Mass Republican for Congress Mike Stopa – Help Arizona fight Illegal Immigration

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New Video from the Stopa Campaign

Libertarian Republican Mike Stopa, running for Congress in Massachusetts appeared on Fox News last week, with Sean Hannity. Stopa said strongly that one of the first things the incoming Republican Congress should do, is to pass legislation helping Arizona fight illegal immigration.

Also:

"I've always believed in the Reagan philosophy of Free Enterprise..."

A Republican for Legalized Marijuana, Prostitution and Gambling

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New York Republican Political Consultant Roger Stone quoted at StoptheDrugWar.com, "Anti-Prohibitionist Candidates Challenge New York Status Quo" 7/2:

"I'm a libertarian Republican, not a religious right or Moral Majority Republican," Stone said. "I'm pro-freedom, I favor gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana, casino gambling, and prostitution. The only way to get the pimps and drugs out of it is to regulate it. It's a $10 billion industry -- let's legalize it and run out the mob, the pimps, the guys who exploit women, let's empower women."

Stone is serving as political consultant for Kristin Davis for Governor.

Colorado’s Jane Norton – We need Taxpayer Bill of Rights on Federal level

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Colorado's Taxpayer Bill of Rights placed severe restrictions on expanding state government spending. Now, former Lt. Governor and current Republican candidate for US Senate has backed the initiative on the Federal level.

Appearing as a guest on Jon Caldera's "Devil's Advocate" cable TV show, Norton said:

"I believe in TABOR. I believe we need to have restrictions on how quickly the public sector can grow in proportion to the private sector, and I've advocated for a TABOR type bill on the federal government level. We need those kinds of restraints."

Watch the 3-part video interview at JonCaldera.com

Anti-Prohibitionist candidate challenges Chuck Schumer in New York

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LR EXCLUSIVE

Randy Credico is the Independent candidate for US Senate challenging Chuck Schumer. He will be running on Kristin Davis's newly-formed Anti-Prohibition Party ticket.

A source has informed Libertarian Republican that Credico has turned in 1200 sigs for Davis-Credico.

He is a professional comedian and community activist against drug laws.

From DrugWar.org:

An unlikely pair of anti-prohibitionist insurgents are running statewide campaigns in New York designed to challenge the political status quo...

The anti-prohibitionist tag team has been doing some joint appearances, [Kristin] Davis said. "Randy is on my Anti-Prohibitionist Party petition as the Senate nominee. We just did an event over the weekend. It was a signature drive kickoff slash birthday party for me," she said. "There were maybe 300 people there."

Credico will also appear on the Libertarian Party line.

California’s corrupt town of Bell

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From Eric Dondero:

Libertarian Republican contributor and publisher of our allied site Left Coast Rebel, Tim Daniel, got published at Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller. Tim's piece, "Ringing the bell at the top: Paging Chris Christie" July 24:

Here's an excerpt:

Consider Bell. A diverse, poor offshoot of Los Angeles, Bell’s population in 2000 stood at 37,000 and its median per year household income clocked in at $29,000. But according to a blitz of media reports, city manager Robert Rizzo’s yearly salary clocks in close to $800,00.

The local issue of overpaid, zealous administrators in Bell, California, demonstrates a far more troubling macro picture for both the state and the nation a whole. California’s pension system alone now comes with a price tag that dwarfs the estimates of 10 years ago. This is due mostly to the 1999 California enacted pension ‘reform’ based on ludicrous investment gambles that assumed (among many other things) that the Dow Jones Industrial average would be trading at 25,000 by 2009. And with the ongoing recession and business/entrepreneur exodus – it will only get worse.

California may break records in fiscal insanity and union largess but the issue is not unique to this state alone. A story today out of Ann Arbor, Michigan highlights city officials who saw it fit to use taxpayer dollars to purchase an $800,000 piece of art despite the city’s current fiscal distress. The city also hired an art-coordinator and while doing so fired the city administrator that oversees trash collection efforts.

Speed Demon

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A Hypervelocity star in the center of the image. Click for larger. Credit: NASA, ESA, O. Gnedin (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), and W. Brown (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.)

This is very strange, this star was ejected from our galaxy and is traveling at about 1,600,000 miles per hour — that’s 2,500,000 km/hr !! Of the 16 known hypervelocity stars this is the fastest. To add to the strangeness this star also should have burned out long-long ago but yet we can still see it.

Read how it came to be ejected, how it got going so fast and why we can still see it with Hubble in the Hubble press release, you can also visit Hubblesite to see more images:

A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a life-changing misstep. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy’s giant black hole, which captured one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. Adding to the stellar game of musical chairs, the two outbound stars merged to form a super-hot, blue star.

This story may seem like science fiction, but astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star, known as HE 0437-5439, one of the fastest ever detected. It is blazing across space at a speed of 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) an hour, three times faster than our Sun’s orbital velocity in the Milky Way. Hubble observations confirm that the stellar speedster hails from the Milky Way’s core, settling some confusion over where it originally called home.

Most of the roughly 16 known hypervelocity stars, all discovered since 2005, are thought to be exiles from the heart of our galaxy. But this Hubble result is the first direct observation linking a high-flying star to a galactic center origin.

“Using Hubble, we can for the first time trace back to where the star comes from by measuring the star’s direction of motion on the sky. Its motion points directly from the Milky Way center,” says astronomer Warren Brown of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., a member of the Hubble team that observed the star. “These exiled stars are rare in the Milky Way’s population of 100 billion stars. For every 100 million stars in the galaxy lurks one hypervelocity star.”

The movements of these unbound stars could reveal the shape of the dark matter distribution surrounding our galaxy. “Studying these stars could provide more clues about the nature of some of the universe’s unseen mass, and it could help astronomers better understand how galaxies form,” says team leader Oleg Gnedin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Dark matter’s gravitational pull is measured by the shape of the hyperfast stars’ trajectories out of the Milky Way.”

The stellar outcast is already cruising in the Milky Way’s distant outskirts, high above the galaxy’s disk, about 200,000 light-years from the center. By comparison, the diameter of the Milky Way’s disk is approximately 100,000 light-years. Using Hubble to measure the runaway star’s direction of motion and determine the Milky Way’s core as its starting point, Brown and Gnedin’s team calculated how fast the star had to have been ejected to reach its current location.

“The star is traveling at an absurd velocity, twice as much as the star needs to escape the galaxy’s gravitational field,” explains Brown, a hypervelocity star hunter who found the first unbound star in 2005. “There is no star that travels that quickly under normal circumstances — something exotic has to happen.”

There’s another twist to this story. Based on the speed and position of HE 0437-5439, the star would have to be 100 million years old to have journeyed from the Milky Way’s core. Yet its mass — nine times that of our Sun — and blue color mean that it should have burned out after only 20 million years — far shorter than the transit time it took to get to its current location.

The most likely explanation for the star’s blue color and extreme speed is that it was part of a triple-star system that was involved in a gravitational billiard-ball game with the galaxy’s monster black hole. This concept for imparting an escape velocity on stars was first proposed in 1988. The theory predicted that the Milky Way’s black hole should eject a star about once every 100,000 years.

Brown suggests that the triple-star system contained a pair of closely orbiting stars and a third outer member also gravitationally tied to the group. The black hole pulled the outer star away from the tight binary system. The doomed star’s momentum was transferred to the stellar twosome, boosting the duo to escape velocity from the galaxy. As the pair rocketed away, they went on with normal stellar evolution. The more massive companion evolved more quickly, puffing up to become a red giant. It enveloped its partner, and the two stars spiraled together, merging into one superstar — a blue straggler.

“While the blue straggler story may seem odd, you do see them in the Milky Way, and most stars are in multiple systems,” Brown says.

This vagabond star has puzzled astronomers since its discovery in 2005 by the Hamburg/European Southern Observatory sky survey. Astronomers had proposed two possibilities to solve the age problem. The star either dipped into the Fountain of Youth by becoming a blue straggler, or it was flung out of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy.

In 2008 a team of astronomers thought they had solved the mystery. They found a match between the exiled star’s chemical makeup and the characteristics of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The rogue star’s position also is close to the neighboring galaxy, only 65,000 light-years away. The new Hubble result settles the debate over the star’s birthplace.

Astronomers used the sharp vision of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to make two separate observations of the wayward star 3 1/2 years apart. Team member Jay Anderson of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., developed a technique to measure the star’s position relative to each of 11 distant background galaxies, which form a reference frame.

Anderson then compared the star’s position in images taken in 2006 with those taken in 2009 to calculate how far the star moved against the background galaxies. The star appeared to move, but only by 0.04 of a pixel (picture element) against the sky background. “Hubble excels with this type of measurement,” Anderson says. “This observation would be challenging to do from the ground.”

The team is trying to determine the homes of four other unbound stars, all located on the fringes of the Milky Way.

“We are targeting massive ‘B’ stars, like HE 0437-5439,” says Brown, who has discovered 14 of the 16 known hypervelocity stars. “These stars shouldn’t live long enough to reach the distant outskirts of the Milky Way, so we shouldn’t expect to find them there. The density of stars in the outer region is much less than in the core, so we have a better chance to find these unusual objects.”

The results were published online in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 20, 2010. Brown is the paper’s lead author.

NCBI ROFL: Writing emails as part of sleepwalking after increase in Zolpidem [Ambien]. | Discoblog

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sleep computer“Sleepwalkers have been described to be involved in complex motor activities like cooking, eating, driving a car, playing an instrument, stabbing and murder [1]. We describe a case of a 44-year-old woman with idiopathic insomnia almost all her life. She tried various medications, psychotherapy and behavioral techniques for the treatment of her insomnia without any significant effects. She was started on Zolpidem 10 mg 4 years ago. She was able to sleep 4–5 h each night, but then the effects started wearing off. She increased the dose of Zolpidem by herself to 15 mg every night; she would take 10 mg tablet around 10 p.m. and 5 mg around 3 a.m. With this regimen she started sleeping for 5 h every night and felt alert during the daytime. After increasing the dose, she began to have episodes of sleepwalking. During one such episode, she went to bed around 10 p.m., she woke up 2 h later, and walked to the next room on the same floor. She turned on the computer and connected to the internet. She logged in by typing her user ID and password to her email account. She sent three emails to her friend inviting her to come over for dinner and drinks (Fig. 1A and B). Her friend called her the next day to accept the invitation. She said that the emails had strange language. The patient was not aware of these emails. She checked her sent folder and found three emails sent at 11:47 p.m., 11:50 p.m. and 11:53 p.m. They were in upper and lower cases, not well formatted and had strange language. She was shocked when she saw these emails, as she did not recall writing them. She did not have any history of night terrors or sleepwalking as a child. Her overnight video polysomnogram did not capture any episode and was normal. She was advised to reduce her dose of Zolpidem; after which she did not have any more episodes of sleepwalking.”

Bonus Figure:

fig 1

Fig. 1. (A) Emails written by patient during an episode of sleepwalking. (B) Emails written by the same patient three minutes after the first e-mail (A) during an episode of sleepwalking.

email

Photo: flickr/Ingorrr

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Then how come I still check my email every 5 minutes?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The case of “Judge Nodd” and other sleeping judges–media, society, and judicial sleepiness.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Sleep disturbances in Disney animated films.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!


Spitzer Telescope Finds Buckyballs… in Spaaace! | 80beats

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Looking at a planetary nebula 6,500 light years away, scientists recognized an old friend: the buckyball. The large, soccer ball-shaped molecule–made from bonding 60 carbon atoms together–was first seen in a lab in 1985. In a paper published today in Science, scientists confirm the first known extraterrestrial existence of the rare carbon balls.

buckyballsspace

The buckyballs’ planetary nebula, called TC 1, surrounds a white dwarf star. Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, a team led by Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario observed traces of the the 60-atom balls and their 70-atom cousins while looking at light coming from the white dwarf.

When light hits molecules and atoms, they will vibrate in specific, measurable ways–a field of science known as spectroscopy. One of Cami’s colleagues, who was studying Tc 1, found some unfamiliar fingerprints in the nebula’s infrared light. Cami recognized them as carbon’s 60-atom configuration and its favored 70-atom carbon partner. [Discovery News]

The researchers think a lack of hydrogen in this nebula allowed the formation of the buckyballs, known more generally as fullerene (named after architect Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes).

The team suspects that abundant carbon and a lack of hydrogen in the nebula created just the right environment to give rise to buckyballs. When hydrogen is present, it combines with carbon, preventing the pure-carbon spheres from forming. [New Scientist]

The spherical version of the carbon molecule has found many applications in chemistry and physics research, for example, in building nanostructures. Researchers suspect that the balls, given their temperature, formed within the past 100 years, but may be impossible to make out a century from now.

The finding “shows that complex, large molecules can exist in space,” said astrophysicist Theodore Snow of the University of Colorado in Boulder, who was not involved in the research. “Buckyballs are very stable and resistant to interstellar ultraviolet radiation, so once formed they can have long lifetimes in space.” [SPACE.com]

Sir Harry Kroto, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering buckyballs, waxed poetic about their interstellar presence, wondering if there might be buckyball leftovers in each of us.

“It’s so beautiful that it’s been hiding from us and it took an experiment trying to uncover what was going on in stars to find it…. All the carbon in your body came from star dust, so at one time some that carbon may have been in the from of buckyballs.” [BBC]

Related content:
Discoblog: Nano-Nascar? Tiny Dragster Has Chassis, Axles, & Buckyball Wheels
80beats: Researchers Want to Build a New World Out of Nanotech “Buckypaper”
DISCOVER: Cages of Carbon
DISCOVER: Does Your House Have Robotic Vision Yet? (on Buckminster Fuller’s far out ideas)

Image: Artist’s rendition / NASA/JPL-Caltech


That Amazing, Unstoppable BP Container Cap Post | The Intersection

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Well, Darlene’s last guest post went stratospheric on Digg, and we are still reeling from the traffic. For some strange reason–having to do with the bizarre combination of “Tom Johnson,” a list of “sexy” scientists, and now this–this July we are on track to break our all time traffic record from precisely a year ago, when everybody was debating Unscientific America.

Thanks, Darlene. Or, to paraphrase the original title of your post:

“Who gets the credit for the BP Container Cap post? Darlene Does.”


Moss That Makes Mushroom Clouds: A Plant Explodes to Spread Its Spores | 80beats

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The browser you are currently using does not support the Discover photo galleries. Supported browsers include recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 7 or later), Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email webmaster@discovermagazine.com. Thank you for reading Discover, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Let’s say you’re a peat moss plant. Since you’re stuck in one place, and it’s low to the ground where there’s little wind or air turbulence, you have to find a way to shoot your spores way up into the air where they can be dispersed.

In reality, mosses have conquered this problem by shooting their spores into the sky at speeds of greater than 30 meters (nearly 100 feet) per second. Their spherical capsules containing the spores deform inward until the pressure forces a ferocious explosion to propel spores at that velocity. But even this is not enough—air would slow the spores before they reached a high enough height to get carried away.

Luckily, Dwight Whitaker and Joan Edwards found that the moss plants have another trick, which they published in the journal Science. After shooting video at 100,000 frames per second, the scientists saw that the plants shoot their spores in a vortex ring, like a tiny mushroom cloud or a smoke ring. The fluid dynamics of the vortex rings allow it to carry those spores through the air much farther than they could travel without it.

For plenty more about this, read Ed Yong’s post at Not Exactly Rocket Science. But first, watch this short video the researchers made.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Mosses Use Explosive Cannons And Mushroom Clouds To Spread Their Spores
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Flowers Change Color And Back Again To Advertise Their Opening Hours
80beats: Spores in Mastadon Dung Suggest Humans Didn’t Kill Off Ancient Mammals
The Loom: Fungus Opera

Video: Clara Hard, Joan Edwards, Dwight Whitaker


Experimental Glider Flies Like a Plane, Lands Like a Bird | 80beats

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Though the wing-flapping contraptions of early human flight haven’t quite caught on, researchers think birds may still have something to teach us about navigating the air: how to land. MIT researchers have made a system that can bring a modified glider to an elegant bird-like stop, causing it to set down on its tail.

flowvis-top

Russ Tedrake of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and his student Rick Cory developed the computer model to bring a basic foam glider to a unique landing. The principle behind the plane’s stop is the same one used by stunt planes–stall. When its wings tilt back, the plane loses lift and falls from the sky. Traditional planes don’t use this method to land because the airflow is chaotic (see smoke visualization above) making it hard to predict how the plane will behave.

Birds come to a stop by tilting their wings back at sharp angles. This creates turbulence and large, unpredictable whirlwinds behind the wings. If an airplane pointed its wings up in this way, it would lose lift and fall out of the sky. But MIT researchers wanted to take advantage of stall–specifically, post-stall drag–to help a plane come to a controlled landing. [Popular Science]

Video after the break.

Tedrake and Cory developed a computer program to control the glider with a steering motor attached to its tail. The program predetermined the best flight paths to bring the glider to a safe landing, and also how to correct or switch courses if it veered too far off the path.

For a range of launch conditions, they used the model to calculate sequences of instructions intended to guide the glider to its perch. . . . Cory and Tedrake also developed a set of error-correction controls that could nudge the glider back onto its trajectory when location sensors determined that it had deviated from it. [MIT]

They launched the 90-gram craft from 12 feet away from its landing wire, in winds between 13 and 19 miles per hour. Though they don’t predict a passenger plane landing like this anytime soon, they think the technique might prove useful for flying robots that could perch and recharge their batteries on a power line. With more research, they might also make craft that use other bird strategies.

The researchers say they are continuing the research and will next be moving outside into real-world conditions. They also plan to explore the use of flapping wing vehicles as well as more typical propeller driven aircraft. [Wired]

Related content:
80beats: Scientists Glean Secrets of Flight From Birds, Bats, and Bugs
80beats: Boeing’s “Phantom Eye” Joins the Roster of Unmanned Spy Planes
8obeats: DARPA Loses Contact with Mach 20 “Hypersonic Glider” During Test Flight
80beats: Flying the Sunny Skies: Solar-Powered Plane Completes 2-Hour Test Flight

Image: Courtesy of Jason Dorfman (MIT/CSAIL).
Video courtesy of Russ Tedrake and Rick Cory


Mosses use explosive cannons and mushroom clouds to spread their spores | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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Sphagnum-moss

As you read this, forceful explosions are rocking the planet, covering it in mushroom clouds. Thankfully, nuclear winter isn’t going to befall us quite yet. These explosions are caused by biological cannons rather than man-made bombs and the clouds they produce are mere millimetres high. They are the means by which peat mosses disperse their spores.

There are over 285 species of peat moss, all belonging to the genus Sphagnum. They are among the most common plants in the world, growing in the cold, moist parts of the Earth and covering about 1% of its land. They rely on the wind to disperse their spores and all of them face a similar problem. They grow in flat mats, which hug the ground at a level where the air is relatively still. Ideally, they need to get their spores into the ‘turbulent boundary layer’ – a zone up to 10cm off the ground, where swirls of air and sideways currents can carry the spores over long distances.

Most species place their spores at the end of stalks, but even these only stick out a centimetre off the ground. To get the spores even higher, the peat mosses shoot them out, using their stalks as mini-cannons. Each one has anywhere from 20,000 to 250,000 spores loaded into a round capsule at its tip. On sunny days, the capsule dehydrates and collapses inwards, transforming from a sphere into a cylinder and squashing the air inside it. Soon, the pressure becomes too great and the capsule literally blows its top, shooting out both spores and air.

The whole process takes less than a hundredth of a millisecond. The spores are ejected at around 30 miles per hour at around 32,000 times the force of gravity. And they reach a height of around 10 centimetres, more than enough to reach the turbulent layer of air above the moss.

But this isn’t the whole story. Despite its forceful launch, the spore shouldn’t be able to reach that height. Given its initial speed, it should get to a maximum height of no more than 7 millimetres in less than half a millisecond. In reality, it goes far higher for much longer. After 5 milliseconds, the average spore has already risen by 4 centimetres, with only vague signs of slowing down.

To solve this mossy mystery, Dwight Whitaker from Pomona College and Joan Edwards from Williams College filmed the firing of the spore cannons. The action is so quick that they had to use ultrahigh-speed cameras that shoot up to 100,000 frames every second. These videos revealed that each launch is accompanied by a tiny mushroom cloud. These clouds are rolling haloes of air called ‘vortex rings’. It’s these rings that give the spores the extra boost they need to rise above it all.

Firing_moss-cannon

Vortex rings are produced when a ball of fluid (in this case, the air trapped in the capsule) moves through larger mass of fluid (in this case, the atmosphere). As the ball of capsule air explodes outwards, its leading edge pushes the molecules of the surrounding air apart. But remember that air has friction – because of this, the outer layer of the ball is pulled outwards only to roll back in on itself later. The result is a moving doughnut of air – a vortex ring. You can see this happening more clearly in the animations on this page.

Squid and jellyfish commonly produce vortex rings behind them to push themselves along. Humans make them whenever we blow smoke rings. Dolphins produce them sometimes by blowing water rings. But this is the first time that anyone has found a plant that can create its own vortex rings. The fact that the low-lying peat mosses can shoot their spores to such a height is a crucial element of their success.

Reference: Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1190179

Images by Clara Hard, Dwight Whitaker and Joan Edwards

More amazing plants:

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

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Dave Appell: remember the messenger | Gene Expression

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David Dobbs has a long measured response up to David Appell’s strange argument that Pepsi’s “free speech” rights were violated during the recent ScienceBlogs kerfuffle, by way of which he casts some aspersions on the character and agenda of specific bloggers. Here’s the thing about Appell, he has a long history of confused and surly criticisms and interrogations of others and himself. I know that history because I first became familiar with Dave Appell in May of 2002. In between pointers and commentary on physical science, his primary beat as a science journalist, he would offer some personal reflections, frustrations, and worries. I’m not big into bloggers who “overshare,” especially science bloggers, so I tried to ignore that as I focused on the substance of Appell’s posts.


But he popped up again in subsequent years with what I felt to be peculiar and emotionally driven behavior. First, in early 2007 I heard Rod Dreher offer a long explanation and apology on NPR for his support and subsequent opposition to the Iraq War. Dreher was heartfelt from what I recall, and didn’t soft pedal his faults which led him to his initial opinions. Well, that wasn’t enough for Dave Appell, he sent Dreher a nasty note where he stated that hoped that Dreher would burn in hell for the suffering that he caused. For someone who believes in free speech Appell certainly does not incentivize public candor about error. If you do something stupid, and perhaps even foul, keep your mouth shut! Then in 2008 he had a relatively widely linked post up criticizing the whole enterprise of blogging and the blogosphere. He concludes:

So more and more I am focusing on real writing, detailed reporting for magazines where you can do some real investigation and reporting and your audience isn’t just people reading over their calzone at lunch. I don’t want to end up some vapid blogger who tries to say everything and so who says nothing whatsoever. Life is too short. I’m really not sure what the solution is.

Two years on he’s obviously still reading blogs, still blogging (posting YouTube clips and updates on his kittens even!), and commenting on the situation of the blogosphere. He even wants to broaden the discussion and let a thousand flowers bloom.

Sometimes when the message seems a bit muddy, it’s not because you lack powers of perception. If you see the byline “Dave Appell,” and it doesn’t have to do with atmospheric physics or such, update your priors! (or better yet, click away)

Readership survey soon (again) | Gene Expression

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Since I’ve moved to Discover Blogs I suspect my readership has changed a bit. I have the results of a previous survey from early in 2010, back when I was at ScienceBlogs, but haven’t posted on it in detail. I’ll try and do that in the next few days, but I also will put up a survey for this incarnation of the weblog to see if there are changes. I’ll ask the standard demographic questions (age, sex, race, income, education, etc.), but the comments are open if you are curious about something about the readership of this weblog and would like me to include a question regarding that issue. I can’t guarantee I’ll add it, but I might.


Additionally, I want to highlight that I have a personal delicious feed going. That’s where I usually get the stuff for “Daily Data Dumps.” If you want to subscribe, the RSS address for that is http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/gnxp?count=15. I also contribute to two other blogs, Gene Expression Classic and Secular Right. If you subscribe to my total feed you can get all the content of this weblog, as well all the posts for those two blogs, as well as my periodic contributions to Comment is Free at The Guardian.

Finally, some blogs which you might not know about, but perhaps should. A Replicated Typo, on the evolution of culture (with a focus on language). And I can’t recommend Genomes Unzipped enough. What blogs are you reading out of curiosity? I “circulate” my RSS feed subscriptions a fair amount outside of a core set.