July 26, 2012
Lewis Black has a formula for addressing creationists. You carry around a fossil. Then, when someone starts talking about creationism, you pull it out and hold it up in plain view and say "Fossil!" Then, if they keep arguing, you throw it over their head. That makes me laugh.
Despite the fact…
July 26, 2012
UPDATE: The initial info I got clearly stated that this kind of magnet was being generally banned, but Nanodots, a brand name, and possibly some other brands are not being banned. "Buckyball" is the brand being banned. I wonder, can a company call themselves "buckyball" and trademark that name…
July 24, 2012
... older than a few days so that I can do something other than deal with a new spate of spam. This spam is different from other spam, so it is quite possible that I'll accidentally delete real comments. If you think a post of yours is taking too long to get posted let me know, and I'll see if I…
July 24, 2012
Curiosity Rover is now tweeting its stuff. Things are going to get pretty exciting over the next few days as the space ship comes in for a landing on the Planet Mars. Meanwhile, the Mars Orbiter has made positional adjustments that will facilitate sending information back about the 15 minutes of…
July 24, 2012
I have always felt that sea level rise would be quicker and higher than my colleagues in climate science have suggested. My reasoning for that is simple. Sea level rise has in the past not followed overall climate change in a perfectly simple manner such that the present era has lower sea levels…
July 24, 2012
Just to let you know, I've got a couple of new posts up in the "weblogue" series on The X Blog:
My career in music: The Early Years
We put a chair there, and we would take turns sitting in the chair and listening to the sound effects record.
A train coming from one side to another. A pin dropping…
July 24, 2012
In 2008, John O'Sullivan wrote a novel called "Vanilla Girl," which is actually a big giant blog post on blogger.com, about "A teacher's struggle to control his erotic obsession with a schoolgirl."
Blogger "About" Page of John O'Sullivan, "Vanilla Girl" author and climate change denialist. O'…
July 23, 2012
Dr. Sally Ride is reported to have died today after a long battle with cancer. She was 61. Ride was the first American woman to go into outer space, and the youngest at the time, at age 32. She was also a pioneer in STEM promotion, and a prolific author.
July 23, 2012
The question came up: If referring to a person as a word for a female body part in an insulting manner is sexist, then isn't calling a man a "boob" sexist?
(I may or may not have referred to some guy as a boob.)
My first reaction was to simply say, "No, because a boob, in this sense has nothing to…
July 22, 2012
Dropbox is still the best way for most users to store their files on multiple computers and in "the cloud" in part because it is system agnostic and not linked to a corporate entity that has other plans for you. And, using Dropbox you can share files pretty easily as well. However, there is…
July 22, 2012
Or, perhaps, not? I was.
July 22, 2012
The minor league baseball game is on Friday, August 10th, and it is sponsored by the Minnesota Atheists. The local team, the Saint Paul Saints, will change their name to the Mr. Paul Aints for the occasion. If you are in the greater Twin Cities area please try to get to the game! I'm not sure if…
July 21, 2012
I've started a new, modest but I think good, project on The X Blog. I've dragged out and dusted off, and rewritten and reorganized, a selected series of essays that I wrote few years ago but were not widely read, especailly by you if you are fairly new to this blog. I'm going to be posting a few…
July 21, 2012
The smartest radio talk show in the world addresses ignorance, Sunday.
Skeptically Speaking # 174: Ignorance
This week, we’re looking at how the basic condition of not knowing things provides the motivation to keep science moving. We’re joined by Stuart Firestein, Chair of Columbia University’s…
July 20, 2012
Joe Romm of Climate Progress gave testimony to the US Congress on the relationship between the release of long-trapped Carbon into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels and drying conditions that lead to an increase in wild fires. Joe notes "... we're already topping Dust Bowl…
July 20, 2012
You know what I'm talking about. Here's the video:
The Eagle has landed. Holy crap. Excellent driving. Neil.
I love that Armstrong checks to see if it will be possible to get back up the ladder in his space suit before stepping off. Good move. That would have been...interesting...if they could…
July 20, 2012
This from Slashdot:
"Microsoft has apologized and promised to rectify the fact that one of its developers slipped a sexist phrase into Linux kernel code supporting Microsoft's HyperV virtualization environment. In that code, the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor reads '0xB16B00B5,' or…
July 20, 2012
Climate gate involved the criminal theft of computer based data from University of East Anglia (UEA) researchers by global warming deniers. According to Julian Gregory ,Detective chief superintendent, "the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack" and that…
July 19, 2012
The Washington Post has an article out (an "exclusive") about three drugs used to treat anemia that their investigative reporting seems to show are less effective and more dangerous than people thought. Here's the dramatic intro from the WP's article:
On the day Jim Lenox got his last injection,…
July 19, 2012
Science Debate is an organization that has been trying to get the presidential candidates to directly address important science policy issues. After several months of meeting and convening and conversing among top science organizations and seeking public input, Science Debate Dot Org has nailed…
July 19, 2012
John Abraham is a friend of mine who works in climate science. Pretty soon you'll get to hear him and some other doods talking about climate change, in a special edition of Skeptically Speaking. Meanwhile, you can read an excellent, just posted interview at FutureDude magazine, where some dood…
July 19, 2012
In June.
Bill McKibben has an important piece in Rolling Stone about climate change: Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
We probably are having the warmest year ever recorded by science, and one of the warmest years in a couple/few hundred thousand years as recorded by proxyindicators. Bill's…
July 18, 2012
An exoplanet smaller than the Earth may have been identified in some far away solar system.
Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what they believe is a planet two-thirds the size of Earth. The exoplanet candidate, called UCF-1.01, is located a mere 33 light-years away,…
July 18, 2012
This one is a little different. It was an air to air missile, and five guys were thrilled to stand underneath it when it went off several thousand feed above them:
More on this film here.
July 18, 2012
I just got a copy of The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction. I read one review of it a while back which was quite positive, suggesting that the book was both really useful and really not boring. Here's the description from the publisher:
You've experienced the shiny, point-and-click…
July 18, 2012
The Olympics are old. The first ancient Greek Olympic game may have been held in 776 BC in the Greek city of Olympia. Almost 1,200 years later, when Greece was being Christianized, Theodosius I decided that the Olympics would not be played any more, so the last games of the original series was…
July 17, 2012
Ten questions make up this AP style quiz provided by the Washington Post.
Click here.
July 17, 2012
Derek Muller is the Creative Director of Veritasium, a science video blog with 90 films based off of interviews with Australians about issues such as global warming, seasons and the scale of the universe.
July 17, 2012
Before getting into this, I just want to give you the best quote about physics from a physicist I've seen in a long time. In describing the phenomenon we are discussing here, JPL scientist Slava Turyshev says, "The effect is something like when you're driving a car and the photons from your…
