gregladen | November 15, 2012I've not been to Maine in years, but there was a time when I frequented the state and knew it pretty well. And, my recollection is that almost everybody there is white or whitish. Hardly any black people. I looked it up just now: Maine is 12th from the bottom among us states in terms of percent "black" with about 1%.
Now, here's the thing. Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog is reporting on comments mad by Maine Republican Party Chairman Charlie Webster's concern that on election day, "Dozens of black people" showed up out of nowhere and voted. Here's Charlie:
"Pat" is "Part" so that's "…
gregladen | November 15, 2012As you know, it was recently reported that a woman named Savita Halappanavar was killed in an Irish hospital when she was not given proper medical treatment for religious reasons. One of the last conversations she had was with hospital employees who told her and her husband that this was an "Irish Catholic Hospital" so of course there would not be a termination of a pregnancy, which was in the process of a long and problematic miscarriage, even if the patient, Savita Halappanavar, might die with out it. Well, she did die, at the hands of the hospital staff. First, the fetus died, but the…
gregladen | November 14, 2012I would almost count it unethical that the New Scientist has a thing that looks like a blog post (an article you can comment on) that has some science in it, but that you have to be a paid subscriber to comment on. WTF New Scientist? What are you trying to pull?
But that's OK, I've got a blog and can comment here.
Link between global warming and drought questioned
14 November 2012 by Fred Pearce
THE world has been suffering more droughts in recent decades, and climate change will bring many more, according to received wisdom.
"Received Wisdom" means stuff we were told, passed down to us from…
gregladen | November 14, 2012How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is Ray Kurzweil's latest book. You may know of him as the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil is a "futurist" and has a reputation as being one of the greatest thinkers of our age, as well as being One of the greatest hucksters of the age, depending on whom you ask. In his new book...
Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even…
gregladen | November 14, 2012The Gender vs. Sex question...referring to the meaning of those two terms in relation to each other...is standard material for discussion in Anthropology and related fields, but is often left unattended to in day to day discourse. Both terms have internal complexity, with Gender meaning something about people’s identity as well as being a linguistic term, different but overlapping, and of course, Sex is a verby noun sometimes. But when we say “Gender vs. Sex” we are clearly talking about biological things such as chromosomes and genitalia, behavioral things such as attraction and orientation…
gregladen | November 14, 2012I have two questions:
1) Which high power storms had zero extra energy from warming in the atmosphere and seas owing to the release of fossil carbon?
2) Which high powered members of the military, other government units, or industry and business had zero extramarital affairs or the equivalent?
Answer: Number 1 has been on the increase, number 2 on the decrease, on average, the former owing mainly to the burning of fossil fuels, the latter to the disestablishment of the hareem system.
Visit the Petraeus Affair Tumblr.
gregladen | November 13, 2012Two items:
1) The recent episode of Skeptically Speaking on space is now a podcast. Details here.
In almost any discussion of space exploration and observation, one question always arises. Why should we spend the money, when there are problems here on Earth? This week, we’re going to tackle this question, with a panel of people who know just how important the science of space actually is. Penny4NASA‘s John Zeller and Noisy Astronomer Nicole Gugliucci return to the show, along with Scientific American Associate Editor John Matson, and Cynthia Phillips, Senior Research Scientist at the SETI…
gregladen | November 13, 2012Several restaurants are laying off employees, needlessly, as a form of passive aggressive snit in objection to Obamacare. They don't want to have to give their employees health insurance. I think some of these companies are also known for having opposed Obama in the election, which is their right (corporations are people too, after all!) but this is actually, in my view, a form of voter intimidation large scale. If the mainly fast and medium-speed food industry collaborates tacitly or not to make a certain voting pattern hurt all of their employees, they are creating a class of people who…
gregladen | November 13, 2012You probably already know that when Obama won the presidency a large number of people, many teenagers, tweeted racist comments about that. Funny story: I found out about the use of the n-word in relation to the re-elected President in one person's tweet, so I figured I'd investigate. I went to twitter and entered the appropriate search terms, and found a bunch of hateful hideous tweets, as expected. About 20 down I found my friend Debbie Goddard. She had done the same search and tweeted about it. Sort of like hearing a bad noise in the yard and when you go out there to check it out you…
gregladen | November 13, 2012One of the most commonly winged-about facts of Earth's climate change we hear from science denialists is that sea ice in the Antarctic is increasing, therefore, there is no global warming. The fact that every other measurement of temperature and ice-osity indicates warming and melting would make a normal person think of the Antarctic situation as odd, and seek explanations, but somehow this logic does not emerge in the minds of the denialists. It has been suspected, and increasingly confirmed, for some time that the increase in sea ice in the Antarctic is the result of changes in wind…
gregladen | November 13, 2012If you had a friend or relative who didn't vote at all, and for that reason someone you didn't like got elected, then, naturally, you would run them over. Like this:
Upset over the result of last week's presidential election, an Arizona woman ran over her husband with her car, believing him to be directly responsible for Obama's reelection because he didn't vote.
According to police in Gilbert, 28-year-old Holly Solomon of Mesa and her husband Daniel argued loudly in a local parking lot before Holly got in her Jeep SUV and began chasing Daniel around. She eventually managed to pin him…
gregladen | November 13, 2012Three only vaguely connected items that I thought you might want to know about:
From Amanda Marcotte: Skepticon Demonstrates That Pro-Fun Means Anti-Harassment
From Jessica at The Friendly Atheist: Uganda Passes ‘Kill the Gays’ Bill
From Think by Numbers: Government Spends More on Corporate Welfare Subsidies than Social Welfare Programs
gregladen | November 13, 2012Sungudogo, the highly entertaining and exciting adventure novella set in the Central African rain forest, which provides the Skeptics Movement with its own Origin Myth, has been available on the Kindle for a while now, but it is now also available on Smashwords, HERE.
...
Sungudogo is a little known zoological mystery, an “undiscovered” primate living in the remote and rugged region of the eastern Congo, where the Central African Rain Forest fringes the high walls of the western edge of the Great Rift Valley.
Sometimes called the “fourth African ape,” Sungudogo is not a Gorilla, not a…
gregladen | November 13, 2012The other side of the coin(age): Newton and the Counterfeiter
Did you know that Isaac Newton had two jobs? One, you know about: To figure out all that physics and math stuff so we could live for a while in a Newtonian world (later to be replaced by an Einsteinian world). The other was as the big honcho of the Royal Mint. Where they make the money.
In that second job, Newton had several interesting problems to deal with, which were in some ways more complex than how planets keep orbiting around stars and apples keep falling from trees. He needed to secure the coinage of the land against…
gregladen | November 12, 2012... from you, as a friend or relative? Or, more exactly, what kinds of often well meaning things do you say or do for someone with chronic illness that are actually hurting and not helping?
I have a good friend who, like many other friends actually, has a chronic illness that is sometimes painful, sometimes scary, sometimes annoying, and at any given time, I think, is one or more of those things, and she has written a blog post listing over a dozen things that people often do or say that she wishes they wouldn't. Most of these are really simple things, often unintentional, but not without…
gregladen | November 12, 2012There's been a lot of talk lately about what the Republican party and its members were up to this election year. Racial slurs and lynching chairs, being mean to recent immigrants, and voter suppression directed at minorities could hot have helped to get the non-white vote in line for last Tuesday's elections. A ramped up attack on women in general and their health care in particular could not have helped to get the none-male vote in line for last Tuesday's election. And, importantly, white males in large numbers are annoyed at attacks on women and minority, so the Republican approach could…
gregladen | November 12, 2012This is the year of the woman in the US Congress and elsewhere, despite the best efforts of some to make sure that the opposite happened.
This is the year in which the Right Wing carried out the most anti-woman campaign ever since suffrage, or at least, so it would appear, along with a continued attack on non-hetero persons. A defining moment in this campaign occurred in February, when the Republican controlled House carried out a nearly comical hearing on women’s reproductive rights.
Three Democrats walked out of a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on religious liberty and the…
gregladen | November 12, 2012Let Them Eat Shrimp: The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea by Kennedy Warne has been out for about a year, but if you've not seen it you may want to have a look at it. Warne, editor of New Zealand Geographic magazine, is a naturalist who writes about the embattled mangrove swamps, which are a key part of many oceanic ecosystems as well as local and regional economies.
"What’s the connection between a platter of jumbo shrimp at your local restaurant and murdered fishermen in Honduras, impoverished women in Ecuador, and disastrous hurricanes along America’s Gulf coast?…