May 20, 2011
The worker's death was probably unrelated to the nuclear disaster, but it can't help moral much at the crippled site. Fission and cooling still remain issues at the Fukushima plant. Although fission is not happening to any large degree, or possibly at all, there has been fission more recently…
May 20, 2011
On the Move: How and Why Animals Travel in Groups, edited by Sue Boinski and Paul Garber is a compendium of academic research on ... well, on how and why animals travel in groups. Notice of this book is a fitting start to a series of reviews of migration-related books that is part of Migration…
May 19, 2011
Bird migration is a huge topic. Super-Big. Vast. Overwhelming.
So, starting today, it is Bird Migration Week (running from Thursday to Thursday) on this blog. I'll be posting a number of quick reviews of bird-migration related books and a few other items, but for starters, I'll send you over…
May 19, 2011
Everything is connected to everything else. Sometimes, the connections are non-trivial. Often they are fundamental, sometimes exploitable, and now and then very potent sources of debate and discussion. I've come to think that a measure of sanity is the degree to which one limits a sense of…
May 16, 2011
The law of superimposition says that stuff found on top is younger than stuff found lower down, in a geological or archaeological column. This is generally true, but there are exceptions, mostly trivial and easily understood. If a cave forms in a rock formation, the stuff that later ends up in…
May 15, 2011
on Skeptically Speaking, recording live today.
We look at the cutting edge science and old-fashioned wonder of the hunt for planets circling other stars. We'll talk to Ray Jayawardhana, Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, and author of Strange New…
May 14, 2011
There is a lot happening in Japan, and the situation at Fukushima remains pretty much out of human control. There is a nuclear incident at a reactor site other than Fukushima. There is still quite a bit of radioactive material leaking into the sea. The radiation levels in the crippled Fukushima…
May 14, 2011
I'm looking forward to the moment in a few weeks from now when Desiree Schell and I sit down and have a serious public conversation about approaches to promoting skepticism and science-based reasoning and policy. We'll also discuss New Atheism and Accommodationism, I assume.
As you know,…
May 14, 2011
You can't easily. But you can do something similar, enjoy a rewarding experience, and have access to a tasty brew at a reasonable price and only a moderate level of fiddling. A while ago I bought a Cuisinox COF-M4 Milano 4-Cup Espresso Coffeemaker. It is a modernized version of the early 20th…
May 12, 2011
I had never felt airsick before, or since. But now I was a nauseated rag doll flopping around in the middle row of a six seater prop plane and I was ready to hurl at any moment.
A timely repost
BBC depiction of the path of Flight 447. I find it astonishing that the most important weather…
May 11, 2011
Surly Amy has been (successfully) raising money to help defray conference costs for women interested in attending The Amazing Meeting. Moments ago, Emma Cating, Megan Wells, and Amy Peters, who has applied among many others to obtain this funding, were awarded the first Surly Women Thinking Free…
May 11, 2011
Did I use 'offing' correctly? Strange word.
Anyway, Mike Haubrich has pulled off another coup at Atheist Talk Radio. He has arranged for a conversation to happen, live, between Desiree Schell and yours truly. This will be in early June (details forthcoming). We'll be talking about multiple…
May 10, 2011
It's Bora's birthday. He's here and here. Well, he's everywhere, but those are two places he be.
May 10, 2011
"We should not have published the altered picture"
Meaning, what exactly? Oh never mind. Have a look at this:
Here's a picture from the same newspaper:
I ask you: Who was the woman standing at that podium before she was erased?
Now, look at this picture:
Are we certain that the banana…
May 10, 2011
You've all seen the photograph. Here's a closeup:
On the right is a bunch of people in the Sitch Room at the White House watching in-house coverage of the Navy Seals taking out O-b-L. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Counter Intel Adviser Audrey Tomason are, notably, the only women in the…
May 10, 2011
A lot of paleolithic diet and exercise books, many how to be a hunter-gatherer guides for the suburbanites, and numerous biologically-based-sounding self-help volumes based mainly on woo have been produced since The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living…
May 10, 2011
UC Davis Prof Steps Down from Chair-ship over his own misogynist treatment of grad students:
A while back
...a department chair in the veterinary school at the University of California at Davis had polled a class on what grade he should give to a student who had to miss some quizzes because she…
May 9, 2011
Florida Senate Bill 1854 would have required a so-called "thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution" which is code word in US state legislatures these days for "taught along side Intelligent Design Creationism as an alternative to established scientific…
May 8, 2011
We explore the changing ways that medicine and culture have treated pregnancy and childbirth. We'll talk with doctor and medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein, about her book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth From the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank. And on another edition of Everything You…
May 7, 2011
This post at 10,000 Birds, an item I accidentally bumped into on the Internet while looking for something else, and an unusual sighting moments ago, converge. And, its a nice distracting convergence which I need right now because as I sit here one week before fishing opener, looking at the glassy…
May 7, 2011
The games developer David Braben and some colleagues [developed] something called Raspberry Pi. It's a whole computer on a tiny circuit board - not much more than an ARM processor, a USB port, and an HDMI connection. They plugged a keyboard into one end, and hooked the other into a TV they had…
May 6, 2011
So Amanda had this TV. It had a remote. The remote sucked. It was broken. Then I moved in and with me came a universal remote. Lucky Amanda. I programmed the universal remote (a Radioshack 5 in 1) to handle the TV as well as a DVD player and a stereo. The remote handled everything. The old…
May 5, 2011
This will be of interest to many of you:
Karen Stollznow and Elizabeth Loftus Join the Board
Amherst, NY-May 5, 2011-The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) welcomes two additions to its executive council. Karen Stollznow and Elizabeth Loftus recently accepted posts.
Karen Stollznow has spent…
May 5, 2011
May 5th, 1961. Freedom 7. The United States took its first small step on its journey to the moon...
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Do you hear the nervousness in his voice? I think the whole thing got a bit more causal, but not necessarily much safer,…
May 5, 2011
May 5th. The Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo falls on the fifth this year. Auspicious? No. Calendric. But the fifth of May is a day on which interesting things tend to have happened. For Mexico, this is the day on which the Mexican army defeated the French army at Puebla in 1862. Strangely, the…
May 4, 2011
I have always thought, naively and probably incorrectly, that what defined Accommodationist is what they think, not how they argue. At the same time, I have always thought that what defined a "New Atheist" is how we argued, and not what we think.
When I say "always thought" I mean for the last…
May 3, 2011
Al Gore's voice comes out of it.
May 2, 2011
Tea party clarifies its position on race and racism. Not current, but increasingly relevant:
I didn't know about the reparations. Did you?
But in all seriousness, I'm so glad the right wing has finally come out of the closet and defined itself honestly.
May 2, 2011
It seems like every time I take Huxley (now 18 months old) to the doctor, the following things happen: 1) Somebody says "Well, he won't need to get stuck with any needles for a long while now .... his next scheduled immunization is [insert phrase indicating 'a long time into the future']"; and 2)…
May 2, 2011
Worker exposure to high levels of nuclera radiation and the distribution of radioactive materials about the landscape and in possibly unexpected places are the stories of the week at Fukushima. Also, officials are wondering, how have the potential effects of a tsunami at Fukushima (and, apparently…
