Archives for August, 2012
Happy Birthday, Mike!
Posted by Greg Laden on August 31, 2012 Today is Mike Haubrich’s birthday. Have you checked out his blog lately? A sampling: On Race and The Republican Party The Moon Landing On Original Sin Matt Young Gets Inside the Ark Park’s Sales Pitch
Everyone who isn’t a blog scientist, please leave the room….
Posted by Greg Laden on August 31, 2012 Hitler finds out that the hoped for Arctic Sea Ice recovery isn’t happening, and that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real.
Gender Issues
Posted by Greg Laden on August 30, 2012 A couple of items for you over at the X Blog. We have His and Hers writing instruments, and I finally made my own Hitler parody called “Hitler finds out that Surly Amy is sending 32 women to the Skeptics Conference in Berlin”
What If Romney’s Bain was Saved by a Federal Bailout?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 30, 2012 That would be funny. Tim Dickinson has some pretty amazing investigative reporting in which he notes that the origin story for Romney is that he … … took leave of his duties at the private equity firm Bain Capital in 1990 and rode in on a white horse to lead a swift restructuring of Bain…
Is reality real?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 30, 2012 I like to ask people who believe in reality the following question: “What is the one single piece of evidence that convinces you that reality is real?” The answer is always easily debunked. For example: “Evidence”: Reality is real because I can sense the world around me. Answer: Senses have been known to fool people,…
Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children
Posted by Greg Laden on August 29, 2012 Creationists are holding everyone else back
Why Minnesota Can’t Have Nice Things
Posted by Greg Laden on August 29, 2012 
In Minnesota’s Lakes Country, what we sometimes call “Up North,” the people have various degrees of knowledge of the land and its wildlife. Cabin people and campers visit briefly and may learn in detail the workings of a particular lake or patch of forest, but are usually poorly informed of the true nature of the…
Isaac is a Hurricane
Posted by Greg Laden on August 28, 2012 This isn’t even in the advisories and discussions yet on the Hurricane Center site, but they are calling Isaac a hurricane. Here’s a recent snapshot: The current track puts Isaac just southwest of New Orleans with the heaviest winds and storm surge along the outer reaches of the delta and Lake Pontchartrain. Expect a storm…
Bigfoot Hoax Turns to Tragedy
Posted by Greg Laden on August 28, 2012 I am very sorry, but it is hard for me to feel too badly about Randy Lee Tenley getting killed on Highway 93 on Sunday night in Montana. I do, however, feel badly for his family (if he has one) and for the two teenagers who hit him with their cars. A 15 year old…
WTF Isaac?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 28, 2012 Isaac is still not a hurricane. It will be one within 24 hours. Right? Right? Either way, Isaac is big, wet, and windy and long before it makes landfall it will start to cause flooding and wind damage ashore, within the next 24 hours or so. There is a pretty good chance that the storm…
OK, Now they’re just playing around with the hardware…
Posted by Greg Laden on August 27, 2012 Today, NASA did something never before done, and well, not all that impressive. Charles Bolden of NASA spoke some words into a microscope, and this voice stream was sent to the Curiosity Rover on Mars, which then sent it back. Hey, I just spent the last 15 minutes swapping monitors around on my computers, and…
Isaac will be a hurricane by the time you read this….
Posted by Greg Laden on August 27, 2012 …. prolly. At the moment, Isaac has all the pieces in place; winds are high enough, pressure at the center is low enough, and all that. But, the storm is not organized with an eye and nicely formed bands. I imagine that the folks in the Hurricane Prediction Center are annoyed. I suspect they will…
New Creation Science Attraction, and I say, “go for it!”
Posted by Greg Laden on August 27, 2012 I am looking forward to the construction of the meatspace version of the currently on-line only “Creation Science Hall of Fame” on vacant land on Interstate 75 between the Creation Museum and the Ark Park. Someday this section of Northern Kentucky will be a veritable Miracle Mile of Creationism Related Facilities. It is about this…
Skeptical about global warming? Here’s your book.
Posted by Greg Laden on August 27, 2012 This is a book for global warming sketpics so they can be more convincing in their skepticism. The title is “The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism.”
Isaac: Good news and bad news
Posted by Greg Laden on August 27, 2012 The good news, if you see Hurricanes as bad, is that Isaac did not turn into a hurricane over night and is having trouble getting its act together. This has caused estimates of the hurricane’s maximum strength at the time of land fall to be reduced. Isaac will be a serious storm when it plows…
Hurricane Landfall: What is it and don’t be stupid about it.
Posted by Greg Laden on August 26, 2012 It is time to discuss, once again, the falsehood known as “Hurricane Landfall.” A hurricane is a whopping big thing. A hurricane can be bigger than some states. The physical region across which a hurricane is potentially deadly and damaging is very large, many tens of miles across, sometimes a couple of hundred miles across.…
So…there really is a god!
Posted by Greg Laden on August 26, 2012 For the second time in a row, storms have interfered with the Republican National Convention. The political party that denies science, and in particular, denies climate change, that thinks NOAA built an Ark and that has no interest in the kind of regulation that saves Libertarians from themselves when Hurricanes hit settled communities, is being…
Two interviews with NCSE’s Eugenie Scott
Posted by Greg Laden on August 26, 2012 In Defense of Science: An Interview with NCSE’s Eugenie Scott A few weeks ago I wrote about what happens when people respond to well-established science with disbelief or mistrust. As I noted, this is an occupational risk for researchers who work on vaccines (and journalists who write about them), which is why I told a…
That’s one small step for a man named Neil Armstrong
Posted by Greg Laden on August 25, 2012 Neil Armstrong died today. NASA has released a statement.
World Wide Mind (and Culture)
Posted by Greg Laden on August 25, 2012 World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet is a new book by Michael Chorost. I’ve not thoroughly read it yet but I’ve looked through it and I’ve listened to an interview with Chorost. Here’s the book description from Amazon to give you an idea what it is about: What if…
Waterworld
Posted by Greg Laden on August 25, 2012 This week on Skeptically Speaking: This week, we’re discussing some fascinating science focused on the liquid portions of our big blue planet. We’re joined by graduate researcher Andrew David Thaler, founder of Southern Fried Science, to talk about the weird and wonderful networks of life that exist in the Deep Sea. And on the podcast,…
Curious about Curiosity?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 24, 2012 Here’s the last few news reports: August 21: NASA’s Curiosity Studies Mars Surroundings, Nears Drive NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has been investigating the Martian weather around it and the soil beneath it, as its controllers prepare for the car-size vehicle’s first drive on Mars. The rover’s weather station, provided by Spain, checks air temperature, ground…
Breaking: Arctic Sea Ice Reaches Historic Minimum
Posted by Greg Laden on August 24, 2012 According to data just now available, the total surface area of the summertime Arctic Sea that is covered in ice has reached the lowest point ever recorded. Every (northern) summer the sea ice in the Arctic melts to some degree, reaching a minimum around the middle of September. Over the last several years, the amount…
Meteorological Items of Interest (including a hurricane)
Posted by Greg Laden on August 23, 2012 Soon To Be Hurricane Isaac Isaac is a tropical storm currently located south of Puerto Rico and heading for Haiti and Cuba. After rolling over those land areas for several hours, and reaching the southeastern Gulf of Mexico, Isaac is expected to become a modest hurricane, likely to menace the west coast of Florida and…
Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, and The Biggest Blogathon Evah!
Posted by Greg Laden on August 23, 2012 There is a relationship between how much CO2 is in the atmosphere and sea level. More CO2 means a warmer atmosphere and that means less long term (glacial) ice and that means more sea water. Also, a warmer planet means the ocean water is warmer, and thus it expands, and that also contributes to sea…
Should they allow pigs at the State Fair, and what if they do?
Posted by Greg Laden on August 22, 2012 The State Fair is about to start up here in Minnesota, and the top epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota has very clearly stated that the swine should be excluded this year in order to avoid swine to human transmission of a flu virus that has been showing up in increasing numbers lately. I’ve blogged…
Mimicry
Posted by Greg Laden on August 21, 2012 Mimicry is when one species has changed over time via Natural Selection to look like another species. Three commonly defined forms of mimicry are: Batesian mimicry, named after Henry Walter Bates, a 19th century Natural Historian, where one species is poisonous or otherwise dangerous to a predator, and another species takes evolutionary advantage of that…
Your chance of getting pregnant if raped…
Posted by Greg Laden on August 19, 2012 … goes down, compared to other forms of insemination, because “the female body has ways to shut that down.” That’s according to Missouri Congressman Todd Akin. But this only works, according to him, if the rape is “legitimate.” From this we can easily develop a sort of Witch Hunt method to determine if a woman…
It worked!
Posted by Greg Laden on August 19, 2012 Never mind the heat shield, the parachute, the thruster-guided landing, all of that. Curiosity went to Mars to carry out experiments using Big Science Gear and now it is confirmed that at least one set of gear works! The method is laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, in which very high power but short burst laser light is…
Siege of Stars by Henry Gee
Posted by Greg Laden on August 19, 2012 Henry Gee, the Nature editor, has a novel in three parts … Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy … that I found hit home very closely like maybe Henry was me reincarnated and then transported back through time so his, er, our timeline would cross. This is not surprising since Henry and…
, which is now available for the 
