may 2008 / greg goebel
* This weblog provides an "online diary" to provide notes on current events, interesting items I run across, and the occasional musing. It promotes no particular ideology.
* FLORIDA ROAD TRIP AGAIN (4): I left Boonville, Missouri, early on the morning of Saturday, 5 April. I had a single stop that day, the Saint Louis Zoo. I was a bit surprised to find during trip preparation that the zoo was free, though I was supposed to pay for parking. Actually, I got there at opening time and they hadn't staffed the parking lot booth, so I didn't even pay for that.
At free, the Saint Louis zoo is a real bargain because it's a five-star zoo by almost any standards. The entry building is very nicely put together and modern, with full-scale and pretty models of a giant squid, manta ray, and hammerhead shark hanging from the ceiling. There's a nice "insect zoo" building marked by a giant stag beetle statue at the entrance and with a very nice butterfly pavilion as an annex.
The insect zoo leads to a long nature trail with animals in big open-air enclosures -- the zoo has very few cages, which is good not only for the animals but for shutterbug visitors since there's no bars to obstruct shots. At the end of the trail there's primate and reptile buildings. Usually reptile buildings are kind of dull, but this one was big and impressive, with a central court set up as a jungle-covered caiman pond.
The far end of the zoo featured another row of open-air enclosures. The inhabitants were nothing all that unusual -- cranes, storks, gazelles, peccaries, and so on -- but the ambience was nice. One enclosure had a little herd of petite Speke's gazelles and, unusually for zoo animals, they seemed very interested in me. I got a set of shots of them, mostly with them staring right at me in what seemed to be great kindly curiosity. Maybe they found me funny-looking? I supposed zoo animals have to get their entertainment, too.
The zoo had a big exotic-bird house, but it wasn't easy to get good shots out of it. The only thing I managed to get right was a set of pix of an Aussie kookaburra, an oversized species of kingfisher. They weren't the best shots but I'd been after that one for a while. I then traced back down to the center of the zoo, past sea lion pools to the central pond, which featured pelicans, mergansers, and other birds "just passing through". That left one corner to canvass, with the ape enclosure and a walk-through aviary modeled on a southern swamp. I managed to pick up some nice shots of bluejays, another thing I had been after for a while. We have bluejays in Colorado, though not the same species, but it seems to be the custom with brightly-colored birds to be skittish and very difficult to get close to.
* The zoo was impressive and I spent longer than I planned there. It was time well spent, but it put me a bit behind schedule. I left Saint Louis, cutting a corner through Illinois on the way South. I had been a little surprised during trip planning when I looked over the map of southern Illinois and traced out my route to find that it went through the town of Metropolis. Hmm, isn't that the place that's set up on a Superman theme? Alas, since I was running behind, I couldn't spare the time to stop.
Although the skies were clear and the weather pleasant as I cruised over the Ohio River into Paducah, Kentucky, past Fort Campbell and then into Tennessee, it had been flooding in the area over the past few weeks and the low-lying areas were still thoroughly wet -- forests along the road were knee-deep in water in places. After I popped through Nashville on the freeway I started getting into the higher ground, cruising through the hills around Chattanooga and into north Georgia as darkness set in.
I made my night stop in Calhoun, Georgia, about a hour's drive north of Atlanta, running late again -- I took some time to get the rest of the mud off my car. The hotel room was second-rate. The bathtub was so short I couldn't sit with my legs stretched out in it. Admittedly my legs are well longer than average, but the bathtub still gave me the impression of being designed for 12-year-olds. At least the water was hot and the bed was comfortable. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- WASTES & RECYCLING (3): Recycling seems like a modern notion, but it's actually been around for a long time. Scrapyards and junkyards are nothing new, we've been recycling scrap steel and other metals for decades.
Recycling automobiles is a highly refined process. On arrival at the junkyard, all the valuable fittings are removed for sale, all fluids are drained, and then the car is flattened or baled or shredded. Hydraulic press systems do the flattening or baling, which allows the compressed cars to be conveniently hauled off on a truck or railroad car. Shredding is now preferred, because it allows the useless "fluff" -- carpets, plastic fittings, and so on -- to be separated from the valuable metal. There was a time when the hulks of cars were simply burned to get rid of the fluff, but that was a noxious process and it is now discouraged. Shredders tear the car into bits about the size of popcorn. The steel is easy to separate from the shred, using magnets, and the light fluff can be separated with blowers.
Separating out nonmagnetic metals like copper and aluminum is more troublesome. More modern "eddy current" separation systems use a varying magnetic field to induce a current into aluminum objects, which then sets up an opposite magnetic field that ejects the aluminum from the sorter.
One part of a car that is particularly troublesome to recycle is the tire. Tires can't go into an ordinary landfill, and in some places there's no specific place to dump them, so they tend to pile up. Shredded tires do actually make a pretty fair fuel, better than coal, and have been used to fire cement kilns -- though this gets into carbon dioxide emissions and global warming again.
* The part of recycling that seems new is the recycling of household wastes. Actually, it is a change, in the sense that before modern "green" consciousness, the only materials that were recycled were those where there was a definite profit in doing so. That isn't the case for most household recyclables.
Recycling has become a weekly ritual for urban dwellers, who diligently put out their recycle bins and generally try to follow the rules. There was a time when city sanitation departments were particularly enthusiastic about the rules, but became less enthusiastic when it was discovered that recycling wasn't as easy or profitable as expected. However, although recycling did suffer setbacks in the early days, technology has helped matters considerably in recent years, with "smart" sorting systems now available to help sort out recyclables in a cost-effective fashion.
Nowdays, in the US over 30% of MSW is recycled, up from about 10% in 1980. Increases in resource costs are helping recycling, since it is becoming more profitable in general to recycle -- in fact, a good portion of America's recycled materials is sold to China. Some critics suggest that the materials end up in Chinese landfills instead, but since they're paying for the material that is extremely unlikely. It's not so unlikely when we pay them to take materials off our hands, and there has been a problem in disposing of "e-waste" -- old electronic systems, particularly personal computers, which tend to be very difficult to dispose of. Electronic firms are under increasing political pressure to factor disposal of their products into the product life-cycle.
Recycling tends to be pushed these days because it is getting harder to site landfills. The problem is not really one of running out of places to put them -- they don't take up very much land. The problem is that nobody wants to have them next door, a matter embodied in the catchphrase NIMBY: "Not In My Back Yard". Some activists go further, pushing BANANA: "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody" -- or even NOPE: "Not On Planet Earth".
Despite government efforts to push recycling, 100% recycling isn't in the cards for the forseeable future. The percentage of recycled materials is definitely going to increase, particularly as manufacturers spend more effort to design products with their ultimate disposal in mind, as they are being increasingly forced by laws to do. However, there's going to still be a good portion left over, and the refuse has to go somewhere.
* And so, after interminable installments, ends this survey of modern infrastructure. One of the interesting themes in this survey is that modern infrastructure technology is highly automated, much more so than most people realize. Operations such as farming, mining, and shipyard work that once required mass muscle power now are run heavily by machines under the direction of a handful of specialists with the knowledge of how to use them.
There is still some sentimentality for the quaint old ways of making things. People tend to find mills with water-wheels fascinating; they are not so fascinated by modern agritech mills. Factory farms with regiments of chickens and hogs, huge powerplants, and automated railyards seem unpleasant and repellent. Much is made of the notion that modern economies are based on the production of "softer" goods like electronics and software, but ultimately we're still stuck with producing food and metals and going through the grungy motions of keeping a city running.
The fact that the world is increasingly automated also has the effect of isolating the citizens from the systems that keep them alive. We may go through our lives and not pay real attention to the infrastructure systems that surround us, though we would find out how important they were if they were to abruptly disappear. Conventional education curricula tend to be just as oblivious to infrastructure. Hopefully this series has done its little bit to correct that imbalance. [FINAL END OF SERIES]
* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: I've been noticing the increasing use of commercial fingerprint ID systems. According to an AP article, they're starting to really catch on, with employers using them as a much improved replacement for employee time sheets. Employees use an index finger print or palm print to show when they come in and go out, with the machine tracking their time spent in the office or shop or factory. Ingersoll-Rand Corporation says it has sold 150,000 scanners to Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Hilton Hotels, and the US Marine Corps -- the Marines use them to track civilian employees.
Workers who are used to punching time cards aren't particularly upset about the scanners, finding them less of a nuisance, but those less used to having their time tracked find it creepy and annoying. One union official said: "They don't even have to hire someone to harass you anymore. The machine can do it for them." A plan by the New York City municipal government to install scanners has led to loud protests. The city government replies that the current system of time cards is prone to fakery and also requires that the city staff hundreds of timekeepers to track the 160,000 employees. Automating the process is expected to cut $60 million USD in expenses. City officials say all the system records is the print and times of coming and going; it is not a master spy database on the employees.
* SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Online had a short article on an interesting "developing world" technology: a "drinking straw" from an organization named the Vestergaard Fransen Group that could be used to safely drink from impure water sources.
The "Lifestraw", as it's called, is kind of a hefty "straw", roughly about the size of the cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels. It is loaded up with filters made from halogenated resins that kill nearly all the microorganisms in the water and also trap elemental contaminants like iodine and metals like silver. However, it cannot trap heavy metals like iron and there are some parasites that can slip through. One Lifestraw can clean a total of 700 liters (185 US gallons) of water before it gets too clogged. The group is also introducing a larger system, the "Lifestraw Family" device, based on the same principles, that can handle a total of 15,000 liters (4,000 US gallons).
* Another little note on SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN Online addressed an issue I've long been curious about: does turning a fluorescent lamp on and off tend to consume more energy than just leaving it on? I knew it took a little surge of energy to get a fluorescent lamp operating, but I didn't know how much. In reality, the startup consumes the power equivalent of a few second's operation of the lamp. Yeah, if I sat there and turned the lamp on and off continuously, I'd be guzzling power; if I turned it off when I left the room to get a drink and turned it back on again when I got back, I'd be ahead for the game for power consumption.
However, turning the lamp on and off does impact its lifetime. Researchers who have considered the economics say that it makes sense to turn off the lamp for an absence of five minutes or more. Since the lamp lifetime is long in any case, the electricity consumed is far more the economic factor in the lamp's operation -- and since lamps are continuously improving these days, the future replacements are likely to be cheaper, more efficient, and more long-lived anyway.
* FAT FIGHT: The alarming news of an "epidemic of obesity" making headlines over the past few years has led to a counter-revolution by critics who find the matter overblown. As discussed in an article in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ("Can Fat Be Fit?" by Paul Raeburn, September 2007), the issue has become extremely confusing. There are those who suggest that the "epidemic" of obesity may be related simply to new or different ways of obtaining statistics on the matter, and that the staggering rise in mortality being predicted simply hasn't happened.
It is certainly known that it is unhealthy to be obese, with highly overweight people tending to have increased risk of heart attacks, diabetes, and some sorts of cancer. Nobody seriously contests that notion, it being consistent with common experience, but there is an argument over whether it is unhealthy to be slightly overweight. The conventional wisdom is that being overweight is unhealthy, but a few years ago Katherine M. Flegal, a researcher at the US Centers For Disease Control & Prevention, published a study based on national survey data on obesity and confounded everyone by saying that slightly overweight adults had less risk of dying than thinner adults.
One of the problems is defining "overweight". The standard measure is the "body mass index (BMI)", which is body weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters. A BMI of more than 25 is regarded as overweight; a BMI of more than 30 is obese. The problem is that human physiques vary considerably and it's hard to make a useful generalization based on such a calculation. There are pro athletes with a BMI of 30 -- which is not all that surprising, since muscle is denser than fat.
Flegal's study was ammunition for a faction of writers critical of the conventional wisdom on obesity. Few of the critics had any medical qualifications or had conducted serious studies to back up their claims; some sounded crankish because they accused anti-fat scientists had been corrupted by ties to drug makers and weight-loss clinics.
There is, however, a serious component to the argument. It is claimed that obesity costs Americans tens of billions of dollars a year in health care and lost productivity -- but what if the crusade against fat is not merely bogus, but actually counterproductive? Scientists involved in nutrition research find the whole feud exasperating, saying that decades of studies back up the notion that fat is bad for us.
Flegal's study has been criticised on the basis that the "lean" group included smokers and patients with chronic illnesses, who are not surprisingly underweight; cut them out of the picture and being slightly overweight doesn't look so attractive any more. Flegal has admitted that she didn't exclude the chronically ill from her study, but claims she performed additional work that showed it would have made no real difference if she had. The argument rests on the fine details of statistical analysis.
For now, the accepted wisdom says to keep BMI between 20 and 25, preferably towards the low end of the range. Take off a few kilos of fat and most of the available evidence says you'll be better off for it.
ED: Another interesting item along this line that I picked up elsewhere concerned the 2004 documentary movie SUPERSIZE ME, in which journalist Morgan Spurlock pigged out on McDonald's food and found his health going downhill while his waistline exploded. The judgement of the experts was that the movie amounted to little but propaganda. In 2006, a research study was conducted in Sweden in which 18 volunteers were put on a junk food diet, with their progress carefully observed medically. The results were that some of the subjects did gain weight rapidly, while others didn't -- in fact, some put on muscle even though they weren't exercising.
* CLIMATE CHANGE & THE SUN: Although skepticism that human carbon emissions are causing global warming is gradually fading, doubts still linger -- and with some good reason, since climate is a very complicated phenomenon, influenced in difficult-to-predict ways by a large number of variables.
It is, for example, very plausible that variations in the behavior of the Sun would have an effect on climate. A Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center (DNSC) has suggested that the Sun's particle output, which streams past the Earth as the "solar wind", has increased over the past few decades. The higher density of the solar wind means that fewer cosmic rays -- highly energetic particles from deep space -- strike the Earth's upper atmosphere. Such collisions ionize atoms in the atmosphere, helping to form clouds; fewer collisions mean fewer clouds, and, since clouds reflect solar energy, a hotter Earth.
This is certainly an interesting theory, and given that the debate over global warming can become emotional, not merely an abstract one. Are we raising a hysterical fuss over carbon emissions when the warming trend has nothing to do with them and doesn't pose a long-term threat? A controversial British documentary titled THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE used Dr. Svensmark's theory as part of its brief, helping the video reach the conclusion that global warming is the "biggest scam of modern times".
Now a paper published in the ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS of the Institute of Physics and written by a team of researchers from Lancaster University in the UK examined the correlation between solar wind density and global temperatures over the last 20 years. The team used three different approaches to check the correlation, and all three gave the same answer: there wasn't one of any significance. Says Professor Terry Sloan of the Lancaster team: "For example, sometimes the Sun 'burps', it throws out a huge burst of charged particles. So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun. We saw nothing."
The Sun has a predictable 11-year activity cycle, with the study straddling two cycles. In the first cycle, there was a weak correlation with cloud cover, but at most it could have only explained a quarter of the change in cloudiness. In the second cycle, no correlation was observable. Svensmark's theory has also been criticised by Mike Lockwood of the UK's Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, with Lockwood showing that there has been an overall reduction in solar activity for the last 20 years, at the very same time the globe has been clearly getting hotter.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was heavily targeted by THE GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SWINDLE, which criticised the IPCC's conclusions that from the time global temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of solar variability by a factor of about 13 to one. Says Terry Sloan: "We tried to corroborate Svensmark's theory, but we could not. As far as we can see, he has no reason to challenge the IPCC -- the IPCC has got it right. So we had better carry on trying to cut carbon emissions."
* FLORIDA ROAD TRIP AGAIN (3): I left Loveland, Colorado, early on the morning of Friday, 4 April. When we'd switched daylight savings time a few weeks before, instead of getting up an hour earlier I decided to jump back two hours, so instead of getting up at five as my usual custom I was getting up at four. That meant I would be adjusted to getting up at six on East Coast time -- no sense in making a trip more tiring by screwing up my sleep routine. Getting up at six made more sense than getting up at five when playing tourist, since it matched the day better to the operating hours of attractions.
The weather was pleasant and cool, cool enough to keep the bugs down, though there was one thing I hadn't considered: in early April all the deciduous trees haven't leafed out yet, making the scenery a bit bleak for the drive. It was no big deal but I realized that since I've always lived in the West it was something not obvious to me -- here the forests are predominantly evergreen and look pretty much the same the year round.
My first stop was at the Natural History Museum in Hays, Kansas -- an item I'd noticed on the return leg of the previous trip, but it had been closed that day. It was a nice, clean, modest facility, multiple levels in a dome, not particularly extensive but with some nice fossil skeletons in the spiral gallery and set of dinosaur replicas at the top. It was worth seeing but only because I was passing by -- it wouldn't have been worth my time to go out of my way to see it.
Actually, the most interesting item on that stop was the statue of a perching pterodactyl with young on a pedestal alongside the ramp back onto the interstate. I had to get some shots of it -- however, like a dummy, when I pulled off the side of the ramp I misjudged the condition of the shoulder to find the tires on the right side of my car sinking into a few inches of mud. It made quite a mess spinning out when I left. It's not the first time I've misjudged a shoulder and regretted it.
I was a bit surprised when I rolled down Interstate 70 some distance from Hays and spotted a very large wind turbine farm, one of the most extensive I had seen. I didn't recall seeing a single wind turbine there on the September trip, and though sometimes I can be unobservant, I did recall billboards protesting the plan to set them up. It was quite a complex to have been implemented in such a short time. However, since they're bought prefabricated and then erected on site -- the big turbine blades make for an interesting tractor-trailer load -- it likely didn't take too long to set them up after laying the foundations and the ground electrical / communications infrastructure.
I dropped by the Rolling Hills Wildlife Adventure near Salina again. It was a low-priority item, but my travel schedule that day wasn't too demanding, and I wanted to see if I could get pix of their aardvarks. No such luck; they weren't even in their enclosure. I did get a few interesting shots, one of a gray wolf that honestly seemed as interested in me, in a friendly doglike way, as I was in it; as well as a nice set of shots of maned wolves, which are Latin American canids that look like gangly oversized red foxes. I was a bit surprised I hadn't heard of them before.
I passed through Fort Riley and then drove through Kansas City late in the day. When I'd gone through in the fall I'd had something of a confusing transit, and it wasn't until I planned things out from a road atlas this time around that I realized just how confused I had been. I had been trying to stay on Interstate 70 through the city; I didn't realize that in the very heart of the city, I-70 turns into a short connecting freeway, I-670, which quickly turns back into I-70 again. There's a dogleg freeway north of I-670 that takes on the I-70 designation, and I'd tried to stay on it, when all I had to do was keep on straight on I-670.
I got to my night stop in Boonville, Missouri, and crashed out. I had to clean the worst of the mud off the side of my car before I racked out, which kept me up a bit late. Oddly I don't recall a single detail of the motel. What makes this more odd is after I'd similarly crashed at Columbia, farther down the road, in September, I couldn't recall a detail of that stop, either. In both cases, I could remember all the other motels I stayed at. All I can really recall about I-70 through Missouri was the large number of billboards for adult entertainment stores. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* INFRASTRUCTURE -- WASTES & RECYCLING (2): The ultimate destination of most municipal solid waste is the landfill. Don't call it a "dump" -- to sanitation workers, a dump is where somebody's just tossed out refuse and forgotten about it. A landfill is a considerably more sophisticated operation.
A modern landfill is a pit that is lined to collect the toxic "leachate" out of the refuse and prevent it from contaminating ground water. At the bottom is a layer of clay, but that's mainly a substrate: the primary barrier to the leachate is a heavy waterproof fabric or plastic known as "geo-textile", carefully laid down in strips about 6 meters (20 feet) across and sewn or heat-sealed together. There is a layer of gravel above the geo-textile through which the leachate circulates; perforated pipes are run through the gravel layer so a sump pump can draw the leachate out.
What's done with the leachate? One faction thinks it should be recirculated through the refuse in the pit to encourage decomposition, but the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dislikes this idea and so it is usually pumped to a local sewage-treatment plant, or possibly a small treatment plant on the landfill site itself. The problem is that refuse is often contaminated with nasty stuff like paint, insecticides, and used motor oil; the rules say that clients have to segregate such materials, but they don't always do so, and enforcing the issue is difficult.
Every day, after the refuse is dumped, dirt is bulldozed over the top of it to partly seal it away. Arranging to have enough dirt set aside to keep up with the demand is one of the tricky issues in setting up a landfill. The pit is not actually filled up in layers from the bottom, however; instead, the refuse is dumped at a particular place on the side of the landfill, called the "active face", resulting in sloped layers built up gradually across the pit.
Once the landfill is full, it is closed off. In some cases the decaying refuse can generate enough methane to be an explosive hazard, so a network of pipes draws it off. It is usually flared to get rid of it -- in modern times, with the fear of global warming, this practice is encouraged because methane is over 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide flaring it produces. In some of the larger landfills, the methane is used to generate electricity.
There was a time when closed landfills were opened to development, with houses and buildings set up on them, but this is more politically troublesome to do these days. In modern times, the landfill will have to settle out for a few decades before it can be put to any serious use.
* At least before we started worrying about global warming, it seemed to be a better idea on paper to burn refuse than to bury it in landfills, reducing the mass of the material and even obtaining a bit of energy from it. Alas, even without factoring in carbon emissions, "waste to energy (WTE)" is problematic. The big problem is that refuse is a pretty lousy fuel, being completely irregular in its burning properties, and burning it is troublesome, meaning that the processes to do so are elaborate and expensive. The second is that a WTE plant is at least as unpopular with the neighbors as a landfill.
There are certain classes of very nasty wastes, in particular biomedical or "red bag" wastes, that effectively have to be burned. This is an expensive process because such wastes don't have much fuel value themselves, and the incinerator has to be fired by gas or some other fuel. The US Army has had a particular waste-disposal problem in getting rid of old stockpiles of nerve-gas weapons and the like. Obviously, an incinerator system designed to safely get rid of poison gases is going to be built to a very high and expensive standard.
Of course, that almost sounds trivial in comparison to the problem of disposing of radioactive wastes from nuclear reactors, a problem that nobody's comfortably solved yet. The general idea these days is to convert the waste into glassy bricks and store them in deep mines. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* ANOTHER MONTH: I dropped the "Another Month" entry some time back since it seemed too self-indulgent, but as it turns out there's a place for a bit of personalized fluff and the occasional small comment or reference. Besides, it makes for a low-overhead blog entry. Cooking up blog articles five days a week can become something of a grind.
I usually like to have about 50 articles stockpiled, since it allows me to keep up with schedule if I get too busy on other things, or run low on source material for a while; gives me a variety of articles to choose from so I don't run similar articles on consecutive days; and also allows me to review and enhance articles before releasing them -- or toss them if they don't seem worthwhile on later inspection. I'm actually up to a stockpile of about 60 articles for the moment. That's more than I need, but along with the "pull" of having to keep the blog stocked up, there's also the "push" of having things to write about pile up on me. Still, I've been spending a disproportionate amount of time on the blog, and now that I'm at the saturation point, I'm looking forward to scaling back the effort on it a bit.
Since I was out for a week on a long road trip, there's not too much new on the website this month. I'm still trying to recover from writing INTRODUCTION TO EVOLUTION and haven't been able to get really rolling on a new subject, which is unfortunate. The evo science subject is as obsessive as it is quarrelsome and it would be nice to get away from it.
I read Richard Dawkins until I couldn't take much more. While I have great admiration for "Dawkins the brilliant charismatic scientist", his unpleasant twin "Dawkins the zealous opinionated atheist" drives me out of the room. I'm not pro-religion as such, being an agnostic in the sense of having little interest in the matter one way or another, but by that coin that means I have no interest in picking fights with my Christian friends.
I can't see that devout ever suffer from any fault I haven't seen elsewhere, my favorite black-humor example being the Swiss-French (by way of Vegas) colleague I once had who was a winter-sports fanatic to the point of channeling the Taliban. Besides, I don't like the idea of coming on like the Thought Police, particularly because I find it difficult to care much about what people believe as long as they don't make nuisances of themselves. I'm starting to get into the fantasy novels of Terry Pratchett as an antidote to Dawkins. Pratchett is crazy, but he knows it and likes it. Those not familiar with his works might try THE HOGFATHER video mini-series, available for cheap on DVD -- though I should warn it is quirky and slow-moving.
I suppose I'm stuck with evo science over the long run; having got into the subject I'll never get completely out of it again. I've been poking through Olivia Judson's DOCTOR TATIANA'S SEX ADVICE TO ALL CREATION, a clever book on the evolutionary biology of sex, presented in the format of a tell-all sex column and terminating in a multispecies talk show: "You mean you bdelloid rotifers haven't had sex in 85 MILLION YEARS?" At least there's some folks in the arena who have a sense of humor.
I haven't been emailed by the Darwin-bashers yet, or for that matter the militant atheist crowd on the other side of the fence. I may end up dodging the bullet: my science documents generally don't get many readers; there's massive amounts of material on the subject online, meaning my document will be masked in Google searches; and the "cretinists and evilutionists" are so busy screaming abuse at each other at the top of their lungs that they may not pay a relatively low-key document any mind. Of course, the other part of my mind wants to get readership. This can't end well.
On a positive note, website readership is ramping up this year after being stagnant for the last two, though my Google Adsense ad revenue is not keeping pace, in fact it's falling behind. However, the media reports that Google ads have been flagging as of late, both in absolute terms and relative to the competition. That means that either Google cleans up its act to bring revenues up, or I switch to a different ad provider. Also I have been getting surprisingly positive feedback on site layout. I keep thinking it looks crude, but readers do tell me they appreciate the simplicity and lack of overhead.