March 2, 2009
Only one person on the crew spoke English, and this was the same person, a young woman named Akiko, who called herself a "production assistant," with whom I'd been in communication to arrange this whole thing, over the last many months.
The crew was from Japan and they were filming a documentary…
March 2, 2009
Berry Go Round #14 is up and running at Gravity's Rainbow. Here. Enjoy!
March 2, 2009
The Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds is a rather unique product, targeted squarely at mobile professionals who require the power, features, and performance of workstation-class machine on the go. We previously evaluated the standard ThinkPad W700 and praised the system for its performance and stand-out…
March 2, 2009
Late word out of the IAU's Minor Planet Center: a small asteroid will pass close to Earth [on] ...March 2nd ... at 13:44 Universal Time. How close? The MPC's Timothy Spahr calculates that it'll be 0.00047 astronomical unit from Earth's center. That's only about 40,000 miles (63,500 km) up -- well…
March 1, 2009
... explained.
I heard the first 50 minutes or so of a one hour edition of This American Life dedicated to explaining the banking crisis in terms that can be understood by any reasonable smart (or even not so smart) person. The bottom line: Nationalize the banks, then re-privatize them as soon as…
March 1, 2009
This morning, interviewed by Yours Truly. Massimo was brilliant! You will not want to miss this. The podcast is up now at this location on the intertubes. You should also visit Dr. Dr. Dr. Pigliucci's web site, Rationally Speaking, here.
March 1, 2009
Should OpenOffice.org (OOo) writer (the text editor unit of the OpenSource office suite) have the horizontal ruler, on the top of the page, visible by default, or should it be hidden by default? This is the argument that it should be hidden by default. If you become a registered user of the OOo…
February 28, 2009
Since someone is posting love songs, I figured I could do that too.
Peace Monday!
OK OK so that was not a love song. But the love song is not a video, just a still with the music in the background, and that just isn't commercial. Well, maybe with a couple of Margaritas in the right company,…
February 28, 2009
... Being interviewed by ME! (So don't expect this to go well!!!!)
Sunday March 1, 2009
Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, of the Stonybrook Institute in New York, is a biologist and a philosopher who has published about a hundred technical papers and several books on evolutionary biology. He is a fellow…
February 27, 2009
Laughing at Coulter. Below the fold.
February 27, 2009
Perhaps we are all subject to falling into the trap of what I call the Hydraulic Theory of Everything. If you eat more you will be bigger, if you eat less you will be smaller. Emotional states are the continuously varying outcome of different levels of a set of hormones, forming "happy" or "…
February 27, 2009
This barking dog is not very smart. But it could make a good Republican. The only thing harder to understand than Michele Bachmann is the Republican Party. Bachmann is hard to understand in this way: How can a person with her mind be an elected member of congress?!?!??? The Republican party…
February 26, 2009
Public Schools new dress code enforced - watch more funny videos
February 26, 2009
A "pre-existing condition" in the North Indian Ocean stoked the sudden intensification of last year's Tropical Cyclone Nargis just before its devastating landfall in Burma, according to a new NASA/university study. The cyclone became Burma's worst natural disaster ever and one of the deadliest…
February 26, 2009
An Open Letter to All Software Developers,
I don't like changing, shifting, cutsie, idiotic date formats, and I don't like rounding off much either.
Many systems that provide information on date and time make unwrarented and embarrassingly stupid assumptions about what you want to know. In…
February 26, 2009
This week we touched on the adviser/advisee relationship between faculty and students in class, and by coincidence blogger k8andcat has posted a very insightful and useful post on this topic. If you are a student (grad or undergrad) or a potential mentor, please read it.
It is here.
February 26, 2009
We are expecting the storm of the year today in the Twin Cities. I'm looking at a weather map, and there is snow everywhere around Minneapolis and Saint Paul, including where I am. Events have been canceled. The whole nine yards (important planning related sports metaphor).
Yet when I look…
February 26, 2009
Bash 4.0 includes associative arrays, a superwildcard called "**" and a new redirection operator. Details are here.
February 26, 2009
Ana has contributed a detailed comment.
February 25, 2009
The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such…
February 25, 2009
Go to any bar and you'll see a lot of males standing and sitting around not mating. I'll bet you would have guessed that the reason they are not mating is that no females will mate with them for one reason or another. But there is the distinct possibility that they are very inconspicuously…
February 25, 2009
Lizzie, got a job. It's a pretty nice job, with benefits and a salary and everything. Not in her field (biology), but it is a job she likes. So I took her out for a congratulatory dinner, which ultimately gave me a chance to try a new restaurant. Also, we had been in a routine for a few months of…
February 25, 2009
So Ana IM's me, and I can tell through the text that she was almost out of breath with excitement or fear or something. But then I remembered shes been observing the Minnesota Senate court challenge. Turns out something rather interesting happened. Luckily, TPM has it covered:
Norm Coleman's…
February 25, 2009
When will the madness end? When the Republicans dry up and blow away, of course.
In the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union 2.0 address, by Bobby Jindal, governer of Louisiana, we heard this:
"Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of…
February 25, 2009
Why is there no Birth Control Pill for men?
The answer I'd like to propose can be summed up in two closely linked words pilfered from the question itself:
Men. Control.
Myriad aspects of life can be understood by recognizing a single critical fact, and the layered, sometimes complex, deeply…
February 25, 2009
joined twitter
February 24, 2009
Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex?
One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized as potentially significant for…
