April 21, 2012
HiThis post has been MOVED and UPDATED and can be found HERE. Thanks.
April 21, 2012
Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT yesterday, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining the genre's ability to inspire engineers and scientists. Describing himself as a "pessimist trying to turn himself into an optimist," and…
April 21, 2012
I have it on good authority that this is going to be great.
Jeff Masters has a writeup.
Penn State climate scientist Dr. Richard Alley hosts parts II and III of Earth: the Operator's Manual on PBS beginning at 7pm Sunday, April 22--Earth Day. Part I of this excellent series aired in April 2011.…
April 20, 2012
It's almost like the guy had had nooklar meltdown right there.
Hat tip: Barbara Forrest, author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
April 20, 2012
Picasa sucked. Make no mistake about it. Whether on Linux or Windows, Picassa took the worst of all the different photo management software and combined it into a single app that I would never recommend anyone install.
Except one thing; Picasa was good at enhancing photos. It had a couple of…
April 20, 2012
Isn't something like this thought to have happened in California as well, in recent years?
April 20, 2012
There's an app for that!
This is woo, right?
April 20, 2012
There is a study that shows that people who sit more per day die sooner, despite other factors such as overall health. It is reported in The Atlantic and written up here.
From the study:
Prolonged sitting is considered detrimental to health, but evidence regarding the independent relationship of…
April 19, 2012
This week, we're joined by Robert FitzPatrick, founder of Pyramid Scheme Alert, and co-author of False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes. He'll discuss the promises and pitfalls of schemes, and how to tell legitimate direct selling…
April 19, 2012
John Hawks is one of the nation's leading palaeoanthropologists, and has lately been working with ancient DNA, recent and earlier Human Evolution, and an interesting project that is a sort of casting call for extinct humans and their relatives.
Most of you know John from his famous Internet site…
April 19, 2012
Most of the world's mountain glaciers are either totally melted or reduced significantly in size. For every one of these glaciers, there's somebody who will tell you that that particular glacier has disappeared or is disappearing for some reason that has nothing to do with anthropogenic global…
April 19, 2012
One of my favorite musicians ever died today at the age of 71. I happen to play two songs with him singing and playing today. I do that most days because they are on my gym tape.1
Levon was a member of The Band, but he was also in The Hawks (with Ronnie Hawkins) and worked on his own. The…
April 19, 2012
... only worse, apparently.
The Lousy Canuck has it covered. I think you should go read his post and get the conversation going. I don't know enough about it to say much more than Jason has already said.
I'm not a big Mike Rogers fan. He has called for the execution of those involved in the…
April 19, 2012
I live near a highway. All winter, I almost never went west on that road, only east, but a couple of times I did go west. And, in a tree off to the right in that direction, I noticed a mass of stuff that resembled a Bald Eagle's nest as much as any mass of stuff ever could, but of course, it was…
April 18, 2012
Joey Bernard, who writes about science under Linux, has just started a multi (as in two?) part series on GSL, the GNU Scientific Library. It is here. Just browsing through the files of GSL is fun. You find little gems like this:
const size_t npidigits = 5000 ;
const double pidigits [5000…
April 18, 2012
... Huffington, by Shawn Otto:
Dear Arianna,
Congratulations on the Huffington Post's Pulitzer prize. That is an important feather in the paper's cap.
I want you to know how much I value your publication, and how I think the dust up over the antiscience HuffPost article "NASA Global Warming Stance…
April 16, 2012
Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Otto has won the prestigious Minnesota Book Award. The award is very well deserved.
Here's my writeup of the book, and here's a radio interview with the author that we did a couple of months back.
Shawn's book is a critically…
April 15, 2012
What's wrong with this picture? (hint)
April 15, 2012
Yesterday, at the Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) Convention in Minnesota's United States Congressional District 3, my candidate, Sharon Sund, did not gain the endorsement of our party; the endorsement went to the Gentleman from Edina, Brian Barnes. Brian won fair and square, and it was a good…
April 15, 2012
This is a good starting point:
"Successful organizing is based on the recognition that people get organized because they, too, have a vision."
-Paul Wellstone
April 15, 2012
One hundred years ago today, the Titanic, the largest boat in the water at the time, and unsinkable by design, ran into an iceberg and sank. Many died on board because of insufficient safety equipment.
A majority of first and second class children survived the sinking, but only 34% of the third…
April 11, 2012
Another poll shows increasing and strong interest among Americans in developing Green Technology and related technologies, as well as reduced interest in anti-environmental extremism and petrolatum-related efforts.
Previously, we discussed the new poll by the Science Debate people, and now we have…
April 11, 2012
We've had conversations before, here, about this topic, especially in the context of school. We've spoken about how to deal with students who are trying very hard to push creationism in the classroom, where you are the teacher. We've spoken about what a parent of a student in school might like to…
April 11, 2012
An earthquake triggered a tsunami warning in Indonesia, which is said to have covered "Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Myanmar, Thailand, the Maldives and other Indian Ocean islands, Malaysia, Pakistan, Somalia, Oman, Iran, Bangladesh, Kenya, South Africa and Singapore," but the wave that…
April 10, 2012
Rick Santorum, Republican Candidate, has essentially dropped out of the Republican presidential race. Gone, but not forgotten.
April 8, 2012
CBS News is reporting that veteran newsman and "60 Minutes" star interviewer Mike Wallace has died at age 93.
Details of his passing aren't yet clear, but on the CBS website colleague Morley Safer is remembering the journalist's 65 years from Wallace's first appearance on the network to his last, a…
