Well, here’s a shocker. The global warming freak-out crowd has apparently been mistaking its data. First, NASA’s James Hansen and his group had to fix a Y2K bug that a Canadian statistician found in their processing of the thermometer data. As a result, 1998 is no longer the warmest year on record in the United… Continue reading

Two proof copies of the new edition of Doctor Janeway’s Plague (see side panel) are in the mail from CreateSpace (aka CustomFlix, which handles my DVDs). One of the advantages of CreateSpace’s new set-up is that there are no up front costs for the writer (see Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s rule: “Money flows to the writer.”)… Continue reading

The limits of materialism. Scott Carson has the latest: The latest issue of Nature (08/16/2007) has an interesting cover headline: “Form Follows Function” introduces an article by Johannes Hermann called “Structure-based activity prediction for an enzyme of unknown function” that argues, in effect, that the function of a certain enzyme can be predicted on the… Continue reading

I bet you didn’t know PZ Myers is a literary critic: Try comparing LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy to Dan Brown’s tripe, or to those horrid westerns by Louis L’Amour, or the Left Behind books, or anything by Tom Clancy. Which ones have the most depth, treat their readers as serious people who will think and learn,… Continue reading

When it’s fun to be a Red Sox fan…. Red Sox win, read Red Sox Chick.Yankees lose, read Yankees Chick. What’s not to like?