February 21, 2016
When the Texas A&M University Press asked me to consider reviewing Feeding Wild Birds in America: Culture, Commerce, and Conservation by Paul Baicich, Margaret Barker, and Carrol Henderson, I had mixed feelings.
Was this just another backyard bird feeding guide? That would be nice, but not too…
February 19, 2016
Tropical cyclone Winston is now a Category 4 storm and is probably going to make a direct hit on Fiji, tomorrow, Saturday. It will likely be a record storm for Fiji.
The storm is fueled by high sea surface temperatures, which extend to a significant depth, which probably caused the storm to…
February 19, 2016
Back in the old days, yesterday, making comments on the mobile version of Scienceblogs.com was sometimes difficult because the thingie at the bottom of the post that suggests the other wonderful blog posts you might want to visit tended to cover up the comments.
That has been fixed!
That is all,…
February 19, 2016
It is far too early to predict the outcome of the Democratic Party primary. Personally, I like both of the candidates and will support whichever one is selected to run in the general election. Both candidates have strong reasons to vote for them, and each candidate has their own “electability”…
February 19, 2016
Classic dinosaurs went extinct long before humans existed. But birds are dinosaurs, and birds still exist. So, no.
But birds are not classic dinosaurs mainly because they are not extinct (a tautology) and they are not big and scary. But some of them were.
One of the last (but not the last) big…
February 18, 2016
Kamal Harris is running for Barbara Boxer's seat in the California Senate. She just received an endorsement from Climate Hawks Votes. This is not an easy endorsement to get. A candidate has to be a true "Climate Hawk" and have climate change as a top priority, and to be smart about it, to have…
February 16, 2016
Recently NASA GISS released the measurement of the Earth's surface for January 2016. I added this latest measurement to the long term database (from 1880) and calculated the running 12 month average of surface temperatures. This is the resulting graph:
These are anomaly values, as indicated.…
February 15, 2016
I have often made the argument that religiosity, a personal belief in god, spirits, the supernatural, etc., would emerge in human societies on its own if it wasn't there already.
Imagine taking an entire generation of people in a geographically isolated region, and wiping out their memory of…
February 12, 2016
Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are viable candidates to win the Democratic nomination to run for President of the United States.
There are polls and pundits to which we may refer to make a guess as to who will win. Or, we could ignore all that, and let the process play out and see what…
February 11, 2016
First, what is a gravitational wave?
I find it interesting that some people are expressing difficulty in understanding what a gravitational wave is, as though everybody (who is not a physicist) has a perfectly good understanding of what any kind of wave is. We don't need to go too deeply beneath…
February 11, 2016
Just a quick note that will be of interest to my local readers. Senator Leo Foley passed away at the age of 87, just a few days ago. Senator John Hoffman, who now hold Senator Foley's old seat, wrote this:
Last Friday, Feb. 5 former Coon Rapids Senator Leo T. Foley passed away peacefully…
February 11, 2016
Sean B. Carroll is coming out with a new book called The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters.
This is the molecular biologist Sean Carroll, as distinct from the physicist (who wrote this).
Homeostasis is one of the basic principles of biology. The term can be…
February 11, 2016
I don't normally write about faith (I'm an atheist, I'd be bad at it), but I do often write about climate change. But my friend and colleague Paul Douglas happens to be an Evangelical Christian, Republican, and Rock Star Meteorologist. You've seen his work if you've seen the movies Jurassic Park…
February 10, 2016
I'm looking at an exit poll by NBC and I have thoughts.
Gender Gap
Much has been made of the fact that Sanders got 55% of female votes, more than 44% for Clinton. That is indeed significant. But little has been said about the fact that among males, 66% voted for Sanders and 32% for Clinton. (55…
February 9, 2016
At about 9 PM eastern, with 90% of the votes counted in the Democratic primary, Sanders is showing a strong win. He is currently at about 60%, while Clinton is at 38%. That gap is significantly larger than what I had intuitively established at the cutoff for a Sanders "lower than expectation loss…
February 9, 2016
Over the last several years, ice fishing contests, which are a big deal in Minnesota, have been repeatedly cancelled due to insufficient ice thickness on the relevant lake. Some of these contests have been permanently cancelled because the annual cancelations were becoming more frequent. Just now…
February 8, 2016
I wrote about what I thought might happen in the New Hampshire primary a few days ago, but enough new stuff has happened to make it worth revisiting.
Who will win the New Hampshire GOP Primary?
And, perhaps more important, who will come in second, third, and fourth?
We know that Donald Trump…
February 5, 2016
I watched the debate pretty closely, and in my opinion, both candidates did pretty well and it was mostly an even contest. (Note: I am not committed to one or the other candidate, I happen to like them both.)
Sanders did very well in getting his message across, but he demonstrated weakness in…
February 4, 2016
SEE THIS UPDATE
ADDED: Following the GOP primary, there has been another development. In most recent polls, Trump is clearly ahead in New Hampshire, with Marco Rubio a moderately strong second or third. In various polls he is second in most polls (by a few points) and tied in one. Kasich is…
February 3, 2016
Was the Iowa Caucus outcome determined by a coin flip?
We have seen several reports that Hillary Clinton won the Iowa Caucus by a coin toss, or by six coin tosses. Or some other number. We've also seen reports that six delegates were awarded to Clinton on the basis of coin tosses, implying that of…
February 2, 2016
Increasingly, I feel the need to declare my position on the candidates before commenting on the process, because, increasingly, the conversation has become one of comparative litmus tests. So, here's the deal on that: I like Clinton and Sanders both, and I like each of them for both overlapping…
February 1, 2016
Suddenly my computer tells me that copy.com is shutting down as a cloud storage service. That sucks, since I had a few terabytes of free storage with them.
I will now have to seek an alternative. What are your experiences with cloud storage, free or otherwise?
February 1, 2016
As of 8:45 or so PM:
Cruz 28.9 Trump 25.6 Rubio 20.8
I'm privileged to live in Minnesota, which is Iowa's neighbor and thus not so different from Iowa, except our college football teams are better.
And it isn't just the corn, but also, the caucus. We do that here too. Our caucus system is…
February 1, 2016
UPDATE (Tuesday Morning):
In the Democratic Caucus, Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by an amount so small that the caucus results have to be regarded as tie.
Clinton: 49.86%
Sanders: 49.57%
O'Malley: 0.57%
Lesson learned: Those who caucused for O'Malley for ideological reasons, knowing he could…
January 30, 2016
There is a food crisis sneaking up on us right now. A lot of them, actually. A lot of little one, some big ones. There are always places in the world where food has become scarce for at time, and people starve or move. You've heard of the ""Syrian refugee crisis," and the often extreme reactions to…
January 29, 2016
David Macaulay is famous for his "how things work" books. How Machines Work: Zoo Break! is a new book that is really fun. So fun that it took me a long time to get it back from Amanda and Huxley so I could review it.
The concept is simple. A story, a simple story, is constructed, that has nothing…
January 29, 2016
I'm not sure what an "album" is, but I think it is like a CD.
Anyway, if you don't know who Baba Brinkman is, check this out. (he previously produced "The Rap Guide to Evolution.")
Then, head on over to the Indiegogo site to see his project. This is likely to be a go, with your help. He's a fourth…
January 29, 2016
UPDATE for Feb 6th debate:
This post was originally written for the previous GOP debate. Here are a few comments on last night's debate.
I watched the debate at a debate watching party of DFL activists, so naturally I saw very little of it because we were a loud and raucous crowd. But this morning…
January 26, 2016
The Great Human Race is a new production of National Geographic, in three parts. I recently viewed the first episode, "Dawn" which comes with this description:
All people can trace their roots to the savanna of East Africa, the home of one of the first members of the human species -- Homo habilis…
January 25, 2016
Storms like last weekend's blizzard and widespread snowfall can happen, in theory, any winter, but large snowfall storms in the US Northeast have been significantly more common in recent years than in previous recorded history. Over the last few years we've seen these large snowfalls happen…
