July 13, 2009
Yesterday some moron from Missouri made our lives miserable, made thousands of people's lives miserable, got a passenger in his car minorly mauled and caused a major environmental catastrophe.
If you live in Minnesota you probably know what I'm talking about. A man driving on Route 94 out by…
July 13, 2009
Amanda, who is pregnant, claims to have had no food aversions and she claims to have no food cravings. This makes me laugh.
One reason it makes me laugh is that Amanda is one of the most rational, straight thinking people I've ever known. She knows there is a reality, she faces it daily, and she…
July 13, 2009
Al's First Big Thingie:
July 13, 2009
I was sick Sunday, and I'm a bit off today, so everything is 36 to 48 hours off. So, my review of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future will be delayed. In the mean time you can have a look at these items:
1) An interesting post by David Dobbs places the current…
July 13, 2009
Hat tip: This place
July 13, 2009
Several inches of hail on the ground in Rice, Minnesota, June 27th 2009.
July 13, 2009
CNN is supposed to be a professional news outlet. But even the editors and writers at CNN's Fortune desk are no match for Microsoft's' Stupid-Ray Gun.
This piece is virtually giddy about the fact that the next version of Microsoft Office will be just like Google Office. Free and on line .
Now,…
July 13, 2009
... or is obesity simply Yet Another Risk Factor in severity of this illness?
Probably the latter, but health officials seem interested in the developing data.
From CTV:
... in a report released Friday, health officials detailed the cases of 10 Michigan patients who were very sick from swine flu…
July 13, 2009
Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is true.1 This is a long story, so it may span more than one blog post. You might not want to read this story while you are alone or while sitting in the dark.2
Kimberley South Africa is said to be the most haunted city in the world, and it certainly…
July 12, 2009
Physioprof recently posted some comments on science and religion that I basically agree with.1 But I want to add an observation that I've been thinking about since this Pew Research report came out.
The current issue is that the average American thinks that an electron is larger than an atom, and…
July 11, 2009
There's a lot of philosophical discussion about what, precisely, constitutes a law or a theory in scientific practice. There's also a lot of usage of the terms that has come to us over several centuries of not-quite-consistent application of terms.
Check out this interesting essay at The Austringer
July 11, 2009
There are two lies you will hear from anyone who is into the sport of angling. 1) "It was THIS BIG!" and 2) "Catching fish isn't the point. It's the experience of fishing that matters."
The Mocking Bass. For four years this fish watched me cast lures and live bait from the end of the small…
July 10, 2009
Lousy Canuck has ramped up the metaphor with Two boats tethered together on a lake as his method of addressing the 1% solution. Also, there is now a very interesting post on Quiche Moraine regarding the Hollywood Case Study and the book Unscientific America.
See also this at Pharyngula.
July 9, 2009
... In which I narrow the gulf between two allied factions enough that with a running start you can jump across ... maybe.
It has been suggested that Accommodationism is "a more moderate atheist perspective on the nature of religion and science."1 In this view, religion and science are not…
July 9, 2009
So the other day I stopped at the grocery store to get a few items for the trip up north. One of the things I needed was water. I know, I know, if I buy bottled water the earth will split in half and we will all die. But you have not tasted the water that comes out of the tap at the cabin.…
July 9, 2009
Book note: I have received my copy of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum of The Intersection, and am now reading it for review. I am probably going to finish it this weekend, so you can expect something on Monday or Tuesday.
July 9, 2009
This is illegal. Do not do this in the US. Or, do it only for CD's that you totally own. Like, you are the artist formerly known as Prince and you are going to rip your own DVD off of your own DVD. That is probably not legal either.
So, for those of you tuning in from Bora Bora:
And remember,…
July 9, 2009
VideoLAN's VLC media player, arguably the world's best media player, hit version 0.9.9 in early April. Three months and more than 78 million downloads later, VideoLAN has announced VLC 1.0.0, or "Goldeneye."
Your media will never be the same.
In fact, with VideoLAN's VLC media player for Windows,…
July 9, 2009
.... or is there a honest to goodness glitch in the way browser shares are counted?
There is indeed evidence that IE browser share has dropped at the expense of Firefox over recent months. There is some evidence that there are problems with the way in which different versions of IE are counted…
July 9, 2009
It has become virtually axiomatic that as climate shifts or other potential insults to the ecology of a given area occur, plants and animals enclosed in parks bounded by "impermeable" landscapes are at great risk. Instead of the extreme ranges of a plant or animal moving north or south, or…
July 8, 2009
The Citizens Jury on Election Recounts is a privately funded entity that has assembled 24 jurors and given them stipends and various resources to evaluate the recount process and make recommendations. The "jurors" are randomly selected regular people.
"I think there needs to be many different…
July 8, 2009
Stuff you can't really do in Windows. Sort of but not really.
July 8, 2009
Have you ever noticed that many google servies, like most or all of the google apps including Gmail and Google Docs, are "Beta"?
Well, not any more:
Like many software products, Google's Gmail service was first released with a "beta" label on it. In the software industry, a product that is in…
July 8, 2009
Ion channels, chica.
Hat Tip: Virginia Hughes. Who also has something interesting on Coffee.
July 8, 2009
Whatever you may think about the Military Industrial Complex, you've got to admit that Raytheon does like to give money to edumication and stuff. Or at least, those of you who live in the Greater Boston Area have seen their name on a bunch of projects.
I've just received notice of a new modeling…
July 8, 2009
And a few words about Michele Bachamann. Oh, and he makes the claim that Dan Quail was brilliant. Brilliant!
Man, this guy sure does know how to babble. At least he admits that he is a moron several times.
More details and analysis here, at DMB.
July 8, 2009
At the beginning of the 20th century, a traveler in Central Africa made mention of some strange people that he had come across. He was traveling among regular, run-of-the-mill natives...probably Bantu-speaking people living in scattered villages and farming for their food. But along the way,…
July 7, 2009
Here is Al Franken being sworn in to the U. S. Senate:
Do you remember The Ad? The ad that made everyone in Minnesota who kinda didn't like Norm Coleman go over the line and realize that Norm Coleman is the scum of the earth? You can read about that here but I'll summarize it for you briefly and…
