April 2, 2011
At TEDxDubai, longtime English teacher Patricia Ryan asks a provocative question: Is the world's focus on English preventing the spread of great ideas in other languages? (For instance: what if Einstein had to pass the TOEFL?) It's a passionate defense of translating and sharing ideas.
April 2, 2011
Most evolutionary biologist have fully rejected the "hopeful monster theory" but it turns out they were wrong to do so.
Most mutations are deleterious, and are quickly weeded out of a population but in some cases not before they briefly cause hideous results that make everyone turn away in horror…
April 2, 2011
Despite the deafening silence from TEPCO regarding questions over a physical breech in Reactor 2, it is now generally being considered that there is a breech in reactor 2. It is not clear if it is a hole in the containment vessel of some kind or just some disconnected or cracked pipes. Experts…
April 1, 2011
Curiouser and Curiouser .... the podcast. This is part one of three planned discussions with Theo Theofanous.
April 1, 2011
The experts monitoring and reporting on the Fukushima nuclear disaster have, for several days now, stopped talking about melting reactor fuel or breached containment vessels. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the Energy Collective, and other groups now merely pass along information about…
April 1, 2011
This is the closest thing I've got to an April Fools joke for you.
April 1, 2011
There's been about 90 or so significant nuke accidents. That's a lot considering that there are only some 400-500 or so facilities involved. But it's OK. Nuclear power is totally safe. We have backups on backups on backups. Nothing can go wrong. ... go wrong ... go wrong..
Oh, and Happy…
April 1, 2011
The first step required to recall Wisconsin Republican Senator D. Kapanke has been completed; A petition with sufficient signatures to require a recall election has been filed. Challenges mus be filed over the next 10 days. If there remain enough valid signatures, the recall election is required…
March 31, 2011
Information gleaned form Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions seems to indicate that ripples seen in the rings of Saturn and Jupiter were caused by comets. Shoemaker-Levy 9 (famous for a multiplicity of impacts on Jupiter in 1994) left one set of ripples. Saturn's cometary clues date to a…
March 31, 2011
Ralph Langner:
When first discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm posed a baffling puzzle. Beyond its unusually high level of sophistication loomed a more troubling mystery: its purpose. Ralph Langner and team helped crack the code that revealed this digital warhead's final target -- and its…
March 31, 2011
"The human voice: mysterious, spontaneous, primal." With these words, soprano Claron McFadden invites us to explore the mysteries of breathing and singing, as she performs the challenging "Aria," by John Cage.
March 30, 2011
Watch it now before it gets pulled:
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March 30, 2011
The Anti-Evolution Bills in Tennessee have advanced.
Tennessee's House Bill 368 was passed by the House Education Committee on March 29, 2011, and referred to the House Calendar and Rules Committee, while its counterpart, Senate Bill 893, is scheduled to be discussed by the Senate Education…
March 30, 2011
For that special organization or person that makes you throw up a little in your mouth when you hear about their latest aggravating attack on our children's education, by way of making fun of something that is not really all that funny, DontDissDarwn Central annually awards the highly alliterated…
March 30, 2011
"Puppets always have to try to be alive," says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena's subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the…
March 30, 2011
As I tune in to NHK live TV, and see the piece on using Twitter to aid in disaster relief being shown for the 20th time over the last 48 hours, I wonder about what appears to be a sudden and dramatic drop in the level of coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Over the last several…
March 29, 2011
It is said that it is physically impossible for the nuclear material in any of the Fukushima reactors to melt through the containment vessels. Despite a rumor of a crack in one of the vessels, nuclear power experts have maintained that it is impossible that there could be such a crack.…
March 29, 2011
I am going to interview Neil deGrasse Tyson this coming Sunday on Minnesota Atheist Talk. Details of the timing and how you can listen to the interview live can be found here. Unlike my recent interview with PZ Myers, in which I literally asked him the very questions you posted on my blog, I've…
March 29, 2011
Yes, yes, I know ... Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson did not just come out, and it is not part of any current news story, so I'm not supposed to mention it in a blog post, because blog posts are only about things that happened during the last forty-five…
March 29, 2011
This is the picture of Vesta, which is an object in our solar system:
That's the picture that Wikipedia uses as of this writing, and it was taken by the Hubble. The key thing to note is that Vesta, which lies in the asteroid belt and has been thought of as a big asteroid, is very globular like…
March 29, 2011
Some years ago, I was asked by a friend to accompany him on a visit to a site in Saratoga Springs, New York, where we were to witness the activities of a gen-u-wine geomancer. I had never heard of a geomancer before. If you don't know what one is, be happy. If you do, you have my sympathies.…
March 28, 2011
The most interesting and important current news, interesting if confirmed, is that plutonium has been discovered in soil near Fukushima. With all this talk about radiation, it is easy to forget that some of these elements are extremely poisonous in their own right. Plutonium is a very nasty…
March 27, 2011
below the fold
March 27, 2011
Sea water has now been replaced with fresh water for cooling reactors, and, apparently, spent fuel storage pools. Work continues on restoring power and repairing cooling systems, but the cooling systems remain unrepaired. An interesting development overnight (overday in Japan): A very high…
March 26, 2011
A crack in the containment vessel of Fukashima Reactor 3 has been mentioned by MSNBC and ABC news, citing the New York Times. The New York Times has an article in which the crack is mentioned in a side bar, attributed to an anonymous person. An anonymous source is not particularly impressive, but…
March 26, 2011
Ferraro was from Newburgh, New York and served in the US House. She was a progressive Democrat. She ran for Vice President with Walter Mondale. She was the first woman, and the first Italian American (which in those days meant more than it does today) to do so.
The fact that she was a woman was…
March 26, 2011
This is a particularly important update. An anonymous source in Japan has told reporters connected to the New York Times that there is a visible crack in the Fukushima Reactor 3. This is the reactor that showed isotopic evidence of a leak of some kind. Arguments had been made that a hole in the…
March 25, 2011
This just in from NASA:
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Stardust spacecraft sent its last transmission to Earth at 4:33 .m. PDT (7:33 p.m. EDT) Thursday, March 24, shortly after depleting fuel and ceasing operations. During a 12-year period, the venerable spacecraft collected and returned comet…
March 25, 2011
The water within Reactor Number 3 (where three workers were exposed to high levels of radiation yesterday) is 10,000 times more radioactive than the average water inside a nuclear reactor and contains radioactive iodine that is generated during fission and has a half-life of 8 days. Japanese…
