If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-word essay; hopefully, you will agree that I am a very well-qualified candidate for this job opportunity. Voting ends at noon EDT 30 September and there is one vote allowed per valid email address (registration required).

Sex toys.

Griffin and McGwin. "Sexual Stimulation Device-related Injuries" Journal of Sex and Martial Therapy, 2009.

Sci would like to take this time to note that Neurotopia claims no responsibility for what happens if your boss catches you clicking around below the fold.

Alright, I admit it.

I went a little overboard with last week's edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. This feature was intended to be a light-hearted look at whatever particular woo target that catches my fancy on a given week, as opposed to the more serious discussions of alternative medicine I like to do at other times. However, it's a fine line between believing in a bit of strange altie woo and possibly being a disturbed individual, and I fear that last week's targets (the guy who wanted to sell the secrets of Jesus on Ebay and Alex Chiu, who claims to have figured out how humans can be immortal, all using little magnetized devices one wears on the hands and feet) crossed that line. Maybe it was too much quantum entanglement of my neurons--homeopathically, of course--with those of that quantum homeopathic guru, Lionel Milgrom, whom I discussed very early on.

So, this week, I want to pull back from the abyss, where woo drifts into possible insanity, and move on to other topics. I had thought of commenting on "spiritual healer" Adam the Dreamhealer, but Skeptico beat me to it in such a comprehensive fashion that I couldn't really think of anything new or amusing to add. In any case, I haven't yet recovered from my delving into the dizzying space of quantum homeopathy. Fortunately, I think I have just the thing to bring me back to earth: bowel cleansing. (If poop doesn't bring one back to earth after all that quantum woo and bizarre talk of immortality and Jesus bestowing His secrets upon us, I don't know what will.) Consider this phrase:

"Death begins in the colon."

These interpretations proclaim a "growing disconnect," "a dangerous divide," a "widening gulf" and use other metaphors that are representative of what sociologists might label as a moral panic. This traditional fall from grace narrative about science argues for the need to return to a (fictional) point in the past where science was better understood and appreciated by the public. In the U.S., this point in the past is often referred to as the years just after the launch of Sputnik and leading up to the Apollo moon landing.

Yet you would be hard pressed to find this type of rhetoric in the peer-reviewed literature examining public opinion about science, the role of scientific expertise in policymaking, or the relationship between science and other social institutions. Indeed, if there is a "dangerous divide" in society it is between the conclusions of experts working in these areas and the extraordinary claims that are often made by some journalists and pundits.

To get a sense of how experts view the Pew survey, consider this interpretation at USA Today from Michigan State political scientist Jon Miller, widely recognized as the academic dean of public opinion research on science: "The major value of this survey is that it rebuts the frequent allegations that Americans are 'turning against' science."

Or consider how the Pew researchers themselves described the central findings of the survey:

Americans like science. Overwhelming majorities say that science has had a positive effect on society and that science has made life easier for most people. Most also say that government investments in science, as well as engineering and technology, pay off in the long run. And scientists are very highly rated compared with members of other professions: Only members of the military and teachers are more likely to be viewed as contributing a lot to society's well-being.

I shared a similar observation in a post yesterday, detailing the Pew results that indicate an unrivaled amount of cultural respect, admiration, authority, and deference to science and scientists.

So why do so many popular claims about a crisis in public support for science persist? And why are they potentially distracting, if not harmful, to public engagement efforts? In a forthcoming peer-reviewed article at the American Journal of Botany, I team up with my colleague at the Univ. of Wisconsin Dietram Scheufele in describing the origins of this all too common fall from grace narrative about the place of science in American society, an interpretation that often evokes what we call the "Sputnik Myth."

Below I've pasted the relevant excerpt from the article:

July 2008 was a turning point in the blogosphere, and July 2009 promises to be one as well. One year ago, give or take a few weeks, several things happened. Some of those things relate to events unfolding as we speak. I'd like to review them for you and give you a warning of what might happen next.

I don't know what's going to happen with swine flu. I do know that if there is a nasty flu season we'll all get through it better if we help each other, not run from each other. It's national independence day in the US, so I thought this clip of the crowd singing the National Anthem (hat tip, Paul Rosenberg at Open Left) at Boston's Fenway Park (home field of the Boston Red Sox baseball team) was appropriate. It was Disability Awareness Day and to recognize it the anthem was being sung by a handicapped youngster. When he got nervous, the entire ball park came to his rescue:

And indeed they do come to his rescue.

I don't want to indulge in too much Fenway gush, even though it's an incredible ballpark. I resisted the Red Sox Nation thing a long time after I moved to Vermont. I figured I was masochistic enough to deal with the weather here, but not masochistic enough to be a Red Sox fan. (I was also turned off by what seemed a racist ownership by the previous owners, and one ugly experience back in the '80s when a Sox fan was abusive to Jim Rice and called him the N word. Then again, a HUGE white guy two rows in front of the harassing fan finally had enough, stood and turned toward the harassing fan, and said, viciously, "You leave Jimmy alone!" He did.) But this current team and ownership won me over.

Last year I had the good luck to attend a splendid game on Aug 29, when Dice-K shut down a hot White Sox team. The game was great. But the stunning treat came in the middle of the 8th, when, as happens every night at Fenway, Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" was played over the PA system during the team changover. I knew about this and thought it cute: They'd been playing this for a few years when, a few years back now, the crowd started singing along with the chorus every night. "Sweet Caroline" became a sort of theme song.

Andrew points out that Dr. McNutt will also be the first geoscientist to be the science advisor to the Secretary of the Interior.

(And check out the profile published by Geotimes in 2005. It's currently timing out on me, so I can't double-check the facts, but I believe she mentions dealing with three daughters as good preparation for management.)

(And I should add that this is the first time in my professional career that I've known the scientific reputation of a new USGS director.)

Unscientific America

First, PZ says the book is "useless." Chris says well, phooey, because plenty of other people like it. And then everybody calls one another "poopyheads" (or variants thereof) in the comments sections of both blogs, which are running into the hundreds.

I'm relieved to note that I am completing two big projects next week, so I won't have time to read my copy of Unscientific America for a couple weeks - until all of this dies down. But now I'm really, really interested to read the book. . . which is probably exactly why Chris sent PZ a copy. ;-)

This is a basic one, from philosophy of science 101. There are several different ways to derive a naturalistic position. Mooney and Kirshenbaum sort of get it right, although I disagree with some of the details.

Modern science relies on the systematic collection of data through observation and experimentation, the development of theories to organize and explain this evidence, and the use of professional institutions and norms such as peer review to subject claims to scrutiny and ultimately (it is hoped) develop reliable knowledge. A core principle underlying this approach is something called "methodological naturalism," which stipulates that scientific hypotheses are tested and explained solely by reference to natural causes and events. Crucially, methodological naturalism is not the same thing as philosophical naturalism—the idea that all of existence consists of natural causes and laws, period. Methodological naturalism in no way rules out the possibility of entities or causes outside of nature; it simply stipulates that they will not be considered within the framework of scientific inquiry.

Following this, he proceeds to damn the "New Atheists" for "collapsing the distinction" between methodological and philosophical naturalism, and argues that Dawkins is taking a philosophical position and misusing science to claim it "entirely precludes God's existence."

One big problem: we don't. Oddly enough, this is one of the most common canards used by theistic critics, that we're demanding a kind of philosophical absolutism, yet Mooney is an atheist. The "New Atheist" approach is firmly grounded in methodological naturalism; it's an extremely pragmatic operational approach to epistemology that leads us to reject religious claims. None of us make an absolute declaration of the impossibility of the existence of a deity, either.

One strand of this view is simple empiricism. Science and reason give us antibiotics, microwave ovens, sanitation, lasers, and rocketships to the moon. What has religion done for us lately? We have become accustomed to objective measures of success, where we can explicitly see that a particular strategy for decision-making and the generation of knowledge has concrete results. I'm sorry, but faith seems to produce mainly wrong answers, and in comparison, it flops badly.

Now, now, I can hear the defenders of religion begin to grumble, there's more to life than merely material products like microwave ovens — there's contentment and contemplation and a sort of subjective psychology of ritual and community and all that sort of thing. Sure. Fine. Then stick to it, and stop pretending that religion ought to be a determinant of public policy, that it can inform us about the nature of our existence, or that it provides a good guide to public morality. Get it out of our schools and courthouses and workplaces and governments, take it to your homes and your churches, and use it appropriately as your personal consoling mind-game. And stop pretending that it is universal and necessary, because there are a thousand different religions that all claim the same properties with wildly different details, and there are millions of us with no religion at all who get along just fine without your hallowed quirks.

The other strand is reciprocity. We atheists and scientists have ideas that we are expected to explain and support with evidence, and we are accustomed to being jumped on with sadistic vigor if we fail to provide it. We merely apply the same methodological standards to religion. We do not insist a priori that gods cannot exist, we instead turn to all those people who insist that they do, and ask, "how do you know that?"

Would you believe that for all the fervor of their certainty, none of them have ever adequately answered the question?

There is no philosophical or metaphysical certainty on the part of us "New Atheists", and we have no problem admitting it. Dawkins wrote it down forthrightly in his book when he scores himself as a 6 on a 7-point scale of atheism: "6. Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. 'I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.'" It's genuinely remarkable how many people say they've read his book, and then walk away to claim that Dawkins says science "entirely precludes God's existence."

I agree entirely with Dawkins' sentiment. I also turn it around to use an agnostic sentiment on religious interlocuters: "I don't know for sure, and you don't either, so why are you being so high-handedly specific in your claims that god was a Jewish carpenter, or his prophet was a polygamist with a flying horse, or that Ragnarok is imminent? Give me a method for evaluating your claims, tell me what rational reason you have to believe that, show me the evidence!" And then they don't. I'm just supposed to have faith.

It doesn't even have to be some weirdly specific, quirky bit of historical fiction — even the vague claims fail on epistemological grounds. How often have you been told that "God is love"? How do they know? What does it even mean? It's just feel-good babble. If it makes you feel good to think it, go ahead…but please, let's not have this standard of unsubstantiated wishful thinking be regarded as a useful contribution to philosophy, or science, or morality, or poetry, or social cohesiveness, or much of anything other than a trivial activity, like the twiddling of your thumbs that you do in idle moments.

Now notice: Mooney and Kirshenbaum are busily carping at these ghastly "New Atheists" for imagined transgressions against reason and the appropriate application of science, but what do they have to say about Christians who believe that crackers turn into Jesus in their mouths, or that a magical ensoulment occurs at fertilization to turn a zygote into a fully human being, or that children should be kept in ignorance about sex, or that woman's role is as subservient breeder, or that using condoms to prevent disease is a violation of a divine dictate that the only purpose of sex is to have babies, or that people who love other people of the same sex deserve stoning, or at least to be unable to share insurance policies? Compared to the "New Atheist" insistence that remarkable claims about magic sky fairies ought to be regarded as patent nonsense, those can be rather destructive to society…and also negatively affect the acceptance of science. Rick Warren surely deserves as much condemnation as Richard Dawkins.

But no. The book is silent on the people who directly oppose science politically, culturally, in our classrooms, and on our radio and television. They aren't the problem, I guess. If only we could clear away the distracting Atheist Noise Machine, train a generation of science journalists to stop bashing religion (as if they do now), and presto, the populace will obligingly stop shaking their angry fists at science and will lie back and accept that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, that the climate is changing and we need to take political action, and oh my yes, gay people can have their civil rights, too.

Oh, wait, I'm over-generalizing. They do say something about those people who believe in talking snakes, angels, and the power of mystic mumblings.

The American scientific community gains nothing from the condescending rhetoric of the New Atheists—and neither does the stature of science in our culture. We should instead adopt a stance of respect towards those who would hold their faith dear, and a sense of humility based on the knowledge that although science can explain a great deal about the way our world functions, the question of God's existence lies outside its expertise.

Respect faith. Be humble. Pretend that all those beliefs are unquestionable.

Bull…oh, excuse me. Mooney gets rather pearl-clutchey when strong language is used. I shall restrain myself (and you commenters, too, please: I normally trust you all to cope with adult language without too much concern, but apparently a couple of authors with very delicate sensitivities will be reading this and counting your four-letter words).

Look, the only reason "the question of God's existence" is in any way outside the domain of science is because it is such an amorphous subject that the believers will always rapidly move its definition beyond testability when pressed. However, they also claim that these deities had major material effects on the world — and most also claim ongoing, direct participation by their favorite god on their personal universe. Those are not beyond the realm of science! If absolute knowledge of this superbeing's existence is out of our reach, we can at least easily push him/her/it/them back into a fairly tenuous connection with the world, to the point where they are irrelevant.

And if science can't say a thing about the existence of gods, sweet jebus, Mooney, be consistent and admit that the jabbering, sanctimonious priests can't either! Why we should respect their fairy-tales and complete lack of humility while you castigate godless science for relying on mere evidence is incomprehensible.

The essence of what Mooney and Kirshenbaum recommend in their book is that science must cut off its own balls, science must wear her corset cinched tight, science must not dissent from the masses, science must be obliging and polite, because that is the only way the public will accept it.

I rudely disagree.

There is nothing condescending about appreciating that almost every human being, even the most god-soaked, has a functional mind and that maybe they can actually learn about science and a scientific way of thinking that makes their myths untenable. There is nothing condescending about being uncompromising in our expectations and trusting that others can hear and think and express their own ideas. There is something deeply condescending about setting aside a big chunk of people's experience and telling people that they should not question it.

Science is a sublimely human activity and a central part of the best of Western culture…and of every culture on earth that aspires to be something more than a collection of dirt-grubbing subsistence breeders, propagating for the sake of propagating. It's what gives us the potential to reach beyond making do, that gives us the leisure and freedom to flower in the arts and explore the diversity of human experience. Even institutionalized religion itself is an incidental byproduct of the first clever dicks who thought to reroute the flow of a river to irrigate fields and led to centralization, urbanization, hierarchies of leadership, accounting, writing, and the whole avalanche of change that followed. It's important. Mooney and Kirshenbaum know this; it's what their whole book is about.

In order to be what it is, though, science must live. It's a process carried out by human beings, and it can't be gagged and enslaved and shackled to a narrow goal, one that doesn't rock the boat. Imagine they'd written a book that tried to tell artists that they shouldn't challenge the culture; we'd laugh ourselves sick and tell them that they were completely missing the point. Why do you think some of us are rolling our eyes at their absurd request that scientists should obliging accommodate themselves to a safe frame that every middle-class American would find cozy? They don't get it.

Somehow, they think that Carl Sagan's great magic trick was that he didn't make Americans feel uncomfortable. I think they're wrong. Sagan's great talent was that he showed a passion for science. People made fun of his talk of "billyuns and billyuns", but it was affectionate, because at the same time he was talking about these strange, abstract, cosmic phenomena, everyone could tell he was sincere — he loved this stuff.

Another example: Feynman. Watch the man, and what is the impression he makes? Absolute joy. He's laughing at the universe. People love his lectures because he's cocky and bold and doesn't hesitate to show you where you're wrong.

For a less openly abrasive case, how about E.O. Wilson? In his talks, he seems to be a soft-spoken gentleman who's willing to concede quite a bit of respect to everyone — but read his work, and there's a steely spine there, too, and if you get him talking about ants, you discover he's cheerfully obsessive.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum's prescription for improving the fate of science in this country is to train young scientists to be more media- and politics-savvy, to build a generation of cautious barometers of the public mood "capable of bridging the divides that have led to science's declining influence." And perhaps we could get more support for the arts if young artists were taught to favor bucolic photo-realism, if poetry was required to be in greeting card meter, and if all music was appropriate to elevators? We'd surely have a new renaissance if the NEA only funded art that a conservative senator would find inoffensive!

I recommend something different. Our next generation of great science communicators should be flesh-and-blood people with personalities, every one different and every one with different priorities, all singing out enthusiastically for everything from astronomy to zoology, and they should sometimes be angry and sometimes sorrowful and sometimes deliriously excited. They shouldn't hesitate to say what they think, even if it might make Joe the Plumber surly. If you want to improve American science and the perception of science by the public, teach science first and foremost, because what you'll find is that your discipline is then populated with people who are there because they love the ideas. And, by the way, let them know every step of the way that science is also a performing art, and that they have an obligation as a public intellectual to take their hard-earned learning and share it with the world.

Face the fact that some of us (but definitely not all of us) will be so smitten with this wonderful, powerful way of thinking that we're going to follow our bliss and laugh at the hidebound ritualists who expect us to respect their superstitions, and at the prissy wanna-be moralists who demand bloodless conformity. You will not generate new Sagans by insisting on deference. You will not change a culture with a declining appreciation of science by demanding that scientists respect the beliefs of people who despise science the most. Mooney and Kirshenbaum single out the increasingly vibrant atheist sub-culture as something that needs to be muffled, and that's symptomatic of the failure of their suggestions: what other ideas should be stifled lest they disturb American complacency? And shouldn't shaking up that complacency be exactly what scientists do?

As Boas wrote to the editor of The Nation:

The point against which I wish to enter a vigorous protest is that a number of men who follow science as their profession, men whom I refuse to designate any longer as scientists, have prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies.

An instant after this was taken, SteelyKid succeeded in getting Appa off the couch, and thumped down hard on her butt.

This is also "Late-Wednesday Baby Blogging," as Kate and SteelyKid left for Readercon early this morning (well, Kate is bound for Readercon. SteelyKid is spending the weekend with her grandmother). It's awfully quiet in Chateau Steelypips right now. Almost... too quiet...

No, wait, Emmy's barking at a dog outside. Not too quiet after all. That's a relief.

For more of his great work (including spoken word, info on his films and his blog) click here.

*Obligatory note: Humans are not monkeys. We're apes along with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons. In general, monkeys have tails whereas apes do not. But I agree that the word monkey is much funnier.

[Video below the fold]

The most striking of the summary findings, to me, is the second table down, in which the fraction of people saying that "Science/ medicine/ technology" is the greatest achievement of the last 50 years has dropped from 47% to 27% since 1999. About half of that shifted to "Civil rights/ equal rights," which is hard to begrudge, but the other half seems to have gone to "Nothing/ Don't Know," which is kind of sad.

(There's a note suggesting that this is probably a fishy result caused by using differently worded questions, but still...)

On the depressing end of things, roughly half of Americans still think that lasers work by focusing sound waves, and that electrons are at least as big as atoms. If you want evidence that there's something wrong with the way we teach science, there it is. The numbers for evolution and global warming stink, too, but at least there you can point to large and well-funded operations promoting disinformation about those topics for political/ religious reasons. I haven't noticed a large-electron lobby, though, and I'm pretty sure there are no sonic lasers in the Bible. This is just bad education.

So, for those of you tuning in from Bora Bora:

And remember, Linux is not for everyone.

Arrrrrr....

The newspaper Marca (journalist Jesus J. Boyero) broke the news that Kasparov and Karpov will play a 12 game (4 Rapid and 8 blitz) match in Valencia 21st-24th September 2009. The match is on the 25th Anniversary of the start of their infamous first aborted match in Moscow in 1984-5, this was followed by an epic series of close World title matches which ended in Lyon 1990.

Score! I'm so there. Well, not literally there in Spain, but at least at my computer following the games.

In other Kasparov news, here's Kasparov's statement durin ghis recent meeting with President Obama. It seems Kasparov was impressed with Obama:

I am attending and participating in the big Cambridge University Darwin Week bash, and I noticed that one of the two concurrent sessions the first day was on evolution and theology, and was 'supported by the Templeton Foundation' (though the list of Festival Donors and Sponsors does not include any mention of Templeton). I dragged myself away from a promising session on speciation, and attended. Good thing I did. It was wonderfully awful. We heard about the Big Questions, a phrase used often, and it was opined that the new atheists naively endorse the proposition that “There are no meaningful questions that science cannot answer.” Richard Dawkins' wonderful sentence about how nasty the God of the Old Testament is was read with relish by Philip Clayton, Professor at Claremont School of Theology in California, and the point apparently was to illustrate just how philistine these atheists were--though I noticed that he didn't say he disagreed with Richard's evaluation of Yahweh. We were left to surmise, I guess, that it was tacky of Richard to draw attention to these embarrassing blemishes in an otherwise august tradition worthy of tremendous respect. The larger point was the complaint that the atheists have a “dismissive attitude toward the Big Questions” and Dawkins, in particular, didn't consult theologians. (H. Allen Orr, they were singing your song.) Clayton astonished me by listing God's attributes: according to his handsomely naturalistic theology, God is not omnipotent, not even supernatural, and . . . . in short Clayton is an atheist who won't admit it.

From Glenn Greenwald comes this nauseating account of media spinelessness in the face of the evil that is torturing another human being:

As I have reached major milestones in my life (graduation with my bachelor's degree, my wedding day, the birth of Little Isis, my second graduation), I have keenly felt her absence. While I think of her daily, it is during those times that I have really mourned for her.

But, then I remind myself that it is not actually my mother that I am mourning -- it's the absence of a mother in general. You see, as I wrote a month ago, my mother left our family when I in elementary school and our relationship devolved from there. And, as I wrote a month ago, I have lived a lot of my adult life trying not to be like my mother.

[I'm chuckling aloud in the cafe in MRU's hospital as I write this, thinking of all the undergraduates and graduate students who commented that they read my blog. Those people that are more senior than you that you look up to? We're just as fucked up as you (if not more so).]

My mother's birthday is a strange day for me. Part of it is morbidly strange. Try as I might to not let the thought cross my mind, I am less than ten years away from the age my mother was when she died. On her birthday I tend to find myself wondering if she knew with each passing year how little time she had left. I find myself wondering if she knew on the morning of her death that later in the evening she'd see our family dog hit by a car, take him to the vet, and then die on the exam room floor of the vet's office of a massive myocardial infarction. I find myself thinking that, if I end up as she did, I will never see Little Isis as a teenager, as a young adult, or as a man. I won't know his wife or my grandchildren.

It's hard not to let my mind travel down the path of the macabre on her birthday. It's also hard to celebrate the life of a woman I still find myself angry with after all these years.

So, I've recently taken to thinking of my mother's birthday as more of an anniversary of my own motherhood. I allow myself the time for all of the screwed up things I need to think about, and then I mentally recommit myself to providing for Little Isis -- to making him and his happiness my priority and the reexamine the kind of mother I have been over the last year.

My diagnosis isn't great, but it's not terminal. Sometimes I feel like I work too much, or I am too exhausted at the end of the day to really play with the intensity that he deserves, but he is also a brilliant and happy little boy. His teacher comments on occasion that he is too chatty at naptime, but he also has a wonderful vocabulary and I am proud of it. How many two year olds understand the word "chrysalis?" Little Isis still wakes up some nights crying and asking to come sleep next to me in the bed, but his affection for me also melts my heart and there is not better feeling than my snuggly baby against me. Sometimes I cop out and make macaroni and cheese instead of vegetables, but he's healthy and growing. I frequently worry and pray that he never understand financial insecurity, but he understands the concept of putting money in his piggy. That gives me hope that I haven't screwed him up too badly.

Tonight when I put him to bed I'll silently reflect on the ways I may have failed him this year, but also promise to try to do better in the future. I know that I can't promise him that I'll always be there, but I think I can promise that I'll always try to be.

I am certain that I can promise to always love him.

Prikolny Geyser near Uzon Caldera in Kamchatka. Image taken in July 2009.

Case in point is the new geyser that has appears on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. Dubbed the "Prikolny Geyser" (more or less "Peculiar"), it was first noticed in the spring of 2009. The geyser is located 14 kilometers' from Eurasia's only geyser field, the "Valley of Geysers" - the valley was inundated by a landslide in 2007 that covered almost half the geysers. The Prikolny Geyser appears to have a periodicity of ~6-20 minutes between eruptions, but oddly it seems that the geyser recycles the water it erupts (video link). It is unclear from the article exactly how we know that all the water is being recycled - you might expect that there should be some net loss during the eruption - but the geyser spouts the water 5 meters / ~15 feet, and then it all trickles back into the geyser to do it over again.

The Valley of Geysers and Prikolny Geyser are both located near the Uzon caldera (below), and this is likely the source of heat for the hydrothermal features. This caldera (along with the Geyzernaya Caldera) form a fairly sizeable one at 7x18 km depression and last erupted ~7700 years ago. This eruption wasn't the caldera-forming eruption but rather some silicic domes and maars (volcanic crater formed by a phreatomagmatic - water-related - eruption). The caldera-forming eruption, however, was a big one, ejecting 20-25 km³ of pyroclastic material from the caldera. This eruption likely occurred somewhere around 39,000 years ago (or more recent). Periodic hydrothermal explosions occur in the depression as well, most recently in 1986.

Uzon Caldera, Russia

Concerning the new geyser, Valery Droznin of the Kronotsky Nature Reserve speculates that the geyser might be the result of an overactive hot spring, but why the hot spring might be pulsating to form the geyser is unknown. The geyser is being monitored by rangers in the Nature Reserve for temperature, periodicity and any changes that might occur. If you want to take a peek, there is even a webcam for Prikolny Geyser. It will be interesting to see how long the geyser might last in this location and what it might say about any regional changes to the hydrothermal fields of the Uzon caldera.

Your media will never be the same.

In fact, with VideoLAN's VLC media player for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it doesn't have to be. One of the amazing things about VLC is that it can play anything that you've ever even thought about playing. That random media format that one site in Ecuador requires--VLC likely plays it, while Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. likely will not.

source

It is the best, and it is open source. Suck eggs, proprietary stuff!

Before we can answer this question, of course, we have to ask "What is an evolution blog?" There is not a simple answer. Goldstein considers an evolution blog to be a science blog that is intended "to provide information [about evolution], steering away from the controversies over creationism and intelligent design." The extent to which a blog must "steer away" from discussions of creationism to be considered an evolution blog is not made clear, but it appears that any science blog that routinely features discussions of evolution removed from the creationism culture war would fall under Goldstein's definition.

On to the paper itself. Much of Goldstein's article acts as an introduction to what blogging is and what differentiates it from Twitter and Facebook. This is probably old news for most readers here, but given that more and more scientists are becoming engaged with science blogs in one way or another, it could be a useful primer for those who want to know what all the fuss is about. Trying to quickly and accurately describe the science blogohedron* is as easy as getting a firm grip on Jell-O that has been left out in the sun, but overall I think Goldstein provides a pretty good summary.

*[I prefer the term "blogohedron" to "blogosphere" because it invokes something that is many sided with pointy bits, not smooth and uniform, which I think better captures the nature of the science blogging landscape.]

One point that I object to, however, is the characterization of science blogs as being off-the-cuff and written in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Goldstein writes;

Entries are not polished, the idea being to reflect what's happening at the moment, often written in the voice of an unreflective first person or as a set of notes to one's self. ... Many blog entries are intended to be provocative, and they may reflect a view that is extreme even for the blogger, who may be seen as experimenting with new ideas.

The shell itself is made from broadened and flattened ribs, fused to parts of the turtle's backbone (so that unlike in cartoons, you couldn't pull a turtle out of its shell). The shoulder blades sit underneath this bony case, effectively lying within the turtle's ribcage. In all other back-boned animals, whose shoulder blades sit outside their ribs (think of your own back for a start). The turtle's torso muscles are even more bizarrely arranged.

This body plan - and particularly the odd location of the shoulder blades - is so radically different to that of all other back-boned animals that biologists have struggled to explain how it could have arisen gradually from the standard model, or what the intermediate ancestors might have looked like. Enter Hiroshi Nagashima from the RIKEN Center; he has found some answers by studying how the embryos of the Chinese soft-shelled turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis) shift from the standard body plan of other vertebrates to the bizarre configuration of adult turtles.

By comparing the embryos to those of mice and chickens, Nagashima showed that all three species start off with a shared pattern that their last common ancestor probably shared. It is only later that the turtle does something different, starting of a sequence of muscular origami that distorts its body design into the adult version.

I have been working behind the scenes to get the opportunity to interview Irena, the woman who lives with the amazing Snowball, the dancing cockatoo. She has indicated her willingness to be interviewed so I am going to share this opportunity with all of you, dear readers. I will give you one week to think of all those questions that you'd like to ask Irena about Snowball, so please post your questions in the comments section below. I will choose the ten best questions and email those to Irena, and will post the entire interview here as soon as she returns it to me in email.

To whet your appetite, I have embedded one of Snowball's videos below the jump for you to watch.

One of the things I do during my break is try and read a lot of books. I mostly read fiction during the break, but this year I'm going to mix in a science auto/biography and a social media/new technology book. The trick is, I'm going to let you all choose which ones.

Below I have a couple of polls where you can vote on which book you want me to read. All the books are ones I have on hand right now so you won't be costing me anything depending on what you vote for. Some of the science books are relatively recent, some a little older.
Each list has at least one book that I know is a classic that I should've read but haven't. Now's your chance to correct the error of my ways.

Each poll is followed by a link to the book's Amazon pages for those that feel they need more information on the books in question.

Social Media

• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler
• Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins
• Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
• Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
• The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
• Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen
• The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism by Matt Mason

Science Auto/Biography

• A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life by J. Craig Venter
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson
• The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffman
• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
• The Art and Politics of Science by Harold Varmus
• A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Silvia Nasar
• Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise

I'm looking at taking at least 600 pages worth of this material, so if the top vote-getters are significantly less than that, I'll probably add another from one of the lists.

(I'll bump this post to the top of the blog every week or so, just to more people a chance to vote. I'll end the voting around July 24th.

And yes, I've done something like this before.)

Update 2009.07.09: Kicked to the top as a voting reminder.

I've been telling you about how gorgeous Helsinki is, but mostly so far, I've shown you photographs of flowers. I hope you realize that I wanted to establish in your mind that it is warm and sunny enough here for flowers to bloom, but today, I just had to share a picture of the River Vantaa (which gives the Helsinki airport gets its name). In this image, you can see that clearly, it is sunny and there is no evidence of snow or glaciers anywhere. I sometimes worry that my host will get sick of hearing me repeat "This is so beautiful" like a mantra, but I think this photograph helps you understand why this amazing place renders me practically speechless.

Still the thing that really caught my eye was this:

There is indeed evidence that IE browser share has dropped at the expense of Firefox over recent months. There is some evidence that there are problems with the way in which different versions of IE are counted which could be screwing up the stats. Regardless, Market Share by Net Applications, the service which provides a monthly market share assessment, has failed to produce the July 1 results claiming that the data are under review.

Can you say ... "Confirmation Bias?"

Some details of this murky situation and links can be found here.

The first guest is Mike Lillis, the congressional correspondent for the Washington Independent. We'll be talking about a bunch of issues, from the healthcare debate in Congress to the global warming bill to the Sotomayor nomination to Al Franken finally joining the Senate.

The second guest is Jeff Sharlet, author of the book The Family: Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

As always, you can listen to the show live between 6 and 7 pm EST by clicking here.

And actually, it's not as much a criticism of Dunbar — she's an out lunatic — but of the system in general, that a leading politician would think this kind of appointment is at all appropriate.

There are five species of ebolaviruses and among them, only one - the so-called Reston ebolavirus - doesn't cause disease in humans. By fortuitous coincidence, this is also the species that Roger Barrette and colleagues have found among Philippine pigs and even among a few pig farmers.

The team were called in last July by the Philippine Department of Agriculture to identify a mystery illness that was sweeping across the country's pigs, infecting their lungs and airways and causing miscarriages. Barrette's group collected tissue samples from five groups of pigs throughout the island and through a battery of tests, they gradually ruled out their list of potential candidates - foot-and-mouth disease, African swine fever, and others.

The first positive hit was an infection known as blue ear disease, or to give it its formal name - porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV). It was already the primary suspect for the pig illness, and the Philippine strain was genetically similar to one that was sweeping through China at the time. It seemed like the mystery was solved. But not so - when Barrette incubated an infected lymph node with monkey cells that are immune to PRRSV, the cells still started dying. There was another virus.

To identify it, Barrette used a powerful tool called a "panviral microarray" - a small slide that contains the genetic signatures of tens of thousands of viruses, neatly arranged in a grid. Similar tools have already proved their worth in viral detective work - the closely related Virochip was used to identify the SARS virus in 2002. This time, the technique brought up a strong hit for Reston ebola.

No, I do not believe that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker lives, but this trailer makes the documentary film look interesting anyway, mostly because it focuses on the people; the residents of the town nearest the "rediscovery site", the scientists, the politics and the media frenzy surrounding this "Grail Bird" [3:29]

Do smells have an impact on how we judge people? Certainly if someone smells bad, we may have a negative impression of the person. But what if the smell is so subtle we don't consciously notice it? Research results have been mixed, with some studies actually reporting that we like people more when in the presence of undetectable amounts of bad-smelling stuff. How could that be?

A team led by Wen Li believes that the judges might have actually been able to detect the odor, and then accounted for it in their response -- giving a face the benefit of the doubt when there's a hint of bad odor.

But odor detection is a tricky thing. Sometimes you're not sure if your milk or wine has gone bad, even after giving it a good whiff. The researchers felt that controlling the odors for a study would be the key to getting good results.

They first determined the odor detection threshold for each of 39 student volunteers. This was done by having each person sniff bottles containing progressively stronger solutions of three different compounds: Citral ("lemon"), anisole ("ethereal"), and valeric acid ("sweat"). The threshold was determined by when they could detect the odor. Then, for the actual experiment, bottles that were about 100 times more dilute were used.

"The Earth has been here 6,000 years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn't been done away with. We need to get the uranium here in Arizona, so this state can get the money from it."

Here's video of it:

Well, congrats, Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney! Youve been wearing The Ring for so long, youve officially turned into CASEY LUSKIN!!!!

YAY!

Bringing internet drama no one cares about into meatworld!

Attacking your 'opponents' character in forums where they cannot respond, then bitch when they do respond!

Bitching about how 'mean' people are in comments!

Why, I honestly cant tell you buxom brunettes apart!

Round of applause, everyone, for the happy threesome!!!

P.S.-- I hope you two enjoy my gift of Kwok! Its the least I can do, really!

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, is used by psychiatrists to accurately diagnose patients along five different axes of disorders. Four versions have been produced since the first publication in 1952, and a specially appointed task force began revisions on a fifth, DSM-V, in 2007, for publication in 2012. But critics of DSM-V say that the manual's introduction of dimensional, rather than categorical, diagnoses is a paradigm shift that the field is not ready for. Secrecy surrounding its development has also bred concern among psychiatrists, leading to the resignation of committee member Jane Costello. As David Dobbs says on Neuron Culture, "This level of disagreement and polarization only deepens my belief that the discipline is at crisis point and a crossroads--and in the nasty, scratchy fight over who gets to drive, the question of where to actually go may get a rather rushed answer."

Today, I asked Stacy Baker, everyone's favorite Biology cyber-teacher, to answer a few questions.

Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?

I'm a high school biology teacher. I've taught general, honors, and advanced placement biology for the past four years. Prior to teaching I worked as a biologist and studied seabirds in the Pribilof Islands and migrating seabirds off the Atlantic coast. I also worked a few years in wildlife rehabilitation. I have a BS in Zoology from Washington State University.

What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?

When I was growing up I would answer, "Anything, but a teacher." I'm serious! My mom's a teacher and growing up watching her work long hours and get very little very financial reward turned me against the profession. Why on earth would anyone want to be a teacher?

Life has a funny way of making you eat your words. When I was working in the field I would occasionally have the opportunity to share what I was doing with local K-12 students. My colleagues said I had a gift for teaching and I suppose when enough people tell you you're really good at something you start to wonder if it's what you're meant to do. I've really enjoyed teaching despite its many frustrations. The kids make it fun. Some days I feel like I've spent the whole day laughing.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

The web makes current science accessible to my students. The Open Access movement and science blogs make it easy to connect my students with scientists and original research. The web is a great way to make science exciting again. My students get tired of learning about what's already been done and it excites them to talk with scientists about what is currently being researched. If a scientist talks with them about what they're doing, my students often will (on their own without even being asked) research everything about that topic and learn all the content they need to know in the process. Some of these students are the ones who walked into my classroom saying they hate science. They walk out with a completely different attitude.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, Flickr, Ning, Facebook and others?

My students maintain and update our class blog, Extreme Biology. At the beginning of every school year, a new group of students is trained on how to use the blog. For most of my students this is the first introduction they've had into blogging so the learning curve is pretty steep. I'm hopeful that as the years go by, more students will enter my class having already used blogs and other web tools and I'll be able to skip the time-consuming training and jump right into the science. As the year progresses, my students will discover new tools for us to try. They find current science research to blog about and then put a creative spin on the topic in order to educate their peers. Some of them write songs, create animations, make videos, and previous students return to share advice. We even had our own series of interviews of Science Online '09 participants!

In addition to the blog we have a class wiki, youtube channel, twitter, and ning. The public twitter was only started at the end of the last school year so it hasn't really taken off, yet. I also have a private twitter feed with my students.

The session about using the Web in the classroom which you led together with eight of your students was The Big Hit of the Conference. We all learned a lot from it. What did you learn from it, from the audience questions and comments?

First, I want to thank everyone in the audience for being so wonderful and treating my students like mini-celebrities! They floated on clouds for weeks afterward! We learned that kids really have a lot of power when it comes to how the web is being used. Their voices truly matter. My students arrived at the conference feeling unsure and a bit intimidated, but they left with a ton of confidence. The audience fired questions at them the entire time and the students did a remarkable job of answering.

I floated on clouds for weeks afterward!

When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favorites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?

The details are too fuzzy because it's been so many years now. Yours! But, in addition to yours there are too many great science blogs to pick favorites. I will say that my students have received a lot of positive feedback from bloggers they've interacted with here on ScienceBlogs and I'm really grateful for that. Many of the blogs mentioned at the conference I already knew about, but my students made a ton of new discoveries.

You have some experience with research in the field. What motivated you to spend this summer in the lab, learning some of the most cutting-edge techniques in molecular and cellular neuroscience - not easy stuff to do by all means?

This summer I'm working in Michael Nitabach's lab at Yale studying circadian rhythms in fruit flies. The project is funded by a NIH grant directed at getting science teachers involved in research. While I can't share the details of the original research project Dr. Nitabach has me working on, I can say it's very exciting and that I'm learning a lot. The lab is pretty fast-paced as its filled with post-docs, grad students, and undergrads. A lot of great ideas get thrown around in the "fly room" each day, during lab meetings, and department cookie breaks. I love all the Drosophila jargon that gets thrown around and I'm trying to convince the lab to make "fly pusher" shirts this summer. Fruit flies are a fun model to work with and they make genetics very accessible to students so I'm excited about taking everything I've learned back to the classroom. Check out the cool fly brain I dissected last week!

The experience I'm gaining in Dr. Nitabach's lab is going to make me a better teacher. I didn't enter the teaching profession in the traditional way. At the risk of upsetting the traditionalists, I believe there is total lunacy in allowing a person to teach science who has never actually practiced science. You can't learn science by reading textbooks or taking educational methodology classes. Every science teacher needs to have the experience of participating in original research and they need to routinely refresh their skills. The last time I performed science in the field was five years ago. I feel quite rusty. In my perfect teaching ideal, science educators would teach for 4-5 years and then take one-year off to work on an original research project. I realize this is incredibly unrealistic thanks to the immobile system we have in place to train teachers, but due to my non-traditional background this type of ideal is possible for me.

The NIH grant was offered through the use of the ARRA money. Hopefully, NIH will seriously consider offering the grant every year. It would be a strong investment into the future of science education.

As you are applying for jobs, is the schools' attitude towards the use of the Web in the classroom high on your list of criteria?

Absolutely! I was told in an interview recently that I wouldn't be able to continue my blogging at that school. I politely ended the interview. It's become so much a part of my methodology that I don't think I could ever abandon it. Not every student has the luxury of having a home computer, but there is simply no excuse for a school to not have enough computer resources to offer their students. If a teacher has a detailed plan on how they use the Web safely in their classroom, they should be allowed to use it.

Is there anything that happened at this Conference - a session, something someone said or did or wrote - that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

The reception we received has motivated me to seek more ways my students can directly interact with practicing scientists. I also want to have my students more involved in participating in online conversations with scientists outside of just our blog. Some of them already do that, but I'd like to see more of them doing so. For example, I'd like them to have a journal club and discuss a paper on PLoS.

It was so nice to finally meet you in person and thank you for the interview (and say Hi to all your students). I hope to see you again next January.

It was wonderful to meet you as well! See you in January!

==========================

See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

Related: Post from last year.

Well, after long deliberations and reading some 120 books, we have chosen our shortlist.

Adult Shortlist

• Night Child by Jes Battis
  
• The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
  
• The Alchemist's Code by Dave Duncan
  
• Things Go Flying by Shari Lapeña
  
• Half a Crown by Jo Walton

Young Adult Shortlist

• The Summoning (Darkest Powers, Book 1) by Kelley Armstrong
  
• Dingo by Charles de Lint
  
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
  
• Wild Talent: A Novel of the Supernatural by Eileen Kernaghan
  
• Night Runner by Max Turner

There's more info on the books and authors at the Shortlist page.

We'll be announcing the winners in September.

Please note that there were many, many very fine Canadian fantastic fiction books in 2008 and all the books on the recommended reading list on the shortlist page are also very good. Any of the shortlisted books or those extra ones would repay anyone's time and attention. Also, all the shortlisted YA books are good enough to be read and enjoyed by anyone.

Give a couple of them a try!

My tribe doesn't believe in global warming! ... Plimer has a sciency-looking book saying it's all a big hoax! ... the Australian government will collapse ... Al Gore is fat!

OK, that was a paraphrase. Except for the bit about the Australian government collapsing.

George Monbiot takes advantage of the obvious opening.

But one article particularly caught my eye, with the headline Why The Koran Cannot Be Used for the Oath of Public Office in America. Oh goody, I thought; this should be fun.