March 13, 2009
The crew of the international space station had a close call with a spent satellite engine in Earth orbit Thursday, forcing the crew to take shelter aboard its return capsule before the object passed harmlessly, NASA said.
cnn
Well, as George Carlin would say, "That was not a near miss. It was a…
March 13, 2009
Coleman, that is.
Stephanie Zvan kicks Norm Coleman's ass all the way from here to Bognor Regis.
Read it here.
March 13, 2009
A 24-year-old ski lift operator who fatally shot the general manager of the Eldora ski area was determined to kill co-workers who weren't Christian, according to court records obtained Thursday.
Ed's got this covered.
March 13, 2009
... Not politically better, not feel good better, not any of that. Well, yes, that too. But for all areas where Open Source is developed, it it simply better technologically. Anybody telling you different is selling you a bill of goods.
I tried to say something of this sort here, on Bill Hooker'…
March 13, 2009
Details here.
Help Al Franken out with the trial expenses here. Please.
March 13, 2009
.... Not to pick on Norm's physical appearance or anything, but those of use who find his continued existence in Minnesota politics both enigmatic and unconscionable (for us, for allowing it) are starting to see him like that. Anyway, somebody who is too busy to blog sent me this interesting item…
March 13, 2009
March 12, 2009 (Computerworld) WASHINGTON -- While new federal CIO Vivek Kundra gave a speech here this morning on his vision for the U.S. government's use of technology, the FBI conducted a search of the District of Columbia's IT offices -- where Kundra worked until last week -- and arrested an…
March 12, 2009
And his name is Charley Brown. Chapter one of a novel set in bustling Pembina North Dakota is here, at Quiche Moraine.
March 12, 2009
The following post has been slightly revised in response to commentary below and elsewhere. I thank all those who commented for the helpful critique.
The question of diversity in science, and more specifically, success for women, is often discussed in relation to bench or lab oriented fields.…
March 12, 2009
Yes, it is the Mendel's Garden Frankenpeople edition, at Biofortified. This is a web carnival all about genetics and stuff. Enjoy it here.
March 12, 2009
A colleague and grad student of mine, Rob, just sent me the following question, slightly edited here:
A student in my intro class asked me a good question the other day to which I had no answer. When did smiling cease to be a threat gesture? I have a couple of ideas. One is that with reduced…
March 12, 2009
The FBI "raided" the Washington DC (city) office of Vivek Kundra, who is just finishing his term as Chief of Technology for the district. Kundra had been asked to to to the Federal Government to be the federal chief information officer.
Later in the day, the FBI agents arrested two people, a DC…
March 12, 2009
There is new information from an older idea (from about 2000) by Paul Sherman and colleagues. The idea underlying this research is simple: Symptoms of illnesses may be adaptive. Indeed, this may be true to the extent that we should not call certain things illnesses. Like "morning sickness."…
March 12, 2009
The phrase "genomic imprinting" has come to refer the turning off of a gene (a particular instance of a gene on a particular chromosome duplicated across the cells in a body) so that the gene is not expressed at all, with the turning off of the gene not caused in the body in question, but rather,…
March 12, 2009
Federal agents this morning are searching the Judiciary Square office of Washington, D.C.'s Chief Technology Officer.
The search is part of "an ongoing investigation," said a spokeswoman for the FBI's D.C. Field Office, Lindsay Gotwin, said. She declined to comment further.
The outgoing Chief…
March 12, 2009
It has long been known that incest is not as bad as you think. Anti-cousin marriage laws are like prohibition laws and blue laws. They arise from a Christian conservative movement that swept Western Civilization from the late 18th century through the 19th century, up to about the time of the…
March 11, 2009
Hat Tip Evolving Complexity
March 11, 2009
Don't overlook the awful news from Germany, in which a taunted and bullied crazy person killed 15 people and self. He started out in his old High School where he gunned down 9 people, so quickly that many of the dead were students found with their head on the desk and their pencils still in their…
March 11, 2009
Bill Gates is now (once again) the richest person in the world, even though he lost a personal 18 billion dollars since last year.
In other words, Bill Gates lost more than the GNP of Kenya, El Salvador, Iraq, Qatar and about a hundred other countries. If Bill gaes was a country, he'd be about…
March 11, 2009
Mother ship? No, I'm not talking about Target! I'm talking about SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, the web site of Seed Magazine, which in turn, is inextricably (much to their horror, I'm sure) entangled with Scienceblogs.com.
The home page of the venerable purveyor of Science as Culture is HERE. Have a look at…
March 11, 2009
Lee Yong Dae is an Olympic gold medal winning badminton player. ..
Totally stolen from Miss Cellania:
Watch Badminton Shuttlecock Smashes Watermelon and more funny videos on CollegeHumor
March 11, 2009
Funniest thing on the internet today.
Here in the TC, we have howling winds and sub zero temps, and the wind chill is 30 or 40 below. But we have food, at least.
March 10, 2009
The basic fabric of the universe is heterogeneous and lumpy. Why? Cosmologists fight over that. Recent theoretical work may be pushing the pendulum towards a string-related explanation (after a period of time when this seemed less likely).
A network of 'cosmic strings' criss-crossing the…
March 10, 2009
I first became acquainted with the Romanovs (as historical figures, not the actual Romanovs) reading in middle school about Russian History. Later, someone turned me on to Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra, which is quite a well known popular historical account of the last Czar of Russia and his…
March 10, 2009
Pytoplankton gets some of its nutrients from the dust that settles on the ocean surface. Unfortunately, some of this dust, owing to human caused pollution, is toxic to phytoplankton.
Adina Paytan, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues have found that…
March 10, 2009
... has been found. Inside the fish's skull, in fact. This is from a chimaeroid fish, which today are fairly rare but during the Carboniferoius were quite common and diverse. There are really two aspects of this find that are especially interesting. One is the 3D imagery that was obtained of…
March 10, 2009
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March 10, 2009
Karen Ventii is a medical writer in Atlanta, who formerly blogged at Science to Life on the Scienceblogs.com network. Karen has written a guest post for Quiche Moraine on Gender Trends in Science and Medical Writing. Please have a look, it is quite interesting. Here.
March 10, 2009
Dino spoor, that is. A recently reported finding in PLoS ONE clarifies a number of questions about how certain dinosaurs held their front limbs (zombie/Frankenstein-position palm-down vs. huggie-wuggie palms-facing-each-other). This research confirms ...
that early theropods, like later birds,…
March 9, 2009
Franken/Coleman recount updates, what happened to the General Motors pension funds, 10 reasons why conservatives' fiscal ideas are dangerous, and the last stronghold of free-market economics: academia?
catch up here.
