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Well, it's been discovered by Scientists, those who are not too busy worrying about the war on terror, that is, that there is a planet only 20.5 light years away that could maybe might be possible to support life. Right now it's called Gliese 158C, but some would like to call it New Earth. I mean, we find another planet that might have life on it already and we are already ready to name it. What if it already has a name? And, even if it didn't, why would we want to call it New Earth. I feel like we might have messed up in picking the first name, it's not very fun or intimidating. Personally it needs to be one or the other. If that isn't enough for you, here is Steven Colbert reporting on it with a guy from the Smithsonian.

I don't think I can add anything to this. George W. Bush busts a move with some African dancers, via the Daily Show: More video of the move-busting... [youtube]FIuODSIuHLo[/youtube]

The House of Representatives has voted to expand democracy to American citizens in Washington DC. Over the past 200 years, through the Civil War, the end of slavery, the women's suffrage movement, two World Wars, and the defeat of the Soviet Union, America has neglected to expand voting rights to hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. Washington DC has no real representation in the House or the Senate. And despite this latest vote it's likely to stay that way. It doesn't look like the bill will pass in the Senate, and even if it does George W. Bush is likely to veto it. "It's unconstitutional!" is the whine from Republicans like Senator Mitch McConnell. You see, it's not because they are afraid that Washington DC residents will vote for Democrats, or because DC residents are largely poor and black. Of course they think everyone should have the right to vote! Of course they aren't elitists or racists! It's just that the procedural steps for granting suffrage properly is much more important to a democracy than, you know, actual democracy. How many times have we heard about spreading democracy from President Bush? In fact, spreading democracy was the reason we invaded Iraq in the first place, that is after we didn't find any weapons of mass destruction. Any President willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to give Iraqis the vote should be leading this charge to give it to citizens of his own country. I will give the Republicans in the Senate and the President some credit - they are right to criticize this particular bill, just not for the wormy, hypocritical reasons they cite. This bill is a sort of compromise - it would give one House seat to DC and another to Republican-leaning Utah, which just missed getting another seat in the last census. While it's better than nothing, this bill still doesn't give DC residents any representation in the Senate. If Wyoming deserves two Senators, then so does DC. Perhaps an amendment really is the way to go, but I doubt these Senators would vote to propose one to the states. Instead of saying "I can't vote for this because it should be an amendment," they should just tell the truth: they don't want to give seats in Congress to all the people in DC because they tend to vote for the other side. Listen, there are a lot of political issues in this country that have two (or more) perfectly valid viewpoints. We can debate back and forth on gun control, the death penalty, tax rates, etc. to our heart's content. Representation in a democracy is a not one of these issues. The fact that we can get more votes to ban flag burning than to give DC residents representation is shameful, disgusting and undemocratic.

Recently it has come to my attention that all of the nations bees are seriously threatened. I know, it's hard to believe that it would be a big deal, and in fact, no one has really made a big stink about it yet. But it's important. Why, you might ask? Well, even if you didn't ask, you should probably read on since this topic definitely affects everyone, even if you don't like honey or bees. Most people know that bees are responsible for honey and bee stings but what you may not know is that they are a much more important member of the agricultural community. Bees, especially honey bees, are responsible for the pollination of flowers (you might be saying duh, here but follow me on this one, please), and said pollination causes plants to actually bear fruits as the method of their reproduction. And said fruits are important for not only human nutrition, but also for that of most of the animals we raise as pets and most of the animals that we eat. This topic came to my attention from my grandfather, an almost retired farmer. He brought it up to my mother in this manner. Grandpa: "Hey, The Fidge (that's me, btw) is a biologist, right?" Mom: "you know she is" G: "Well, can she tell me why the lady down the road's bees are almost all dead?" M: "Really? They are almost all dead? Why?" G: " Well, if we knew, we wouldn't be asking The Fidge, would we? Of her 20 hives, only two of them are still alive. All of the other hives are dead. And the other guy down the road, he had 125 hives and now only maybe twenty of them are still alive. They asked me if I knew what was happening, and I said I would ask the Fidge." So, this has become a job for me. Although I am just using the internet to research it, I do plan on calling a visit on these beekeepers to talk to them about their practices, but in the meantime I will fill you in on what the vast spaces of the interweb have to say about this little bee apocalypse. First of all, officials are calling this epidemic Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD for short. (I just would like to point out that everything needs an acronym.) This used to be called Fall Dwindle Disease (FDD) but it was changed b/c it was noticed that this is not due to seasonality, nor can it be ruled to just being a disease. Actually, most experts are baffled to what exactly CCD is. Basically, they can't narrow it down to what is really killing all the bees. For example, according to the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences news release on the topic: "Preliminary work has identified several likely factors that could be causing or contributing to CCD," says Dennis van Engelsdorp, acting state apiarist with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. "Among them are mites and associated diseases, some unknown pathogenic disease and pesticide contamination or poisoning." That helps narrow it down, doesn't it? So, basically we can't really rule out anything at this point. We don't know what is killing the bees, and we can't decide what it could be, either. Most of the information I am using in my research comes from the Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium Web site. In the hives that were researched by MAAREC there was evidence of vampire mites, a small parasite that lives off the "blood" of adult bees, viral infection, stress due to constant relocation of hives for crop pollination, intestinal amoebas, fungal infection, stunted learning and development due to industry chemicals (pesticides, fungicides, herbicides), and on and on. You get the point. We have not been able to narrow CCD down to any particular thing, which makes it incredibly difficult to treat the problem. The drastic amount of bees found dead over such a short period of time is what is so scary about the whole thing. A small bee apocalypse, the few surviving bees are all very young adults from what most beekeepers can see. I mean, as I pointed out, the two local cases above have lost an incredible amount of bees from their original numbers, and this is the case all around the country. The rate at which these bees are dying is alarming, especially since we cannot narrow the cause of their mortality down to anything specific. According to Jean-Louis Santini of AFP, "Bee numbers on parts of the east coast and in Texas have fallen by more than 70 percent, while California has seen colonies drop by 30 to 60 percent. It is normal for hives to see populations fall by some 20 percent during the winter, but the sharp loss of bees is causing concern, especially as domestic US bee colonies have been steadily decreasing since 1980." Well, either way, I have not really helped to narrow it down, but I hope you have learned something. Maybe this summer when food is really expensive you will know why, since most of the food we eat comes from the pollination efforts of bees, with only a few crops such as corn and wheat being wind pollinated. And just so you know, this is not something just limited to specific areas. This is affecting not only the US, but parts of Europe as well. This is a big deal, and no one seems to know anything about it. I figured I would end this article with a quote from Albert Einstein. "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man," This may seem a little extremist, but it does bring the point home.

Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorite authors, died a few days ago on April 11th. You may or may not have heard by now. The New York Times wrote a nice piece on his life and a large number of blogs and forums have filled with discussions of his books, essays, and politics. If you haven't heard by now, I guess I'm not too surprised. Ablogistan took a look and found that there were more twice as many mentions of Anna Nicole Smith in the news than Vonnegut. That fact is both depressing and fascinating at the same time. One of the tried and true methods of social science research is content analysis, where researchers pour over the raw text produced by a culture and measure things like word use. Content analysis is nice because it gives you quantitative data in areas otherwise relegated to qualitative research, but it can be a real chore. If you wanted to study McCarthyism, for example, you would need to poor over thousands of pages of microfiche counting word occurrences and judging usage. The chart comparing Anna Nicole Smith and Kurt Vonnegut is fascinating because it points out how the rise of the Internet has helped lessen a lot of the tediousness of content analysis. So let's take a look. What else is more important than Kurt Vonnegut? (Unfortunately the Internet has not made the difficult stuff like conceptualization and research design any easier, so the findings below are not exactly academic journal material). Google News search for Kurt Vonnegut (past week): 1,317 articles. Google News search for Anna Nicole Smith (past week): 10,232 articles. Google News search for Don Imus (past week): 9,534 articles. There you have it. Anna Nicole Smith, notable for going from being poor and attractive to being rich and less attractive, then rich and somewhat attractive again, is almost 8 times more important than Kurt Vonnegut. Don Imus, who hasn't even died yet, is about 7 times more important than Vonnegut for calling some basketball players "nappy headed hos." Google News tends to include more traditional news outlets (newspapers, television, etc.). So what about the unprofessional world of commentary and discussion found in blogs? Congratulations, bloggers! You talked about as much about Kurt Vonnegut as you did Anna Nicole on the day the news of their deaths came out. And so far Don Imus has yet to have half as many mentions. Blogpulse shows an even clearer trend: So there you have it: Officially speaking, Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote for half a century, producing some of the best novels of all time, is less important than a woman who was famous mostly for being famous. We have empirical proof. And once again, the bloggers have shown that they just don't measure up to professional news media.