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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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    23,000 Dead In The US Per Year

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    Ever year about 23,000 people die of infections from antibiotic resistant bacterial.

    Here is a film of bacteria evolving from regular old bacteria into killer superbugs. On a coffee table size Petri dish.

    You can get the story at NPR, where you will learn that

    “Getting more people to understand how quickly bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance might help people understand why they shouldn’t be prescribed antibiotics. The drug resistance is not some abstract threat. It’s real.”


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    Today is Lock Up Your Gun Day

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    Not really. But it is World Suicide Prevention Day. And, one way YOU can help prevent suicides is by keeping your gun locked up, separate from the ammo, and keeping the ammo locked up as well.

    Why?

    Here’s why:

    • Suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among teens and young adults and the 10th leading cause of death among all Americans.

    • On average, 4 teenagers and 118 total Americans complete suicide every day.

    • 90% people who survive a suicide attempt do not go on to die by suicide.

    • Many suicide attempts occur with little planning during a short-term crisis.

    • 50% of suicide deaths in the United States are by firearm.

    • Access to firearms is a risk factor for suicide.

    • Firearms used in youth suicide usually belong to a parent.

    • Reducing access to lethal means, like firearms, saves lives.

    • A gun in the home is 22x more likely to be used in a suicide, homicide, or unintentional shooting than for self defense.

    • If there is a gun in your home, keep it unloaded and locked up or with a trigger lock. Store the bullets in a different place that is also locked.

    • If there is a gun in your home, do not let children and teens have a key to the places where guns and bullets are stored.

    • If a household member becomes depressed or has severe mood swings, store the gun outside the home for the time being while you seek help!

    Adapted from this source.


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    Happy Labor Day. Who’s Not Doing Their Job?

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    Laborers generally do their jobs, because if they don’t they get fired. But there are entire professions where people are not doing their jobs and the rest of us suffer.

    Jacob Wetterling was abducted and murdered two and a half decades ago. The guy who did it was known to the cops then, and he had done things like this before, and those thinks were known about. There are all kinds of reasons they should have busted him even before Jacob was murdered, but they weren’t doing their job. Turns out that when you look across the country and across decades, you can find FAR more examples of cops not doing their jobs, either being outsmarted or just being lazy or who knows what, than you can find example of them doing their jobs. This Labor Day is not for them.

    The press. We all love the press, and respect the press, and wouldn’t know what to do with out the press, bla bla bla. But we now understand that the wars in Iraq would have likely been avoided had the press been doing its job then. The press is now grading Donald Trump on a curve, treating his presidency in such a way that it legitimizes racism and white supremacy. That is the press not doing the sacred job they seek reference for. I suspect that if you look across history you will find lots of great examples of the press doing a great job. But there will be more examples of the press falling down on the job. If the press was really doing its job with respect to Donald Trump, Trump would have been in prison decades ago. This Labor Day is not for them.

    Weather reporters. So many of them have been for so long in denial of climate science, passing on doubt to the average American, using their position of trust to spread lies. We have had a harder time pushing people and institutions in the general direction of reality with respect to climate change because of weather reporters not doing their jobs. This Labor Day is not for them.

    There are exceptions to all these cases. You know who you are, and you don’t need lip service from me. You are in the game already, criticizing your colleagues. Or should be. This labor day is for you, a little. But mostly it is for the people who have jobs that if they fail at, even a little, they get fired, demoted, or abused.

    So here it is. An extra day off. Use it well. Do something fun. Then get back to work or you’re fired!


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    Electronics for Kids: Great new book for kids and their adults

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    The simplest project in the new book Electronics for Kids: Play with Simple Circuits and Experiment with Electricity! by Øyvind Nydal Dahl is the one where you lean a small light bulb against the two terminals of a nine volt battery in order to make the light bulb turn on.

    The first several projects in the book involve making electricity, or using it to make light bulbs shine or to run an electromagnet. [/caption]The most complicated projects are the ones where you make interactive games using LED lights and buzzers.

    Electronics for Kids: Play with Simple Circuits and Experiment with Electricity! does almost no electricity theory. Thankfully. It simply delves in to messing around with electricity (and in so doing, provides basic theory, of course).

    This is a book about how to play with electricity, not how to get a Masters Degree in electricity. In other words, any kid, the ones who seem destine for a career in electronic engineering and the ones who don’t, can get along in this book because it does not assume itself to be a building brick to a greater career. Yet the projects are interesting and informative and educational, and any kid who does a dozen of these projects is going to learn.

    This kind of activity, which should involve parents for most kids, is the cure for the sense of depression you feel when you go to the toy store and look at the “science” section and everything you see is crap. Just get this book, order 50 bucks worth of parts, and get to work-fun. Then order some more parts, probably.

    No kids’ book on electronics would be complete without a batter made from something you get in the produce section.[/caption]This book for kids is very kid oriented, as it should be. One of the first practical projects you build is an alarm system to keep your parents the heck out of your room. You can make a noisy musical instrument. You can make a device that makes sounds some humans can hear (the kids, likely) and some can’t (parents).

    Although soldering is done, it is minimal and, frankly, can probably be avoided by using alternative techniques. But really, it is not that hard and one should not be too afraid of it.

    A lot of the projects use and develop logic circuits. Kids actually love logic circuits, I think because they end up rethinking a bit about how tho think about simple relationships. And, it is good to know this stuff.

    Unlike many electronic kits you can buy (which can be quite fun and educational in their own right) this approach does not rely on ICs (integrated circuits) that produce magical results with poorly described inputs and hookups. There are some basic ICs, including gates, an inverter, flip flops, and a timer. These are very straight forward circuits that are mostly (except the timer) really just very fancy switches.

    The web site that goes with Electronics for Kids: Play with Simple Circuits and Experiment with Electricity! gives you a list of all the parts used in the book, with enough information to find them easily on line or at a hardware or electronics store. The book suggests a multimeter, which is probably the most expensive thing on the list. (this one is perfectly good and is about 35 bucks.) Other tools include a soldering iron and related bits, a wire cutter, some scissors, tape, etc.

    Many of the parts, including a breadboard, LEDs, hook up wires of various kinds, and pretty much all the resistors, capacitors, etc. etc. can also be used with the more sophisticated Arduino projects, should you end up going in that direction.

    This is a really fun book. If you have a kid of the right age (maybe from six to 12, with 100% adult involvement under 10 years) get it now, secretly, get some parts, and work your way through several of the projects. Then, make it (and the parts) a holiday present. Then look really smart.

    This chapter-end section give you an idea of the level of the projects. There is a lot of stuff in here. All doable, but it will take a while to get through it all. [/caption]Here is the overview table of contents (the book is much more detailed than suggested by this top level TOC):

    PART 1: Playing with Electricity
    Chapter 1: What Is Electricity?
    Chapter 2: Making Things Move with Electricity and Magnets
    Chapter 3: How to Generate Electricity

    PART 2: Building Circuits
    Chapter 4: Creating Light with LEDs
    Chapter 5: Blinking a Light for the First Time
    Chapter 6: Let’s Solder!
    Chapter 7: Controlling Things with Circuits
    Chapter 8: Building a Musical Instrument

    PART 3: Digital Electronics
    Chapter 9: How Circuits Understand Ones and Zeros
    Chapter 10: Circuits That Make Choices
    Chapter 11: Circuits That Remember Information
    Chapter 12: Let’s Make a Game!

    Appendix: Handy Resources


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