Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!"

When we roll home with only bagels, I feel I've won. No more. I've armed myself with the tools of illogic, thus guaranteeing I win every marital argument from this point forward. You can too.

Use the following brain-deflating fallacies to ensure dominance in debate club and/or with unsuspecting significant other.

• Appeal to Ignorance: if it isn't proven, it's false—"Did you SEE me bogart the last of the jamocha almond fudge? No? Well, there you go."

Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier Retreat Scaremongering


A guest post by my friend Lai Ying at the Greenwich Institute of Toxicology.


Global warming is a get-rich-quick scam invented by Al Gore when he was cold and hungry, sleeping in a doorway and penniless.  Stories that Al Gore was rich before he invented the CO2 scam are lies propagated by his cronies and acolytes.

That being so, it follows that all "evidence" in support of the global warming THEORY has either been faked or is the outcome of self-delusion by warmist agendists.

Ever want to be interviewed by big time media?  I'll tell you the two secrets to getting your message out.  I'll be talking about the Project Calliope extreme DIY satellite project on NPR's "All Things Considered" this Saturday (July 24), sometime after 5pm.  And while I honestly have no idea what the final edit will sound like, I'm insanely pleased to have been invited.

How did I get on NPR?  How can you?  I will tell you the 2 secrets I've learned to getting noticed by the media.

The basal ganglia is a series of highly connected brain areas localised deep in the cerebral cortex that recently has attracted interest of neuroscientists when it was linked to learning, and discovered to be affected in a number of disorders of the addictive and obsessive spectrum, but also in Parkinson’s disease (PD). And now researchers think they have understood why as they found that neurons in this area signal the beginning and the end of voluntary actions.

The CMS collaboration at the LHC collider has just produced its very first results on the production of Upsilon particles, with 280 inverse nanobarns of proton-proton collisions at 7 TeV center-of-mass energy. I wish to discuss these results here, to explain what is interesting in these very early measurements, and what we can expect to learn in the future from them.

The production of resonances decaying to muon pairs is one of the first things one wants to study when a hadron collider starts operation. This is because these particles are extremely well known, so one immediately figures out whether the detector is working properly, what is the resolution on the momenta of the reconstructed particles, etcetera.

Arctic Ice July - Update #4



Once again my focus is on Nares Strait.  This time I want to show how glaciers can be affected indirectly by sea ice.

There are two major glaciers in the Nares Strait - Petermann and Humboldt.  Both are primed for calving.

It has been known for quite some time that exercise promotes neurogenesis, but now a study by Leuner, Glasper, and Gould, published by PLoS ONE this month, claims that the most intimate form of exercise - sexual activity - can produce the same effects.  And better yet- having multiple, repeated sexual experiences results in a greater positive effect than a single experience alone. Added bonus: it reduces anxiety as well.  I love that kind of data!

On my way home last night, motoring the red Jeep down Ohio Rt 53, out in the middle of nowhere, only a bunch of farm fields, oncoming traffic and darkness, I saw a bright flash of light in my left eye. I realized, with a familiar guilty pleasure that a death, and an opportunity to observe bizarre evidence of an incredible natural phenomenon had occurred.



A Firefly had crashed into the proverbial windshield on the freeway. My proverbial windshield.

I am not a religious person, and I'm most certainly not spiritual either. Both of these statements get me into trouble in polite society, especially when they are coupled.

Apparently I'm not the only one, as anybody who has used an online dating service will readily testify. Typically, these web sites allow you to specify your religious beliefs (and to express a preference for the religious beliefs of your prospective dates). Try simply checking the "atheist" box (if there actually is one), and you'll be waiting a long time for your matches. But if you describe yourself as "spiritual but not religious" your chances are markedly improved (though the problem now is that you'll see a lot of new agey types showing up in your inbox). Why?

Biotransport and ocean mixing


Before I get into the 'bio' aspect of this article I want to put it in context by pointing to a means of ocean mixing that is not as well known as it deserves to be.  And to put that, in turn, in context: a new report from NSIDC confirms that there is a lot of open water in the central pack near the North Pole.  That open water was noted by one of my readers, Lord Soth in a comment.

Here is an abstract from the NSIDC report for July 20 2010: