jlynch
Posts by this author
August 16, 2007
Last October I blogged about the reappearance of jaguars in southern Arizona and the possible effect of Bush’s border fence on the species recovery. While jaguars have been seen in Arizona, the closest breeding population is 125 miles south of the border and is being studied by the Northern Jaguar…
August 16, 2007
Today in 1960, Joseph Kittinger made a jump from the balloon Excelsior III. Nothing special, I hear you say. Well, the balloon was at an altitude of 31,330 meters, and Kittinger free-fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds, achieving a maximum speed of 1,149 kph (that’s over 700 mph). He set records…
August 16, 2007
Births
1832 - Wilhelm Wundt, German psychologist
1845 - Gabriel Lippmann, French physicist, Nobel laureate
1904 - Wendell Meredith Stanley, American chemist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1705 - Jakob Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician and scientist
1893 - Jean-Martin Charcot, French neurologist
1899 - Robert…
August 14, 2007
Births
1892 - Louis, 7th duc de Broglie, French physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1893 - Leslie Comrie, New Zealand astronomer and computing pioneer
1896 - Gerty Cori, Austrian-born biochemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
Deaths
1953 - Ludwig Prandtl, German physicist
1982 - Hugo Theorell, Swedish…
August 13, 2007
Births
1777 - Hans Christian Ãrsted, Danish physicist
1840 - Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German psychologist
1933 - Richard R. Ernst, Nobel Prize Laureate
Deaths
1774 - Johann Jakob Reiske, German physician
1856 - Constant Prévost, French geologist
1860 - André Marie Constant Duméril, French…
August 13, 2007
One of the reasons that I canceled my subscription to Skeptic was that it was giving a mouthpiece to Frank Miele and his odious defences of Arthur Jensen and putative links between race, intelligence and IQ. Miele as an undergraduate contributed to the racist journal Mankind Quarterly, has…
August 12, 2007
Births
1625 - Rasmus Bartholin, Danish physician, mathematician, and physicist
1814 - Anders Jonas Ãngström, Swedish physicist
1819 - George Gabriel Stokes, French physicist
1872 - Richard Willstätter, German chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1912 - Salvador Luria, Italian-born biologist, Nobel…
August 12, 2007
Cheney in 1994: "And the question for the President in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got that right."
Full…
August 12, 2007
Jim Lippard has highlighted an article in the latest Skeptic which provides a taxonomy (below) of answers to why this universe is the way it is. Jim neglected to mention that the article is freely available online as a PDF.
1. One Universe Models1.1 Meaningless Question1.2 Brute Fact1.3 Necessary/…
August 11, 2007
Events
1877 - Asaph Hall discovers Deimos.
1883 - The last quagga (above) dies at the Artis Magistra zoo
1960 - Echo I, the first communications satellite, launched
1977 - The first free flight of the Space Shuttle Enterprise.
1981 - Release of the IBM PC
1990 - Sue, the most complete skeleton…
August 11, 2007
ABC (Australia) is reporting that the Yangtze River dolphin or baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) may not be definitely extinct after all (see here and here). Wang Ding - who headed the survey team - is reported as saying:
This is only one survey and...you can’t have a sample in a survey, so you cannot say…
August 11, 2007
Take eight minutes and watch this. Nice work by the buffaloes when faced by a weak lion defense.
(HT to Tim Sandefur for the link).
August 11, 2007
Births
1673 - Richard Mead, English physician
1722 - Richard Brocklesby, English physician
1858 - Christiaan Eijkman, Dutch physician, Nobel Prize Laureate
1905 - Erwin Chargaff, Austrian biochemist
1912 - Eva Ahnert-Rohlfs, German astronomer
1926 - Aaron Klug, Lithuanian-born chemist, Nobel…
August 9, 2007
To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything.
Events
1846 - The Smithsonian Institution is chartered by the U.S. Congress after $500,000 was given for such a purpose by scientist James Smithson.
1990 - The Magellan space probe reaches Venus.
Births
1839 -…
August 9, 2007
You’re 50% Irish
You’re probably less Irish than you think you are...But you’re still more Irish than most.
How Irish Are You?
This despite being born, and spending 25 years, in Ireland. Just goes to prove how dumb these online quizzes are! (Via Mike).
August 9, 2007
These are new licence plates for Oklahoma, where apparently the Koolade was drunk in vast quantities. I think I need to lie down.
August 9, 2007
Events
2001 - George W. Bush announces federal funding for limited research on embryonic stem cells.
Births
1726 - Francesco Cetti, Italian scientist
1776 - Amedeo Avogadro, Italian chemist
1896 - Jean Piaget, Swiss psychologist
1896 - Lev Vygotsky, Russian psychologist
1896 - Erich Hückel,…
August 8, 2007
Events
1576 - The cornerstone for Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg observatory is laid on Hven.
1908 - Wilbur Wright makes his first public flight at a racecourse at Le Mans, France.
Births
1901 - Ernest O. Lawrence, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1902 - Paul Dirac, English physicist Nobel Prize…
August 7, 2007
Eh, no. The rest of the world of sports doesn’t care when a cheating misanthrope hits a ball and shatters the "most-hallowed record" in American sports.
Bonds, of course, played for ASU and his name hangs in the baseball stadium. This is nothing for ASU to feel proud about.
[Picture from Sports…
August 7, 2007
Back last December I reported that the Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) was "effectively extinct". Now I must report that the species has been declared officially extinct, the first official extinction of a large vertebrate for more than 50 years.
August 7, 2007
Over at Corpus Callosum, Joseph highlights a "Pick Your Candidate" webpage. You enter your stand on various issues, and the page ranks the candidates based on their similarity to your views. Here’s the Top Five it spat back at me:
Kucinich
Gravel
Obama
Clinton
Edwards
Somewhat satisfyingly, the…
August 6, 2007
Events
1991 - World Wide Web debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.
Births
1844 - Auguste Michel-Lévy, French geologist
1932 - Dr. Maurice Rabb, Jr., African American ophthalmologist
Deaths
1639 - Martin van den Hove, Dutch scientist
1848 - Jöns Jakob Berzelius, Swedish chemist…
August 6, 2007
August 6, 2001, is the day that George W. Bush received the Presidential Daily Brief headlined, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." The PDB stated that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure in the U.S. that could aid attacks, that one idea was to hijack U.S. airplanes, and that the FBI had…
August 5, 2007
Two weeks to go before the semester begins here at ASU and I still have syllabi to put together for my two classes (more on them closer to the start) along with three book reviews to finish. It has been a lazy Summer for a change, but that means there is much to do during the last few weeks before…
August 5, 2007
Bush’s attempt to temporarily amend the FISA law passed the House last night (227 to 183), with 41 Democrats voting with the Republicans to allow Bush & Gonzalez continue their attack on civil liberties. Only two Republicans voted against the measure.
The voting record of the Arizona…
August 4, 2007
Events
1858 - Cyrus West Field and others complete the first transatlantic telegraph cable after several unsuccessful attempts.
1969 - Mariner program: Mariner 7 makes its closest fly-by of Mars (3,524 kilometers).
Births
1930 - Neil Armstrong, astronaut and first human to stand on the Moon.
Deaths…
August 4, 2007
In a follow up to this story, Virgil Renzulli (VP of Public Affairs here at ASU) has this to say:
At ASU, as at most American research universities, positions funded by external grants are completely dependent on that funding. Robert Pettit, former director of the university’s Cancer Research…
August 4, 2007
After nearly two weeks away from regular Intertube access, I’m back. Below the fold is your day in science:
Births
1719 - Johann Gottlob Lehmann, German minerologist and geologist
1805 - William Rowan Hamilton, Irish mathematician
1906 - Eugen Schuhmacher, German zoologist
1912 - Aleksandr…
August 4, 2007
The School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) here at ASU has joined forces with NASA to scan the original Apollo images of the Moon and to place them online for the general public. See here. [Hat tip to /. for the link]
August 3, 2007
Doing this
and only suffering bruises of the liver and lung, stress fractures to vertebrae and a small fracture on the top of one hand.