Mammoth Tales: the blog

I have been thinking for a while about starting another blog. I began to think about this as I read about the advantage of an online presence for promoting a book. My idea was not to create a blog only about the book, but one that was less political, more sciency, and to perhaps limit the smart-assery a bit (but only a bit). Everything I learned at the ScienceOnline2010 conference tells me this is the right way to go. The biggest lesson of the conference, in this respect, was "stop goofing off and get it on line." That said, I'm proud to present Mammoth Tales.

As I just said, Mammoth Tales will be less political and more sciency than archy. It will be less of an all purpose blog than archy. Still

In politics, my editorial policy will be to exclude politics that aren't relevant to the larger theme of the blog. Politics, like religion, can be a distraction from a business' primary purpose. How often do we hear conservatives complain about how a celebrity's off stage liberal politics ruin their enjoyment of that celebrity's performances? How often are non-believers turned off by businesses that advertise the owner's religion? I am very strongly opinionated in my politics. If you hadn't noticed that, go back over archy's with a carefully critical eye. I don't want to unnecessarily annoy my other audiences.

It is not my intention for Mammoth Tales to be all mammoths all the time. I intend to use the site for anything I write that is related to science including science journalism, science education, history of science (and maybe a little plain old history). I plan to do more linking to stories that I find interesting, even if I don't have much to add to the stories. I also plan to us more capital letters in the titles.

For the time being, Mammoth Tales post will probably be not much more than a subset of archy posts. I'll cross post anything from archy that fits the editorial slant of the new blog. I'm thinking about a model in which I give some science news a short post in archy and a longer treatment in Mammoth Tales. We'll see how that works out. I plan to repost many of my old mammoth posts from archy and add updates to a few. I hope that makes it interesting enough that archy readers will want to check out both blogs from time to time and, on occasion, flip back and forth between the two driving up the hit meter on both.

Finally, be patient, the new blog isn't very pretty yet (it is nothing more than an off the shelf Blogger template). I still need to populate the blogroll and make a compelling logo. That comes later. the important thing is to get the site up and running and to put some words on it for you to read. As the old cockroach wrote:

they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not

I hope it is.

Absorbed into the social networking Borg

At ScienceOnline2010 I discovered that, however well wired I may look in some contexts--say, among my older relatives--I am a Luddite among science bloggers. I took notes on paper. Everyone tweeted, except me. I live on the Internet. I'm practically a senior citizen among bloggers. I even took a tentative dip into Facebook last fall. But, I don't do mobile very well. I don't carry a cell phone unless I have a special need for one at that minute. Even when I do carry one, I usually have it turned off. I don't know how to text on the phone we have. With my eyesight and lack of manual dexterity, I'm not sure I could text even if I did know how. I'm giving in on the next step into the connected world, I just signed up for Twitter. I'm archymck. Like Facebook, I'm not quite sure how to integrate this into my life in a useful way (and not as another gigantic time suck). Tips, tricks, and followers are welcome.

scio10 We're back

I got home at about eleven last night after a seven hour flight and sixty dollar cab ride. Clever Wife met me with hugs and chocolate cake. Then I slept for eleven hours. One more cup of coffee, and I'll feel normal (though I should aspire for something better than that).

The flights were safe and on time. On the way, I read most of the way (Anthony Grafton's Defenders of the Text) and took a short nap over North Dakota (Minnesota and Montana residents can insert their own joke here). On the first leg of the trip back I read Sydney Perkowitz's Hollywood Science. The book was an easy enough read that I expected to finish it on the second leg. Instead I sat next to a man who was so interesting that we talked non-stop the entire trip. Fortunately for her, the young woman sharing the row with us was listening to her Ipod so she didn't have to put up with two geezers bonding.

Every session at the conference was interesting and I got something of use out every single one. I'll post separately about some of the sessions. The socializing and networking went better than expected. I'm naturally rather shy, though I can be a crashing bore when I come out of my shell. I think I managed to stay in the middle most of the time. I must have done something right, I just received a friend request in Facebook.

I had one technical glitch. I took our spare cellphone and skipped taking the camera thinking I could use the phone and it would be one less thing to carry around. Then I discovered that the camera in the spare phone doesn't have a flash. There will be no pictures except those others send me (which probably won't be of me at my best).

The biggest problems for me were medication related. I've reached the age where I have multiple prescriptions. I'm bit of a physical mess. between us, Clever Wife and I have something like eleven prescriptions. I had at least one unpleasant reaction each day, each one worse that the previous. The first day, I went to a session on graphic tools and found my eyes so dry that I couldn't focus (naturally the eye drops were back at the hotel). On day two, I had an attack of tremors during my presentation (I'll post the presentation later today or tomorrow). The last day, when I should have been running around trying to make my best impression for some last minute networking, I had an attack of tremors so bad that I couldn't eat with a fork at lunch. If there hadn't been finger food, I would have gone hungry. It was only at the airport that I realized I had taken a second dose of the morning pills the night before and was going through violent withdrawal from the night pills. When I popped a night pill, the tremors were gone in twenty minutes. At home, I have avoided this by using a daily pill box. I understood that TSA regulations required me to carry all of my pills in the pharmacy labeled bottles, so I left the pill box at home. Let's call that one a learning experience.

Now, I have to check my Luddite paper notes from the conference and try to put everything I learned into action. I need to get over my Twitter aversion and join the noise. I started tinkering on a more specifically blog a while back; I need to finish it and get it online. I need to send letters to the people I chatted with (networking, you know). I need to get an agent for the book. I need to work on my elevator speech. I need to do the laundry from the trip. I need to get a new sport's jacket because the old one is getting really ratty even though I've only been wearing it for nine years. I need to get some groceries and fix Clever Wife a nice dinner. I need to make it up to the cats. Blah blah blah. And so on.

Southward bound

this is it
less than a day to go
i hope you re packed
i have my stateroom
all fitted out
i found a nice place
in one of your jacket pockets
underneath a couple of a t m receipts
and next to a very old bus pass
i made a nice nest out of
the tooth picks from
grocery store cheese samples
it s not only comfy
but it provides
all the in flight smacks
a cockroach could desire

let s get this show
on the road

yee haw

The bug and the blogger meet the scientists

boss

i m looking forward
to our big trip
to north carolina

great uncle archy
was a world traveller
he went to france
after the war to end all war
to watch them put together
the peace that ended all peace
he hung out with ghosts in london
and tourists in hollywood
oh the stories he used to tell

me i ve never been
east of aurora blvd
or north of the late lamented
larry s market

you re not much better
oh sure you visited serbia
to chat with an old revolutionist
and went to leningrad
to look at the icons
but you ve only seen
the upper left hand corner
of your own country

we both need a change
let s pack our grips
and hop a plane
back east and down south
to rub shoulders
with the science set
you don t have to tell them
you were a history major

we can see
if they finally
ended prohibition
in the bible belt
but only in the interests
of scientific research
of course

Bad history about Finland

Stupid never sleeps. Therefore, we must remain ever vigilant and never let down our guard. For if we do, stupid will slip into our world, unrecognized and unmocked. Sadly, I let my guard down last May (I think I was taking a nap that day) and the stupid escaped from its box. Luckily, Sadly, No! noticed something on Media Culpa that resurrected the stupid from the pages in MacLean's magazine. First some background.

The town of Tampere, Finland has a small museum dedicated to the life of Lenin (not Lennon, the Beatle, Lenin, the Commie). Lenin has a few connections with Tampere and Finland in general. During the failed 1905 revolution, Lenin stopped in Tampere on his way to Russia. In those days, Finland was ruled by the Russian tsar, but not considered part of Russia proper. He was met there by a group of Russian Communists, including Stalin. It was their first meeting and Lenin wasn't especially impressed. During the next revolution, March 1917, Lenin again passed through Tampere on his way to Russia. Once again that whole revolution thing didn't work out so well and Lenin returned to Finland, wearing a devilishly clever disguise, and hid out for a couple of weeks. The third time Lenin returned to Russia for a revolution, October 1917, it was a roaring success. Three weeks later, Lenin recognized Finland's independence from Russia. That's about it for Lenin's connections to Finland and Tampere.


Lenin's disguise, clean shaven and a wig
What brought the Lenin Museum to the attention of Susan Mohammad, the Maclean's reporter, was a minor brouhaha over public funding for the museum. Some local conservative political groups, who didn't like the results of Lenin's last revolution, want to make the museum an anti-Lenin museum and rename it the "Museum of the Victims of Totalitarianism." By "totalitarianism" they only mean Lenin's kind and not the kinds practiced by Hitler, Franco, various Latin American Caudillos, Ayatollah Khomeini, or the Plymouth Colony. In an attempt to demonstrate why some Finns would think Lenin was a bad man, Mohammad wrote the following sentence:

[A]bout 10 million Finns died under Lenin, almost half due to starvation.

Lenin ruled Finland for a little over three weeks in 1917, which is not enough time for most people to starve to death unless they're locked up indoors. The population of Finland during those three weeks was around three million, a number that is considerably smaller than ten million (but you already knew that). The collectivization famine, engineered by Stalin, five years after Lenin's death, did kill up to ten million people in Ukraine and South Russia. The only resemblance between that atrocity and what Susan Mohammad claims is that it both involved foreign people and both were the fault of a half Russian guy whose nickname ended in -in.

Despite having Mohammed's fantasy pointed out to them, the MacLean's editors have never issued a correction. The Finns had a good laugh over the article. One paper asked the questions "how [could] Lenin have pulled off the feat of exterminating us three times over, and ... who is living here now?" We should join in the fun, because it's never too late to point and laugh at stupid.

Is this a Southern thing?

I'm heading to the Carolinas next week and want to be up on the local customs.

A South Carolina man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for stealing an $80 slab of meat. ... Prosecutors said the sentence was justified because the Aug. 26 theft from Reid's grocery store in Orangeburg was his ninth offense.

Authorities said when a store manager approached Zachary about the missing New York strip and the big bulk under his shirt, he fled, right into the arms of an off-duty police officer.

[...]

Zachary testified he was "massaging" the meat, not stealing it.

Bad, badder, and baddest science

Fox News may have just published what will prove to be the stupidest science article of the year. Several science bloggers have already written about this, but the article is so wrong it deserves attention by a wider audience. This is the opening of the offending, and unsigned, piece:

The tremendous volcanic eruption thought to be responsible for Earth's largest mass extinction — which killed more than 70 percent of plants and dinosaurs walking the planet 250 million years ago — is still taking lives today.

Scientists investigating the high incidence of lung cancer in China's Xuan Wei County in Yunnan Province conclude that the problem lies with the coal residents use to heat their homes. That coal was formed by the same 250-million-year-old giant volcanic eruption — termed a supervolcano — that was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Except for the fact that there is a high incidence of lung cancer in Xuan Wei, everything about these sentences is wrong.

• The dinosaurs did not go extinct 250 million years ago; dinosaurs did not exist 250 million years ago. An extinction event did occur 250 million years ago. It is usually called the End Permian event. At that time, over ninety percent of all sea life went extinct, including the trilobites, and around seventy percent of all land species went extinct. Just as the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, cleared the field for mammals to evolve, the End Permian extinction cleared the field for dinosaurs to evolve.
  
• Volcanoes do not make coal. Period.
  
• The Permian was not ended by the eruption of a supervolcano. Supervolcano is the popular name for an extraordinarily large caldera collapse. These events pump enormous amounts of ash into the atmosphere. The land downwind from a collapse can be buried under hundreds of feet of ash, killing all life and probably causing some extinctions. Globally, the amount of ash that lingers at high altitudes is enough to cause a sudden drop in temperatures that continues for years. If the right background conditions are in place, it is enough to trigger an ice age.
  
• The volcanic event that coincided with the End Permian extinction was the deposit of flood basalts in what is now Siberia. Flood basalts are lakes of lava that are deposited by slow-motion eruptions through a series of fissures that form over a large area, rather than single vents like more familiar volcanoes. Flood basalts events that can last millions of years. The flatlands of Eastern Washington are a flood basalt deposit that took over six million years to form.

The anonymous Fox News writer was trying to summarize a recent paper about a cancer cluster in a small area of southern China. The authors of the paper have discovered that the low grade coal used for cooking and heating in Xuan Wei contains a much higher amount of silica than coal anywhere else in the world. Exposure to crystalline silica, which most commonly comes from cutting and grinding rock, causes inflammation and scaring in the lungs, a condition called silicosis.

The coal used domestically in Xuan Wei comes from three seams that were laid down in the late Permian. The uppermost seam, the one that was laid down closest to the time of the Siberian flood basalts and the End Permian extinction, contains the highest amount of small grain silica. The researchers found that the silica was added to the coal after if formed, probably carried in by groundwater. As a source for the silica, they point to a local layer of flood basalts, the Emeishan basalts, which were laid dawn about ten million years before the End Permian extinction. natural erosion of these basalts would have made the ground water high in silica. Later the eruption of the Siberian basalts would have added silica to the atmosphere, which, carried by water, would have added more silica to the already silica rich coal.

The paper is a great piece of detective work aimed at locating the source of an extremely tight cancer cluster. The women of Xuan Wei get lung cancer at a rate twenty times the Chinese average. However, the solution to the mystery has nothing to do with supervolcanoes and nothing to do with dinosaurs. The mystery of how those got into the story probably has more to do with a scientifically illiterate intern trying to tie a fairly dry scientific paper to two far more exciting and popular topics. Chris Rowan has traced the lede sentence, to a press release issued by the American Chemical Association, with one very significant change. This suggests the possibility that the Fox writer did not read beyond the release and maybe the paper's abstract. Sadly, most of the people who read the Fox article will never know just how wrong it is.

Hey baby, wanna get lucky?

Who would have thought that line still worked (or that it ever did).

A truck driver, who claimed to be a Taoist master, has been convicted of duping a young model into having sex with him. He will be sentenced later this month, following a psychiatric report. The [Hong Kong] District Court heard during the trial that Au Yeung Kwok-fu had used false pretenses to trick a 19-year-old girl into have sex with him nine times since 2007, by telling her that this would improve her luck. He also claimed his so-called supernatural powers would prevent her from getting pregnant. Judge Stanley Chan said the victim was a simple-minded person with little experience of life. He said this had led her to have sexual intercourse with the defendant, leaving her pregnant and seeking an abortion. The judge rejected suggestions that the sex was part of a Taoist ritual, and that it could have had any effect in changing the victim's luck. He will hand down his sentence on January 21.

Joe Lieberman coddles terrorists

I was shocked, shocked to find out that Joe Lieberman (CT - himself) thinks we should go easy on terrorists. How else can we interpret this:

You could not find a better, more humane facility for a detention center in the world.

That's how he describes Guantanamo Bay. It's the nicest prison in the world. The prisons on the mainland are nastier than Gitmo and he wants to prevent the accused maybe-terrorist like people from being sent there. What else do you think we should do to make their lives easier, Joe? Send them personal valets to bring them pina coladas by the pool? I don't think so!! These people are the worst of the worst. They managed to take a mighty nation that defeated King George, Santa Anna, Kaiser Wilhelm, and the Berlin Wall and turn us into a nation of bed-wetters who cry "please shred the Bill of Rights" every time the alarm is raised to orange*. They need to punished for that! Their neighbors denounced them for money and that should be proof enough that they are bad, evil, icky men who deserve to be taken out of that tropical paradise and put behind the cold, gray, esthetically unpleasing walls of built-in-America prisons. I suppose next Joe will be saying he doesn't want to inconvenience them with long, boring trials!!! Enough is enough! Send the prisoners here; they deserve it.

* Gag stolen from Comrade PhysioProf.