March 5, 2009
It turns out that Dolphin Safe Tuna is bad for sharks. And visa versa. More or less....
Let's as BlogFish about it...
Who's right depends on what you value more, dolphins or broader ocean ecosystem health. At least that's the way I see it. We could protect dolphins totally during tuna fishing…
March 5, 2009
In this illuminating talk, Richard Pyle shows us thriving life on the cliffs of coral reefs and groundbreaking diving technologies he has pioneered to explore it. He and his team risk everything to reveal the secrets of undiscovered species.
March 5, 2009
Bonus video:
Rachel on Jay Leno
March 5, 2009
NASA's planet-hunting space telescope Kepler is slated to launch the night of March 6 from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to find Earth-sized planets that could have liquid water at the surface and potentially harbor life.
"It's not just another science mission. This…
March 5, 2009
Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, will reportedly not leave his television career to become Surgeon General.
I read it here.
March 5, 2009
Ed Ulbrich, the digital-effects guru from Digital Domain, explains the Oscar-winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create the older versions of Brad Pitt's face for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."
March 5, 2009
It is a long way from Kazakhstan to Kentucky, but the journey to the Derby may have started among a pastoral people on the Kazakh steppes who appear to have been the first to domesticate, bridle and perhaps ride horses -- around 3500 B.C., a millennium earlier than previously thought.…
March 5, 2009
Dawkins gave a talk that could be criticized as not particularly new, in that his main idea is that human brains are too powerful and adaptable to continue to function primarily within an adaptive program serving as a proper adaptive organ. Instead, human brains think up all sorts of other, rather…
March 5, 2009
A unique ecosystem of plants, birds and monkeys thrives in the treetops of the rainforest. Nalini Nadkarni explores these canopy worlds -- and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships.
March 5, 2009
... again ... This just in from the NCSE:
Antievolution law proposed in Florida
It's not a hurricane or even a tropical storm. But a small knot of ignorance is twisting through the Florida state senate.
Late last week, Stephen R. Wise (R-District 5) filed Senate Bill 2396, which if passed,…
March 4, 2009
Richard Dawkins came to Minneapolis and gave a talk, sponsored by CASH, the primary atheist/humanist group on the UMN campus, on "The Purpose of Purpose."
Before the talk, several of us got together at Annie's Parlour. It was harmonic convergence, in a sense, of numerous independent groups all…
March 4, 2009
...My friend Carl and I went out to the Berne Grange Hall, up on The Heldeberg, one evening to see them. I remember my brother, in his white lamé suit, holding up a Jimmy Hendrix album and saying, "If any of you can tell me who this is, you win the album." (Silence.) "OK, now we're going to play a…
March 4, 2009
A Texas-sized battle over scrapping a longtime requirement that Lone Star State students be taught weaknesses in the theory of evolution has split politicians, parents, and professors who teach biology at the state's Christian universities.
"I hope to reach others on the weightier matters of the…
March 4, 2009
A RIVETING and hugely satisfying report on BBC Radio 4 today tells the story of a missionary who was charged by an American missionary group with taking the Gospel to the little understood Pirahãs tribe in the Amazon - only to realise how ridiculous his faith in Christianity was.
... read about it…
March 4, 2009
A computer model of the formation of Olympus Mons (a big giant mountain on Mars) indicates that this geological formation should contain pockets of water.
The scientists explained that their finding is more implication than revelation. "What we were analyzing was the structure of Olympus Mons,…
March 4, 2009
...The war has just ended, both are finding their way home on foot, still in uniform, bedraggled, soul-weary. The only thing keeping them putting one foot ahead of the next is the thought of home and family. Meeting on the road, they recognize each other through the grime and dust for the brothers…
March 4, 2009
And with this, a five year old catapulted back in time, say 10,000 years in West Asia or Southern Europe, encountering two people, would make perfectly intelligible sentence that wold be understood by all. Assuming all the people who were listening were at least reasonably savvy about language and…
March 3, 2009
"We'll be in the Hudson." Holy crap. I've been in the Hudson. But not like that.
March 3, 2009
..Dr. Michael Behe is a biochemist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He's also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a well known creationist think tank whose purpose is to disguise religious doctrine as science in order to avoid the Constitutional ban on promoting religion in public…
March 3, 2009
Kim Hannula is a 40-ish geology professor at a public liberal arts college in the Rockies. Her New Year's resolution is to reduce stress by changing her rheology, or maybe by walking to work and looking at the pretty mountains.
Go visit and say hey. If you can get the comments on Kim's blog to…
March 3, 2009
Start beating your children now. It is god's will.
H/T: Pharyngula
I love the way they link Bill Clinton's failed attempt at getting a blow job to teenage suicide.
March 3, 2009
...Here's the main point of our disagreement. Alden is a strong Christian who thinks that modernism has had a disastrous effect on our culture and our individual abilities to determine the answers to important questions. As an atheist, I am unable to see where religious belief and faith yield any…
March 3, 2009
Emacs is exactly like a religion. A western religion, at least, operates by testing the faith of its participants. The god coldly allows babies to die of unexplained illnesses, violence to affect the innocent, wars to break out, natural disasters to ruin everything. That we mortals have faith…
March 3, 2009
... hiding in a Ring of Saturn.
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn's G ring an embedded moonlet that appears as a faint, moving pinprick of light. Scientists believe it is a main source of the G ring and its single ring arc.
Cassini imaging scientists analyzing images acquired over…
March 3, 2009
Seriously! The Franken team is now entering the 'defense' phase of the absurd Election Challenge launched by Norman Coleman, who lost the election for Senate to Al Franken but who refuses to give up his seat.
If everybody who reads this blog sends five dollars to Al, they'll have enough to ... well…
March 3, 2009
The Vatican is sponsoring a five day conference to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species.
The subject is the compatibility of evolution and creation.
More at the BBC
March 3, 2009
Circus of the Spineless Issue 36 is up at Invertebrate Diaries
March 3, 2009
Norm Coleman had to pay a $7,500 fine yesterday for failure to disclose important evidence in the 26 day long Franken-Coleman Senatorial Election Challenge Trial. The plaintiff, Coleman, also claimed in a written statement to the court that since the number of illegal votes cast in this election…
March 2, 2009
Apparently, there has been some significant movement in Florida, as a major shift has occurred in public opinion regarding evolution vs. creationism. Nearly 100 percent of readers of the Orlando Sentinel, it would seem at least on the surface, to support the teaching of evolution, and not…
