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Top Science Books: 2016

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Here is my selection of the top science books from 2016, excluding those mainly for kids. Also, I don’t include climate change related books here either. (These will both be covered in separate posts.)

The number of books on this list is not large, and I think this was not the most prolific year ever for top science books. But, the ones on the list are great! For brevity, I’m mostly using the publisher’s info below. Where I’ve reviewed the book, there is a link to that review. Click through to the reviews if you want to read my commentary, but in most cases, you can judge these books by their covers.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

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In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women’s colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates.

The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll

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In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level—and then how each connects to the other. Carroll’s presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique.

Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World by Rachel Ignotofsky

Inside, the book does not look like other books.
Inside, the book does not look like other books.

A charmingly illustrated and educational book, New York Times best seller Women in Science highlights the contributions of fifty notable women to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) from the ancient to the modern world.

Full of striking, singular art, this fascinating collection also contains infographics about relevant topics such as lab equipment, rates of women currently working in STEM fields, and an illustrated scientific glossary.

The trailblazing women profiled include well-known figures like primatologist Jane Goodall, as well as lesser-known pioneers such as Katherine Johnson, the African-American physicist and mathematician who calculated the trajectory of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

Women in Science celebrates the achievements of the intrepid women who have paved the way for the next generation of female engineers, biologists, mathematicians, doctors, astronauts, physicists, and more!

Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

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Every animal, whether human, squid, or wasp, is home to millions of bacteria and other microbes. Ed Yong, whose humor is as evident as his erudition, prompts us to look at ourselves and our animal companions in a new light—less as individuals and more as the interconnected, interdependent multitudes we assuredly are.

The microbes in our bodies are part of our immune systems and protect us from disease. In the deep oceans, mysterious creatures without mouths or guts depend on microbes for all their energy. Bacteria provide squid with invisibility cloaks, help beetles to bring down forests, and allow worms to cause diseases that afflict millions of people.

Many people think of microbes as germs to be eradicated, but those that live with us—the microbiome—build our bodies, protect our health, shape our identities, and grant us incredible abilities. In this astonishing book, Ed Yong takes us on a grand tour through our microbial partners, and introduces us to the scientists on the front lines of discovery. It will change both our view of nature and our sense of where we belong in it.

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben

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Are trees social beings? In this international bestseller, forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.

After learning about the complex life of trees, a walk in the woods will never be the same again.

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

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An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world

Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more.

Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren’s remarkable stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”; and about the inevitable disappointments, but also the triumphs and exhilarating discoveries, of scientific work.

Yet at the core of this book is the story of a relationship Jahren forged with a brilliant, wounded man named Bill, who becomes her lab partner and best friend. Their sometimes rogue adventures in science take them from the Midwest across the United States and back again, over the Atlantic to the ever-light skies of the North Pole and to tropical Hawaii, where she and her lab currently make their home.

Lab Girl

The Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals (Princeton Field Guides) by Don Proghero

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This book is an interesting idea. Never mind the field guide part for a moment. This isn’t really set up like a field guide, though it is produced by the excellent producers of excellent field guides at Princeton. But think about the core idea here. Take every group of mammal, typically at the level of Order (Mammal is class, there are more than two dozen living orders with about 5,000 species) and ask for each one, “what does the fossil record look like.” In some cases, a very few living species are related to a huge diversity of extinct ones. In some cases, a highly diverse living fauna is related to a much smaller number of extinct ones. And each of these different relationships between the present and the past is a different and interesting evolutionary story.

If you looked only at the living mammals, you would miss a lot because there has been so much change in the past.

The giant sloths may be extinct, but Don Prothero himself is a giant of our age among fossil experts. His primary area of expertise includes the fossil mammals (especially but not at all limited to rhinos). I believe it is true that he has personally handled more fossil mammalian material, in terms of taxonomic breath and time depth, across more institutional collections, than anyone.

See my full review here

The Princeton Field Guide to Prehistoric Mammals (Princeton Field Guides)

Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry by Christie Wilcox

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Christie Wilcox’s book is one of the better science books I’ve read in some time. This is an area I should know something about, as a biological scientist, and as a person who has lived for years in the venom-rich rain forest. But I still found myself learning something new with every page turn. Wilcox has studied venom for years — this is her area of specialty — and her text is enriched with well placed and well told stories of her own sometimes harrowing experiences.

The book is very well written and very well documented with copious notes.

A fascinating subtext has to do with human evolution and experience. There is a theory that primates generally are tuned to venomous creatures, especially snakes, and some of the key primate evolutionary adaptations are shaped by the experience of living in trees where large venomous snakes hunt. In the present day, there is what looks to me almost like a cult of self envenomation, found among people who keep venomous snakes (mainly), who inject themselves with venom regularly in order to stay, maybe, immune in case of an accidental bite. But they seem to be doing something more than this, almost using the venom as a sort of drug or, fascinatingly, as an elixir to extend life. On top of this, there is even an expanding practice of using snake bites, or ingesting the powdered form of snake venom, as a recreational drug. This set of not too unrelated human stories sits intriguingly amid myriad stories of venom use among a wide range of animals, including several mammals, fish, cone snails, snakes and lizards, etc.

Read my full review here

Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry

Some Other Books

There are a few other books that I want to mention, that are not strictly science books, or that are great but that would appeal to a narrower audience.

The first is a book you should buy instead of a science book, this year, if you are only going to buy one book. This is Shawn Otto’s “The War On Science.” I’ve written a review of it here. Please follow through to the review, look it over, then get yourself a copy of this important book.

Howard Wainer’s “Truth or Truthiness” appeals to people who consider themselves skeptics, but may not be as much interest to a wider audience. But if you call yourself a Skeptic and have not seen it yet, have a look it!

Earthquake Time Bombs is an important book to read if you live in an earthquake area and care that YOU ARE ALL GONNA DIE!!! No, but seriously, Robert Yeats is THE expert on earthquake risk and hazard, and I loved this book even though I don’t live in an earthquake prone area. But, I’m really into geology. Are you? If so, check it out.

Anyone interested in, or engaged in, the Evolution-Creation discussion should have a copy of THe Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth on their shelf. Check out my review to see why.


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The Alligators of Texas

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The American alligator is found only* in the US, and is widespread in Texas. It is found in both rivers, such as the Rio Grande and Sabine, and along the coast. And, it turns out that the preferred locations for many of the important activities in the day to day live of the American alligator overlap a great deal with humans.

Louise Hayes, biologist, and photographer Philippe Henry have produced, with TAMU Press, have produced Alligators of Texas, a highly accessible, well written, and richly illustrated monograph on these beasts.

LOUISE HAYES has been studying American alligators in Texas since 1985 at sites such as Brazos Bend State Park and the J.D. Murphree Wildlife Management Area. PHILIPPE HENRY is a professional wildlife photographer based in St. Mathieu du Parc. His photographs have been published worldwide.

If you are into Alligators and their relatives, regardless of where you live, this book may be an important addition to your collection. If you live in Texas in any of the Alligator areas (near larger rivers, the coast, etc) then you need this book along side your bird guides and plant ID pocket volumes. Not that you need to know how to identify an Alligator, but rather, to learn all about them.

This is a very nice looking book.

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*Originally, I wrote “only in the US” because the info that came with, and in, the book apparently says this, and there are other sources that say this as well. For example, one distribution map for Mexican relatives of the American Alligator shows no alligators anywhere near the Rio Grande. An interested reader, however, asked how the heck the Alligators stay on only one side of the Rio Grande and avoid Mexico.

It seems that these alligators actually do avoid the main body of the Rio Grande and are simply rare or non existent in Mexico, but at the same time, the ARE in the Rio Grande, but just rare. For example, a small population showed up in Fort Hancock in Hudspeth County in 2009. They must have been able to pass back and forth across the river.

So, it seems that this species of Alligator is an occasional but rare find in Mexico, and presumably not that common in the Rio Grande itself.

Anybody from the region have any local alligator information to add?

SEE THIS NEW INFO ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF TEXAS GATORS


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You think this year’s election is strange?

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Clinton beat Trump by a large margin, by electoral standards. A couple of percent is actually a lot these days. Yet so far it appears that Trump won the electoral vote, even though those votes are not yet cast and who knows what is actually going to happen.

But this year, strange as it it and stranger thought it may become, is not the strangest ever. That goes to 1876.

Wow.


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How Will The Swing States Swing?

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The election is one week off. I think I’ve convincingly demonstrated, here, that Clinton is likely but not certain to win, that Trump has something of a chance, but not a great one, and that the swing states, therefore, matter.

There are a lot of states that are called swing states but are not. There are non-swing states that are slowly becoming swing states. For example, Georgia and Texas may well be swing states for the next presidential election. Virginia has been considered a swing state for so long that this now reliably semi-progressive/centrist vote-for-the-Dems-for-POTUS state probably shouldn’t be considered a swing state any more. Of course, once a state is a swing state, it should probably not be trusted for several election cycles thereafter.

And, of course, there are swing states that are currently busy swinging back and forth and must be paid close attention to. Here are a few observations on this subset of swing states, based on this morning’s polling and my previous model. (A LOT, perhaps a record number, of polls came out over the last 36 hours, most of which are fairly low quality, and I’m mostly ignoring them.)

Right now, it looks like Trump will win Arizona. My model puts Arizona in Trump’s column. Before you object, FiveThirtyEight agrees with me.

My model puts Iowa in Clinton’s column, but polls disagree, and it looks like Iowa is going to be Trump. This may be where my model fails (likely, paying too much attention to Iowans of the past?) Or, this could be where I get to say, later, “I told you so.” This contrast has been developing for weeks, but there hasn’t been a lot of poling data.

Proposal: If Iowa votes for Trump, take Iowa out of the first slot for the next primary season. (Unless Trump wins the election, then, move to Iowa.)

Nevada really is very, very, close but all indicators suggest that Clinton will win Nevada. My model says Clinton will win Nevada.

New Hampshire probably is not on the table any more as an unreliable state, or a swing state. Does anyone know if this has anything to do with Massachusetts and New Hampshire cross border commuting and car insurance? Eric?

Even though my model is very iffy about North Carolina, it does give it to Clinton by a very small margin, and polls suggest that North Carolina is firmly Clinton.

My model currently puts Ohio barely in the Clinton column. Previous runs of this model put Ohio in Trump’s column. Polls suggest it is very iffy. FiveThirtyEight puts Trump one percent above Clinton, suggesting a fair sight better than 50-50 chance of Trump winning there.

Verily, Ohio is the swingiest of states.

I think everyone and every poll and every model is agreed: Pennsylvania is Clinton. But, Pennsylvania has pulled surprises in the past, so don’t turn your back on Pennsylvania. If you find yourself in the elevator with Pennsylvania, check your wallet.

People have been talking about Utah like it matters. It does not and never will. But it is interesting. Don’t confuse “interesting” with “matters.” Trump will win in Utah.

Are we done calling Virginia a “swing state” yet? Clinton.


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The Presidential Race Tightens Even As Many Assume It Is Over

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A Trump-Kaine presidency is now on the table.

It ain’t over ’till the lady in the pantsuits wins. Or looses.

Imagine Debbie Downer and Chicken Little have an offspring. It would be me. Or at least, that’s how I’ve felt over the last few weeks as the only person in the Free World who seems to have noticed that the gap between Trump and Clinton is closing, and in fact, was never really that large to begin with. It only appeared large because a fluctuation occurred at about the same time everyone was hoping for a fluctuation, so it became more real than it should have been. The race has been close for some time, remains close, and is narrowing.

This morning, the newscaster for NPR introduced a story on the race with “With Hillary Clinton’s lead narrowing …” or words to that effect. The story was about President Obama’s remarks. You think you’re wining, then you miss a couple of free flows, get a penalty or two you weren’t expecting, next thing you know, you wake up the next morning, and you’re the Minnesota Vikings. Or words to that effect.

Let’s look at some tracking polls. Tracking polls may be inaccurate with respect to magnitude (how high or low the candidates are, in relation to each other, but scaled in absolute terms) but they are supposed to be helpful in detecting short term changes. So, for example, if you have good reason to think two candidates are at, say, 60 – 40 in the split among voters, and a tracking poll then tells you that that first candidate has likely lost about 5%, that means that you should take seriously the possibly that it is no longer 60 – 40, but may have moved closer to 50 – 50, without assuming how much closer. That is what tracking polls can give you.

The Los Angeles Times has a well respected tracking poll. This is a picture of it:

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Here’s the ABC tracking poll.

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This shows the race narrowing to a near dead heat.

In both of these polls, ignore the absolute value. What these tracking polls are telling you is this: Ten days ago, you were jumping up and down happy because Clinton was so far ahead and her lead was expanding. Today, you need to stop jumping up and down and you have to put your nose the grindstone and work on making sure she wins, because, simply put, Trump has a chance.

A third tracking poll, the IBD/TIPP poll, is considered to be highly accurate (has never been wrong in a presidential race) and has put Clinton and Trump in a near dead head for a long time now. IBD/TIPP shows Clinton’s lead expanding a bit.

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So, with two tracking polls showing what looks like an emerging reversal of fortune for the Clinton campaign, and one maintaining as an indicator that things are close, those who wish to not have a Trump Presidency should be concerned about two things.

The first thing to be concerned about is your own personal connection to and understanding of reality. A lot of Americans really like Trump, and you didn’t think that was possible and still don’t understand why. Fail to grasp that at your peril.

The second thing, of course, is an actual Trump presidency.

This is the point where most un-realists, those who simply wish Clinton to win so hard that their eyes have become scaled over, make this argument: “But the Electoral College, bla bla bla.”

So, let’s look at the Electoral College. I recently projected a very close race in the Electoral College, that some said was a crazy outlier. But when I looked at the other projections, I found that mine was similar to many others, with only one difference: I projected win/loss for all states, while the others left a lot of states as unknown. In other words, for states where we know the likely outcome, the race is close.

But how close?

Here is a list of the selected sampling of pundit forecasts listed at 270 to to win.

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This represents the range of what people are thinking.

Note that in all cases, a) Clinton has more than 270 electoral votes, BUT, in several cases she is within one state of losing that. Note also that Trump is in every case below 270. But, also notice that in all cases (not shown in this table, but visible on direct inspection) there are plenty of unattributed states for either candidate to draw from.

This is the map that is of most concern:

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This is the map 270 provides to represent “contested states.” It is not unreasonable. New Hampshiere, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wisconsin, and Iowa are reasonably thought of as contested. In this scenario, neither candidate has enough to win.

Let’s take this map and give Trump the states he is very likely to win if the wind is blowing softly in his direction. We get this:

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Still, neither candidate wins.

I personally have a hard time believing Wisconsin will not be blue. New Hampshire has been trending more and more Blue, so maybe it will be Blue as well. Le’ts assume that Maine goes blue as well. If that all happens, Clinton wins by 3 electoral votes.

But it is also not unreasonable to guess that New Hampshire goes for Trump, or that, say New Mexico ends up going for Trump. In that case, Clinton is just below the 270 mark. If Trump then wins North Carlina and Florida, then hello President Trump.

Indeed, in the Election Year From Hell, we may very well expect this nightmare scenario:

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If this happens, the vote on November 8th is thrown out and Congress decides who will be president. The House will decide who will be President, and they will pick Trump. The Senate will decide who is Vice President, and they will pick Kaine.

On Election night, I’ll be watching New Hampshire and North Carolina very closely.


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Learn Scratch Programming (For Kids And Adults)

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Scratch Programming Playground: Learn to Program by Making Cool Games is a brand new offering from No Starch Press.

Never mind all the other programming books for kids, this is the best so far.

It helps that the Scratch Programming environment is so easy to use and allows such creative development, and it also helps that Scratch is likely to be a programming environment for basic robotics in the future. But the book itself is excellent, and works at several levels. A young kid working with an adult, a medium level kid working on their own, or an adult playing on the computer after the kids have gone to bed.

Scratch is in the Logo family of object oriented programming. Indeed, Scratch itself, as a language, is a very short distance from the original object oriented programming, much closer to the source than many professional object oriented language.

It works like this. See the graphic to the right. This is code that controls a “sprite” which in this case is a picture of a ball.

The light brown C-shaped things are control constructs. An outer one called “forever” contains code that will be run from the time the program is started until it is stopped externally. Inside that is an “if” loop that checks to see if the object “paddle” (specified in the blue object) touches the sprite (ball). If that event happens, then the code inside the “if” thingie is executed. In this case, the variable “score” goes up by one, a funny little blerp sound is made, and the ball turns in the opposite direction.

Meanwhile, the paddle has a wadge of code that goes with it as well, which responds to key presses or mouse movements, so that the paddle can be used as part of the bouncing the ball game. And so on.

In the code block on the left, contact between a pirate (a sprite) and a leaf causes the leaf to disappear and the pirate to get a score for making the leaf disappear.

You can imagine the possibilities.

So, imagine the following game. A complex maze is on the screen. The player uses arrow keys, etc., to move a tiny cat around in the maze, working the cat from the beginning to the end. At the end, there is a hole that the cat goes through, and now the cat is in another maze. And so on for several mazes.

Are there objects in the maze the cat must avoid? Or obtain? Will you time how long it takes to get through each level? Will you keep a high score? Will you have two cats, with two people controlling them, each moving in opposite directions through the maze?

The code examples I give above are not from Scratch Programming Playground, but the maze example is. It is one of several projects that the book works you though, as you learn all the various programming concepts in Scratch 2.0. The programs you learn to code produce complicated results and are really spiffy, but the programming itself is easy and the code is not extensive, because Scratch 2.0 is so powerful yet easy to use.

Each example, such as the maze, is fully developed, and then, new versions (like having the second player ability, etc.) added, and by the time you are done with that example, if not sooner, you are already adding things of your own design, from your own imagination.

Scratch 2.0 can be run as a stand along program in windows and on a Mac, but works better on the web, in a browser, on all platforms. Working in that environment, on the browser, has the important advantage of immediate access to a large amount of work done by others, that you can freely borrow from. And, of course, you can show off your own work.

Scratch Programming Playground tells you how to obtain or set up an account on Scratch at MIT, holding your hand effectively but respectfuly through the entire process. The book is also associated with, as per usual for a No Starch book, a web site with the code and other items used in the book. However, I recommend actually hand building most of this code on your own, so you actually learn what you are doing.

It is possible to figure out how to make a hand held game controller work with Scratch programs, but that will depend on the controller you have and the platform. A USB controller and a bit of software from the web that lets you set up the buttons should work.

I would not be surprised if future Internet of Things programming, robotic programming, and other coding you might want to get involved in either uses Scratch or follows this model. The mBot robots can be controlled with a version of Scratch, which produces Arduino code for that robot, and there is now a compiler that allows the general use of scratch for Arduino. Arduino is a basic prototyping machine that can run things, as in “Internet of Things” and that is similar to controllers in general, like the ones in your computer, VCR, thermostat, DVD, car, Mars Rover, etc. (Wait, did I just say “VCR” … whatever.)

A bit of the book giving instruction on a code block to control a tennis ball sprite.[/caption]Anyway, Scratch 2.0 on the web, as per Scratch Programming Playground, gives you, er, your kids, great training in all the programming concepts, and with it you basically controls sprites (objects) on a screen. But the same language is already adapted to control a common form of robot (mBot) and has been adapted to program a widely used controller. So, with Scratch Programming Playground, a little practice and nine dollars worth of hardware, you can take over the world! Or, at least, a good portion of the Tri State Area.

When I do my “Science oriented holiday gift guide” (SOHGG) in a few weeks, this book is going to be on it. Al Sweigart, author, has really nailed a kids oriented programming book better than I’ve seen done before, and I’ve seen them all.


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Is Trump Yet Another Russian Oligarch?

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There has been a lot of talk about Trump and Russia and Putin. I think most people watching this see some sort of connections. Some go so far as to say that Trump is literally a Russian agent. Here is an interesting perspective from intelligence expert Malcolm Nance, author of The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election

About Nance’s book:

In April 2016, computer technicians at the Democratic National Committee discovered that someone had accessed the organization’s computer servers and conducted a theft that is best described as Watergate 2.0. In the weeks that followed, the nation’s top computer security experts discovered that the cyber thieves had helped themselves to everything: sensitive documents, emails, donor information, even voice mails.

Soon after, the remainder of the Democratic Party machine, the congressional campaign, the Clinton campaign, and their friends and allies in the media were also hacked. Credit cards numbers, phone numbers, and contacts were stolen. In short order, the FBI found that more than twenty-five state election offices had their voter registration systems probed or attacked by the same hackers.

Western intelligence agencies tracked the hack to Russian spy agencies and dubbed them the CYBER BEARS. The media was soon flooded with the stolen information channeled through Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. It was a massive attack on America but the Russian hacks appeared to have a singular goal—elect Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.

New York Times bestselling author and career intelligence officer Malcolm Nance’s fast paced real-life spy thriller takes you from Vladimir Putin’s rise through the KGB from junior officer to spymaster-in-chief and spells out the story of how he performed the ultimate political manipulation—convincing Donald Trump to abandon seventy years of American foreign policy including the destruction of NATO, cheering the end of the European Union, allowing Russian domination of Eastern Europe, and destroying the existing global order with America at its lead.

The Plot to Hack America is the thrilling true story of how Putin’s spy agency, run by the Russian billionaire class, used the promise of power and influence to cultivate Trump as well as his closest aides, the Kremlin Crew, to become unwitting assets of the Russian government. The goal? To put an end to 240 years of free and fair American democratic elections.

Wow


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Cthulhu Calling: A New Take On An Old Horror (Updated)

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National Novel Writing Month Project

NaNoWriMo is an international project< involving thousands of writers, or would be writers, who commit to writing an entire novel within the month of November. (I hear that you can finish a work already started, but you have to produce 50K words during the month for the novel to count). Since I’ve written a novel within a month once before, I figure I can do it again, only this time, better. Why will it be better? Because I can take my time, since I have a WHOLE MONTH to do it in. (I only had a few days to finish the last one.)

This post is a modified version of my novel’s page at the NaNoWriMo site, which apparently can’t be public.

Cthulhu Calling

This is H.P. Lovecraft’s story, set in more recent times, without the racism and sexism, and the story is kinda different too. Disclaimer: The Synopsis and Excerpt provided below may or may not survive the writing process.

Author:
GregLaden

Genre:
Horror/Supernatural

Synopsis

A timelessly ancient presence lurks deep beneath a cold northern lake, sleeping and dreaming. It has been doing so since eons before the lake itself ever existed, passing time as glaciers came and went, scraping the surface of the planet closer and closer, and ever changing in its appearance.

But the Old One it does not always dream alone.  For the Old One, dreaming is sustenance, and those creatures that happen to be about, that happen to have evolved by chance or design of nature to exist at that moment in long and deep time, are recruited to be the chosen with whom the old one dreams. And generally, they are not aware that they are being fed upon.

Thousands of years after the Old One first took to resting on this quiet blue planet, one of the more clever denizens, the humans, happened by chance upon a feast in progress, and became curious.  That same species had an expression:  “Curiosity killed the cat.”  The Old One knew nothing of cats, but felt very uncomfortable with human curiosity.

And so begins the story of Gean and Lacy, two humans not delectable in the usual way, and thus untouched, undemented, by the reaching mind of the ancient sleeper, who would entirely by chance discover at least part of the unthinkable truth, and ultimately step unsafely close to the unearthly creature busily consuming its meal.  

This monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, with an octopus-like head and face covered with a mass of tentacles, a scaly, rubbery body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, vestigial wings, and large enough to displace all the waters of a sizable Walleye honey hole, would be the least of Gean and Lacy’s problems. They should really have avoided enraging the Masters of the Universe who ran one of the country’s largest corporations, raising the suspicions of the investigators in charge of a secret bureau of the Department of Homeland Security, or disturbing the troubled harmony of the academic world of anthropologists and other scoundrels.

Excerpt

It turns out that sometimes, when you dream a certain thing, you die.

Had this happened once, it would never have been noticed.  Twice, it would have been attributed to coincidence.  But it happened three times, and in this case, three times is not a charm.  Over 10,000 people had been sleeping while attached to a SleepMeter 2000 during the course of up to four and a half years, nearly 80 million hours of data from their sleep cycles uploaded to the central server. Four of them happened to die during their sleep. One was not dreaming at the time and the cause of death was a heart attack.  That’s a coincidence.  The other three had died of a brain hemorrhage, and the data from the SleepMeter 2000 indicated not only that they were dreaming at the time, but they were dreaming oddly. The signals picked up by the sensors built into the Sleep Cap that comes with the SleepMeter 2000 clearly indicated dreaming, but along with the dreaming came an additional electronic signature utterly unique compared to all of the other signals stored over the years on the SleepMeter servers.

Also, all three died at the same exact moment in time.

This is what Lacy Edwards, my roommate and nerd-in-chief at SleepMeter Inc, was telling me.  Lacy sat across the kitchen table, telling me the story while she typed rapidly on the keyboard of her ubiquitous laptop and I munched on a piece of toast leftover from breakfast.  Her long semi-curly red hair was jiggling slightly against her shoulders as she tapped away at the keys. Her pale but very pretty face, punctuated by a sideways colon of sharp green eyes, fragile em-dash nose and, with her intense focus on her keyboard, open-bracket frown tilted down, not looking at me, but only at the screen. Ok, maybe it isn’t fair for me to always think of Lacy as an emoticon, but she seemed to spend her life inside computers so it felt right.

“There were nine other instances of that strange signal coming from people’s heads while they slept,” she said.  “Eight in the ones who died, at various times over the previous weeks.  One had been picked up from the brain of another individual who seems to be both still alive and still a customer using the SleepMeter 2000 service.  But the bosses at work have been totally cagey with me. ‘This is just an anomaly, and has nothing to do with our device,’ they said.  They told me to lay off.  Hell, they are probably right.  The 2000 is safe.  It doesn’t DO anything, just reads signals.  That’s not the problem.”

“We don’t need to look into safety, I told them. We need to look into these people.  I think we might have discovered a new disease or something. And the thing is, we saw it coming in all the cases where they died, and one guy is still alive.  For now.”

“And if you really did discover a new disease,” I mentioned through my toast, “you also have the diagnostic tool for it.”

She looked up from her laptop for the first and only time and, giving me a wink (colon to semi-colon and back) said, “… and of course, I thought of that. That’s when I realized the reason they did not want me looking into this.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I was the inventor of most of the technology that went into making the SleepMeter 2000 work.  Therefore, I am the inventor of this possible technology to identify a medical condition that can lead to death from brain hemorrhage.  And of course, they want to patent that themselves!”

“Oh. Right.” I poured more milk into my coffee.  The coffee was too cool to be considered hot coffee, but maybe with a little more milk it would kinda be ice coffee. “So what are you going to do about that?” I asked, fairly confident that she could not do much about it.

“Well, I’m not going to do nuthin’” Lacy said, saying each of those syllables with grand exaggeration and timing them with hard one-fingered hammering, hand raised dramatically with each strike on her keyboard, in a gesture of over dramatic finality. “Because I just finished doing it.  Let’ go eat something, I’m starved.”

“What did you do?” I asked as she slapped the cover of the laptop shut.

“I’ll tell you at dinner.  From now on I assume our apartment is bugged,” she said with another semi-colon wink and a closed parenthesis, er, grin, clearly joking about the bugging, but I was pretty sure not about dinner. 

UPDATE: October 26th

I’ve been working out the story, and I’m confident I have a good overall plan. I also have a good sense of where the characters will be coming from (and going to), at least the main characters.

I have enough of the plan worked out that I can write backwards, starting with the apex of the story, aka “Act III.”

For reference, Act II is the part to the left of he paper stuck on the white board with the magnet. The sock is for cleaning off the white board. Slightly dampened, it works better than the dry erase erasers.

photo_20161026_164852


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Trypanosomiasis Discovery: An Argument for Basic Research

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One of the differences among the current four candidates for POTUS is the recognition, by only one of them, of the great importance of basic research. By that, I mean, give the scientists funding to pursue the questions that interest them. A sort of free market of ideas driven not by profits of the Bayers, Koch Borthers, and Cargils of the world, but rather, by how cool stuff is and how much untethered knowledge is advanced each time something else cool happens.

Tsetse fly
Tsetse fly
Trypanosomiasis is a terrible disease. I know only one person who had it, he was treated, survived, but his brain did get fried, at least for a while, and since that was a key asset for him, that was very sad. I did work extensively in a region that had been made into the world’s largest contiguous parkland, spanning three countries, because much of it had been depopulated due to a major epidemic of trypanosomiasis. And, the insect carrier of the disease, the tsetse fly, was there in abundance.

For those who have not met a tsetse fly, think of it as a tropical version of the Horse Fly, that large black thing that looks like a house fly on steroids with the bite that hurts like hell. They are very distant relatives, but have a similar love of human flesh and similar approaches to getting it.

The disease affects both humans and cattle, and has a very high mortality rate, so cattle keeping people such as the BaHama and others who lived in that area were very seriously affected.

Trypanosomiasis is caused by a protozoan, Trypanosoma, which has phylogenetically obscure associations and is probably polyphyletic. There is almost no recent research on the evolution of this protozoan, that I know of, yet it is probably very interesting, being found in both the old and new world, and probably having differentiated a very long time ago. Given the very interesting ways that protozoans reproduce, this would likely be a massively difficult project, above the PhD level. But if you are interested in making a contribution …

You know of trypanosomiasis as “sleeping sickness.” Africanists, trapped between the silliness of the common name and the tongue twistiness of the scientific name call it “tryps.” You don’t want tryps.

Anyway, here’s the thing. Despite major efforts, the disease was never eradicated. It would be totally gone in a region, impossible to find blood samples with the parasite in the sample, and then suddenly re-emerge. Nobody knew where it was hiding.

It turns out that where it was hiding, just discovered, is in retrospect totally obvious, and the kind of thing that, in my view, would have either been thought up or observed by accident, as happened here, had there been more basic research on all the different elements of this sad story of disease and death.

Annette MacLeod of the University of Glasgow was working on related matters, when (to oversimplify and shorten the story a bit) she discovered that the tryps parasite can hide in the skin, staying out of the blood supply and thus off the blood test radar. This may say something of our heavy reliance on blood tests as a sort of Ultimate Truth when it comes to infectious disease. Anyway, the tryps protozoan can remain in the skin, where, possibly, it gets picked up by a biting tsetse, and the, if all goes well for the protozoan, gets spread into the bloodstream of a downstream victim, and the whole things starts over again.

The story is written up here in Science.

Will other researches, working on other diseases, even those thought to be entirely blood borne, have a look in alternative tissues from now on? They should. Adding a sort of “look both ways” rule to the study of disease may not be a bad idea. Don’t assume the typically focal tissue is the only place a microbe of some sort carries out its activities. Check around. Look in the closet. Behind the door. Under the bed. You never know what will be lurking.

This seems to be unpublished research, but The research is here, and you can check out MacLeod’s publications to get a bead on this, and perhaps keep an eye out for the work in print.


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AGU Throws Science, Climate Under The Bus

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The American Geophysical Union just lost whatever remaining credibility it had as a scientific society earlier today when it announced no change in policy regarding taking money from ExxonMobil.

We talked about this before, here.

Margaret Leinen, the AGU president, issued a communication today that says this:

Last week the AGU Board of Directors discussed the organization’s April decision to continue engagement with ExxonMobil after receiving additional information from several sources. The Board maintained its original decision after another careful and systematic review of hundreds of pages of both newly provided and previous documentation and a thoughtful and comprehensive discussion. We thank all those who made their voices heard.

AGU has always valued open dialogue and exchange of ideas, and we believe this decision best reflects AGU’s unique value to the scientific community: our ability to convene scientists of diverse views and from different backgrounds, disciplines, and industries. With membership spanning all Earth and space sciences, AGU has an increasingly important role to play – building on our recognized convening power – in providing a space for active, vibrant dialogue that advances collective scientific understanding of the world and our place within it. This is an important function and strategic goal of our organization as scientific issues continue to be top-of-mind for the public and legislators alike and as places for thoughtful discussion of diverging viewpoints become increasingly rare. We remain, as always, committed to cultivating a space that is inclusive to scientists working across all sectors of society in service of exceptional scientific research and discovery.

We welcome your questions and comments via comments on this blog post or by direct email to President@AGU.org.

See the key part? This: ” ability to convene scientists of diverse views and from different backgrounds, disciplines, and industries. With membership spanning all Earth and space sciences, AGU has an increasingly important role to play – building on our recognized convening power…”

The AGU is pretending that the range of normal activities among its lovely power giving constituency includes nefarious acts, paying for anti-science activities, and so on. They are not arguing that ExxonMobil is in the clear. They are arguing that it doesn’t matter.

The word “power” here is a clear — well, ok, veiled — dog whistle. Someone in the organization wanted us to see that word in this context. The real power in power companies is not the gas or electricity.

So, that’s it for the AGU. What’s next?


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How Far Can You Drive With An “Empty Tank” Warning?

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So, many years ago, Amanda and I got a new car. The first thing we did was to switch get rid of my old Rodeo, and I took her old Subaru sedan, and she drove the new Forrester. So, thereafter I drove her old car, and she drove our new car.

One day I was on my way back home, and I noticed that the gas gauge needle was on E, but the Empty Tank Warning Light was not on. So I figured I’d get gas at the place near home, rather than stopping sooner.

Driving down the highway, the car sputtered and stopped working. I got it over to the side of the highway. Knowing that it was not out of gas, because the warning light was not on, I opted to be towed to the station, just a half mile away (I was almost home!) rather than to try fixing it on the road.

By the end of the day, I learned that the problem with the car, the reason it stopped on the highway, was this: Out of gas!

Later, I mentioned to Amanda that her former car’s gas tank warning light didn’t seem to be working any more, and I thought there was 20 miles or so before it went empty! Her response: “It has never worked, since I bought the car. You are thinking of the other car, dummy!”

Well, she didn’t say “dummy” but she should have. And, the answer to the question at the top of this post, with respect to that particular car, is: Undefined.

Much more recently, we were driving our Prius back from a visit up north. We passed the gas statin in Rice, but shouldn’t have, because we were almost out. Coming down into Saint Cloud, the warning light came on. Then, we hit a major traffic jam. There was no way we were going to make it to the gas station.

But, we were going down hill in stop and go traffic in a Prius. So, we switched to “Battery Mode” and stopped using gas for the next 10 minutes. No problem.

The point is, the answer to the question is necessarily imprecise. The best strategy is to avoid letting the light go on. Which, by the way, brings up an important digression into another myth: How empty should you let your car’s gas tank get?

It has long been thought that letting your car get too empty is a bad thing. For modern cars, this is a myth. It may always have been a myth. But today, all the reasons ever cited to avoid this are wrong except two. So, the rule that you should fill your tank when it is one quarter full is incorrect, ignore that. It doesn’t matter when you fill your tank.

But, this part is true: You don’t want your car to run out of gas. Why? Well because then it won’t go! Obviously. But there is another reason. It is actually possible that parts of your system, such as the catalytic converter, will be damaged or stressed by the process of zero-fuel-engine-stoppage. I’m not sure how that happens, but it can happen.

Also, it is a myth that you should not fill the tank on a hot day. You should, actually, never “top off” the tank. Just fill it until the hose clicks you off and leave it at that. Modern cars are designed to handle gas expansion, modern cars in combination with modern gas, are designed to handle moisture in the tank, etc. etc. These various rules about gas are either no longer valid because of changes in technology, or were never true, and merely part of Car Lore.

Anyway, back to the point. Your Mechanic web site has put together a table showing how long you have to drive, estimated and on average, and depending, for each of several makes and models of car, when the emergency fuel light goes on.

I’ve pasted it below, but first, I am reminded of a second myth. Sometimes the out of fuel light is in the form of a tiny gas tank, with the hose on one side. It is said that the side that has the hose on it (see illustration above) indicates which side of the car your filler hole is, which is handy if you are driving a borrowed or rented car.

It doesn’t. Well, maybe about half the time it does, but no, this is not a thing.

Here’s the chart:

how_far_can_you_drive_on_empty


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Very Smart Birds, Very Smart Bird Book

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Crows are smart. Anyone who watches them for a while can figure this out.

But that is true of a lot of things. Your baby is smart (not really). Your dog is smart (not really). Ants are smart (sort of).

It takes a certain degree of objective research, as well as some serious philosophy of intelligence (to define what smart is) to really address this question. But when the research is done and the dust settles, crows are smart.

We were all amazed (or not, because we already knew that crows are smart) to find that New Caledonian crows made and used tools. Now, we know (see my most recent post at 10,000 Birds) that a nearly extinct Hawaiian crow is also a tool user. The interesting thing about this new finding is that it is highly unlikely that the Hawaiian crow and the New Caledonian crow descend from a tool using ancestor, according to the researchers who did this work. Rather, tool use arose independently in the two species. But, really, not so independently.

They are all crows, and crows are smart, and both of these species live in a particular habitat where this tool use makes sense, and competing species of bird that might otherwise be going after the resources the tool use allows access to are absent. So, the trait evolved twice, but not unexpectedly.

The Evolution and Development of Bird Intelligence

I want to point out two things about birds that you probably know. First, they share modalities with humans to a greater degree than most other species, even our fellow mammals. Second, many birds live under conditions where complex behavior would be selected for by long term Darwinian processes.

Most mammals are solitary, small and nocturnal, or if large, are diurnal herd animals or some sort of predator. They tend to be olfactory and have varying degrees of vision, etc. We, on the other hand, are highly visual, not very olfactory, diurnal, and have a complex social system, and so on. We share these traits, for the most part, with our fellow primates, but humans live in many non-primate habitats these days, so we tend to stand out as a bit odd. If you are reading this blog post, chances are that the nearest non-pet and non-human mammal that you could locate right now is a squirrel, and the actual nearest mammal is some sort of rodent that you would have a hard time finding.

But, the nearest animal with an interesting brain, and interesting behavior, is a bird. Go look out your window and report back. I’ll study this diagram on the evolution of intelligence while I await your return.


bird_brain_nathan_emery_figure_evolution

OK, I hope that was fun. Let us know what species it was in the comments, please.

The visual orientation, together with that second trait of smartness, combine to make birds and their smartness akin to human’s smartness to the degree that we subjectively see birds as “intelligent,” and that alone is interesting. But likely, we are both intelligent by objective criteria, about certain things.

Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence was written by Nathan Emery, who is a Senior Lecturer (that’s like a Professor of some sort, in America) at Queen Mary University, London. He researches the evolution of intelligence in animals, including primates and various birds, and yes, including the crows!

He and his team “…have found striking similarities in the behaviour, ecology, neurobiology and cognitive mechanisms of corvids (crows, rooks, jackdaws and jays) and apes. [Suggesting that] these similarities are adaptations for solving similar social and ecological problems, such as finding, protecting and extracting food and living in a complex social world.”

The book is really great, the best book out there right now on animal intelligence, possibly the best book so far this year on birds. This is the kind of book you want laying around the house or classroom to learn stuff from. If you are writing or teaching about anything in evolution or behavior, this is a great way to key into the current work on bird intelligence.

Bird Brain is also going to earn a place on my Holiday Shopping Guide in the “Best gifts to give a science oriented youngster or your local life science teacher to encourage thinking about evolution” category. Yes, this is definitely a gift level book. Nobody will not like this book.

This is like a coffee table book in that it is slightly larger (not huge, just a little big) format, and full of great pictures, and the kind of book you can pick up and start reading anywhere. But it is also a book with a story, in a sense, or at least, an arc organizing the research being reported on. It is engagingly and well written and, very importantly, written by an expert.

I do respect journalists who become very interested in a topic and learn all about it and write it up, but there are limitations to such work. It is possible for various errors, minor or not, to sneak into such a work because the author is not deeply engaged in the way that a lifelong commitment to a work allows for. Bird Brain is written by an expert, so that is not going to happen here.

I highly recommend Bird Brain, for anyone who does not want to be a bird brain about birds, intelligence, evolution, or the evolution of intelligence in birds.

Here’s the TOC:

  • Foreword by Frans ee Waal
  • Introduction
  • 1 From Bird Brain to Feathered Ape
  • 2 Where Did I Hide that Worm?
  • 3 Getting the Message Across
  • 4 Feathered Friends (and Enemies)
  • 5 The Right Tool for the Job
  • 6 Know Thyself, and Other
  • 7 No Longer Bird-Brains

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    Subscribe to your eight favorite newspapers for $18.99 a month?

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    Wouldn’t that be great?

    Many high end newspapers charge something like $10 a month to subscribe, just to the digital edition. But most people who use digital editions of newspapers scan several, pick and chose what to read, and end up reading them all for free because they don’t reach the limit of number of articles provided to a certain web browser per month.

    But sometimes, one runs into that limit and suddenly can’t access articles for the last several days of the month. This hurts readers. (In some cases it hurts the papers. There are a half dozen items in the Washington Post right now that I’d like to blog about, sending thousands of readers to that paper, but I cant’ because I ran out of freebies early. Or they got stricter. Not sure.)

    One can get around this by clearing cookies, switching web browsers, switching computers, etc. But this is unethical and defeatist in two ways. First, the writers and other staff actually do have valuable paid jobs, and ripping off the paper is ripping them off. Second, related but at a different scale, these are companies that may annoy us in various ways, but that we actually want to exist.

    Due to new media and other considerations, newspapers, which may often be annoying but are still important, are facing an existential crisis. They have to make some money somehow. It simply is not true, though this philosophy arose during those heady days of the Time of Napster, that IF something can be downloaded from the internet, by any means, it IS therefore free, and any attempt to charge for it is IMMORAL.

    One can also get around this by subscribing to the damn newspapers! And, if you have a fave, and that is the paper you generally read, do that!

    But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the user scenario where several newspapers, not one, are roughly equally important to someone. For me, it is the Star Tribune, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and some subset of papers from Saint Paul, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco, and London. This is because I read and write about topics that are covered by all these papers. I do this to write a blog that does not make me enough money to subscribe to half dozen papers to the tune of $600. But, for personal pleasure and blogginess, I’d pay ten or even 18 bucks a month for a service that gave me all of this, or a choice of several.

    So, I have a proposal, which is embodied in the headline of this post.

    Netflix for Newspapers

    Not necessarily run by Netflix, not necessarily restricted to newspapers. But mainly a paid monthly subscription to … to what? To all the newspapers? To your choice of six? To your choice of X for Y dollars, where the incremental increase per X of Y decreases until a point where you get them all for a hefty but not absurd cost, but allowing regular people to have easy access to, say, a half dozen or so of their favorites for the current cost of one or two subscriptions? Something?

    Am I missing something? Is there already something like this out there? I doubt it, because if there was, someone would have tried to sell it to me by now. Why does this not exist? Can someone please arrange for this to exist?

    Would you want this?


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    Tell The AGU To Do The Right Thing About AGW #ExxonKnew

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    A while back it became apparent, or should I say, more apparent, that Exxon corporation had been playing a dangerous and unethical game with the science of climate change, and for decades, misled people on the relationship between their fossil fuel related activities, the effects of those activities, and possible solutions. (They’ve known about this problem all along.)

    Part of this seems to have involved making misstatements about climate change, and pumping resources into anti science activities and organizations.

    The American Geophysical Union is the unifying organization for geologists and physicists and other scientists who study climate change. The AGU does a lot more than that, but a good portion of the climate science community, internationally, engages at the AGU’s annual conference.

    Meanwhile, the AGU has a rule against accepting sponsorship from anti science organizations. Yet, Exxon has been sponsoring events at the AGU for some time.

    Obviously this can get tricky. Why not take money from a major corporation that ultimately benefits from the AGU, as it does by having a better equipped scientific community from which to draw both employees and expertise? And to some extent that is true, and to some extent many situations of tension exist like this.

    But in this case, there is a very strong argument that AGU should stop taking money from Exxon.

    Also, see this piece by Geoffrey Supran: Scientific organizations must be braver in confronting climate denial

    Recent revelations about Exxon have indicated that that organization’s activities are over the top. And, hundreds of members of the scientific community that is served by AGU and that engages in this sort of research signed on to a letter demanding that the AGU stop taking Exxon’s tainted money.

    And, the AGU board met, and blew off the scientists, and sidled up to Exxon. They gave all the usual, but rather lame, excuses.

    Tomorrow the board meets again. ClimateTruth.org is asking people to sign a petition supporting the scientists. Below is information from ClimateTruth.org. HERE IS THE LINK TO SIGN THE PETITION.

    The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is the largest association of Earth scientists in the world and a well-respected institution that advances public understanding of science. Yet, the AGU continues to accept funding from Exxon, one of the world’s leading funders of climate change denial.

    The AGU’s own sponsorship policy forbids accepting funding from any organization that supports science misinformation, a rule that was put in place for good reason. It’s time for the AGU to start abiding by its own policy — starting with Exxon.

    Now’s your chance to take a stand. Over 300 Earth scientists have signed on to an open letter calling on the AGU to reject Exxon sponsorship. Signers include renowned climatologists James E. Hansen, the former director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Michael E. Mann, Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. Today, we’re asking you to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these scientists, and 50,000 citizens, by adding your name.

    The AGU Board meets TOMORROW and we’ll be hand-delivering the thousands of petition signatures from across the nation directly to AGU headquarters in Washington, DC. It’s not too late! You can still join this collaborative campaign of scientists and citizens — and help us remind the AGU that its leadership matters to all of us.

    Stand with scientists and tell the AGU: Stop taking funds from Exxon, a company that misleads the public about climate change.

    Exxon has been deceiving the public about the science of climate change for decades and funding climate disinformation at a massive scale. Yet, the AGU Board couldn’t be convinced at their last meeting and decided to continue accepting funding from Exxon. It took a letter from U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Ted Lieu to push the AGU Board to vow to once again “review and discuss the information” at its next meeting tomorrow, on September 14.

    Your voice matters. Tell the AGU to drop Exxon sponsorship.

    Thank you for helping us hold the AGU accountable and for standing up for science — today and every day.
    Truthfully Yours,

    Amanda, Emily, Brant, Brandy, Daniela and the rest of the ClimateTruth.org team


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