Not good. Not good.

Without a trace of embarrassment, a spokeswoman for the Scottish Nationalist Party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, admitted that the first minister’s science adviser had not been consulted because the decision “wasn’t based on scientific evidence.”

The scientific community is facing a new European reality. Last November, the European Commission’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker, chose not to reappoint Prof. Anne Glover as his science adviser after lobbying by Greenpeace and other environmental groups.

“We hope that you as the incoming Commission president will decide not to nominate a chief scientific adviser,” they wrote.

Never mind that Professor Glover’s advice on G.M.O. safety reflected the scientific consensus. Mr. Juncker, hoping to make his political life easier, complied with their demand. Europe now has no chief scientific adviser.

Yep, GMO foods. And again, I find myself in the awkward position. I'm not a fierce advocate, and I have my own occasional worries about possible unforeseen environmental consequences, but I hate when My Side is acting like wingnuts.

[Added] From the links at the bottom of the piece (last link above): An Ecomodernist Manifesto and "Is eco-modernism the third way on climate change? seem like good further reading.

Gmail search tip -- use the from: and filename: keywords

Just noticed this string that appeared in the Gmail search window after I clicked on one of the thumbnails in the "Recent photos" sidebar while looking at a new message from ... let's say somebody@example.com. It looks like a handy way to find that picture that person sent you that one time.

from:somebody@example.com filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png)

Works whether the pictures are attached or embedded in the body of the message, despite what it says here.

You might want to add gif and other extensions, of course.

Note the parentheses, the colons and the absence of a space after them, and the capital ORs. Not positive, but I think those might all be requirements.

For further review

The lede didn't grab me ...

WHEN was the last time you saw an anti-smoking ad?

... because my immediate and then also considered answer was "the last thousand times I watched any baseball or basketball game for at least fifteen consecutive minutes."

But apparently, my evident non-membership in the article's target audience notwithstanding, there are all kinds of shenanigans associated with that lawsuit thing a few years ago, against Big Tobacco. I am too tired, right now, to really get what's being described in the article, but superficially, it appears to be: billions of dollars won, then lost, and it's probably only going to get uglier.

As in, way uglier.

Let's hope a night's sleep and then some coffee will make it at least a little better. But I'm betting on nightmares.

[Added] Sadly, related.

Statistically improbable phrase of the day

... I started hanging out at a local pigeon supply store.

Also, is a “pigeon mumbler” like a horse whisperer?

Also, too, would you consider this gentrification? And if so, with all the negativity that that connotes?

John Gotti’s old Mafia headquarters became a pet-grooming center.

Based on the article, that's a book I'd like to read.

"How to Easily Print a Large Image to Multiple Pages in Windows"

The answer turned out to be surprisingly hard to find using the Google, so I thought I'd add a little link juice and, of course, a note of thanks to Scott Ogrin of ScottiesTech.info.

It makes the mind reel that there is something fundamental that MS PAINT can do that none of my other image processing programs can.

[ + ]

How to blockquote in the new new new Gmail [UPDATED]

(Updated below)

I don't see a (mouse-clickable) toolbar option to blockquote a section of text in the new Compose And Reply Experience, but you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-9. And who wouldn't remember that?

Also, you can increase indent with Ctrl-] (control key + right bracket) and decrease it with Ctrl-[ (control key + left bracket).

Full list of keyboard shortcuts available by hitting ? when in Gmail (obvs, you'll have to click outside the area you're typing in, if you're in the middle of composing a message), and also here.

__________

[Update 2013-04-07 02:04] My bad. It actually is possible to blockquote and indent text using the mouse:

I.e., click on the A button. In the pop-up toolbar, click the button second from the right and then choose from the next pop-up toolbar.

Live video chat with Lawrence Wright about his new book on Scientology

Goodreads says:

Join us on Monday, March 11, at 2pm ET/11am PT for a live video chat with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright. We'll be talking about his new book Going Clear, a hard-hitting look at the Church of Scientology.

Links: Goodreads's book page and author page. Lawrence Wright's website. Read an excerpt on Random House's site (scroll down a bit). Amazon's page. Michael Kinsley's delightful review.

(pic. source)

Nerd Alert: "Numberplay"

I just noticed that Wordplay, "The Crossword Blog of the New York Times," has a weekly feature called Numberplay, which some of you might be interested in.

There's, like, actual math involved. Take for example the latest post, "The Gambling Machine Puzzle."

This week’s puzzle was suggested by mathematician Nelson Blachman, [...]

[...]

Dr. Blachman told me he liked this week’s puzzle because “its solution required some ingenuity but only simple probability theory to start with. Evaluating the expected payoff from the optimum (or any other) strategy, however, needed a tiny bit of integral calculus.”

"Only simple" probability theory!?!!? "A tiny bit of" integral calculus?!!!

The very idea that the New York Times is for once not liberally-artsishly going all "I CAN'T EVEN BALANCE MY CHECKBOOK LOL" is something to savor and salute.

Something else to savor and salute, from Nelson Blachman's website: the bookend entries on his list of publications:

``The System of Microstresses in Cold-Worked Metal,'' Physical Review 70 (9, 10), 698-704 (November 1 and 15, 1946) (baccalaureate dissertation).

``Three Tangent Circles' Incircle,'' The Mathematical Scientist 37.2, 151-153 (December 2012).

Emph. added.

"Twilight of the Bombs"

Repeating something, in case you didn't see me mention it on the Twitter.

Highest possible recommendation: a one-hour talk by Richard Rhodes, followed by forty minutes of Q&A, mostly with Stewart Brand. Starts bleak, ends hopeful.

---

Update

2022-08-25 Video no longer available. Sorry.

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David has started watching, and likes it.

And as for the new book idea, mentioned at the end, I wonder if we could get it done through Kickstarter. Or maybe one of you has an in at the Gates Foundation? Rhodes is, as you probably already know, one of my favorite authors, and I'd love to see him funded for that new project.

Uh, which I will still say even as I now see that I have read about one-eighth of his canon.

"Place Hacking: All up in your infrastructure"

A website which makes you wish awesome hadn't been killed by overuse. The only thing better than the pictures is the attitude.

(h/t: Paul Hayes, RTed by Mike Forester )

Tour of Confusion (That's What The World Needs Today)

You'll understand the title when you get to the end of this minute-ish-long clip, but I thought I'd add the first part on for a little context, at least.

(alt. video link)

Sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? At least for the non-calcified. If I ever get to that part of the world, I'd love to go on a few of those.

That whole diavlog between Sarah and Sarah is worth listening to, as is their first one.

P.S. If the name that Sarah Wildman mentioned in the above clip rang a bell, but you're not quite sure … here's a reminder.

(title: cf.)

Wavy Gravy [updated]

Today's Google Doodle is great!

The CSM has a pretty good write-up.

[Update] An interesting (to those interested in webdev) critical response from Alex Walker: "Google’s Doodle and Why it Hertz my Brain!"

Not sure how I feel about this, but ...

... it certainly bears further contemplation, and I definitely sympathize with the underlying motivations.

Ban The Box

Our “Ban the Box” campaign calls for the elimination of the questions about past convictions on initialpublic employment applications. Our aim is to win policy change through grassroots mobilizations, and to build a political movement of formerly-incarcerated activists. This campaign will allow us to target and challenge the many “boxes” on a variety of applications (i.e. employment, housing, social services, etc.) we are required to check that supports structural discrimination against formerly-incarcerated people.

Banning the box on public employment applications will contribute to public safety because it will promote stable employment in our communities. Communities of color and poor communities already are targeted by mass imprisonment, racial profiling, school closures, and low employment rates. People coming out of prison or county jails need to be able to feed their families, pay rent, and reunite with their families, and return their lives as productive members of the community. People with jobs and stable community lives are much less likely to return committing crimes in order to survive.

Ban The Box is a campaign being conducted by All Of Us Or None.

(h/t: Rexi44)

Enhance your privacy while surfing the Web

I haven't had a chance to look at it closely yet, but Privoxy looks like a Good Thing.

(h/t: Sean, in Comments (#49) at Crooked Timber)

A quick test of free-ocr.com

A short while ago, I happened upon free-ocr.com, a site that does optical character recognition on an image file that you upload (PDF, JPG, GIF, TIFF or BMP), using as its engine the open source package Tesseract. It's quite a handy site.

This post is mostly a note to self, and a way to report some results to T. Reinhardt, the site's proprietor. But I thought some of you might also be interested to see some examples of just how hard a problem this is, and where the current state of the art lies.

MORE »

"The Shame of College Sports"

There's a long piece in the Atlantic and available online that some of you might be interested in. It's by Taylor Branch (Wikipedia entry). Here's the introductory blurb:

A litany of scandals in recent years have made the corruption of college sports constant front-page news. We profess outrage each time we learn that yet another student-athlete has been taking money under the table. But the real scandal is the very structure of college sports, wherein student-athletes generate billions of dollars for universities and private companies while earning nothing for themselves. Here, a leading civil-rights historian makes the case for paying college athletes—and reveals how a spate of lawsuits working their way through the courts could destroy the NCAA.

Here is the rest.

I haven't gotten to this one yet, so this is partly a note to self, and I can't say for sure how good it will be. But based on a shorter NYT article about the piece and the author, I'm betting it'll be worth your time if you're interested in this aspect of sports.

(h/t: KK | pic. source: TB's homepage)

P.S. You can read and listen to the Frank Deford piece from which the blurb above is taken. It aired last month.

Having problems commenting? [UPDATED]

It's not you.

MORE »

Oh, hey, there's a new Feyman book out!

And it's by Lawrence Krauss, to boot!

You can read the first chapter for free at Amazon.

Sadly, this event has occasioned one of the more boneheaded conclusions in any book review I've ever read. Robin McKie complains that Krauss "concentrates a little too heavily on the science."

If you know anything at all about Feynman*, you know the stories of Feynman-the-personality have been told to the point where even Feynman fanboys like me are a little sick of hearing them. Kudos to Krauss, I say. At least as far as I can tell from this review. "[P]ages and pages on the minutiae of electron interactions and photon exchanges" is a feature, not a bug.

(h/t: Twin)

[Added] A follow-up.

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* However, if you don't know anything about Feynman, you're in for a treat. Even if you would say you don't like science. Seriously. A truly fascinating and heroic person. Read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think? and then read James Gleick's biography.

A good idea, at least: WebCite

I haven't played around with it enough to give it a review, but I applaud the thinking behind WebCite, at least.

The idea is to combat link rot (or wingnut bloggers, who disappear their posts after being proved wrong!) by archiving a copy of a Web page that you use as a reference, exactly as that page appeared when you linked to it.

Imagine if someone were to write a script to go through Wikipedia and WebCite all of the reference links. How fabulous would that be?

Submit a link for WebCite archiving here. More info here.

__________

(I came across this in a TPM post about Donald Trump telling Fox & Friends that he is totally not at all a racist, because he had that one black apprentice that one time.)

Anonleaks is coming!

So the good people from Anonymous say:

A rare .ru link that we can feel safe in clicking: anonleaks.ru.

Some details from Adrian Chen at Gawker.

The sudden new importance of Anonymous discussed on this blog starting here.

(h/t: @on_the_media)