December 15, 2012
I have been writing about this topic for years. Lately, I have been ignoring it. Last few massacres, I didn't say or do anything. I think Gabby Gifford's shooting was a last straw for me; I became too disgusted with our situation and I became too disheartened with the number of people who require…
December 14, 2012
But not as severely as they should have been.
The IPCC, as you know, comes out with a set of reports every five years. The reports are written by groups of experts. Draft reports are widely accessible to people who register themselves as "experts" and there is no quality control in that process,…
December 14, 2012
When Atheists talk, people listen.
Then, they tell them to shut up.
David Phillip Norris of the Twin Cities recently wrote an article for MNPost called With talk of tolerance and equality, one group is still forgotten: atheists. This was written as a reflection on the just finished and rather…
December 14, 2012
When I was in 5th grade one of my classmates announced that she and her family (they were a family of singing folksingers) planned to take a trip in a boat they had built around the continent. In that class were were all required to give talks on various topics of our choosing, and she gave a talk…
December 13, 2012
Fifty years ago to day a space ship passed by the planet Venus. The Earthlings had named the space craft "Mariner 2" and sent it to Venus for purely scientific purposes. Interplanetary domination was never the intention of this or any other Earth mission.
And that began the story of planetary…
December 13, 2012
The Slow Loris (Genus Nycticebus) is a category of prosimian (primates that are neither monkey or ape) that lives in southeast Asia. Most prosimian species live on the island of Madagascar, but there are several African and Asian forms, all of which are nocturnal. The Slow Loris is special…
December 13, 2012
Ebb and Flow, the Twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Space Ships, which have been employed to provide detailed gravitational mapping of the Moon's geology, have apparently served their purpose and will be reprogrammed in a few hours from now to crash into the moon on Monday.…
December 13, 2012
Tired of merely watching birds? Ever consider trying to draw them? There's a method to do so. John Muir Laws is very good at this and he's written a book that can help you get started, maybe even become good at it yourself:Laws Guide to Drawing Birds .
In case you were wondering, Laws' name does…
December 13, 2012
Why is the inclusion of creationism and "intelligent design" still a viable proposal for American biology curricula? What other secular policies are at risk of religious intrusion? NCSE board member Barbara Forrest dissects the issue with a panel of experts, including Barry Lynn, Chris Mooney, and…
December 13, 2012
The Hobbit, the movie, opens tomorrow in a theater near you. This is based on J.R.R. Tolkien's book, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, which chronicles the adventure of Bilbo Baggins. To many, this constitutes a prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which many read (or saw in movie form)…
December 12, 2012
I just reconfigured my laptop with a new system (a form of Linux) and, almost as important, a new power brick. That second item may be more interesting than it sounds for some of you; I'll write that up later. This change also meant trashing my emacs configuration file. I didn't have to trash it…
December 12, 2012
But not that moon. Saturn's moon. And it is not really the Nile. But, just as the Nile is one of the longest rivers on Earth, this new river is the longest river observed anywhere other than the earth. Yay Earth, you have the Longest Rivers known to Earthlings!
Scientists with NASA's Cassini…
December 12, 2012
Tea Party leader South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint is stepping down from his position in the US Senate to take on leadership of the Conservative Heritage Foundation. That itself is kind of strange, since being a US Senator is a Big Huge Deal and being the head of some think tank is only a…
December 12, 2012
A friend of mine told me this story: As a special forces soldier, a Green Beret, he was alone and traveling through a dense area of jungle in or near Viet Nam during the 1960s. Enemy soldiers were nearby and he intended to pass through their patrol area to arrive at some safe destination, but he…
December 11, 2012
Human infants require more care than they should, if we form our expectations based on closely related species (apes, and more generally, Old World simian primates). It has been said that humans are born three months early. This is not accurate. It was thought that our body size predicted a 12,…
December 11, 2012
This is a summary of several of the better books I’ve had the opportunity to review here, organized in general categories. This is written from a North American perspective since most of my readers are North American (though many of you live to the west of the “Eastern Region” … but you probably…
December 11, 2012
Yesterday I wrote about Chris Stringer's modified version of human evolution. Today, let's have a look at Ian Tattersall's new book, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins (Macsci). Tatersall's boo, like Sringer's, is a good overview of the newer evidence in the constantly…
December 10, 2012
A very humorous but fake study from the conservative "The Intelligence Institute" has been circulating around the Internet. The headline: "Intelligence Institute Study shows Fox News viewers have an IQ that is 20 points lower than the U.S. National average" The good news, the study says, "...an…
December 10, 2012
Chris Stringer's new book, Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth, attempts to reconcile the age-old conflict between the "Multiregional" and "Out of Africa" hypotheses of Modern Human origins. Stringer has long been identified with the "Out of Africa" hypothesis, and his…
December 10, 2012
Darwinian Psychology, or really, any “Psychology” that claims to be science, will operate under the assumption that the human brain, as an organ, has arrived at its modern form through the process of evolution, which includes a certain amount of design through Natural Selection. It does not take…
December 10, 2012
Carl Safina is in some ways a modern Rachel Carson, an ecologist who writes excellent stuff about ecology. The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World is his latest work. I saw him recently at the Gustavus Nobel conference where he gave this talk (the actual talk starts at…
December 9, 2012
I liked Chickens: Their Natural and Unnatural Histories by Janet Lembke even if it is annoyingly unscholarly in places where it should be (assertions of fact are frequently made with zero or poor referencing). As far as I can tell, the writing is accurate in its coverage of all things Chicken.…
December 8, 2012
I'd like to call a truce on the War on Christmas. The true meaning of this holiday is, of course, the presents, and pursuant to that I have some suggestions for you in case you are stuck.
Dr Who Presents
The Doctor Who TARDIS Cookie Jar is a must have because is is a Dr. Who Thing, it is a TARDIS…
December 8, 2012
I'm pretty sure that for a long time people who were supposed to know what they were talking about were explaining the Higgs Boson wrong. This led other people to think of it the wrong way as well. I'm not even speaking here of the whole "god particle" thing. That's a whole nuther, equally…
December 8, 2012
The LEGO Adventure Book, Vol. 1: Cars, Castles, Dinosaurs & More! by Megan Rothrock is primarily for people who have been messing around with LEG for, say, less than 10 years or so, especially those who are new at it and seek both inspiration and guidance in such daunting tasks as making a…
December 7, 2012
The other day, PZ Myers noted in a Blog post the remembrance of the École Polytechnique massacre in which Marc Lépine hunted down and killed 14 women, injured another 10 women and a handful of men, as his way of striking out against feminism. To be clear, he was hunting down and killing feminists…
December 7, 2012
A while back I raised the question: Is there still room on the shelf for an almanac? in reference to the World Almanac for Kids. I thought it might be cool for some kids of the right age, if nothing else to demonstrate them (however untrue it may be) that there are still some things you can learn…
