April 19, 2008
This is probably the last thing I'm going to say about pseudonymous blogging. I plan to leave the issue behind forever. Or at least for a few days. The "argument" between DrugMonkey - PhsyioProf - BlaBlaBlaBlog ("the clique") and me has become sterile and senseless, primarily because the clique…
April 19, 2008
The Oklahoma City bombing was a terrorist attack on April 19, 1995 aimed at the U.S. government in which the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in an office complex in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The attack claimed 168 lives and left over 800 injured. Until the September 11, 2001…
April 18, 2008
The Best Laid Plans...A homeless man has found confidential blueprints for New York's new Freedom Tower dumped in a city rubbish bin.
Mike Fleming handed the documents - marked "Secure Document - Confidential" in to the New York Post newspaper.
The Freedom Tower is being built at Ground Zero, to…
April 18, 2008
Good question ... what IS in the air?
The simple answer is that the air ... the Earth's atmosphere ... is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with a tiny amount of some other gases including water vapor. Then, there's dirt. I want to talk a little about the oxygen, one of the other gases (carbon…
April 18, 2008
... the blog carnival, is HERE at Dinosaurs and The Bible: A Creationist's Fairy Tale
April 18, 2008
Darrow was born this day in 1857. He was a lawyer and a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
We know him as the defender of John Scopes in the Monkey Trial of 1925. Darrow and Scopes lost that trial, which was the first of many court cases regarding the teaching of…
April 18, 2008
When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and…
April 17, 2008
Check out the new Climatology of Global Ocean Winds Atlas:
You can drill down to various segments of the planet (well, the oceans) and loot at wind patterns in great detail, with nice rose plots and everything. (Click on the picture to go to the site.)
Winds are the largest source of momentum…
April 17, 2008
The I and the Bird #73: The Other Diary of Samuel Pepys web carnival is up at A Snail's Eye View
April 17, 2008
The 103rd edition of the Tangled Bank is available at Nature Network.
April 17, 2008
A couple of weeks ago, Bayblab blog requested that I join a discussion on their site regarding pseudonymous blogging. It was obvious to me given the reputation of Bayblab that this was likely an ingenuous request, but I went ahead and joined the discussion anyway.
In the course of that discussion…
April 17, 2008
The Seattle Times, which as far as I know is a regular newspaper, has published a guest editorial by Bruce Chapman in their opinion section.
Chapman has published a lot of editorials in the Seattle Times, and in sum, they make him look like (I'm just sayin') he's on the payroll of both Microsoft…
April 17, 2008
A huge archive of Darwin's unpublished material has been put on line this week at The Complete Works of Charles Darwin. Many of his notebooks were already on line, but much of that was previously published (so the notes that were on line were actually published. The newly netted material has no…
April 16, 2008
A survey of the Western Area Peninsula Forest (WAPF) in Sierra Leone has discovered two new breeding colonies of the Vulnerable White-necked Picathartes Picathartes gymnocephalus, in addition to the 16 sites already known.
The survey was part of a one-year project carried out by volunteers from the…
April 16, 2008
Apparently, this did not used to be true. TV news viewers in the past did not pick their news station in a way that correlated with party affiliation in the US. But now, increasingly so, they do.
This is from a study from the University of Georgia, Athens, based on data from the Pew Center for…
April 16, 2008
Several thousand intelligent beings have surrounded two funny looking blue trees. On some planet. Elsewhere. [Image source] Back in the old days, when Carl Sagan was alive and at Harvard, there was an annual (or at least frequent) debate between Sagan and my adviser, Irv DeVore. The debate was…
April 16, 2008
He was 90 and worked at MIT. From the MIT press release:
Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.
A…
April 16, 2008
There are so many lessons in this story it is hard to know where to start. First, don't throw away data. Second, scientists do question their own dogma and in fact get rather excited about it. Third, Click and Clack (Car Talk) glossed their answer to a question the other day (sort of) ... it…
April 16, 2008
At this moment (noonish central time, April 16th) if you type "Expelled" into a google search, the results in order are:
1: The expelled movie site.
2: Another page on the expelled movie dite
3: The wikipedia entry for Expelled
4: A blog by PZ Myers at Pharyngula for when he got expelled from…
April 16, 2008
Speaking at the first TED Conference in 1984, Nicholas Negroponte waxes prophetic on the converging fields of technology, entertainment and design. Years before anyone was using the word "convergence," Negroponte was thinking about TV screens as the "electronic books of the future" and computers as…
April 15, 2008
But wait, there's more....
April 15, 2008
Molecular and Cell Biology Carnival #1 is up at The Skeptical Alchemist.
April 15, 2008
The following video is on the NCSE Expelled Exposed web site, but that site is getting so much use it is broken! So enjoy the video while we wait for ExpelledExposed to come back up...
Expelled exposed is here.
April 15, 2008
Let's have some LOL cats...
see more crazy cat pics
But wait, there's more...
April 15, 2008
The April 15, 2008 edition of Books Carnival is at The Book's Den.
The "To Hell With Expelled Blog Carnival!" will be held at Dinosaurs and The Bible: A Creationist's Fairy Tale. Please send your entries by April 17th.
