As a science site, we can continually be baffled that both the left and the right can find something to be critical about.   Some on the right are critical of stem cell research or climate science (Republicans) while some on the left are critical of genetically modified foods or vaccines (Democrats) - to science, it doesn't make much sense.

In the good old days, when I lived in Florida, if you had a completely ridiculous idea but convinced someone else who had some authority, you could get it implemented.   There being no Internet, it didn't have to be a great idea, if it went bad you could just make it go away.   

But in the Internet Age, every dumb thing you do is permanent, so we can laugh at the idea of using 2 million tires to make an artificial coral reef today but in the Florida of my youth, this made complete sense to environmentalists - and they found data to back it up.  The clean-up would be left to future generations.

We're always trying to keep the 'footprint' of the site pretty small while maintaining as much functionality as possible.    You've all seen 'new' versions of lots of sites that seem to add a bunch of whiz-bang stuff that developers fell in love with but for most people they take away from the speed and ease-of-use of the site.

Comments are one of those areas where you can have too much or not enough so it's better to just try things and ask what you think.    As an experiment we have added back email notifications for comments but I'll explain in some more detail all the ways you can decide what comments you want and how you want them.

First, by default your Comment Tracker in the upper right:

I got this notification from the NSF so I thought I would pass it along - obviously I didn't write it but it's not something we would put in an article and it's too long for a corkboard message.  

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You have until January 15, 2009 to apply for allocations of high-performance computer time and storage resources that are available through the TeraGrid for the allocation period of April 1, 2009, through March 31, 2010.

Adam Drewnowski, director of the Nutrition Sciences Program at the University of Washington in Seattle,  says that an ongoing recession will lead to even more obesity.    Drewnowski has a PhD in Psychology but is also Professor of Epidemiology and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medicine.  That's a broad range of expertise for any scientist, and I respect that, but in the nearly two years since Scientific Blogging and our cadre of my favorite science bloggers has been in existence we've had a lot of articles discussing the causes of obesity- and recession may not be the silliest, but it is top five.