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DSN Required Reading

There a couple really cool pieces going around the intertubes recently. Basically, some people out there actually beat us to some stories but did such a great job I'd like to point you their way. Grrlscientist at the blog Living the Scientific Life has an excellent post about the Oregon dead zone. Once a recurrent event, it looks like its here to stay. Forever! Go there to learn more about this recent paper published in Science that has some evidence to link the dead to global warming. Mark Powell at Blogfish has this story as well. Read the comment thread for a thriving discussion on the…

New Reality TV Show - Last Scientist Standing!

Lewis Black is my favorite comedian these days, and as such, he has drawn me into the accretion disk of his latest offering on the Comedy Channel: Root of All Evil. My response to its premier was tepid, but as I have kept watching it, the show has grown on me. The format has Black as hilariously dyspeptic judge presiding over a faux trial in which a pair of comedians from Comedy Central's stable argue for the inherent evil of a pair of the unholy. For example, who is more evil: Paris Hilton or Dick Cheney? Last night's episode asked which is more evil: High School or "American Idol?"…

Sex: A Monotreme's Four-Headed Monster

This latest news item courtesy of New Scientist a.k.a. the London tabloid of science journalism (1), is worthy of Bora's (Blog Around the Clock) Friday Weird Sex Blogging but what the heck - there's nothing more uplifting that a four-headed phallus on a Monday afternoon. As noted in the article, Exhibitionist spiny anteater reveals bizarre penis, spiny anteaters (Tachyglossus aculeatus) ejaculate through only one half of their penis. This mechanism is similar to that of reptiles. Zoologists have wondered if monotremes might ejaculate via the same technique. Since the fine details of spiny…

Celebrating Pi Day With Bird Pie (No, Not That Kind)

Some of us at Scienceblogs have been baking pies and posting pictures and recipes in anticipation of Pi Day (3.14) and in the hopes of winning the Pi Day contest. As I have previously mentioned, I am no pie baker. But why should that stop me from entering the contest? You're right, it shouldn't! So I went ahead and made Bird Pie. And no, it's not made out of birds. Recipe and photos after the jump. How To Make Bird Pie First, get yourself one of those Gladware-type dinner-plate-sized leftover dishes. Take the bottom and either lose it or ruin it in your dishwasher or oven. Now, take…

Why I Love Newspapers

For the second time in a week (see here and here) I've blogged about something from the Philadelphia Inquirer. You may or may not know that the Inquirer recently went into bankruptcy proceedings. I don't know what I would do without the Inquirer to read everyday. Blogging is great but it simply cannot replace, in my opinion, regular newspaper reporting. Somewhat tangentially related to that: I recently renewed my subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was given the option to receive it, for a somewhat lesser price, as only an electronic edition. It completely replicates…

Race and Biomedical Research: Two New Books

I found out about both of these courtesy of the Chronicle Review Note Bene/New Books in Print feature. Both look extremely interesting. First, Revisiting Race in a Genomic World, from Rutgers University Press. With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, the debate over the existence of a biological basis for race has been revived. In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, interdisciplinary scholars join forces to examine the new social, political, and ethical concerns that are attached to how we think about emerging technologies and their impact on current conceptions…

Abstain from Bacon

Elevated from the comments. Reader CSA writes: Even when Bacon *does* show up, physically, he doesn't contribute much. Consider these excerpts from the minutes of the August 2006 KSBE meeting: p. 18: Mrs. Waugh moved, with a second by Dr. Wagnon, that the Board include in its FY 2008 budget recommendation $24 million for the first year of a three year phase-in of universal all-day-K for those schools wanting to offer it. Chairman Abrams asked if the $24 million would be on top of the $149 million included in SB 549. She indicated it would. The motion failed on a vote of 5-4-1, with Dr. Abrams…

When bad ideas strike

The (valid) concern over the eminent domain ruling in Kelo v. New London has been misappropriated for some truly awful purposes. Activists in several western states are using it to push the idea that regulations are "takings," and are trying to block environmental regulation (or bankrupt states). As John Echeverria, executive director of the Georgetown Environmental Law and Policy Institute, told the Post, "The agenda behind these initiatives is to make it so expensive for local and state governments to regulate land use that they can hardly function at all." The underlying idea is based…

Scientists and Engineers for America

Americans "need leaders to protect the integrity of science," according to Neal Lane, Bill Clinton's science advisor from 1998-2001, and before that the director of the NSF. He said that in announcing the kick-off of Scientists and Engineers for America, a new 527 that will be fighting to protect scientific integrity. Lane explained that the group will not be partisan, because people will "lose confidence in science if it is used to advance a political agenda." The goal is to encourage lawmakers to take scientific advice seriously and to respond seriously to issues that arise. The goal is…

What's that in the river?

The world is full of beautiful and strange things. Indonesian insects with eyes on stalks, African mole rats, Amazonian parrots and Chinese snakehead fish. We can get so caught up in the exotic world of other places that we forget the strange and fascinating right under our own noses. As fortune has it Gary Bichelmeyer and three friends had their eyes open as they kayaked the Wakarusa River last weekend. Edit: Not the Kaw, I'm stupid The Lawrence Journal-World tells how the Aug. 16 trip turned uncommon in that, by day’s end, their kayaks were loaded with the upper jawbone and four intact…

Crazies…on twitter? Say it ain't so!

I've been getting a few odd, cryptic messages on twitter from someone calling himself @spiritualgenome. I looked him up to figure out what the heck he was babbling about, and found his web page. Turns out he's a crop circle nut, and you might find a few minutes amusement in his delusions. Fascinating new discoveries by Russian molecular biologists have revealed that DNA has a mysterious resonance that has been termed the Phantom-DNA Effect. In addition these Russian researchers have found that DNA reacts to voice activated laser light when it is set at the specific frequency of the DNA itself…

Why we need to avoid Middle Eastern entanglements: too complicated!

The New York Times has an article attempting to clarify complex political tensions cross-linked with religious identity (or not), In an Iraqi City, the Real Ballot Contest Is for Shiite Leadership. The author, Anthony Shadid, states: The contest bears down on one of the unanswered questions in Iraq's tortured narrative of invasion, occupation, war and recovery. The country today stands as the only Arab state in which Shiite Muslims rule. Nasiriya is a stage, rendered small, where several Shiite currents, from street movements to venerable parties, are now vying for ascendancy. That's not…

Book Progress #29

From Garfield Minus Garfield I did it. The whale chapter has been put on the editorial chopping block three times, and I'm going to move on to other things for a while before coming back for the final cut. I'm particularly vexed by the last section of the chapter, which focuses on the evolution of cetacean intelligence due to sociality. The topic is contentious, and being that I'm not an expert on cetacean neuroanatomy or cognition I want to tread carefully. I've asked for professional help so I can make sure what I have written is accurate, but even so I still have mixed feelings about…

Miss Bimbo?

I thought the whole "digital pet" craze was over, but apparently it's just mutated in some disturbing ways. According to CNN, a game launched in Britain called "Miss Bimbo" is causing quite a bit of controversy. Perhaps meant to be satire of the "glamorous" lifestyles of female media stars, the game instructs players to find rich boyfriends for their characters to leech funds from, blow their money on breast implants for their avatars, and throw a few crumbs to their "bimbos" to strike that balance between emaciated and dead. Oddly enough, the #1 consumers of the game are young girls aged 7…

I get comments

Since I've left my old blog on wordpress I've generally left it to mutate on its own, by which I mean I haven't paid much attention to the comments accumulating over there since October. From what I can tell, though, creationists stop by every now and then and have left a number of arm-waving, vitriolic statements about how I've been brainwashed by the evilutionists. Here are two of my favorites; On Gigantoraptor; This Is all CRAP and you know it ... This was proven to be a Fruad ! It was carved into the rock. It made the cover of Time Mag ,and they had to retract the whole story. After all…

A cult that kills in Oregon

Alayna Wyland is 7 months old, and she is suffering. The area started swelling, and the fast-growing mass of blood vessels, known as a hemangioma, eventually caused her eye to swell shut and pushed the eyeball down and outward and started eroding the eye socket bone around the eye. There are pictures at the link. It's not pretty. I know if my babies had a growth that was almost the size of a tennis ball that was destroying their face, I'd have been camped out at the hospital. But not Alayna's parents! They have a special treatment plan. The Wylands and their church reject medical care in…

Creationists win a prize

There is a zoo near Bristol called — you'll see there are already problems right from the name — Noah's Ark Zoo. It is unambguously proud of its status as a blatantly creationist institution. After looking at the current explanations for origins and evolution; it is our view that the evidence available points to widespread evolution after an initial Creation by God. This is viewed as controversial by some and welcomed by others; but whether currently popular or not we believe the evidence supports a world-view somewhere between Darwinism and 6000BC Creationism and we encourage interested…

More on turning and braking

I can't let it go. There is more here to explore. First, I can't believe that I looked at braking and then turning but not turning then braking. And what about braking while turning? I will model braking and then turning - but it won't stop here. Consider a few motions. I could turn and then brake (which I am looking in this post). Another option would be to brake and then turn. I already showed that this takes a longer distance than just stopping. Braking and then turning in general won't work. Suppose I brake and slow down to a certain speed. Now I am a certain distance away from…

Allegory of the Grade

I have been thinking about grades lately and I am pretty sure they are dumb. The main problem is that it seems that many many many people (politicians, parents, students, administrators, some other faculty, and zombies) think that the grade is the THE THING to worry about. Really, it is just a pale representation of the real thing. This brings me to the allegory of the cave. I know you remember this when you read Plato's The Republic, right? Here is a picture that explains the whole thing: I don't know where this image came from, it was on a boat load of other websites, none looked like…

Parallax, what is it good for?

Very simply, parallax is an apparent motion of an object due to a change in observation position. Let me start with an example. Here are two photos. I took a picture of the cabinet in the background from two slightly different positions. In the foreground is a clone trooper that did not actually move. I added the dotted line so you could see how the clone trooper appeared to change positions with respect to the background. Here is a diagram of the camera in the two positions along with the toy. Since the camera changed positions, the object that is closer appears to have moved with…

The vomit comet bus

Check this out (saw it on the interwebs): It's this video inside a bus of a girl hitting the roof. My first thought was: well, she just jumped. But something was odd. She was in the air too long. Well, of course this calls for a video analysis (using Tracker Video Analysis). Actually, it is a good candidate for analysis. Primarily because the motion happens right next to the back of the bus and the bus can be considered the reference frame. The only problem is the scale. I totally guessed that the back window was 3 feet, but not sure this even matters. Here is the motion of the girl…

McCain admits more drilling is useless

MSNBC's First Read quotes McCain justifying offshore oil drilling: Even though it may take some years, the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial. In other words, it does nothing, but might sound good to people who don't pay attention to details. This, my friends, is not what we need in a president. We need a president who is willing to tell us the truth, no matter how unpopular. Drilling for oil won't solve the problem. The problem is that we as a planet, and in particular we as a nation, use too damn much petroleum, and we're…

Pareidolia in economics

Via Cosmic Variance, we learn of the complex statistical analysis presented here, originally from the Wall Street Journal and based on work from the American Enterprise Institute. The curve labeled the "Laffer curve" is not meant to make you "laff," it is actually an example of the psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia. More famous examples include the ability to see Jesus in burnt tortillas, or the name of Allah in the swirls of an ice cream cone. In this case, the AEI has discovered their own mythical ideal in the data on tax revenue and tax rates. The Laffer curve is the…

The Amazing Feats of Asperger's

I have trouble remembering my own telephone number, so feats like this are totally incomprehensible: When he [Daniel Tammet] gets nervous, he said, he sometimes reverts to a coping strategy he employed as a child: he multiplies two over and over again, each result emitting in his head bright silvery sparks until he is enveloped by fireworks of them. He demonstrated, reciting the numbers to himself, and in a moment had reached 1,048,576 -- 2 to the 20th power. He speaks 10 languages, including Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto, and has invented his own language, Mantï. In 2004, he raised…

Einstein Before Relativity

There's a new collection of Einstein's personal letters that are about to be published. They give us a portrait of the young scientist before he revolutionized science. At the time these letters were written, Einstein was insecure, poor and struggling to publish. In other words, he was just like every other post-doc: In 1915, as Western civilization teetered on the brink, Albert Einstein stood at the threshold of a scientific achievement so bold that it would forever change him and the world. His general theory of relativity, which described how large bodies warped space and time, would…

Steven Pinker is a New Mysterian

Is the Hard Problem of consciousness solvable by science? Will we ever come up with a meaningful explanation as to how squirts of neurotransmitter and minor jolts of electricity create subjective experience? As far as I'm concerned, this is the major philosophical question hovering over neuroscience. If the new Mysterians are right, and we will never understand how the texture of experience arises from neural computation, then neuroscience has a very profound limitation. The most important question in the field will always remain an ineffable mystery. There will always be a big void in the…

Smell and Obesity

Here is the NY Times, describing the latest weight-loss fad: Like almost every dieter in America, Wendy Bassett has used all sorts of weight-loss products. Nothing worked, she said, until she tried Sensa: granules she scatters on almost everything she eats, and which are supposed to make dieters less hungry by enhancing the smell and taste of food. The maker of Sensa claims that its effectiveness is largely related to smell: the heightened scent and flavor of food that has been sprinkled with Sensa stimulate the olfactory bulb -- the organ that transmits smell from the nose to the brain -- to…

Things I Like

1) The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, by Freedarko. This book is perpetually on my coffee table, if only so I can read through it (again and again) every time there's a commercial break during the NBA playoffs. It's a really hard book to describe, but if you think you might enjoy Langston Hughes references in an essay on Lamar Odom, or might like a digression into Shanghai architecture and globalization while reading about Yao Ming, then get this book. On a related note, I really enjoyed the email conversation between Simmons and Gladwell. 2) The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle. Where…

Dogs adapting to urban ecologies

A friend pointed me to this fascinating article about stray dogs in Moscow: ... It has become a symbol for the 35,000 stray dogs that roam Russia's capital - about 84 dogs per square mile. You see them everywhere. They lie around in the courtyards of apartment complexes, wander near markets and kiosks, and sleep inside metro stations and pedestrian passageways. You can hear them barking and howling at night. And the strays on Moscow's streets do not look anything like the purebreds preferred by status-conscious Muscovites. They look like a breed apart. ... They also acted differently. Every…

More children = lower blood pressure

Raising Kids May Lower Blood Pressure: A new Brigham Young University study found that parenthood is associated with lower blood pressure, particularly so among women. ... The study involved 198 adults who wore portable blood pressure monitors, mostly concealed by their clothes, for 24 hours. The monitors took measurements at random intervals throughout the day -- even while participants slept. This method provides a better sense of a person's true day-to-day blood pressure. Readings taken in a lab can be inflated by people who get the jitters in clinical settings. It's a real phenomenon…

Polling global warming

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner polled 1000 Americans and got some encouraging results. Three in ten respondents chose stopping global warming by reducing dependence on fossil fuels as the most important threat, above student performance, business competitiveness and retirement security. Only reducing healthcare costs did better, pulling only three percentage points more support. Majorities of Americans feel we're lagging the world in developing "clean, alternative energy" (13% think we've fallen behind, 40% think we're falling behind), and 64% of the public thinks we need to "immediately" move…

Why I have no interest in any possible biological bases for homosexuality.

Jessica at Feministing notices the BBC reporting on a study that conditions in utero may play a causal role in men's sexual orientation. But, as the title of this post suggests, I do not care what the biological bases for sexual orientation might be, nor indeed whether there are biological bases for sexual orientation. Jessica makes a comment that starts to capture my own non-interest here: ... naturally the larger question with all these why-are-you-gay studies is why do we have to know? I'm terrified that once someone targets a "reason" they're just going to try and find a way to do away…

DonorsChoose update: now with matching funds from SEED!

Since we kicked off the drive yesterday morning: ScienceBlogs readers have made donations totaling $3784.30 Our beneveolent overlords at SEED have put up as much as $10,000 to match reader donations*. That means that so far, SEED is kicking in $3784.30 to match what you all have donated. And, if readers can collectively donate another $6125.70, SEED is committed to matching that as well. So far, exactly 13 readers who have made donations have forwarded their email confirmations from DonorsChoose to sb.donorschoose.bonanza@gmail.com to enter the drawing for fabulous prizes at the end of…

Airbags Make You Less Safe

When cars are stocked with airbags in every possible direction - are there ceiling airbags yet? - drivers become more aggressive: A Purdue University research team that studied five years of motor vehicle accidents in Washington State concludes antilock brakes and airbags don't minimize accidents or injuries because those systems may encourage riskier driving. Fred Mannering, a Purdue professor of civil engineering, led the study. The results, which are bound to be controversial with auto makers and safety experts, say the innovations designed to improve safety also make drivers less vigilant…

Breakfast is Bad For You

Is nothing sacred? I'm starting to wonder if nutrionists are the scientific version of fashion designers, and make sure to contradict their claims every few years or so, just to stay cutting edge. Anyways, I like breakfast. Noting gets me going like a nice bowl of sugary Cinnamon Life. Whatever you do, don't skip breakfast. Breakfast: It's the most important meal of the day. Such pronouncements carry almost the aura of nutritional religion: carved in stone, not to be questioned. But a few nutritionists and scientists are questioning this conventional wisdom. They're not challenging the…

Van Gogh

Dr. Felix Rey was the first doctor to diagnose Vincent Van Gogh with epilepsy, after the artist was hospitalized following this bizarre incident: When Gauguin left their house, van Gogh followed and approached him with an open razor, was repelled, went home, and cut off part of his left earlobe, which he then presented to Rachel, his favorite prostitute. The police were alerted; he was found unconscious at his home and was hospitalized. There he lapsed into an acute psychotic state with agitation, hallucinations, and delusions that required 3 days of solitary confinement. He retained no…

Genes, Diversity, Brains

We spend so much time fixating on our genetic differences that we tend to overlook the places where the human genome has converged over time. In a study published yesterday in Nature Genetics, geneticists from France's Pasteur Institute compared DNA variations in people from Japan, China, Nigeria and northwest Europe. They found 582 genes associated with skin color, hair texture and other physiological characteristics. These are likely just a fraction of the genes historically tweaked by regional variations in selective pressures, producing the differences between -- for example -- an…

Religion Without God (Judaism Version)

So it's the High Holy Day season again - the pious two weeks in the Jewish calendar connecting Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - and that means that many American Jews are going to shul. For most of these religious observers, this will be their only trip to temple during the year (unless, of course, they've been invited to a bar mitzvah). The one thing that always strikes me about spending time in a non-Orthodox temple is just how little God there is. Sure, His name is constantly invoked, but it's always in a rather rote, ritualistic way. I never get the sense that most of the people crammed…

The fact of the irrational voter

The Political Gender Gap: Gender Bias in Facial Inferences that Predict Voting Behavior: ...Contrary to the notion that people use deliberate, rational strategies when deciding whom to vote for in major political elections, research indicates that people use shallow decision heuristics, such as impressions of competence solely from a candidate's facial appearance, when deciding whom to vote for. Because gender has previously been shown to affect a number of inferences made from the face, here we investigated the hypothesis that gender of both voter and candidate affects the kinds of facial…

Who would abort a defective fetus?

A few weeks ago I had a post up, Down syndrome and abortion rates. Today I noticed a variable in the GSS, GENEABRT, which gives responses to the following question: 1567. Suppose a test shows the baby has a serious genetic defect. Would you (yourself want to/ want your partner to) have an abortion if a test shows the baby has a serious genetic defect? I decided to check the responses for different demographics of course. The table are below the fold, but there seems to be a trend with people with more education, less religion and more liberalism being more prone to being inclined to…

More on Eyjafjallajökull and the St. Helens Anniversary

News, news, news! Ash from Eyjafjallajökull piling up on a roof at Seljavellir. Image courtesy of the IMO, by Ari Tryggvason. The latest from Eyjafjallajökull has the volcano continuing to puff away - producing intermittent airspace closures over Europe. The Icelandic Met Office reports a ~7 km (21,000 foot) ash plume, but they note that the explosivity of the eruption seems to have waned some since a maximum on May 13. Right now, the IMO estimates the eruption rate at ~200 tonnes/second. Lets put that in a little perspective - a Ford F-150 pickup weighs about 2 tonnes, so the volcano is…

Eyjafjallajökull Update for 5/11/2010

I an in the home stretch for grading exams, so just a quick update for today: The evidence of floods from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, taken on May 1, 2010 by Dr. Joe Licciardi. Airports now as far south as Spain, Morocco and the Canary Islands are facing closures due to the Eyjafjallajökull ash. The latest London VAAC ash advisory has the ash wrapping around western and southern Europe, which I am sure is making life interesting for routing transatlantic flights into Europe. The flights within Europe don't seem to be that effected according to Eurocontrol - and they have even dropped…

Wednesday Whatzits: Haiti, Tungurahua erupts, Martian lava flows and a pile of updates

Somehow I haven't posted a bunch of interesting items collected over the last few weeks, so I need to catch up. A pre-emptive hat tip to everyone who has sent me links or notes that might seem familiar in this post. Tungurahua in Ecuador erupting in 2000. First off, those of you looking for information on the Haitian earthquake that devastated the capitol Port Au Prince, Highly Allochthonous has post on the tectonics of the quake. Right now, it is hard for me to come up with a worse location in terms of devastation for a quake to have hit in the Caribbean Basin. Back in volcano news, a lot…

Wednesday Whatzits: A Permian caldera find, the legends of Pele and a quieting Redoubt

Some brief tidbits for your Wednesday: The view of Mt. Saint Helens from the Johnston Ridge Observatory. There is a decent article about research being done at a dissected caldera system in the Italian Alps' Sesia Valley. The caldera in question is the Permian in age (248-298 million years old) so don't expect to find it in the GVP database, but the outcrops of this ancient caldera are especially well exposed, allowing for a cross section of volcano and plutonic rocks across 25 km of crustal depth (all of which is now at the surface thanks to hundreds of millions years of tectonics). It…

Terrible volcano journalism (and the weekend open thread)

Satellite image of the island of Tenerife with the main vent of the volcano (El Teide) in the central part of the island. I will be out of town for the next few days, so I thought I'd leave this thread for breaking volcano news that any of you Eruptions readers notice. However, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to point out some abysmal science journalism before I go. I mean, I shouldn't have been surprised considering this is from the The Sun(UK), but, come on, could you at least put some effort in? The article in question pertains to the recent controversy about the level of danger people…

Chaiten slowing down, but not stopping.

Although the mainstream media seems to have lost interest in the Chaiten eruption beyond the "human interest" (or should I say "salmon interest") aspect of the eruption, there is still a lot going on at the volcano. The SERNAGEOMIN recently released this excellent photo of the erupting caldera: What is pretty clear here is thank a new rhyolite dome is erupting on top of the old dome. (On a side note, when I was visiting the Smithsonian last week, we were all lamenting the fact that no one has come out and said what composition this lava is? I'm 99% convinced it is rhyolite, e.g., high silica…

On my random speculations

Before we get too far, I wanted to make sure that folks understand that I'm just making educated conjectures on the nature of the eruptions I read about and by no means do I have any extra insight over those scientists on the ground at the eruption. I have a very limited set of data to examine - whatever the media reports - so I am just speculating based on what I know about the eruption style, volcano in question and whatever other variables might come into play. So, please, don't think that I know exactly what is going on or what will happen better than the scientists tackling the volcano…

Win Ben Stein's Movie

NCSE's Glenn Branch is known for his nigh-omniscience, and today he got a great scoop: the production company behind schlockumentary Expelled is going bankrupt. You'll recall Expelled: No Intelligence... as a movie so full of crap that even frontman Ben Stein acknowledges it's best watched while high. It's so bad that the New York Times called it "One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time," Roger Ebert said "This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions, segues between…

Nonresponsive

The Governator has some thoughts on how to fix our state's broken fiscal situation: In a state of the state speech, the governor said creating jobs was the top priority for his last year in office and proposed spending $500 million in worker training funded by part of the budget which is in surplus.[â¦] Schwarzenegger put the budget hole at $19.9 billion over 18 months, about a billion less than a recent report from the state's budget watchdog.[â¦] Schwarzenegger called for overhauls including changing the state's tax and pension systems and allowing for private prisons, red flags to powerful…

In which I get all accommodationist

I still don't know if I'm using that word right, but Science and Religion Today asked me a question about the award Chad wants to give me. They wonder "Do moderates have a responsibility to be more vocal in science and religion discussions?" It's an admittedly vague question, and they left off my epigram, from Petronius: "Moderation in all things, even moderation." Ah well. In brief, I said yes. I used "religious moderates" in what I think is an idiosyncratic way, taking it as the religious subset of moderates on a particular question much under discussion lately, not members of congregations…