirms what has been determined by other previous investigations: An Investigatory Committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials has unanimously "determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in,…

Ethnographic Notes: Efe Forest Camps

An Efe forest camp is usually dark and depending on the time of day, dripping from current or recent rain. The Efe live in dome shaped huts which may be more or less complete. A half dome might be a hut that was built quickly, or it might be a hut that was built more openly because it has been hot or it might be only a half dome to allow easier access in and out of the hut by children or individuals with injury or infirmity. A fully domed hut, with a small opening, keeps in more smoke (a fire is often kept in the hut) but it also keeps in the heat and keeps out the rain. So a rainy…

Why separation of church and state is critical

If you ever wonder about the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in separating church and state in the Constitution and banning the imposition of a state religion, just look to this story from Malaysia for the sorts of things that can happen when a nation is governed according to religious law: A Muslim woman forcibly separated from her Hindu husband by Malaysia's Islamic authorities after 21 years of happy marriage wept inconsolably yesterday after a judge endorsed her decision to hand custody of six of her seven children to her former spouse. In an unprecedented move for Malaysia - where Islamic…

A Detroit icon has passed away

This one will probably not mean much to those who don't have a Detroit connection (such as, like me, having been born there and spent the first 26 years of my life in southeast Michigan), and it will probably mean nothing at all to my cadre of international readers, but it saddens me nonetheless to have discovered this bit of news via my sister. Lawson Deming, the man who played Sir Graves Ghastly for so many years, died on April 24, just one day after his 94th birthday. For Detroiters of a certain age, who grew up from the 1960's to the early 1980's, Saturday at 1 PM was the time that the…

Who should be Anoka county Attorney?

I have looked at the records, statements, and endorsements of the two candidates running for the open Anoka County Attorney's office, to determine which I should support and, indeed, endorse on this blog. And I'm stuck. It is a hard decision because both candidates have impressive backgrounds. Of the two candidates, Brad Johnson of Coon Rapids (currenly an assistant Hennepin County Attorney) and Tony Palumbo of Blaine (an assistant Anoka County Attorney) both have diverse and impressive experience as prosecutors. Johnson is the lead in the complex crimes unit for Hennepin County, though…