Archives for November 20, 2007
End of the Week News
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 My week ends in about five minutes when I pack for imminent departure to California. I’m being whisked out there (pun intended) to prepare the Thanksgiving gravy for an eccentric couple living in a cabin in a remote mountain area on Thanksgiving. And these people are a bit strange. They recently sent me a picture…
What bird is this?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 Can you name the bird?
Wednesday Cat Blogging: King Cheetah
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 My best photograph of a cheetah. View Larger image I took this photo of a cheetah at De Wildt’s in South Africa. It is a “King Cheetah.” Although there was a period of time when some thought the King was a new subspecies of cheetah, it turns out to be a simple color morph. Although…
Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 05 ~ Causes of Large Scale Change
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 This is the fifth in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming. During the 1970s and 80s, creationists had a long list of reasons to doubt evolution, and every one of those reasons was wrong. But they had so many reasons, and it was so hard to keep track of them all, each…
Technology Tidbits
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 Amazon’s Evil Kindle; Trapping Rainbows; Malware that is worse than ever; The Net is overloaded; Algorithm determines best blog news sites.
This is how we should settle it…
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 For your Christmas List: Real Snake Oil
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 Well, OK, it’s actually fake snake oil…. Wired Magazine (wired.com) gadgets section has its annual (I don’t really know if it’s annual, but it should be) issue of Snake Oil products. Such as The Orbo: When it comes to gadgets, perpetual motion machines are bullshit’s bread and butter. Steorn, the Irish company behind Orbo, is…
Creationists are Immoral
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 Well, no news there… but this really irks me. There is this great piece of biological simulation video that came out of Harvard last year … I’ve posted bits of it here and there. Well, according to PZ Myers at Pharyngula, what would a group of good Christians with the aim of renewing American culture…
The Design of Life
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 The new creationist textbook, The Design of Life, is now available, or very shortly will be. This definitive book on intelligent design (ID) comes as a shot across the bow to dogmatic defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy. Written by two key ID theorists, mathematician William Dembski and biologist Jonathan Wells, it presents the full case for…
Macaque Mothers Favor Their Sons
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 The Trivers Willard Hypothesis predicts that under certain conditions, individuals will bias their investment in offspring differently depending on the sex of the offspring. It is believed that this can be as extreme as infanticide or as subtle as providing different amounts of breast milk. A new study by Katherine HInde finds that macaques may…
Discovery Institute Lecture at UMN
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 Save the date: November 30th. The Christain Study Center knownas the MacLaurin INstitute, of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Campus will sponsor this event: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: The Distubring Legacy of America’s Eugenics Crusade
Whitey Bulger and the Evolution of Sex Bias in Investment in Offspring
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 Most of you won’t know who Whitey Bulger is. He is actually on the FBI’s ten most wanted list. He may have been spotted in Italy last Spring, and the FBI is just now asking for assistance from anyone who knows where he might be. (That’s not gonna work.) Whitey was top dog in Boston’s…
Great Pyrenees and the Norwegian Brown Bear
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 This is a photograph of three Great Pyrenees dogs harassing a brown bear in Northern Norway. This photograph was downloaded by me some time ago from a web site that seems to no longer exist. I’d love to know if anyone knows where this web site is now, or
More Proof that ID is Wrong: The Algorithm March
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 Honey Badger vs. Cobra
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 There was never a doubt in my mind as to who would win this one…
Missionaries. Ick.
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 I live in Minnesota and work in South Africa. That means that every time somebody I don’t know hears that I’ve been to South Africa more than once or am going there for an extended period, they say “Oh, is it mission work … my [cousin/aunt/uncle] is a missionary there.” Thankfully, I have yet to…
Is There a Black Box in your Research Methodology?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 20, 2007 I want to point out an interesting opinion piece about the threat of black boxes and the roll of OpenSource software in math. A key part of the message: Increasingly, proprietary software and the algorithms used are an essential part of mathematical proofs. To quote J. Neubüser, “with this situation two of the most basic…
, which is now available for the 
