Archives for October 12, 2009
Cafe Scientifique Minneapolis
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 October 20th 7:00 to 9:00 PM Bryant Lake Bowl Jonathan Foley, director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, will talk about another inconvenient truth: our complex global food and agricultural system. With your help Foley will take-up the question, “How will we feed and fuel more than nine billion people without destroying…
Shoot Lots of Bullets = Don’t Worry You Won’t Get Shot
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 No one was shot in the following video. So don’t worry about carrying around guns. It’s perfectly safe.
Space Junk
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 Cleaning Up the Orbital Neighborhood Space debris of the man-made variety has been around ever since the first rocket launches in the late 1950s, but it was not until the end of the Cold War that the major space-faring nations began to see the growing number of leftover objects still in orbit from previous space…
How automation can make 1984 more than just acceptable
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 Automation may .. provide the mechanism needed to balance the needs between privacy and policy. Video cameras are everywhere – this genie is out of its bottle. But for many computer vision applications, raw imagery can be analyzed on the fly and need never be directly viewed by human observers. Peter Tu’s latest post. Please…
Must reads
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 There’s a vegetarian spider?????? Holy crap: Bagheera kiplingi – the mostly vegetarian spider Viruses and icebergs … What’s the connection? DDT resistance in Mosquitoes … “It is now beyond obvious that science is liberal because conservatives don’t like to see proof that they are wrong.” Indeed
A boy and his blob
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 Funktionide Part II from eltopo on Vimeo. Get your own blob here. Hat Tip: Desiree
Science and Islam: A model for framing vs. popular science
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 17th century Arabic anatomy drawing, from the Advances of Islamic Sciences web site. In some Islamic sects, drawing living things is not allowed. As a very practical matter, this excludes students from taking part in certain activities in science classrooms. During the Bell Museum Slapdown panel last week, Myers brought up differences between countries in…
“I reject the Darwinian assumption that larvae and their adults evolved from a single common ancestor”
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 What might have been a plausible idea in the 17th or 18th century is the starting point for a just published paper in PNAS.
Keeping Obama’s Peace Prize in Perspective
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 Hmmm… Do I go along with Rush Limberger and Faux News? Or do I go along with … Rachel? Most people don’t get what the Nobel Peace Prize is. I tried to tell you. Some of you didn’t get it. Maybe if Rachel tells you you’ll get it. Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News,…
Nobel Economics: Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 This makes Elinor Ostrom of Indian University the first woman to win this prize. Ostrom won “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons” and Williamson, of Berkeley, won “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm.” details
The “Swine Flu” does not have a name?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2009 Effect Measure has an interesting take-down of a post on The Global Language Monitor (GLM), which brings up an interesting point or two. The GLM is a very strange site which has, as Revere points out, declared itself to be an important go-to place to find out about language trends across the world. I have…
, which is now available for the 
