jlynch
Posts by this author
July 31, 2007
Sahotra Sarkar (Philosophy of Biology, University of Texas) has revived his blog in response to the creationist takeover of the Texas Board of Education.
Sarkar is the author of Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution and thus will no doubt have good things to say about the situation in…
July 30, 2007
Events
1964 - Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the moon, with images 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from earth-bound telescopes.
1999 - Discovery Program: Lunar Prospector - NASA intentionally crashes the spacecraft into the Moon, thus ending its…
July 29, 2007
Births
1641 - Regnier de Graaf, Dutch physician and anatomist
1889 - Vladimir Zworykin, Russian physicist
July 28, 2007
I get back from Exeter later on today, but as it turns out will be departing up north for a short break from the heat of Phoenix. Blogging will recommence later this week.
Below is your Today in Science.
Events
2005 -Astronomers announce their discovery of Eris, a possible tenth planet.
Births…
July 27, 2007
Births
1867 - Charles Dillon Perrine, American-born astronomer
1902 - Karl Popper, Austrian-born philosopher
1904 - Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov, Russian physicist, Nobel laureate
1915 - Charles Townes, American physicist, Nobel laureate
1925 - Baruch S. Blumberg, American scientist, Nobel…
July 27, 2007
Gert Kortoff has written a review of Behe's Edge of Evolution. He points out:
Readers interested in "Intelligent Design Theory" will be disappointed. The reader won't find an exposition of the Intelligent Design Theory. Nine out of ten chapters are about the limitations of neo-Darwinian evolution…
July 27, 2007
It's just after noon here in Exeter and I'm getting ready to head off to lunch. Yesterday's session on multi-level selection was very interesting with Rick Michod (U of Arizona) giving a particularly though provoking paper on the transition to multicellularity. Today's sessions are relatively…
July 26, 2007
Events
1921 - Researchers at the University of Toronto led by biochemist Frederick Banting announce the discovery of the hormone insulin.
Births
1733 - Jeremiah Dixon, English surveyor and astronomer
1833 - Thomas George Bonney, English geologist
1848 - Loránd Eötvös, Hungarian physicist
1881…
July 25, 2007
Well I made it safely to England and the ISHPSSB meeting. Yesterday evening was spent in the pleasant company of Precious Little Snowflake and others. Good fun and good beer was had by all. Today the conference proper starts and I'll be in two sessions on Evolutionary Developmental biology ("…
July 25, 2007
Events
1963 - Syncom 2, the world’s first geosynchronous satellite, is launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta B booster.
Deaths
1960 - Maud Menten, Canadian biochemist and co-discoverer of the Michaelis-Menten equations
July 24, 2007
Events
1978 - Birth of Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby".
1984 - Salyut 7 Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the second woman in space and the first to perform a space walk.
Births
1799 - David Douglas, Scottish botanist
1920 - Rosalind Franklin, English crystallographer whose work…
July 23, 2007
Births
1794 - Johan Georg Forchhammer, Danish geologist
Deaths
1974 - James Chadwick, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1986 - Fritz Albert Lipmann, American biochemist, Nobel Prize laureate
2005 - Richard Doll, English epidemiologist
July 22, 2007
Events
1962 - Telstar relays the first live trans-Atlantic television signal.
1972 - The United States launches Landsat 1, first Earth-resources satellite.
Births
1775 - Etienne-Louis Malus, French physicist and mathematician
1886 - Walter H. Schottky, German physicist
1906 - Vladimir Prelog,…
July 22, 2007
Above is a picture of a lightning strike east of Camelback Mountain last night. The monsoon season has officially started here in Phoenix, so we’re looking at a few weeks of increased humidity and thunderstorm activity. A good enough reason to skip out of town. Tuesday sees me head off to England…
July 22, 2007
So Orac is worth $3590 and Janet tunes in at $4875
Me? I’m
worth $4050.00. Dead though.
$4050.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth. From Mingle2 - Free Online Dating
Mingle2 - Free Online Dating
July 22, 2007
Over at Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy has a thoughtful post on the lessons we should learn from the Iraq debacle, including #4:
When the rest of the world thinks you’re crazy, it’s worth entertaining the possibility that they might be right. We should not defer to their judgment mindlessly, but we should…
July 21, 2007
Births
1711 - Georg Wilhelm Richmann, Russian physicist
1784 - Friedrich Bessel, German mathematician and astronomer
1887 - Gustav Ludwig Hertz, German physicist, Nobel laureate
1888 - Kirk Bryan, American geologist
1888 - Selman Waksman, Ukrainian-born biochemist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1802…
July 21, 2007
Dembski pimps an interview with his new bestest buddy, the electrical and computer engineer, Robert Marks "director of the Baylor Evolutionary Informatics Lab" (which is comprised of Dembski, Marks and two students). The Isaac Newton of Information Theory says:
I hope you catch from the interview…
July 21, 2007
Which LOLcat are you? I are serious cat (37% affectionate, 33% excitable, 51% hungry). Who haz my sandwich?
Hungry for knowledge in any internet forum, you demand decorum. Any off-topic remarks, absurd statements, or tomfoolery on the interweb is deeply frowned upon by you. Truth has no room for…
July 20, 2007
Events
1925 - Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100.
1969 - Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin become the first men to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission.
1983 - The world’s…
July 20, 2007
Events
1969 - Apollo Program: Apollo 11 lands on the Moon.
1976 - The Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
1994 - Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s Fragment Q1 hits Jupiter.
Births
1797 - Sir PaweÅ Edmund Strzelecki, Polish explorer and geologist
1822 - Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics
1897…
July 19, 2007
Remember this?
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be…
July 19, 2007
Easing myself into blogging with the Personality Defect Test. Apparently I’m a Robot: 100% Rational, 42% Extroverted, 14% Brutal and 0% Arrogant.
Your exact opposite is the Class Clown.
Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Hand-Raiser, the Emo Kid, and the Haughty…
July 19, 2007
I’m finally back in circulation, albeit only for a few days. Next Tuesday I leave for the ISHPSSB conference in Exeter (UK) and wont be bringing a laptop with me. The past ten days, I was spending time with family in Michigan - hence the relative silence
Below the fold is Today in Science.
Births…
July 17, 2007
Events
1898 - Marie and Pierre Curie announce the discovery of a new element and proposed to call it polonium.
Births
1635 - Robert Hooke, English scientist
1720 - Gilbert White, English ornithologist
1853 - Hendrik Lorentz, Dutch physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1937 - Roald Hoffman, Polish-born…
July 17, 2007
Events
1975 - Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: An American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft dock with each other in orbit marking the first such link-up between spacecraft from the two nations.
1976 - Viking 1 successfully lands on Mars.
1998 - Biologists report how they sequenced the genome of the…
July 16, 2007
Events
1862 - Comet Swift-Tuttle is discovered by Lewis Swift.
1945 - Manhattan Project: The Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates (see above) a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
1994 - Jupiter is hit by fragments of…
July 14, 2007
Births
1918 - Bertram N. Brockhouse, Canadian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1921 - Robert Bruce Merrifield, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1922 - Leon M. Lederman, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1928 - Carl Woese, American microbiologist
1943 - Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Irish…
July 14, 2007
Events
1965 - Mariner 4 flyby of Mars takes the first close-up photos (above) of another planet.
Births
1671 - Jacques D’Allonville, French astronomer and mathematician
1801 - Johannes Peter Müller, German physiologist
1921 - Geoffrey Wilkinson, English chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1924 - James…
July 12, 2007
Births
1527 - John Dee, English scientist
1579 - Arthur Dee, English physician
1932 - Hubert Reeves, Canadian astrophysicist
Deaths
1896 - Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, German chemist and discoverer of the structure of benzene (above)