December 21, 2007
Roland S. Martin is a CNN commentator who is coming late to the War on Christmas.
The name Roland Martin reminds me of Rowan and Martin. I'm pretty sure that is why Rowan S. Martin uses the "S." .. so people don't think of Rowan and Martin when they hear his name.
Rowan and Martin were funny…
December 21, 2007
A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist, controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature. Magical enhancers regulating gene expressionmay be involved, combined with mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2 and…
December 21, 2007
Humour appears to develop from aggression caused by male hormones, according to a study published in this week's Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.... Makes total sense to me. And if you think I'm kidding, you can stuff it.
This is the finding of a newly published study by Sam Shuster…
December 21, 2007
Plant and animal fossils recently discovered from an island in the Bahamas tell a story of habitat change and human involvement in local extinction.
These finds are reported in a paper by Steadman et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Most people with an interest in…
December 21, 2007
Firefox 3 Beta is released...
From Mozilla:
Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download.
New features and changes ... include:
Improved security features such as: protection from cross-site JSON data leaks, tighter restrictions on site-specific content using effective TLD service, better…
December 21, 2007
No, no, she didn't die. My past-tensing of the verb "to live" (sorry about the verbing of the noun "tense") is a clever trick. But today is a big day in British History.
You see, today is the very first day that Queen Elizabeth of England becomes the oldest person to ever sit on the throne of…
December 21, 2007
The Catholic Church has repressed positive reviews of the movie The Golden Compass, and has encouraged people to not see the movie. Representatives of Catholic groups have spoken out forcefully, on the verge of Holy War Level Talk, against the movie and the book. Now we year news of an event that…
December 21, 2007
A lectin is a funny little protein that seems to be used in a lot of biological systems. They bind to sugars, and one of the roles they play is inhibition of "agglutination" ... clumping, or gluing together ... of other molecules.
A sea cucumber is an echinoderm that lives in the ocean. It…
December 20, 2007
Or, even, one of these...
It does require a prescription (rats!) but all you need is a special barcode and out comes your meds.
[source]
December 20, 2007
Red Hat Profitable; Solar-powered laptop for Tanzania; Happy Birthday Perl; NetBSD 4.0 released
Red Hat 3Q Profit Up 12 Percent from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- Open-source software provider Red Hat Inc. said Thursday that its third quarter profit rose 12 percent as a surge in subscriptions helped…
December 20, 2007
PLoS ONE is One Year Old Today!
December 20, 2007
Reminder: NY to pick between ODF and OOXML:
"In August of 2007, the State of New York passed legislation requiring its CIO, Melodie Mayberry-Stewart, to gather information on the advantages and disadvantages of adopting either ODF or OOXML as a document standard, and to report her findings by 15…
December 20, 2007
Comedian Ricky Gervais has engaged in a debate about theology with the Archbishop of Canterbury - confessing at the end that he might have "blown his image" by taking life seriously.
Gervais is more concerned that religious indoctrination is a form of brainwashing, and he has an interesting reason…
December 20, 2007
The uneasy alliance between Atheists and Wiccans in the War on Christmas paid off this week as a skirmish unfolded in Green Pay, Wisconsin.
A Wiccan symbol now stands alongside the Christmas manger scene above Green Bay City Hall's northwest entrance.
The new display is an evergreen wreath, about…
December 20, 2007
He's no Bing Crosby. No, he's better.
...noted atheist Richard Dawkins is taking his first foray into the world of entertainment with "Merry Nothing," a decidedly dour holiday special scheduled to air on PBS this Friday night.
For Dawkins, the program represents quite a radical shift. In his…
December 20, 2007
THE front-running candidates in the 2008 US presidential election have released Christmas ads to voters, following the lead of one Republican hopeful who copped heavy criticism for his TV spot.
Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher and state governor running for the Republican nomination, was…
December 20, 2007
The AH Trust intends to spend seven million dollars to build a theme park and studio to "promote the account of the creation recorded in the biblical book of Genesis and to combat what it sees as the malign influence on society of Darwin's theory of evolution" and to produce Christians films and TV…
December 20, 2007
Little battles are forming everywhere on the internet. Some wacko nutbag who just noticed the War on Christmas for the first time gets all spitty and spatty on the blog. This is picked up by our intelligence services and passed on to a ration, thoughtful atheist blogger, who humiliates the self…
December 19, 2007
Details here!
December 19, 2007
Yet another missing link has been found! This new find links whales to quadrupedal land mammals.
Thewissen et al. report in Nature new fossil material from the Middle Eocene of Kashmir, India. This species (in the genus Indohyus is represented by a remarkable set of remains, including cranial and…
December 19, 2007
Aepyceros melampus. This is one of the more widespread antelopes. Impala can be either grazers or browsers. They are pretty and they taste good.
This herd is located at De Wildt's Reserve very near Johannesburg
December 19, 2007
A SiCortex SC648 supercomputer and a Linux cluster of 648 CPU's and a TB of main memory woudl draw about 1,200 watts. That's gotta widen your Carbon Footprint!
Unless, of course, you are a bunch of crazy MIT students withe bicycles, and you've got generators attached to the bikes.
A team of ten…
December 19, 2007
Read it all here.
December 19, 2007
"After going premium and suffering some community fragmentation, the OpenOffice.org open source office suite is being taken in a new direction by a company named Ulteo. A brainchild of Gael Duval, founder of Mandriva Linux, Ulteo's mission is to serve as a platform for putting applications onto the…
December 19, 2007
African American children may have reduced verbal ability compared to other children to a degree that is roughly equivalent to missing a year in school, according to a recently published paper. Is this evidence of a racial difference?
The study by Sampson et.al., published in the Proceedings of…
December 19, 2007
A conservative commentator recently editorialized:
For centuries, atheism has been the rake lurking around the edges of the Christmas party, but now it's slurping from the punch bowl in the middle of the room.
Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are selling atheist manifestos by…
