November 23, 2012
Have you heard of the book "Once We All Had Gills: Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World"?
Here's a summary:
In this book, Rudolf A. Raff reaches out to the scientifically queasy, using his life story and his growth as a scientist to illustrate why science matters, especially at a time…
November 23, 2012
There is a petition making the rounds which is getting some real support, and that you should sign:
Enforce the tax code, and strip violating Religious institutions of their tax exempt 501(c) status.
Religious institutions across our great nation serve an important role in community building &…
November 23, 2012
Dinosaur Toys?
Glendon Mellow was asking the other day where to get “realistic” or “scientifically accurate” dinosaurs for kids to play with. There are a LOT of “realistic” dinosaur sets out there, but they are for the most part realistic in that they really look like the imagined dinosaurs of the…
November 22, 2012
After hundreds of studies, it has been difficult to link fish predation by cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) to the reduction of fishing quality in Minnesota lakes. It appears that game fish such as walleye and northern pike make up from less than 1% to nearly 3% of the bird's diet. They eat only…
November 22, 2012
A Thanksgiving Day Classic:
November 22, 2012
How will climate change affect the flavor of wine? Are warming oceans responsible for the recent global jellyfish outbreak? Do we know how a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide will affect poison ivy, tobacco, or even sea anemones? NCSE climate change project director talks about what the research…
November 22, 2012
BaBar data recently analyzed might confirm that time is wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.
If you are a B meson, time may not run the same in both directions for you. This is based on a report in Physical Review Letters called "Observation of Time-Reversal Violation in the B0 Meson System" which has…
November 22, 2012
Today is Thanksgiving in the US. Happy Thanksgiving. Let us being with a word of advice:
TAKE THE TURKEY OUT OF THE FREEZER NAO!!!
And now ... a feast.
The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your…
November 21, 2012
The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution is by a scientist Dean Falk, who has contributed significantly to the study of evolution of the human brain, and who has been directly involved in some of the more interesting controversies in human…
November 21, 2012
A probabilistic quantification of the anthropogenic component of twentieth century global warming is a paper just out that examines an important conflict in the conversation about climate change and global warming. Before getting to the details, have a look at this graph from the paper:
This is…
November 21, 2012
On March 11th, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex suffered damage from an earthquake and ensuing tsunami that caused multiple nuclear reactor core meltdowns and melt-throughs, explosions, and major releases of radioactive material into the air and the sea. In addition to the…
November 21, 2012
One of the reasons that we have not, as a species, as a group of nations, dealt effectively with Anthropogenic Global Warming is the effectiveness of climate science denialism. There are denialists in Congress, on the Internet, and everywhere. They have not succeeded in making a valid scientific…
November 21, 2012
Santa wants you to have this book!
Atheist Voices of Minnesota (which comes in a print version and a Kindle version) is a collection of individual journeys to atheism. All the authors are Minnesotan (natural born, former, or immigrant to the North Star State). While some of the authors are…
November 20, 2012
Nature, the journal, has come out in favor of the US congress acting on a Carbon Tax now.
As looming tax increases and budget cuts threaten to plunge the US economy back into recession, Congress should take a hard look at introducing a carbon tax as an important part of the solution.
This week, a…
November 20, 2012
Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life by Martin Meredith examines the history of human evolution studies, focusing on Africa, and provides a comprehensive overview of the conflict between different researchers, different points of view, and sometimes, different evidence. It is a…
November 20, 2012
Just a quick note, review to come later. Henry Gee has produced a Second Edition of his book The Science of Middle-Earth: Explaining The Science Behind The Greatest Fantasy Epic Ever Told!, which will be released on December 14th as a Kindle eBook.
There are two things to know about this. First,…
November 20, 2012
Neil deGrasse Tyson if famous for telling us that children are natural scientists, and cautioning us to be careful not to ruin that thing about them. He makes a good case. No one ever thought, I think, that he meant that children were born resistant to the sorts of biases that scientists actively…
November 20, 2012
You may have heard that the release of greenhouse gases has recently gone down, to match levels of several years ago. Why, then, do we have someone saying that greenhouse gasses have reached a new record high?
There are two, maybe three, reasons.
First, even though CO2 release from the US may be…
November 20, 2012
This is the time of year that we rightfully contemplate the noble Turkey. The very first thing we notice about this large member of the Galliformes is that there is a wild version and a domestic version, and although the two are rather different, they are both given the same species name, Meleagris…
November 19, 2012
These are the tweets from the Montreal Police:
For those who don't know, Dennis Markuze is a perennial internet-only (so far) stalker who has been sending nasty emails and tweets to anyone he sees as a key Atheist figure or anyone thusly linked, and posting rambling often offensive sometimes…
November 19, 2012
I can't believe we still have to cover this. We know how old the Earth is. The science on this is pretty darn good. It is 4.54 billion years old plus or minus about 1%.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio does not know how old the earth is. Here is what he says about it:
I'm not a scientist, man. I can…
November 19, 2012
A man "lies crumpled on the sand ... Behind him a dark trail leads back to the spot from which he has just been dragged. Looking closer, we notice something slightly odd about the figure crouching over the wounded man. His posture does not suggest a doctor attempting to staunch bleeding, or even…
November 19, 2012
I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the "tribal" people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or…
November 18, 2012
Sea snakes are true snakes that look a little like eels because of their horizontally flattened rudder-like tails, and they spend a lot of time...for most species, their entire lives...in the ocean. Only one species seems to be able to move on land at all. They seem to all be venomous, some…
November 18, 2012
I previously posted on a way to make a turkey that would leave you with the bulk of the bird's uncooked skeleton, and I promised some tips for how to make good stock.
Making stock involves cooking, in water, stuff that imparts flavor, such as meat and vegetables. But there are a few guidelines…
November 18, 2012
You've got your turkey all planned out, and you've got some stock. Now, it's time to explore the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Gravy. (And maybe something to put it on.)
I will tell you how to make excellent gravy with no stress and guaranteed success. Without lumps.
I don't do recipes. I do…
November 18, 2012
First, consider cooking something other than a turkey
Cooking turkey is actually kind of a dumb idea. Most people don't ever cook turkey. Turkey is like chicken ... it's a domestic bird that is familiar to all Americans ... but it is very difficult to cook in a way that does not ruin it. So once…
November 18, 2012
Do you now the story of the Essex? It is a ship that went down to the sea in the 19th century, and the first mate survived to chronicle the story (The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex). There are a lot of reasons that this story is interesting and important. For me, there is a special level of…
November 17, 2012
I have 3D Sun on my iPad, and every now and then it beeps at me and tells me that something important is happening. Earlier today it beeped at me to tell me that an ENORMOUS solar eruption happened.
Notice that the update just prior to the Huge Eruption is an update daying "NOAA forecasters…
November 17, 2012
and later on podcast.
They are the stuff of horror and science fiction stories. They are the fodder for much political debate and public fear. Yet they may be our future and our salvation.
What are they? They are artificially created biological organisms. Authors George Church and Ed Regis, in…
