April 10, 2013
A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the question of penis size and female preference in humans. The study involved making a set of 3D models of human males of various relative body sizes, and fitting them out with various size flaccid penises.…
April 10, 2013
Probably.
The Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University makes annual predictions of hurricane season activity, and they released one of these predictions today. This particular group has a good track record, although I would worry that they tenaciously hold to the idea that global…
April 9, 2013
There is a new outbreak of a bird flu in eastern China, referred to as H7N9. The first thing you need to know is that human populations have not been previously exposed (to any degree) to H7 or N9 type virus, so if this virus were to mutate in such as way as to spread human to human, the result…
April 9, 2013
A lecture by Professor Paul Valdes, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol.
April 9, 2013
Time to shut down comments on older posts, as we are having a blizzard of spam on those posts. I'll reopen commenting in a few days. Sorry for any inconvenience.
April 9, 2013
There is a new Gallup poll that together with earlier data from Gallup provides some interesting information about attitudes in the US about global warming.
Earlier polls have shown increase and decrease in concern about global warming, and changes in what people think of news about climate change…
April 8, 2013
The Cult of Lego is a thing ... a cult ... a past time, a cultural phenomenon. But it is also a book called, as you might guess, The Cult of LEGO.
The book is written by John Baichtal, of Make Magazine and Wired GeekDad blog and Joe Meno, the founder of Brick Journal. The publishers describe…
April 8, 2013
From the Human Rights Campaign:
April 8, 2013
Time to start watching the Arctic Sea Ice breakup. This happens every year, but as you know, the total amount of ice left each summer has been reducing, and the "old ice" which forms a basis for the arctic ice refreeze is disappearing. The result of this change in arctic ice patterns has been a…
April 7, 2013
I hear they keep them on leashes so they don't rush into the audience and kill innocent bystanders.
April 7, 2013
... James Delingpole's Hate Speech in the UK Telegraph
This is James Delingpole demonstrating his prowess when it comes to understanding and commenting on climate science. Dellingpole is the one on our right:
OK, now that we've established Delingpole to be a misinformed misguided intellectual…
April 6, 2013
Obama promised to eliminate left over random nuclear stuff that could be used to build either "clean" or "dirty" bombs, material that was distributed among several countries, by the end of this year (2013). We have yet to see if that task can be completed, but apparently it is on schedule.
Now, we…
April 6, 2013
Why was the Civil War fought?
This is "Confederate Heritage and History Month" so it is a good time to talk about the Civil War. The Civil War was fought over slavery. I don't have anything else to say about that right now, but my friend John McKay has written a lengthy blog post explaining this…
April 6, 2013
Don't hold your breath:
source
After I made this graph I found out that there is a version of it HERE with more info on the background.
April 6, 2013
There are something over 10,000 species of birds (thus the name of the famous blog). Of these, just under 600 are in very very serious trouble, some to the extent that we are not sure if they exist, others are so rare that we know they exist but there are no good photographs of them, others are…
April 5, 2013
A couple of years back, the The Crossley ID Guide for Eastern Birds came out and it caused a huge splash in the birdwatching world. For some time now it has become apparent that bird watching, especially the identification part of it, was changing in its approach. We describe it this way, though I…
April 5, 2013
Napoleon Chagnon spent years living among the Yanomamo of Venezuela and wrote, among other things, a classic ethnography still used widely in anthropology classes. It came to pass that Chagnon and his ethnography came under scrutiny, actually a few waves of scrutiny, from practitioners of cultural…
April 3, 2013
... would not have helped at Sandy Hook ... the armed guards would have been the fist to be killed ... or at any of the other places where there have been mass shootings with armed guards present or very near by. Also, many, many schools already have a "school resource officer" on duty. In…
April 2, 2013
No. That is not who we are. Shame on those counting on us forgetting.
March 31, 2013
This is why we can't have nice things, like immigration reform.
From MSNBC:
Amid a hot-button debate in Washington over how to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, Rep. Don Young, a 21-term lawmaker, referred to immigrant workers as "wetbacks" — a term that could threaten to inflame the debate…
March 31, 2013
The current Wikipedia entry for Climate Change has about 7000 words on that one page (including notes, all the other words that show up on Wikipedia pages). The current Wikipedia entry for the Hockey Stick Controversy has about 25,000 words in all.
The controversy over one aspect of climate…
March 30, 2013
Skeptically Speaking has this:
This week. we’re looking at what science has to say about the origins of selfless – and even self-sacrificing – behavior. We’ll speak to biology professor Lee Alan Dugatkin, about his book The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness. And…
March 29, 2013
Rat Island: Predators in Paradise and the World's Greatest Wildlife Rescue is a new book by William Stolzenburg. I've not seen it, but Desiree Schell interviewed the author on Skeptically Speaking:
This week, we’re looking at invasive predators, changing ecosystems, and the ethical questions…
March 28, 2013
Don't miss this excellent Skeptically Speaking:
This week, we’re looking one orbit outward, at the little red planet that’s inspired so much science and science fiction. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan talks to University of Tennessee geologist Linda Kah, about her work as part of NASA’s Mars…
March 28, 2013
Apollo 11 In 100 Seconds from Spacecraft Films on Vimeo.
March 27, 2013
There are two very important posts out there that I'd like to make you aware of related to climate change denialism. Here's the teasers, please click through and read them. If you like them, tweet them!
First, from The Scientist, an opinion piece by Michael Mann, author of The Hockey Stick and the…
March 27, 2013
This comes form Peter Sinclair's blog:
The Conservation Hawks is a new group dedicated to harnessing the power of sportsmen to address climate change. Stop. Before you give in to anger, or to the “conservation fatigue” that can fall upon us like a giant wet carpet whenever climate change is…
March 27, 2013
Rhett Allain at Dot Physics has proposed that we stop using the terms "Hypothesis", "Theory", and "Law" because people so abysmally misunderstand them. He proposes replacing them all with the term "model".
Take out all three of these “science” words from introductory texts. They do more harm than…
March 23, 2013
I've been waiting for people to die before I told this story on my blog, but certain people seem to take forever to do that so I'm not waiting any more. Besides, it happened a long time ago. The story I'm telling you happened to me a long time ago (about 1990) and the thing that happened to me…
March 23, 2013
It is important to get this right. There is something interesting happening in the Arctic right now, and some people are pointing to it and jumping up and down and yelling about how it is a major climate change event. But it may very well not be. Or it could be. The thing that is happening is…
