gregladen

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Greg Laden

Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist and science communicator. His research has covered North American prehistoric and historic archaeology and African archaeology and human ecology. He is an OpenSource and OpenAccess advocate. Greg's wife, Amanda, is a High School biology teacher, his daughter Julia is a world traveler and his son Huxley is 2.

Posts by this author

May 10, 2017
As you know, President Trump sacked FBI Director James Comey yesterday. The firing involved a letter written by Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general, complaining about Comey, to Jeff Sessons. (The three relevant letters by Rosenstein, Sessons, and Trump are here.) Jeff Sessons had recused…
May 10, 2017
Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual by Jeremy Brecher is a new and helpful book a the growing and essential literature. Late in 2015, nearly two hundred countries signed the Paris Agreement acknowledging their individual and collective duty to protect the earth’s climate—and willfully…
May 9, 2017
Imma just put these here, and you can tell me what you think they mean. Click here to get a PDF, and to see the entire Rosenstein letter.
May 9, 2017
The merging of Alexa and your Internet experience appears to be happening as we speak. You know about the "Echo" by Amazon, similar to Google Home (which apparently you can buy at Target, which presumably does not have a similar device). This is the machine that listens for you to say its name…
May 9, 2017
You've heard of Homo naledi, the strange "human ancestor" (really, a cousin) found a while back in South Africa. There were many skeletal remains in a cave, in the kind of shape you'd expect if they had crawled into the cave and died there, not much disturbed. They look enough like other members…
May 9, 2017
Evil Speaks: Warriors and Watchers Saga by S. Woffington is a new scifi/fantasy novel with an interesting twist. If there is a Bechdel Test for ableism, it would pass. This is an interesting story written for youthful readers (see publisher's summary below) that is well written and mostly devoid…
May 8, 2017
We begin with the usual list of things you pretty much always do after installing every Linux OS. Why these things are not automatically done for you on installation is a bit mysterious, but down deep there are generally reasons (legal reasons) for some of these things. In fact, pretty much…
May 8, 2017
A Zapus is a kind of jumping mouse. A Zesty Zapus is the new Ubuntu Linux operating system, 17.04. It has just been released and has some important features. But Zesty Zapus is not as interesting at the Artful Aardvark, which I'll discuss briefly below. Support of 32 bit hardware is waning across…
May 8, 2017
A Photographic Field Guide to the Birds of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh is one of those next gen guides that uses photos but photos that are either enhanced or contextualized to serve the same role as drawings served in the old days, when drawings were better and photos…
May 8, 2017
JFK: A Vision for America. As our political system slides off the seat and into the crapper, I am finding this book to be a worthy and informative distraction. From the publisher: Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy’s birth, here is the definitive compendium…
May 4, 2017
I've been enjoying Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar: A Guided Tour of the Solar System by Bonnie Buratti. Burratti is a planetary astronomer at NASA's JPL, and is the head of the Comets, Asteroids and Satellites Group. She was a key player in the Voyager program, and in the research done with the…
May 3, 2017
Andrew Jackson was born in March, 1767. Jackson was about 9 years old when the Revolutionary War started. The Revolutionary War and the Civil War were two different wars. There was another war in between called the War of 1812. It was approximately in 1812. Andrew Jackson was a lawyer, a judge…
May 2, 2017
A claim is being made, in a recent issue of Nature Magazine, that humans were active in the vicinity of San Diego well over 100,000 years before archaeologists think humans were even in the New World. Most commentary on this claim dismisses it out of hand, but out of hand rejections are no better…
May 2, 2017
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by NdGT is now available. What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil…
May 1, 2017
Honestly, it is hard to have an honest conversation about science with science obstructors or deniers. That is how you know you are conversing with a denier. You try to have the conversation, and it gets derailed by cherry picking, misdirection, faux misunderstanding, or lies. I don't care how…
April 30, 2017
Climate science deniers like to call we who are correct and rational (we the good guys) "alarmists." So be it. This is a post that closely reflects my own feelings, by my friend and colleague, Lawrence Torcello. It begins: Most of us have wondered about the human context of past crimes against…
April 29, 2017
https://twitter.com/Peoples_Climate/status/858366705105547265 https://twitter.com/PeterGleick/status/858380761786978304 https://twitter.com/USseriously/status/858380252749475840 https://twitter.com/HighTechAztec/status/858372516552822784 https://twitter.com/NRDC/status/858324745716215810 https://…
April 29, 2017
A major Canadian logger appears to be using a pair of law suits to end the existence of Greenpeace and to stop or curtail pro-environmental activities by other organizations operating in North America, or perhaps, generally. This activity is being carried out by Resolute Forest Products. This is a…
April 29, 2017
From MMFA: Broadcast networks are decreasing their climate coverage at a time when the case for reporting on the issue is become more and more compelling. By ignoring this serious matter, media are failing to inform audiences about pressing impacts on human migration patterns, women, and the…
April 29, 2017
The EPA has removed climate science from its site in order that the site contents better reflect Donald Trump's perspective. From Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin at the Washington Post: The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday evening that its website would be “undergoing changes” to…
April 28, 2017
Right in the middle, between the Trump-inspired March for Science, and the Trump-inspired People's Climate March, the New York times managed to come down firmly on the side of climate and science denial, in its editorial pages. This week sees the first NYT installment by the ex Wall Street Journal…
April 28, 2017
The Lese people practice swidden horticulture in the Ituri Forest, Congo (formerly Zaire). Living in the same area are the Efe people, sometimes known as Pygmies (but that may be an inappropriate term). The Efe and Lese share a culture, in a sense, but are distinct entities within that culture,…
April 27, 2017
The New York Times Elizabeth Spayed, Public Editor Dear Elizabeth, I am writing to express my concern for the addition of Bret Stephens to the NYT team as a columnist. I don't expect a columnist who seemingly writes about everything to be wrong about nothing. But the Gray Lady should, at the very…
April 27, 2017
I've been meaning to write a letter to the New York Times I just wrote this letter to the New York Times about their very wrong decision to add a climate science denier to their editorial staff. When they were recently challenged about this idea, the response was, paraphrasing, "millions of people…
April 27, 2017
The Republican line is this: Bring back coal, shut down development, subsidies, any encouragement at all, for solar and wind energy. There is absolutely no logic to this policy, but it is in fact the policy. The reason for it is generally thought to be that the big rich corporations and…
April 26, 2017
The Washington Post: What we are reporting here isn't fake news. But it doesn't feel exactly like real news, either. It's in that foggy realm of Trump news in which everything is slightly ambiguous and wobbly and internally inconsistent and almost certainly improvisational and not actually grounded…
April 26, 2017
Learn to Program with Small Basic: An Introduction to Programming with Games, Art, Science, and Math is yet another addition to the growing list of programming books for people interesting in learning programming. Basic is an under-appreciated language. I wish I had a good basic compiler handy, and…
April 25, 2017
In a current poll, 61% of Americans want to retain Obamacare, and improve this already implemented and existing program. A mere 37% want to "repeal and replace" it. About 69% of American want the Republicans, including the Republican President, to to do some combination of working with…
April 24, 2017
Lennox Yearwood Jr was on his way to speak at the March for Science in DC, when something bad happened. He tells us: ...at the March For Science in Washington DC on Earth Day, I was assaulted, roughed up, and detained by police in the shadow of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and…