gregladen | December 6, 2012The other day I reviewed a guide to using the very high end Lego Technic system. Here, I've got a book that addresses the needs of those at the other end of the Lego Spectrum: The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide
By "other end of the spectrum" I do not mean unsophisticated or easy, I simply mean no electrical gizmos and not too many gears and things. For example, you might use this guide to build a very realistic scale model of the Space Shuttle or a cool Train Station with People waiting for the Train model. Or, perhaps, a house with a chimney. But a really cool one.
If you've not…
gregladen | December 6, 2012Whinging About Skepchick
A critique of a talk by Rebecca Watson is very likely heavily influenced by the critiquer’s membership in one group or another as defined by The Great Sorting. This not because Rebecca is a polarizing person. It is because she has been outspoken on issues that tend to polarize people, like feminism. This polarization is enhanced by the fact that a break-off group of skeptics have chosen to join the haters rather than the thinkers and doers. Also, she leads a group of women who have tried to open up the Skeptical Community to having more female participants and to more…
gregladen | December 5, 2012The picture above is what the Moon would look like if you wore gravity glasses.
We've been following the Grail Mission for some time now, and new results are in. NASA has made a very detailed gravity map of the moon. The Grail mission involves the use of two space craft flying next to each other, keeping track of their relative position by the use of radio signals. As they pass over the moon's surface, they also interact with the Moon's gravity. The complex dynamic of interaction between the twin spacecraft and the moon is measured by highly sophisticated and sensitive equipment, the data…
gregladen | December 5, 2012Rachel Maddow can be very scary, because she's like, all truth and stuff. For example, she claims that evolution is real and the moon landing was real! Imagine that!
But seriously the question is, how can people get things like this, and lots of other things (Obama's place of birth, what really happened at Benghazi, etc.) so wrong.
Many misconceptions are politically motivated, but they are so absurd that it is hard to understand how they are spread and maintained. Recently, Rachel threw a few "truth bombs" and discussed the "truth" bubble that conservative politicians and the conservative…
gregladen | December 5, 2012A large scale model of a human brain has been created by a team of scientists at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo, Ontario. This is a virtual model, inside a computer, that involves 2,5 million virtual neurons structures in a pattern resembling the overall human brain’s anatomy, including cortical regions, motor control regions, etc. There are two components of the model: Visual processing including input and visual memory, and motor control sufficient to make a relatively simple, but 3D, arm move so it can draw things. The brain is called Semantic Pointer…
gregladen | December 5, 2012I'm reading Disaster!: A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues, and Other Catastrophes by John Withington, who also wrote about other disastrous things such as disasters specific to London. It is a couple of years old (and thus does not include the recent Japan earthquake and tsunami). This is more of a reference book than a sit-down-and-read-it book, and it lacks detailed presentation or critical analysis of sources, but if you want to know about a particular past major disaster or category of major disasters (volcanoes, floods, tsunamis, etc.) this is a good starting point. Reading…
gregladen | December 4, 2012I am having a conversation with my friend, Pat. We are talking about the way we talk when we have a chance to spend some time, or the way our emails seem to go.
“I tire of being asked what I think about something only to have the conversation derailed at the first ‘bump’ in my logic, at the first self-contradiction,” Pat says, of life in general.
My response: “I savor your contradictions. It's my desire to explore them with you and to experience the change that happens when you wrestle with them.”
“Yes, I think you get it. How refreshing.”
As you can see, Pat and I have a deeply meaningful…
gregladen | December 4, 2012That is the title of a book by Lars-Åke Janzon, with the subtitle "175 Answers to Possible and Impossible Questions about Animals". Oddly, that particular question appears to be evaded in the book itself, but most of the 175 questions seem to be addressed accurately. This is one of those books you keep around and read bits from now and then...perhaps you bring it on a trip and the tweens use it to create a game show or perhaps you keep it in your Life Science classroom and use it to generate discussion or test questions, or perhaps you just thumb through a fifth of it or so before going to…
gregladen | December 4, 2012You know about Atheists Talk because I mention it now and then. I've done several interviews on the radio show. of sciency people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Ira Flatow, and most recently George Church. I've also been interviewed on it. And I've done the TV now and then as well.
Here's the thing.
It costs the Minnesota Atheists quite a bit of money to keep the radio show on the air. So, we had a meeting the other day and decided to try to continue to do this next year (pending board approval) but also to ramp up our presence a little more in order to potentially increase the trickle of…
gregladen | December 4, 2012Lego Technic is a Lego based technology that includes a combination of totally new kinds of Lego pieces and fancy technology that lets you build some amazing things. You can get kits that range in cost and sophistication from the LEGO 8514 Technic Power Roboriders a sort of motorcycle for robots that costs tens of dollars to a Motorized Bulldozer that will set you back nearly $700. Actually, I think there may be Techno kits that cost way over $1000.
The modified Lego pieces include the techno "brick" which comes in many forms that have holes in them through which specially shaped parts can…
gregladen | December 4, 2012I was just looking at the newly released Time Top Ten Space (science) Moments of the year. This is a little unfair, actually. The year is not over. Something could easily happen between now and January 1, 2013. Anyway, there are things on this list I didn't know, so I therefore assume that you did not know them either.
It appears that the Moon sunk the Titanic. At first this sounds silly, but it is actually quite possible and even if an exaggeration of sorts, interesting. On January 4th, before the Titanic sailed, there was a Spring Tide. This is the monthly (in lunar months, obviously)…
gregladen | December 4, 2012Thursday, at 7 to 9 PM in Room 412 of the Science Teaching and Student Services Building on the East Bank. A few of us involved with Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories will be doing a thing called "Telling our Stories."
The event is run by the UMN Campus Atheists Skeptics and Humanists, and will include August Berkshire, Robin Raianiemi, Eric Jayne, Stephanie Zvan, and Me. Details are here.
gregladen | December 3, 2012UPDATE: The pages are DONE. Good work, Miriam!
Let's try to act like a civilized society, for at least a few minutes, OK? There is a facebook page called "No respect for suicidal teens" that seems to have been put up by someone annoyed by attention given to someone who killed herself that the facebook page creator has judged worthy of death. Thus the page. It almost looks like a persona vendetta of some kind.
Miriam Mogilevsky has created a petition asking Facebook to take this page down. I should note that there are actually two almost identical pages; either the person who created them…
gregladen | December 3, 2012Rebecca Watson gave the following talk at Skeptcon. It is funny, well done, and critiques a Pop-Evol-Psy concept or two, which I have also addressed (Why Do Men Hunt and Women Shop?, Understanding Sex Differences in Humans: What do we learn from nature?, Falsehoods: Human Universals, A Tutorial in Human Behavioral Biology, Driving The Patriarchy: Demonic Males, Feminism, and Genetic Determinism, Race, Gender, IQ and Nature, What is the most important human adaptation?, How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?, Men = Testosterone Damaged Women!, Sex and Gender in An Odd…
gregladen | December 3, 2012Despite rumors to the contrary, NASA actually does real, non-Parody science! And the famous press conference about Mars Rover happened today, and it was exactly as I predicted. Very, very interesting.
PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has used its full array of instruments to analyze Martian soil for the first time, and found a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. Water and sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, among other ingredients, showed up in samples Curiosity's arm delivered to an analytical laboratory inside the rover.
Detection of the substances during this…
gregladen | December 3, 2012A study has just come out in the Journal of Sex Research comparing various psychological and lifestyle measures of women who act in pornographic films with matched sets of women who do not.
There is a pretty clear association between negative attitudes towards pornography and negative assessments of the quality of life for actresses in the pornography genre. Studies have shown that those who regarded pornography as harmful to society also believed that those acting in the films must not like their work. Studies have also shown that people tend to believe that porn stars have sexual and…
gregladen | December 3, 2012My friend, Aslhey Miller, just wrote this thing and it is important. She has fallen in love with someone that her father does not approve of, and he, her father, has gone ahead and "disowned" her (a strange word when you think about it) for that reason. You should read this because it is socially and politically relevant, and Ashley is a social and political activist and a great writer. But she wrote it because she is a writer and needs to write about these things. This was not easy for her ... not easy to make the decision to write about this experience. I would appreciate it if you would…
gregladen | December 3, 2012As you know, NASA is planning a press conference later today, but you don’t have to wait for the big news. It was leaked, and I’ve got it.
The NASA Curiosity Mars Rover has discovered something interesting and rather enigmatic. I understand NASA will be asking your help in trying to identify what it is.
At first, the object appeared as three enigmatic shapes, kind of gray in color, very near each other, spotted in a ground-oriented medium resolution image. This is what the Rover image looked like:
Spectral analysis of the objects indicated that they are similar to igneous rock, but with a…
gregladen | December 3, 2012I might be exaggerating slightly about the ready availability of the materials...
Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves by George Church and Ed Regis looks like a futurist tome on what could happen when technology finally catches up with human imagination and everything changes. Except it isn't. Most futurists are people with some knowledge of technology, a fertile imagination, and a publicist. Regenesis is by a scientist (working with a writer) who is busy making a different future and who has been involved in every stage of development of the technology under…
gregladen | December 2, 2012But if you ask her for more details she'll get mad at you. Watch:
Governor Brewer, two things: First, you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. Second, you need to learn to govern. You are the "govern"or. Act like it.
Hat Tip Archy