Meme tag rag

I’ve been tagged by the Tangled Up in Blue Guy, Mike Haubrich, to tell seven weird or random things about me. So here goes:

1. I’m the wrong person for marketing focus groups. If I like something, it will be taken off the market because not enough people like it.
2. I have registered more than 5,000 books at BookCrossing.com to give them unique ID numbers. Of those books, about 1,000 are “in the wild.”
3. I’ve seen bald eagles, three or four species of hummingbirds, clapper rails, a sora, scarlet tanagers, and black skimmers.
4. I didn’t learn about J.S. Bach until I was 21. That’s a deprived childhood!
5. I daydream about reduction mammoplasty. (You try tying a pair of running shoes around your neck and leaving them there for the rest of your life.)
6. Ironically for a technical writer, I’m quite paperwork-challenged.
7. It’s a random and small world: I’ve met Stephen Jay Gould, Jane Goodall, Pierre Berton, and Sir Harold Kroto; and at my last contract I worked with a man who had worked for Tuzo Wilson.
8. In 1991, I travelled to Costa Rica to see a solar eclipse.

Isotopes over nuclear safety

Harold at Ontario geofish has an alarming report: the Canadian government is choosing isotopes over nuclear safety. Harold says:

The government has now put a lot of pressure on the CNSC to paper over their difficulties and get the reactor running again. This, despite the fact that AECL did a Conrad Black over required seismic safety upgrades…

This bottom line is that this is an old clapped-out reactor in a very active seismic zone.

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond, author, is a professor of geography. He is one of National Geographic’s Explorers in Residence. (Shouldn’t that be Exporers at Large?) You can follow the link for more information, to see a picture, or to hear an interview.

Jared Diamond is professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. He recently published a book called Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,.

He also wrote the widely acclaimed book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. It won a Pulitzer Prize in the U.S. and the 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize in the U.K.

Read an interview with Jared Diamond.

Watch a video about How Societies Fail and Sometimes Succeed.

AECL vs. Canadian Society of Nuclear Medicine

Harold Asmis at Ontario Geofish points out that Atomic Energy Canada Limited has been operating a reactor without a licence… and now we’re going to be short of radioactive isotopes for treating cancer patients.

Bush, the Abominable "No" Man

Graydon Carter has written an editorial letter about George W. Bush for Vanity Fair. It’s called “The Abominable No-Man and Mr. 9/11.” Carter writes,

… a new book by former British foreign secretary Lord Owen may supply a clue. In The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair, and the Intoxication of Power, Owen recalls the time in 2002 when the commander in chief collapsed while sitting on a sofa watching a football game. (Official cause: he’d choked on a pretzel.) The presidential head hit a table on the way to the floor, he suffered an abrasion on the left side of his face, and a blood sample was rushed to Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. Owen says he was told by a British doctor who had visited Johns Hopkins that lab technicians there found that the blood contained significant amounts of alcohol—this in the body of a man who claims he hasn’t had a drop in more than 20 years.

Alliance for Science essay contest

The 2007 Alliance for Science essay contest for secondary school students is on. With cash prizes. The deadline for entries is the last day of February, 2008. Follow the link for the rules.

Fractal snowflake

Karmen at Chaotic Utopia brings us a pattern for fractal paper snowflakes.

1000 birds?

This is a scroll from the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin. It’s a Chinese copy of a 17th-century Japanese design with a motif of 1000 cranes.

The Straight Dope on Neurolinguistic Programming

What is Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP)? Does it work? How does it work?

The Straight Dope has some answers.

Otters!

At Rurality, a trio of otters popped in as Holiday Company.

"You know you’re on Pharyngula when…"

Inkadu says,

You know you’re on Pharyngula when a paragraph in the comments starts with, “Put simply,” and ends with “epistemology.”

Put simply, we can distinguish between ‘harmful’ and ‘non-harmful’ religious beliefs based upon content. We cannot distinguish between them based upon epistemology.

A microscope for Squidmas?

PZ Myers suggests the best models and minimum price for a good microscope for the kids.

Of wedge strategies and straw men

S.E.E. Quine has laid out very clearly the problem with the ID/science debate: she quotes the ID proponents describing their shifty and non-scientific tactics.

Planning your Squidmas tree

PZ Myers at Pharyngula has a link to a series of photos showing how to decorate a tree with interesting, non-traditional ornaments. David Farley decorated the tree, and he says that some of the ornaments are from December Diamonds. I amagine that keeping a sharp eye out in toy shops would help, too.

Biodefense Lab overlooked risks

I almost wish this had been in The Onion. “NIH’s Biodefense Lab Review Overlooked Risks of Dangerous Disease Outbreak” It’s the same old story. Errors will occur. People are the weak link. They will fail to follow procedures. They will have accidents. And then there are car crashes and power failures and fires. You must plan for all your usual precautions failing. Putting a lab for dangerous microbes in the heart of a city might be convenient for commuting, but it’s dumb as dirt for disaster.