jlynch
Posts by this author
January 28, 2008
Northern River Otter Lontra canadensis Schreber, 1777.
[picture source]
January 27, 2008
Events
1986 - Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart 73 seconds after liftoff killing all seven astronauts onboard
Births
1608 - Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Italian physiologist and physicist
1611 - Johannes Hevelius, astronomer
1622 - Adrien Auzout, French astronomer
1755 - Samuel Thomas von Sö…
January 26, 2008
Meet William Torres and his slippers. William was arrested while driving in Allentown (Pa) on two counts of homicide and was known to be dealing coke and heroin from his home. More interestingly, William was pulled over while wearing "a hooded sweartshirt [sic] with a skull-head pattern on it,…
January 26, 2008
Births
1621 - Thomas Willis, English physician
1903 - John Carew Eccles, Australian neuropsychologist and Nobel Prize laureate
1936 - Samuel C. C. Ting, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1851 - John James Audubon, French-American naturalist, ornithologist, and painter
1967 -…
January 25, 2008
Anyone who knows Arizona politics won’t be surprised by another dumb proposal being put forward by Thayer Verschoor and Karen Johnson. Both are Republicans. Both have problems with evolution - Verschoor turned up at an Answers in Genesis fundraiser a few years back. Both supported a measure that…
January 25, 2008
Births
1891 - Wilder Penfield, American-born Canadian neurosurgeon
1904 - Ancel Keys, American scientist
1911 - Polykarp Kusch, German-born physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1823 - Edward Jenner, English physician
1943 - Harry H. Laughlin, American eugenicist
1946 - Adriaan van Maanen,…
January 25, 2008
I’ve seen the light, had an epiphany even. Tom Cruise tells us:
Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, its not like anyone else. As you drive past you know you have to do something about because you know you’re the only one that can really help.
and later
We are the authorities on…
January 25, 2008
This is what Pluto and Charon look like from 3,600,000,000 kilometers. The picture was snapped by NASA’s New Horizons probe which expects to flyby the planet in 2015. Expected future highpoints for the mission are:
June 9, 2008 -- Pass Saturn’s orbit.
March 5, 2011 -- Pass Uranus’ orbit.
August 1…
January 25, 2008
How in the name of all that is rational can a NBC/WSJ poll (taken 1/20 to 1/22) give Bush a 31% approval rating? The economy is circling the drain and Bush has achieved absolutely nothing over the past year. Seriously, name one thing of any worth he has achieved over the past year. Just one .... I…
January 25, 2008
As regular readers probably know, I have been a (sporadic) contributor to The Panda’s Thumb since its founding in March 2004. Usually if I post there, the post ends up here, with comments often ending up at both sites. To make it easier to keep track of these (and to make it easier to keep up with…
January 25, 2008
By way of GrrlScientist, I notice that Fieldiana (the journal of the Field Museum is now freely available online. This means that DD Davis’ classic study "The giant panda: a morphological study of evolutionary mechanisms" of 1964 can now be enjoyed by one and all. Over three hundred pages,…
January 25, 2008
>
Kindred
Musing, between the sunset and the dark,
As Twilight in unhesitating hands
Bore from the faint horizon’s underlands,
Silvern and chill, the moon’s phantasmal ark,
I heard the sea, and far away could mark
Where that unalterable waste expands
In sevenfold sapphire from the mournful sands…
January 25, 2008
Events
2004 - Opportunity Rover (MER-B) lands on surface of Mars.
2006 - Three independent observing campaigns announce the discovery of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb through gravitational microlensing, the first cool rocky/icy extrasolar planet around a main-sequence star.
Births
1627 - Robert Boyle, Irish…
January 24, 2008
Births
1928 - Desmond Morris, British zoologist
Deaths
1877 - Johann Christian Poggendorff, German physicist
1966 - Homi J. Bhabha, Indian physicist
January 23, 2008
Over at The Questionable Authority, Mike re-iterates something I've been saying for years about the DI's "Dissent from Darwinism" signatories, 700 individuals who the DI's flacks claim "have signed the list because it is their professional opinion that the evidence is lacking for the claims for the…
January 23, 2008
I've written before about efforts to study and support jaguar populations here in the desert southwest and Mexico. So the following is saddening. Nature is reporting that:The US government will not attempt to save jaguars from extinction within the formal system of the Endangered Species Act... […
January 23, 2008
Births
1840 - Ernst Abbe, German physicist
1857 - Andrija MohoroviÄiÄ, Croatian seismologist
1872 - Paul Langevin, French physicist
1876 - Otto Diels, German chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1907 - Hideki Yukawa, Japanese physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1918 - Gertrude B. Elion, American…
January 22, 2008
The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism have released a report finding that the administration issued at least 935 false statements in the two years leading up to the invasion of Iraq as "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public…
January 22, 2008
By way of Sage Ross, a graduate student in history of science at Yale:
Spontaneous Generations is a new online academic journal published by graduate students at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. The journal aims to establish a platform…
January 22, 2008
And so it started, four years ago today.
The "more focussed" thing didn’t really work out though ...
January 22, 2008
Events
2003 - Last successful contact with Pioneer 10.
Births
1561 - Francis Bacon, English philosopher
1592 - Pierre Gassendi, French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist
1796 - Karl Claus, Russian chemist
1903 - Fritz Houtermans, Polish physicist
1908 - Lev Davidovich Landau, Russian…
January 21, 2008
Sea otter, Enhydra lutris Linnaeus 1758
Mother with young.
[picture source]
And who can resist sea otters holding hands?
January 21, 2008
Births
1912 - Konrad Emil Bloch, German-born biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1926 - Camillo Golgi, Italian physician
January 19, 2008
Events
1969 - The first pulsar is discovered.
Births
1775 - André-Marie Ampère, French physicist
1910 - Joy Adamson, Austrian naturalist and writer
1931 - David Lee, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1973 - Lorenz Böhler, Austrian physician
2005 - Miriam Louisa Rothschild,…
January 19, 2008
Today sees the formal start of the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference, an event which I unfortunately cannot attend. Instead of spending my Friday with Bora and other science bloggers, I was giving a public talk titled "Evolution Is ..." at Phoenix Country Day School in Paradise Valley.…
January 19, 2008
Events
2006 - The New Horizons probe is launched by NASA on the first mission to Pluto.
Births
1851 - Jacobus Kapteyn, Dutch astronomer
Deaths
1878 - Henri Victor Regnault French physicist and chemist
1954 - Theodor Kaluza, German scientist
January 18, 2008
Huckabee was asked whether it is his goal to "bring the Constitution into strict conformity with the Bible?" He didn’t clearly answer that question, of course, but instead said:
Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that…
January 18, 2008
Epitaph
An old willow with hollow branches
slowly swayed his few high bright tendrils
and sang:
Love is a young green willow
shimmering at the bare wood’s edge.
William Carlos Williams
January 18, 2008
Events
1977 - Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium (Legionella pneumophila, above) as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires’ disease.
Births
1856 - Daniel Hale Williams, African-American surgeon
1892 - Paul Rostock, German surgeon
1918 - Gustave Gingras, French Canadian physician…
January 17, 2008
Coming on the end of the week here and all is good. My classes look sharp, so it should be a good semester of teaching. Various non-teaching bits and pieces have clicked together over the past few days, so it looks like a good semester.
And ASU basketball has done it again - beating Cal 99-90 in…