April 22, 2011
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA is releasing the first images and sounds of an electrical connection between Saturn and one of its moons, Enceladus. The data collected by the agency's Cassini spacecraft enable scientists to improve their understanding of the complex web of interaction between the planet…
April 21, 2011
In this interview with Karen Stollznow, Josh presents the "Three Pillars of Creationism", the beliefs and claims of creationists. He describes their rhetoric and propaganda, and the setbacks they cause for science, from legal cases to creationist theme parks.
Get it here!
April 21, 2011
Well, this applies more generally than just the Internet. What do you think, is she wrong???
April 21, 2011
Tennessee's Senate Bill 893 -- nicknamed, along with its counterpart House Bill 368, the "monkey bill" -- is on hold, "almost certainly postponing any action until next year," according to the Knoxville News Sentinel's Humphrey on the Hill blog (April 21, 2011). Its sponsor, Bo Watson (R-District…
April 21, 2011
A newly found, buried deposit of frozen carbon dioxide -- dry ice -- near the south pole of Mars contains about 30 times more carbon dioxide than previously estimated to be frozen near the pole. This map color-codes thickness estimates of the deposit derived and extrapolated from observations by…
April 21, 2011
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- More than 40 Nobel Prize-winning scientists are urging Gov. Bobby Jindal and Louisiana lawmakers to repeal a law that allows public school science teachers to use supplemental materials in their classrooms beyond state-approved textbooks.
In a letter released Thursday, the…
April 21, 2011
Rally at the Capitol to Repeal Louisiana's Creationism Law
Mark April 28th on your calendars!
We will be holding a rally at the Louisiana State Capitol in support of repealing the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act.
The rally will take place at 11 am and the repeal will hold a…
April 21, 2011
Go ahead to 2:55 (especially after 4:00):
More on Bachmann.
April 21, 2011
Tokyo Electric officials have noted that they can not rule out the possibility that fuel rods in the Fukushima reactors have melted, at least to some extent. No one else, as far as I can tell, thinks that fuel rods have not melted. A Question that is more important than that of Tokyo Electric's…
April 21, 2011
"They charm the females by instrumental music of the most varied kinds"
And thus, Charles Darwin adapted the phrase "Instrumental Music," previously used to mean humans with instruments making music, to name one of the most important "secondary sexual characters ... diversified and conspicuous in…
April 20, 2011
Description and identification of birds, or anything else, can be done in a rote manner with straightforward reference to details. If information about enough details is available, the identification will be accurate. But as humans we hardly ever do that sort of thing. If you ask someone to…
April 19, 2011
... well, at least for me.
Starting this week, I will become a "Beat Blogger" at 10,000 Birds. I am not sure what a Beat Blogger is, but I think it's a real happening with bongo drums and highly esoteric poetry. I'll be scribing one bird-related post every four weeks, on a Thursday. Go have a…
April 19, 2011
The abstract for a recent paper on Titan says:
...We propose a new Cassini state model for Titan in which we assume the presence of a liquid water ocean beneath an ice shell and consider the gravitational and pressure torques arising between the different layers of the satellite....
Titan's orbit…
April 19, 2011
... is now on line.
Plus Mike Klymkowsky reviews Matt Young and Paul K. Strode's Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails); Joel W. Martin reviews Francisco Ayala's Am I a Monkey?; David A. Reid reviews Randy Moore, Mark Decker, and Sehoya Cotner's Chronology of the Evolution-Creationism…
April 19, 2011
Senate Bill 70 (PDF), prefiled in the Louisiana Senate on April 15, 2011, and provisionally referred to the Senate Committee on Education, would, if enacted, repeal Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1, which implemented the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act, passed and enacted in 2008. SB…
April 18, 2011
When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and…
April 18, 2011
Ana's Feeed starting Sunday mid day through last night:
TEPCO press conf. (NHK): Since the accident, we have caused a huge amount of trouble and inconvenience to residents and anxiety to the greater population in general ... Residents have been asked to evacuate and they would like to return home…
April 18, 2011
Dozens of people died in tornadoes in the US over the last couple of days, and most of those deaths were preventable. The truth is, most of those killed died because of a decision they made, so their death is to some extent their fault. But, for good reason, no one wants to blame the victim, so we…
April 17, 2011
There is no evidence that they did, but abundant evidence that they didn't. One example of this is found in how business in the US handle the inevitability of future rising costs of energy, and along with this collection of individual behaviors, the way the free market, the most intelligent and…
April 17, 2011
As Comcast moves towards being the next AT&T (and I'm talking about the ATT of the 1960s, which was more powerful than most countries and more nefarious than Karl Rove and Dick Cheney combined), it gets increasingly strange, self serving, and dangerous as a company to deal with. Over the last…
April 17, 2011
Claims are being made that the situation at Fukushima is starting to improve, but there is no actual evidence of this. We probably (but not certainly) passed the point where nuclear fuel is likely to accumulate in such a way as to cause a major fission event or explosion, but there is still…
April 17, 2011
Good news: The next version of Internet Explorer will only run on Windows 7. That should be the end of Internet Explorer.
Bad News: Google Video is done with. It will stop existing on April 29th. Well, I never used it so I don't really care personally, but this is why I once said that things…
April 17, 2011
A lot of people got mad at me when I complained about the upcoming switch from Gnome to Unity. (And yes, I know Unity is based on Gnome but it is not Gnome. It is Unity). And yeah, I had some things wrong and some of the comments contraindicating my concern were valid, but many were more like "…
April 16, 2011
Two reposts for your edification:
Tornadoes in Perspective
With all the interest in tornadoes, I thought it would be helpful to provide some contextual data (focusing on US tornadoes).
Damaged houses along Grace St. in St. Peter. (Photo courtesy of St. Peter Kiwanis) One thing that has to be…
April 15, 2011
Huxley and I went to Target to look at weather radios and found out that they don't carry them. But the three Target employees that were gathered near the cameras and electronics with whom we inquired were interested to know why we were looking for one.
"You're about the tenth person today who has…
April 15, 2011
Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid by Wendy Williams is a new book on the science of squid.
I wondered at first why a popular science book would be named after a legendary creature (the Kraken) but when I read the book and also read up on The Kraken it became…
April 15, 2011
WTF does that mean? How can an icon, a visual representation of something like a file or program, be "unused" if it is sitting there ... looking like something? As I sit here writing and grading papers and stalking people on The Facebook and working on a graphic for an upcoming blog post on squid…
