June 28, 2011
I heard it said recently that "Evolution" and "Origin of life" are two separate issues. I know that this is a falsehood, and I'll discuss in a moment how and why it is not true. But first, I checked around with a few people that I know and love, and found out that some of them assumed this was…
June 28, 2011
And what do we do about it?
Global warming is for real, and it is important. Just as important is the fact that global warming is largely anthropogenic. Global warming is important because conditions for life on the planet are changing due to warming as well as other changes caused by the release…
June 28, 2011
One in twenty four times:
Click the picture to visit the site.
June 27, 2011
... And she still doesn't know where anything is ...
Michele Bachmann promised, in an interview associated with her announcement to run for President of the United States (POTUS) and Effective Leader of the Free World (ELFW), that she would become a professional clown and murder dozens of teenage…
June 27, 2011
The first nuclear power plant ever was built in Obninsk, Russia. It was the first electricity generating plant on a civilian grid. The plant operated until April 29th 2002.
The exact date of the plant's "birth" varies, but as I understand it, it began operating on the 26th and went to large scale…
June 27, 2011
She's running for president, so this is important.
June 27, 2011
My old friend Mark Moffett is one of the pioneers of high canopy research, dragging his cameras into the upper reached of the rain forest to learn amazing new things and take some amazing photographs. He's also spent considerable time on and beneath the forest floor studying ants. You know those…
June 27, 2011
If elected president, Michele Bachmann promises to take care of herself; In surprise move, Bachmann backs off tea-party stance on Obama.
The Tea Party, which was essentially founded by Michele Bachmann, has a distinctly anti-Obama stance. The far right wing poorly educated and angry group of fair…
June 25, 2011
... at first. But then, well, who knows?
Kathy Griffin had the extreme pleasure of bumping into Michele Bachmann at a political event; the two ladies recognized one another and when they started to speak an assistant filmed the exchange, supposedly for Bachmann's website....
And the rest is…
June 25, 2011
Apparently, when you make a movie, there's this box of stuff left over that someone has to own. It can include things like the original unedited film/video, from which the director and editors selected/cherry picked what they wanted to include, as well as various correspondences and documents and…
June 24, 2011
I can't believe that I'm like 50 something years old and never had one of these:
June 24, 2011
The Placebo Effect is rarely what people think it is, though it is often what people believe it to be. Unconvinced? Check it out.
June 24, 2011
For the next several weeks, I'll be contributing a weekly post at Birdingblogs.com. The informal title of this series of posts is Darwin's Other Birds. The idea is to identify particularly interesting passages from Darwin's writings and put them in an appropriate context. This week's post is an…
June 23, 2011
Apropos this, a timely repost:
This may or may not be a recent photograph of fugitive Whitey (James) Bulger of Boston's Winter Hill Gang. 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…
June 22, 2011
Much of the current news is about exposure and fallout.
As a point of information, the Sievert is a unit of "dose equivliant" from exposure to ionizing radiation. It was designed to indicate relative levels of biological effects on living organisms. This measurement technique attempts to take…
June 22, 2011
There's been a fair amount of talk about the Miss USA interview question "should evolution be taught in schools," and a fair amount of attention given to the answers provided by the contestants. For the most part, people have gotten mad at these women because they are both beautiful in a classic…
June 21, 2011
Huxley learned a while back how to open doors by, of all things, turning the doorknobs. Amanda thought we should get the devices that go over the doorknobs to thwart his efforts. I thought we should just attach fasteners to the doors and seal them up until he's eighteen.
But, I respected Amanda…
June 21, 2011
She was taught evolution in her high school and she sees no problem with it today. In fact, she's a science geek. Move over Science Cheerleaders and make way for the ... no, wait, I don't think I want to go there ...
Anyway, here is the video:
One other contestant (of the presumably 51 or so)…
June 20, 2011
I just realized that in the recent confusion of travelling and home improvement activities, I forgot to point out to you'all that my third every-four-weeks post at 10,000 Birds (the blog) is now up for your reading pleasure: Birds Really Dinosaurs?
June 20, 2011
This post has been moved HERE, please go check it out.
June 20, 2011
This is going to be a busy week. I've got three shelves to build (shelve = complex of shelves, not shelf); This must be done in a hailstorm of loud karaoke singing, interrupted only by actual hail storms, because, well, I live in Coon Rapids and that's how it is; Amanda will be away all week so I…
June 20, 2011
As you know, our own Minnesota Congressman Michele Bachmann is officially running for president. I wonder what it would be like to have the President of the United States of America, like when she goes home to visit her family for Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July or whatever, and all these limos…
June 17, 2011
Research by Gustavo Londoño in the Peruvian Rainforest:
Temp On The Gradient from Ecosite Media on Vimeo.
June 15, 2011
Michele Bachmann is my home-girl. has lived in a nearby town for years, represented a nearby community in the Minnesota State Senate. I had one of her kids in my class at the U. And she's the US Congressperson for the district that is just a few short blocks from where I live now .
In many ways…
June 15, 2011
There is an increase in reports of activity of scientists studying the extent and impacts of radiation spilled or otherwise transferred into the ocean from Fukushima. TEPCO, in the meantime, seems to have a need to put a lot more water, possibly decontaminated to some degree, into the sea.…
June 15, 2011
In the process of writing a post on bird evolution, it occurred to me that it might be helpful to re-post something I wrote a couple of years ago covering research reported by Paul Sereno about new fossil material from a theropod known as em>Aerosteon riocoloradensis. When I went to look at my…
June 15, 2011
Living Dinosaurs: The Evolutionary History of Modern Birds is an academic anthology of key writing about bird evolution. There are two main things that distinguish this book: 1) It includes quite a bit on fossils and their bearing on bird evolution, a refreshing change from DNA-based phylogenies…
June 14, 2011
Who's smarter, humans or non-human animals?
And then there's this:
