gregladen | November 23, 2012Have you heard of the book "Once We All Had Gills: Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World"?
Here's a summary:
In this book, Rudolf A. Raff reaches out to the scientifically queasy, using his life story and his growth as a scientist to illustrate why science matters, especially at a time when many Americans are both suspicious of science and hostile to scientific ways of thinking. Noting that science has too often been the object of controversy in school curriculums and debates on public policy issues ranging from energy and conservation to stem-cell research and climate change, Raff…
gregladen | November 23, 2012There is a petition making the rounds which is getting some real support, and that you should sign:
Enforce the tax code, and strip violating Religious institutions of their tax exempt 501(c) status.
Religious institutions across our great nation serve an important role in community building & out reach, helping the poor & disenfranchised, among many other noble actions.
Our forefathers had the foresight to see that for our nation to succeed, we would need to enforce an unparalleled freedom of religion. However, they also understood the imperative need for a legal separation between…
gregladen | November 23, 2012Dinosaur Toys?
Glendon Mellow was asking the other day where to get “realistic” or “scientifically accurate” dinosaurs for kids to play with. There are a LOT of “realistic” dinosaur sets out there, but they are for the most part realistic in that they really look like the imagined dinosaurs of the last century and a half, and not the reconstructed dinosaurs of present day paleontology. I’m not sure if you can even get those. The 12 piece Large Assorted Dinosaurs - Toys 5–7" Larger Size Dinosaur Figures exemplify the results of an Interent search for “realistic dinosaur.” Yes, they are…
gregladen | November 22, 2012After hundreds of studies, it has been difficult to link fish predation by cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus) to the reduction of fishing quality in Minnesota lakes. It appears that game fish such as walleye and northern pike make up from less than 1% to nearly 3% of the bird's diet. They eat only small fish. Many of the fish they eat are perch, which prey on walleye, and it is even possible that by culling small walleye or northerns, they increase the growth rate for those fish in two way. One is by reducing competition between fish for food, and the other is by exerting selective pressure…
gregladen | November 22, 2012How will climate change affect the flavor of wine? Are warming oceans responsible for the recent global jellyfish outbreak? Do we know how a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide will affect poison ivy, tobacco, or even sea anemones? NCSE climate change project director talks about what the research shows and future questions to be answered. Sponsored by the Bay Area Skeptics.
gregladen | November 22, 2012BaBar data recently analyzed might confirm that time is wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.
If you are a B meson, time may not run the same in both directions for you. This is based on a report in Physical Review Letters called "Observation of Time-Reversal Violation in the B0 Meson System" which has this abstract:
I had to use a screen shot because I can't type in all that wiggly wobbly formula stuff.
Nature Blogs's Eugenie Samuel Reich explains this HERE. If that is not clear, just watch this video:
gregladen | November 22, 2012Today is Thanksgiving in the US. Happy Thanksgiving. Let us being with a word of advice:
TAKE THE TURKEY OUT OF THE FREEZER NAO!!!
And now ... a feast.
The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white flagging to indicate a peaceful intent attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into…
gregladen | November 21, 2012The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution is by a scientist Dean Falk, who has contributed significantly to the study of evolution of the human brain, and who has been directly involved in some of the more interesting controversies in human evolution.
Back when I was a graduate student I was assigned by my advisor a set of literature to absorb and comment on. The mix of published and soon to be published papers included a series of papers written by Ralph Holloway and Dean Falk. These represented a fight over the interpretation of early…
gregladen | November 21, 2012A probabilistic quantification of the anthropogenic component of twentieth century global warming is a paper just out that examines an important conflict in the conversation about climate change and global warming. Before getting to the details, have a look at this graph from the paper:
This is temperature increasing on the earth over a century or so. Notice that there is what looks like a warming around 1940 on top of an otherwise mostly warming trend, followed by a bunch more warming.
The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, in 2007, referring to data that ran up to 2005 inclusively, said…
gregladen | November 21, 2012On March 11th, 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant complex suffered damage from an earthquake and ensuing tsunami that caused multiple nuclear reactor core meltdowns and melt-throughs, explosions, and major releases of radioactive material into the air and the sea. In addition to the reactor meltdowns and melt-throughs spent fuel storage tanks were also damaged and probably contributed to the release. It took about a year for the plant to reach a condition that was stable enough that we stopped checking it every day to see if new bad things were happening. Heroic efforts were…
gregladen | November 21, 2012One of the reasons that we have not, as a species, as a group of nations, dealt effectively with Anthropogenic Global Warming is the effectiveness of climate science denialism. There are denialists in Congress, on the Internet, and everywhere. They have not succeeded in making a valid scientific argument regarding Global Warming, but they have kept the rhetoric in the foreground, which has allowed interests protecting Big Oil to keep the hapless Main Stream Media focused on a false balance between scientific consensus and unreasonable doubt. As a result, the last decade or so has been a…
gregladen | November 21, 2012
Santa wants you to have this book!
Atheist Voices of Minnesota (which comes in a print version and a Kindle version) is a collection of individual journeys to atheism. All the authors are Minnesotan (natural born, former, or immigrant to the North Star State). While some of the authors are professional writers or high profile bloggers, most are regular people with interesting stories to tell. The essays are selected from a much larger group of submissions, the works are carefully edited, and organized into general categories. The Minnesota connection itself is great for Minnesotans, but…
gregladen | November 20, 2012Nature, the journal, has come out in favor of the US congress acting on a Carbon Tax now.
As looming tax increases and budget cuts threaten to plunge the US economy back into recession, Congress should take a hard look at introducing a carbon tax as an important part of the solution.
This week, a reinvigorated Barack Obama returned to the White House knowing that he was poised on the edge of a fiscal cliff. Rather than relishing his victory last week, Obama must immediately set about crafting a compromise on deficit reduction with congressional leaders. The stakes could hardly be higher — for…
gregladen | November 20, 2012Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life by Martin Meredith examines the history of human evolution studies, focusing on Africa, and provides a comprehensive overview of the conflict between different researchers, different points of view, and sometimes, different evidence. It is a good read.
Meredith starts out with an examination of the Taung fossil, its discoverer, anatomy, and associated controversy. As you probably know, Taung was brought light by anatomist Raymond Dart, and had its initial impact on human evolutionary studies in the 1920s when the British Piltdown…
gregladen | November 20, 2012Just a quick note, review to come later. Henry Gee has produced a Second Edition of his book The Science of Middle-Earth: Explaining The Science Behind The Greatest Fantasy Epic Ever Told!, which will be released on December 14th as a Kindle eBook.
There are two things to know about this. First, the Second Edition is revised enough to want to get it even if you have the first edition. Second, if you are not familiar with the book, it may be a bit different than you expect. It is not a book about the science IN Tolkein's books as much as it is a scientifically oriented investigation of…
gregladen | November 20, 2012Neil deGrasse Tyson if famous for telling us that children are natural scientists, and cautioning us to be careful not to ruin that thing about them. He makes a good case. No one ever thought, I think, that he meant that children were born resistant to the sorts of biases that scientists actively eschew, or with a developed sense of probability theory that all scientists need to evaluate their work and the work of others, and those other tools that scientists get trained in for several years before they can really call themselves scientists. He mean, rather ... how shall I put this. Oh hell…
gregladen | November 20, 2012You may have heard that the release of greenhouse gases has recently gone down, to match levels of several years ago. Why, then, do we have someone saying that greenhouse gasses have reached a new record high?
There are two, maybe three, reasons.
First, even though CO2 release from the US may be lower now than it has been in a few years, it is still high (it was high a few years ago, so we've reduced to a level that is high!). More importantly, the US has reduced its release of CO2 primarily for incidental economic reasons. With a recession/depression going on, there is less money being…
gregladen | November 20, 2012This is the time of year that we rightfully contemplate the noble Turkey. The very first thing we notice about this large member of the Galliformes is that there is a wild version and a domestic version, and although the two are rather different, they are both given the same species name, Meleagris gallopavo. This is not entirely unknown among domestic animals, but many domesticates have no living wild version. Thus, the cattle we raise for meat and dairy are sometimes called Bos taurus while the extinct wild form is always called Bos primigenius. The domestic cat has the uninspired name…
gregladen | November 19, 2012These are the tweets from the Montreal Police:
For those who don't know, Dennis Markuze is a perennial internet-only (so far) stalker who has been sending nasty emails and tweets to anyone he sees as a key Atheist figure or anyone thusly linked, and posting rambling often offensive sometimes threatening blog comments on our blog sites, for several years now. He is a Nostradamus cultist. A while back he was arrested and put by Montreal authorities into psychiatric care, and later released under certain conditions including that he not bother people on line any more. More recently he…