jlynch
Posts by this author
November 11, 2007
Current BCS Rankings
LSU
Oregon
Kansas
Oklahoma
Missouri
West Virginia
Ohio State
ASU
Now, some thoughts.
ASU lost (by 12 points, away) to the then #5 team in the country. OSU lost at home to an unranked team.
Oklahoma lost to Colorado, ASU beat Colorado. Oklahoma’s SOS is lower than ASU’s (…
November 11, 2007
An "old-fashioned point of view" from Wayne Johns of Texas:
Whatever happened to little girls playing with dolls and dreaming of becoming wives and mothers? Whatever happened to young men looking for a good Christian wife and finding a young woman still clinging to her doll? Me, old fashioned? I…
November 11, 2007
White-Crowned Sparrow, Zonotrichia leucophrys
We recently planted winter grass and have managed to attract large numbers of white-crowned sparrows, a species that I hadn’t seen before here in Tempe.
[image source]
November 10, 2007
Events
1675 - Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of y = f(x) function.
Births
1743 - Carl Peter Thunberg, Swedish naturalist
1930 - Hugh Everett, American physicist
Deaths
1686 - Otto von Guericke, German scientist
1884 - Alfred…
November 10, 2007
ASU managed to squeak past UCLA 24-20 to go 9-1 for the season and take the lead in the Pac-10 (Oregon have a bye-week). After years of not winning in California, two straight road wins in that state are welcome.
Next up (on Thanksgiving) is USC followed by Arizona. Both are home games and…
November 9, 2007
Births
1565 - Laurentius Paulinus Gothus, Swedish theologian and astronomer
1695 - John Bevis, English physician and astronomer
1918 - Ernst Otto Fischer, German chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1935 - Igor Dmitrievich Novikov, Russian astrophysicist
1935 - Bernard Babior, American biochemist…
November 9, 2007
The ScienceBlogs DonorsChoose Challenge ended a few days back while I was in DC. Eighteen readers of this blog raised $1,970.29, a sum which completely funded seven projects and will impact nearly three hundred needy students. Overall, we here at ScienceBlogs raised over $70,000.
My sincere thanks…
November 8, 2007
Events
1921 - Albert Einstein awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the photoelectric effect.
1994 - Discovery of the chemical element Darmstadtium.
Births
1721 - Mark Akenside, English poet and physician
1731 - Benjamin Banneker, American scientist
1873 - Otfrid Foerster, German…
November 8, 2007
ID supporters seem to like Antony Flew, the one-time atheist philosopher who has apparently seen the light and become a deist. They have awarded him the Phillip Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, they have lauded his latest book, and Bill Dembski exclaims "God bless Antony Flew!" But at the risk…
November 7, 2007
Events
1895 - While experimenting with electricity Wilhelm Röntgen discovers X-rays.
Births
1656 (N.S.) - Edmond Halley, British astronomer and mathematician
1854 - Johannes Rydberg, Swedish physicist
1885 - Hans Cloos, German geologist
1922 - Christiaan Barnard, South African heart surgeon
1923…
November 6, 2007
Is anyone surprised?
Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenager sexual behavior, although they are eligible for tens of millions of dollars in federal grants, according to a study released by a nonpartisan group that seeks to reduce teen pregnancies.
"At…
November 6, 2007
Events
1996 - NASA launches the Mars Global Surveyor.
Births
1818 - Emil du Bois-Reymond, German physician
1867 - Maria Sklodowska-Curie, Polish-born chemist, physicist and Nobel Prize laureate (twice)
1878 - Lise Meitner, Austrian/American chemist, physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1888 - C. V.…
November 5, 2007
Events
1935 - Edwin Armstrong presents his paper "A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation."
Deaths
1771 - John Bevis, English physician and astronomer
1822 - Claude Louis Berthollet, French chemist
1964 - Hans von Euler-Chelpin, German-born chemist…
November 5, 2007
Back from the History of Science Society meeting in DC (well, Crystal City, Virginia actually). Session went well and it was good to catch up with old friends, though watching ASU lose to Oregon wasn't pleasant. Next few days will be busy catching up, but I'll get posting soon (I hope).
October 31, 2007
I’m off for the History of Science Society annual meeting in DC for the next few days, so posting will be scant or non-existent. I’m responding to a series of papers on Victorian critics of scientific naturalism and attending the Committee on Education annual meeting.
Today is your last chance to…
October 30, 2007
Births
1844 - Harvey W. Wiley, American chemist
1847 - Galileo Ferraris, Italian physicist
1857 - Georges Gilles de la Tourette, French neurologist
1894 - Jean Rostand, French biologist
1895 - Gerhard Domagk, German bacteriologist and Nobel Prize laureate (declined)
1895 - Dickinson W. Richards,…
October 29, 2007
This is so cool. A one-millimeter long spider (Cenotextricella simoni) encased in amber gets "digitally dissected" using Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography. The paper is online in Zootaxa 1623:47-53 but requires a subscription.
October 29, 2007
Only three more days left for us to meet our challenge. So far we've only hit 34% of our goal and have raised $1,358 which will help 266 students.
I've added some new proposals to our slate in the hope that if you weren't interested before, you can now find a proposal that you like. You know what…
October 29, 2007
Events
1991 - The American Galileo spacecraft makes its closest approach to 951 Gaspra (above), becoming the first probe to visit an asteroid.
Births
1656 (O.S.) - Edmond Halley, English astronomer
1827 - Marcellin Berthelot, French chemist
1880 - Abram Ioffe, Soviet physicist
1915 - William…
October 28, 2007
Births
1845 - Zygmunt Florenty Wróblewski, Polish physicist
1912 - Richard Doll, English epidemiologist
1914 - Richard Laurence Millington Synge, British biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1792 - Paul Möhring, German physician and scientist
1841 - Johan August Arfwedson, Swedish…
October 28, 2007
You are down 13-0 at the end of the first quarter. Down 20-14 at the half. And win the game 31-20. You are ASU playing Cal on Homecoming night in Tempe.
An amazing game saw the Devils go 8-0 and capture the lead in the Pac-10. Two appalling calls by the referees in the first half made life more…
October 27, 2007
Big game tonight with #21 Cal coming to town for Homecoming to take on the #4 Sun Devils. With #5 Oregon defeating USC 24-17, tonight’s game will be huge for the Pac10 and the BCS standings.
More later.
October 27, 2007
Stanford University Hospital is reporting that Arthur Kornberg, the 1959 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, has died aged 89. Kornberg received recognition for his discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)". His son, Roger, received his own Nobel…
October 27, 2007
Events
1961 - NASA launched the first Saturn I rocket in Mission Saturn-Apollo 1.
Births
1951 - Carlos Frenk, Mexican/British cosmologist
Deaths
1449 - Ulugh Beg, Timurid ruler and astronomer
1968 - Lise Meitner, German physicist
1980 - John Hasbrouck van Vleck, American physicist and Nobel Prize…
October 26, 2007
on the fire suicides of the buddhists "They only burn themselves to reach Paradise." Mme. Nhu original courage is good, motivation be damned, and if you say they are trained to feel no pain, are they guaranteed this? is is still not possible to die for somebody else?
you sophisticates who lay…
October 25, 2007
Events
1977 - The last natural case of smallpox was discovered in Merca district, Somalia. The WHO and the CDC consider this date the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox.
1984 - "Baby Fae" receives a heart transplant from a baboon.
1994 - Announcement that Andrew Wiles correctly proved…
October 25, 2007
Births
1856 - Dragutin Gorjanovic-Kramberger, Croatian paleontologist
1910 - William Higinbotham, American physicist
Deaths
1647 - Evangelista Torricelli, Italian physicist and mathematician
October 24, 2007
Over at Page 3.14, there’s a post where us old farts reminisce about computing when we were young ’uns. I’m quoted as saying
"My first computer was a ZX81 (Timex/Sinclair here in the US). Had 1k of memory. Taught myself assembly.
In high school and college, virtually everything was hand written.…
October 23, 2007
Events
1998 - Launch of the Deep Space 1 mission
Births
1804 - Wilhelm Eduard Weber, German physicist
1932 - Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, French physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1601 - Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer