Doctor Science

Explaining Hillary Hate

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by Doctor Science A few weeks ago Sprog the Elder, who was born in 1989, asked me to explain why some people hate Hillary Rodham Clinton so very, very much. She knew that it went back to the Bill Clinton administration, but had no idea what it was based on. This is more or less … Read more

Boots on the ground

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by Doctor Science The second weekend in October I went down to Philadelphia with a bunch of other NJ Clinton volunteers to do Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) canvassing. PA, of course, is a “battleground” state, and NJ is not. We don’t even have a Senate seat up this year. It turns out I’m not a cost-effective canvasser … Read more

Shelter from the Storm

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by Doctor Science Hurricane Matthew is nearing Florida. I really hope everyone who lives on Florida’s Atlantic-side barrier islands has evacuated. I don’t know if any of the regulars here are in the strike zone, but my best web-design client is an antique store in West Palm Beach. I really hope they got their stock … Read more

Humans never migrated out of Africa

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by Doctor Science Carl Zimmer is a great science writer I’ve been following for years. It’s not really his fault that his latest NY Times article on human evolution was the last straw for me, finally breaking my ability to quietly tolerate a particular turn of phrase. The headline for Zimmer’s article is: “A Single … Read more

Summer’s end book round-up

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by Doctor Science Between preparing for, going to, and recovering from Worldcon, it’s been a while since I wrote about what I’ve been reading. This round-up covers several weeks, and includes novels by Genevieve Cogman, Laura Anne Gilman, Jo Walton, N.K. Jemisin, and Mary Robinette Kowal. huh. I didn’t plan to read only books by … Read more

Pro-Life Science and Abortion

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by Doctor Science Shannon Dingle posted I’m Pro-Life and I’m Voting for Hillary, because she thinks “pro-life policies” should mean support for all kinds of children and parents, not just opposition to abortion. It’s a very thoughtful, nuanced post in general, but includes this statement: I believe life begins scientifically at the moment of conception … Read more

Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist candidates

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by Doctor Science Continuing from the previous post about the Best Pro Artist nominees, here are the candidates for Best Fan Artist. Four of them are from the Rabid Puppy slate, one is not. “Scars”, by Matthew Callahan. “A reflection of the fatigue and doubt troopers may have when faced with back-to-back deployments to a … Read more

Will you stay or will you go?

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by Doctor Science This is your Brexit watch/results thread. I have had only a vague, distant impression about what’s driving Brexit, and only within the past week or so did I realize how close the vote was going to be. For US votes, I follow Sam Wang and 538 for their data-driven, boring approach. The … Read more

If Trump has no money, will his supporters abandon him?

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by Doctor Science Ever since it became clear that Donald Trump would have enough delegates for the Republican Presidential nomination, various desperate Republicans have been talking about the possibility of a “coup” at the convention, where the cooler heads of party stalwarts might install someone more generally-acceptable as the nominee. I’ve been laughing at these … Read more

Making History

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by Doctor Science The night Barack Obama was elected President I was super-tired (I’d been poll-working all day on the busiest day I’ve ever seen), but when he got up to speak I cried for joy. And I kept crying at random times for the next week, because I was so happy. I thought that … Read more

Wednesday Books: Good Stuff

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by Doctor Science This week: novels by Ada Palmer, Adam Rakunas, and Frances Hardinge; novella by Seanan McGuire. Dinner was delayed slightly because I was reading the last few pages of Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning while snapping beans. I love the style, how much everyone talks and thinks, the layers of world-building and … Read more

The John Donne Test

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by Doctor Science I mentioned my John Donne Test on File770 yesterday, and want to put it down coherently in one place for reference and discussion. I used to read a lot of mystery stories. A *lot*. One of my favorite Christmas presents while I was growing up was The Annotated Sherlock Holmes; I read … Read more

Wednesday Book Round-up

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by Doctor Science This week’s reading: In The Labyrinth of Drakes by Marie Brennan: another satisfying installment in the saga of Lady Trent and dragons. In this volume Isabella & Co. are in meta-Egypt, and the similarities to the Amelia Peabody series are obvious and amusing. The one thing that isn’t at all amusing is … Read more

Garden planning

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by Doctor Science

The garden at our new house needs a lot of work. I’m planning on doing it in stages. First, I went to the Native Plant sale yesterday, and got:

BHWPpurchases-05-15-16

Clockwise from pink flowers:

  • pink Creeping Phlox (Phlox stolonifera)
  • Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica) — they’ve already bloomed, I’m hoping for seeds
  • Eastern Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)
  • two Green-and-Gold (Chrysogonum virginianum)
  • Golden Ragwort (Packera aurea) — this is a new one for me
  • two ‘Larinem Park’ Wild Stonecrop (Sedum ternatum)
  • Wild Geranium (Geranium maculatum)
  • two Foamflower (Tiarella cordifolia)

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As you may know, there’s a cultural divide (heh) among gardeners, between “gardeners who use Latin names” and “gardeners who use English names”. I’m mostly a Latin-namer while my mother is an English-namer, which can be confusing for everybody.

Cutting here for multiple images.

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Wednesday Books: A symphony of the unfinished

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by Doctor Science I started a lot of books this week, but finished only a couple. Coincidentally, both are fantasies set in the 1920’s. Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge succeeds admirably as creepy-fantasy, less as historical fiction. The past tense of “weave” was “wove”, dammit, not “weaved”. By which I mean that, in general, it … Read more

Facebook and conservative news

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by Doctor Science

Gizmodo reports:

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

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Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.What the widespread outrage about this (up to and including demands for a Senate investigation) overlooks is whether Facebook’s young Trending curators were trying to weed out stories that are deceptive, false or even dangerous.

Below the cut: includes an image of artistic nudity in the Western tradition, which may be NSFW.

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May the Fourth Be With You Book List

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by Doctor Science — a day late. Many of my friends on livejournal/dreamwidth are in the habit of posting “what I’ve been reading” book lists on Wednesdays. Meanwhile, one of the nicer online things that has happened to me in the past year or so has been becoming part of the community at File770, where … Read more

Maytime

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by Doctor Science This is the nest of an American Phoebe, on the back wall of our single-story house outside the master bedroom: There are at least 4 nestlings — it’s possible there’s another one behind the ivy leaf. I took this picture May 1; they’re still there this evening, May 2, but I expect … Read more

Lifestyle changes

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by Doctor Science Wednesday of the week before last, Mister Doctor Science started to have chest pains while he was at fencing. He was wondering if it was just acid reflux (again), but one of the other fencers insisted on driving him to the ER. That friend is currently my favorite person in the whole … Read more

Hilzoy on how the Republicans got Donald Trump

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by Doctor Science Hilzoy, formerly of this establishment, has moved on from political blogging, but she’s active on twitter. The other day she wrote a tweetstorm that’s been storified as How the Republicans got Donald Trump. Excerpts: @hilzoy GOP has for a long time been destroying trust in press, experts, basically everyone ppl don't know … Read more

Gun safety

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by Doctor Science Unless you were blessedly offline yesterday, you probably saw Jeb! Bush’s tweet: Image of tweet in context from Betty Cracker of Balloon Juice which became an instant meme. As someone who has never held a gun, I have some questions for those of you with actual knowledge. Via commenters at Balloon Juice, … Read more

Money can’t buy love, but why doesn’t it buy competence?

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by Doctor Science The most startling revelation of the past week in the US Presidential race was in Buzzfeed, where McKay Coppins wrote: But to those who have known him longest, Rubio’s flustered performance Saturday night fit perfectly with an all-too-familiar strain of his personality, one that his handlers and image-makers have labored for years … Read more

Reading the Past

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by Doctor Science

The largest project we have to do, to become actually moved in, is to unpack and then cull our book collection. Yesterday I opened a box containing a set of old hardcover books, the Complete Stories of O. Henry, stamped as having belonged to Mr. Dr. Science’s grandfather. “I wonder if these are worth anything,” I said to myself, and opened up a random volume to find publishing details to put into abebooks.

The volume was Roads of Destiny, and this is the frontispiece, the first thing I saw:

Cut for racial epithets that were, apparently, quality humor in 1917.

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