From Biologists Helping Bookstores:

It is my mission to correctly re-shelve books to the appropriate section of the bookstore.

For example, “Darwin’s Black Box”, the famous psuedo-science book by the non-evolutionary non-scientist Michael Behe, should not be in the “Evolutionary Biology” section, but something more appropriate, such as “New Age”, “Religion”, “Christianity”, or even “Fiction”. You get the idea.

I call on all readers of this blog to follow my example. Help your local bookstore correctly stock their science section. Spread the word.

Hear hear!

Read Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians.

I lay awake for about half an hour just pondering the very stupid question: what would happen (to you) if gravity reversed itself for one second?

If you’re in a structure, that’s bad news. When thrown upwards and back down by 15 ft. most will become rubble. All trees would be uprooted.

But, supposing you were outside and survive the chaotic re-settling of terre firma. What would be the worst part?

The atmosphere would not only fall up with everything else, but has been pre-pressurized to explode outward were gravity to free it. Here, it’s not only freed, but helped along as well. So we can expect a very rapid pressure drop, even in just a second, along with the chill of adiabatic cooling. But a brief pressure drop, even a large one, is not that big a deal. There is a far greater pressure differential on a moderately deep scuba dive than between 1 atm and vacuum.

What will really hurt is the overpressure when the air comes crashing back down and compressed (and heated). Enough, I would guess, to pop your eardrums and give you one serious hot&dry enema.

So, making no calculations, I predict, were gravity to reverse itself for one second, a fair many people would survive the material mix up at the surface, only to be battered, perhaps killed, by the worst reverse fart imaginable.

It’s survival of the tight sphincters.

Ah, back to the practice of Ambien blogging. Tomorrow I’ll get to see what I write. And it might occasionally be grammatical. Do not let this frighten you.

I’m trying a different dog food. This is a big deal. Dogs hate change. But I just couldn’t take the taste of the old stuff anymore.

Yesterday, I submitted an essay to a science writing contest. It sucked. The essay, not the contest, except by proxy. I had spent enough time on it, that I was determined to at least get it submitted. But since I didn’t have time to make it good enough to have a chance of winning, spending any time on it, including whatever time I needed just to get it in presentable form to submit it with no chance of winning, would be a waste of time. So I wasted the time, and will be expecting my generic polite rejection email in 4-6 weeks.

Hot Damn: The Avs pick up Smyth and Hannon. I was expecting them to make a run a Drury or Gomez, perhaps they did, but I think this might be better. This is a shift in philosophy. This will be coach Q hockey.