March 8, 2017
How doe a mammal know what a smell is, and more importantly, how does a mammal learn new smells?
Recent research suggests that different kinds of neurons reorganize in novel ways in response to olfactory signals to produce an olfactory memory.
Below is a video made by the research team that…
March 7, 2017
The Crisis We Await
The exact way the Trump presidency ends is not clear. Anything could happen.
Trump had zero idea of what he was getting into with this president thing, and the stresses must be amazing. Clearly, he is being driven over the edge by relatively minor day to day events. Nothing…
March 7, 2017
Book note:
There are two books you may want to check out because, for the moment (Tuesday, March 7th is the moment), they are deeply discounted at Amazon:
Kindle version for two bucks: The End of Nature
Kindle version for three bucks: The First Americans
I also want to note that Shawn Otto's book…
March 6, 2017
When I was a little, there was this older kid that lived down the street, and he was shunned by all the other kids.
He was shunned because he went to a special school for smart kids. Most everyone else went to either the local Catholic school (as did I) or the public school several blocks away.…
February 28, 2017
Karen Stollznow has edited this book: Would You Believe It?: Mysterious Tales From People You'd Least Expect, and you will find my chapter on page 112.
This is a great idea for a book. Suppose Susan Blackmore told you she had an out of body experience? Or that Don Prothero had an alien abduction…
February 27, 2017
This is much better than the one you've already seen.
February 24, 2017
Last night, I went to an event, apparently organized by an indivisible group, in Plymouth Mass.
Plymouth is in Minnesota's 3rd Congressional District, and is represented by Congressman Erik Paulsen. Paulsen took over, years ago, from a "reasonable Republican" that even Democrats in CD03 remember…
February 23, 2017
Which one are you for? I'll take either. At first I didn't want Ellison to leave MN05, but if he does, and he should if he is DNC chair, we have some excellent replacements lined up, and since MN05 is the most left leaning congressional district in the country, we don't have to worry about it…
February 23, 2017
Via Media Matters of America. Very interesting segment.
Santer talks about what is is like to be a rogue scientist in a Donald Trump administration.
The words referred to here the twelve words, were part of the 1995 Second Assessment report of the IPCC. That report is regularly updated, and…
February 23, 2017
As more and more exoplanets (at first) and earth-like exoplanets (eventually) have been discovered, the way thy are described to us has become increasingly sophisticated. Below are embeds of diverse video descriptions that have been very quickly developed and distributed given the freshness of this…
February 21, 2017
Biologist and author Bill Schutt has a new book out: Cannibalism: A perfectly natural history.
He and I talked about cannibalism on Ikonokast: Click here to check it out! It is was a fun interview, and Bill's book is excellent.
See also:
You Come From Cannibals
Among Cannibals
Cannibal, Native…
February 20, 2017
Going from Flynn to McMaster feels like going from Beetle Bailey to Jack Ryan. But I don't know much about him.
He is, importantly, full of degrees and the author of Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, based on his PhD thesis.
How…
February 18, 2017
Animal farm: A Fairy Story
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for…
February 17, 2017
1984
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Winston Smith toes the Party line, rewriting history to satisfy the demands of the Ministry of Truth. With each lie he writes, Winston grows to hate the Party that seeks power for its…
February 16, 2017
Below is a nice video from Move On Dot Org, as well as a link to a petition of theirs.
I would like to take this opportunity to caution everyone who is trying to figure out what is going on in the White House to avoid being misled by confusion, ignorance, or intentional misdirection. I have five…
February 16, 2017
This is not the April 22 March for Science, but something more local and timed to occur with the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in Boston.
From the press release:
Scientists Take to the Streets to “Stand up for Science”
Scientists and impacted communities respond to…
February 16, 2017
No, not that Huxley, the other Huxley. No, not that one either, the OTHER Huxley. OK, yeah, this one:
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically…
February 15, 2017
A while back I reviewed "Climate Change: What Everyone Needs To Know" by Joe Romm (see my review here). In that book Romm provides useful advice to help people understand the impact of climate change on them, on various aspects of their lives. For example, many people choose to retire to a…
February 15, 2017
I get a lot of "infographics" and many are quite good. But this medium has become a vehicle for commercial advertising. So, some company comes up with an info graphics, maybe makes a good one, sends it around to the bloggers and such, and thier name, somewhere down there near the bottom, gets…
February 15, 2017
Paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.
So does civilization.
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is…
February 15, 2017
Everybody is all upset about Trump and his Republicans, but in truth, that seems to matter little. Here in Minnesota we had a local house district open, there was a special election, and the Democrats didn't even try to win it, apparently. So they lost it. It was probably winnable.
Same with GA-…
February 15, 2017
As the Republican led US Senate has voted to confirm (or deny) the party leader's cabinet picks, they've done a poor job, approving, for example, people who have acted in direct opposition to the areas of government they are expected to serve, or in some cases, being abjectly incompetent. The…
February 15, 2017
I am reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin, whom you may know from her occasional and always informative appearances on various TV news shows as a ranking Presidential Historian.
I started reading it because I wanted to see in some detail what was…
February 15, 2017
It Can't Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
Written during the Great…
February 11, 2017
The March for Science, in April, may be a June to September romance between academia and and political activists, but prior experience in Canada suggests we are in it for the cold hard winter.
A conservative government in the land of the maple leaf took wide ranging action to shut down and control…
February 10, 2017
The most recent polling indicates that Donald Trump has a 43% approval and 53% disapproval rating. So he is not exactly loved by the American people, which is odd because he seems so lovable. And, he has told us that the American people love him. And his victory in the November election was…
February 7, 2017
It is like that stabby lady in the bath tub in that movie.
Here, I'll give you a more readable version of the graphic from NOAA:
The chance of an the Pacific ENSO system being neutral, meaning, not adding extra heat to the atmosphere and not removing extra heat form the atmosphere, is about 50%…
February 6, 2017
Representative Mat Gaetz (Republican, Florida) introduced HR 861, "To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency" which is said to defund and remove from existence the Environmental Protection Agency.
Details are unclear, but the idea is to have states and local communities regulate their…
February 6, 2017
Great disasters are great stories, great moments in time, great tests of technology, humanity, society, government, and luck. Fifty years ago it was probably true to say that our understanding of great disasters was thin, not well developed because of the relative infrequency of the events, and…
February 6, 2017
This post is now located, strangely enough, HERE.
