Tellico Blueway

We canoe-camp the Tellico Blueway - a pristine, unspoiled 11-mile paddle along the Tellico River. These stump-filled waters are too treacherous for large motorboats, but ideal for serene canoeing. 
The trip starts  as a narrow channel,  wild roses grow along the river banks, and, as the waterway gradually widens, we pass cattails and tall, light-brown limestone bluffs with gnarled cedars clinging to the rock. 

Before lighting the fire at our primitive campsite,  we watch long-jawed orb-weavers at work in the canopy.  There is no-one else within miles. Next day the river widens, with nesting  ospreys and great blue herons. 

Most surprising of all - this is Memorial Day weekend. About 800,000 people will have visited the Smokies in the month of May, but Stephine and I are alone in doing this. 

Connie Sausage and Annie

Annie Fenniger

I'm presently in Vienna. I have been participating in a workshop on the cold, slow death of everything; well, entropy in bimolecular systems, actually, but it's kind of the same thing. But things are hot in Austria, with Connie and Annie. They're both champions!

Anna Fenninger is the new World and Olympic ski champion. She's highly in demand - a good wholesome, beautiful,  sporty and now highly successful girl.


 Connie's a bit different. She won the Eurovision Song Contest -  the competition that has been boring everyone on the old continent for decades but nevertheless stokes up some amusing remnants of nationalism (Franco's men bribed the juries to make Spain pip Britain's Sir Cliff Richard in 1968, for example) and the contest did start out Abba. Anyway, Connie won it this year for Austria with a magnificent offering entitled River Phoenix or something like that. Thing is, though, Connie's a man with a beard. Conchita Wurst (real name), when literally translated, means something like 'she of the immaculate conception who doesn't give two hoots about anything'.

Conchita Wurst

Although, like the Eurovision voting panel, the IOC have not been averse to bribery in the past, Annie won the Olympics all fair and square.  She decided to not grow a beard, though -  shaving seconds is most important in ski-ing, you see.

Boat Person Update.

Update: The full story of my neighbor's escape from Vietnam is here.

It's even more dramatic than he had told me.

Bye-Bye Premier League! We're DOWN!!

That's it, Norwich City are relegated after three years in the Premier League. Relegated in the worst way - with a painful slide plonking us just over the lip into the death zone right at the end of the season. A season for which the club invested heavily in strikers who,  poorly nourished from the midfield, lost confidence  and shriveled on the vine. And the coach, Hughton, universally loved for being a nice guy, showed he was too nice, unable to motivate. The team lacked passion. Now they are down.   (At least Ipswich weren't promoted, though.)

Excessive Regulations are Turning Scientists into Bureaucrats

A new report from the National Science Board, the National Science Foundation's policymaking think tank,  describes how excessive regulations are turning scientists into bureaucrats. Something we recently mused upon. Overregulation, while mostly well-meaning, often ends up flattening the very flower it is trying to protect.

On the cusp of the unthinkable

For the last three years Norwich City have been basking in the limelight of the Premier Division, while our arch-rivals Ipswich Town languished in the neglected backwaters of the second division  (called the 'Championship').  Of course, we reveled in this situation.  Moreover, as last year it looked as if Ipswich would even be relegated from the Championship to the third division,  City fans, polled as to whether they would like this to happen,  nearly unanimously voted 'yes', even though this may have condemned us to several years without derby games against them.

But, as things are right now, Ipswich are just one point from the play-offs for a place in the Premier League, while we look like we'll have to beat at least one of the elite clubs,  Manchester United, Chelsea or Arsenal, to stay up. So there's a significant chance that the unthinkable will happen - THEY WILL GO UP AS WE  GO DOWN. 

The Overregulation of Science

The Instapundit recently linked to a great blog detailing how overregulation has suffocated and stifled some areas of science.  Research ethics boards put up painful hurdles to investigation, sometimes leading to thousands of lost lives due to delayed clinical trials. These boards may be called ethics committees (in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada) or institutional review boards/IRBs (in the United States). They delay projects and force scientists through laborious and unnecessary hoops. 

Now, I'm not sure science is actually overregulated in this regard. After all, we do need  expert guidance on how to deal with certain things. But what is certain is that the burdensome regulatory hurdles in place are counterproductive.  The whole thing reminds me of vehicle inspection in Europe (and some US states).  Europe requires high standards of vehicle maintenance: you can't drive your car there unless it is safe and meets minimum emissions standards. That's fine, and I appreciate its worth every time I see a filthy truck belching fumes on the I-40.  And cars with brakes that work reduce crash risks. What I am against, however, is Europe's compulsory vehicle inspection.  In Germany and the UK everyone must take time out and pay through the nose to get their car tested every year. That's overkill and not a cost-effective way to increase road safety. It would be much better to send everyone the book of requirements and tell them they can be randomly tested and, if their car doesn't measure up, fined. That would cut red tape and stop wasting everybody's time and money. 

The same goes for science ethics. Rather than force us to dispiritingly wade through molasses every time, give us the book of rules, tell us we must obey it and that we can either  volunteer to go through the committee (if we are uncertain about things) or run the risk of getting randomly investigated.  That shifts the responsibility to scientists while eliminating wasteful, expensive and time-consuming procedures.