Lawrence Lessig is kind of a hero to me. He's working to change congress by shining a light on the influence of money on legislation. His approach seems to be to find obvious examples where a reasonable person would conclude the trade of campaign money for legislation and then raise money to run an ad campaign in the politician's district with convincing evidence that the politician in question both ignored the best interest of his or her constituents and made a decision to benefit those who donated to him or her. The nice thing about this approach is that, as Lessig has pointed out, it is not required to prove corruption. It is only required to show examples of the possibility of corruption, because that possibility of corruption erodes the possibility of trust.

Recently, John Campbell (R-CA) introduced legislation to exempt used car dealers from laws designed to protect consumers from predatory lending practices. John Campbell both personally benefits from the profits of used car dealers as well as being a recipient of about $170k in campaign donations from used car dealers. Check out Lessig's video about it, and sign the petition there, if you want to.

A "pro-test" is apparently a protest in favor of biomedical research. On April 22nd, 2009 at 11:30, scientists, students and patients are being invited to one such protest at UCLA. More information is available at the UCLA pro-test website.

UCLA scientists have been the targets of a campaign of violence aimed at ending animal research. UCLA has an official statement that summarizes the history of this movement. This campaign, while violent, and in at least one case effective (one research actually resigned after his family was threatened), seems very poorly run. A molotov cocktail intended for a UCLA professor was left on the doorstep of a house some number of blocks away from the researcher's home. Cars in the Palms area of Los Angles (not too far from UCLA) were firebombed, but didn't actually belong to anyone having to do with research. A bomb intended to kill another researcher was poorly made and never actually went off.

I don't know if we should be more or less frightened of incompetent anti-science extremists. I do know, however, that there is absolutely no defensible reason to use violence to halt animal research. There are many peaceful, legal ways to provide input to the system. There is a debate to be had as to when it is appropriate to use animal research subjects and when it is not, and there are plenty of extreme examples to be found on both sides. Unfortunately, the ethics of animal research debate almost always devolves into an irrational shouting match, and even violence, which certainly won't get us anywhere.

I have modernized! I may or may not stick with the new look.

My brother-in-law,Robert is illustrating a series of books about dinosaurs. One of the images shows that a particular dino is about the length of two cars. Here's the image in question:

The car on the right is based on my car, and the driver is me! The one on the left is my sister driving Robert's car. As a lover of dinosaurs, it's really exciting to imagine driving on the highway with some dinosaurs. He also sent me a detail of my face for the purposes of using as an icon, which, if all is well, should be showing up on this very blog.

We just had an earthquake, which, being in California isn't that big a deal, except the epicenter was maybe 6 miles from our place. Here's the USGS link. (Edit: the link broke. I guess the USGS site only keeps info about quakes up for a short time.) It wasn't huge, but being so close made it feel a lot more intense.