Category Archives: Uncategorized

UFO’s on Quiche Moraine

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Among a certain class of people, the term “Rumsfeldian” is used to describe a style of leadership that prizes bureaucratic turf-protecting, dissent-quashing through barely concealed intimidation, an inflated sense of self-importance, and the inability to incorporate possible long-term consequences into the decision making process. This class consists primarily of policy wonks, especially the left-leaning ones I interact with daily at the Humphrey Institute, and we are referring to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There is, however, another context where you will hear “Rumsfeldian” being bandied about, and that is in conjunction with his famous quote during a press conference on Feb. 12th, 2002:


The Latest Guest Post on Quiche Moraine.

Happy Birthday Genie Scott!

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Today is Genie Scott’s birthday. Genie is loved by all in the community of biological scientists because of her central role, as director of the National Center for Science Education, in fighting the good fight against irrational efforts to teach creationism in our public schools and elsewhere. Genie is the author of several books, articles, and book chapters, including Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction and Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.

Keith Schon on Skeptically Speaking tonight

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Keith Schon of Cataphora discusses how computers can track behavior, and find out all your dirty little secrets.

What are the limits on what your company is allowed to find out about you, and how are they doing it? How do we figure out, after the fact, whether “Yeah, go do that” means “Yes, grab me some lunch” or “Yes, perpetrate that multi-million dollar fraud scheme.” And what do your online behavior patterns say about you?

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Happy Mole Day!

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It’s mole day. The mole day site is down (try it later), but you can find out about it on Wikipedia.

Mole Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated among chemists in North America on October 23, between 6:02 AM and 6:02 PM[1], making the date 6:02 10/23 in the American style of writing dates. The time and date are derived from the Avogadro constant, which is approximately 6.02Ã?1023, defining the number of particles (atoms or molecules) in a mole, one of the seven base SI units.

Mole Day originated in an article in The Science Teacher in the early 1980s.[2] Inspired by this article, Maurice Oehler, now a retired high school chemistry teacher from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, founded the National Mole Day Foundation (NMDF) on May 15, 1991.[2]

Vegetarian Diets vs. Meat

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It is an old story that a vegetarian diet is linked to a more efficient use of resources than a meat-rich diet. One of the reasons cited for this is that meat is taken from a higher level on the food chain, and thus about one tenth of the energy that enters the system is used per culinary unit (calorie, meal, whatever) than for vegetables. However, this argument, while partly true, overlooks a lot of other factors. For instance, the meat is a more efficiently used package for some purposes than the veggies. Think about it this way: A certain percentage of the food you eat is used to build tissues, including tissues used in growth (for growing individuals), for repair of tissues, as well as for immune system products. Meat is essentially the same “stuff” as is produced in these processes, so the balance of amino acids, co-enzymes, etc. in a chunk of meat is very closely matched to the need. Most of the food we eat is used as an energy source, and both meat and veggies have such energy in them, to varying degrees. With respect to energy alone, the most efficient diet may be something like pure sugar produced from prairie grasses or something along those lines.

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