gregladen | November 1, 2012The Drake Equation is that famous equation where you count how many stars there are, figure out the chance of a star having planets, of planets having water, etc. etc. until finally you get some rough estimate of the chance of live evolving elsewhere in the universe. It's a little more complicated (and also simpler) than that, but one factor that permeates the equation is the life-friendliness of a star system. It might turn out that the presence of asteroid belts affects life-friendliness. NASA reports some new research indicating...
...that the size and location of an asteroid belt,…
gregladen | November 1, 2012The Carnival of Evolution is up and running HERE at Sorting out Science. Catch up with the latest and greatest from the blogosphere on Evolution!
gregladen | November 1, 2012Rising Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact is a new book by Hunt Janin and Scott Mandia. Janin is a writer of non fiction and scholarly books, and Mandia is a professor of physics and a science communicator who specializes in climate-related issues.
To me, sea level is one of the most interesting and important of climate related issues. Interesting because I've done archaeology at the edge of the sea, sometimes beneath it, sometimes racing ahead of it, and often, looking at changes in human settlement caused by its rise since the Last Glacial Maximum. Important because one of…
gregladen | November 1, 2012Live at 9:30 AM Eastern THIS MORNING:
Featuring Obama campaign surrogate Kevin Knobloch and former Republican congressman and Delaware governor Mike Castle.
Moderated by ScienceDebate.org's Shawn Otto and ClimateDesk Live's Chris Mooney.
TUNE IN HERE FOR LIVESTREAM
Thursday, November 1, 2012
The Mott House, Capitol Hill
9:30a.m.-11:00a.m. Eastern US Time Zone
Please consider a donation to support this broadcast, its archive, and our similar efforts.
Thank you,
-Shawn Otto and the team at ScienceDebate.Org
gregladen | October 31, 2012
The McGregor Museum is a complex building with several wings surrounding an inner court yard, a multi-layered roof, balconies everywhere, and numerous trees in the court yard close in to the building. So, a cat can spend the heat of the day in the shaded crown of a tree, and the cool of the evening up on the building's sun-warmed metal roof.
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The interior of the McGregor museum houses numerious exhibits. The old period rooms and hallways focus on the late 19th century, and other newer areas (not shown) have an excellent set of exhibits on archaeology, human evolution, and "San" rock…
gregladen | October 31, 2012As promised, the footnotes for A True Ghost Story.
1Unless this statement itself is not true, in which case, how can you know what is true and what is not true? And besides, it can't really all be true because some of it is about ghosts.
2Who wants to be alone sitting in the dark?
3I use the term "non-White" along side the terms "Black" and "White" to signal that there is complexity here. There are three sources of complexity. One is linguistic, one is ethnic, and one is historical. First, the "ethnic" or "racial" issue: to the extent that these concepts are valid at all, which is very…
gregladen | October 31, 2012... Continued ...
Finally, without any further interruption ...
One morning I was up a bit earlier than usual, and I was in the bathroom shaving. It was an hour or so before sunup. The lighting in the bathroom was poor, but there was a security spotlight outside the window, as I recall, so I had opened the frosted glass pane to let in a little more light, as well as the clean, cold but dry night air, which would keep the fogged over bathroom mirror clear.
As I was just starting to scrape the razor against my face in the bathroom, I heard the ghostly footsteps walking one way down the…
gregladen | October 31, 2012... Continued ...
Since we are talking about geology, I do not want to give up the opportunity to bring up one of the coolest stories of geology ever, given the present day discussion of science and religion. You will be asking for a source for this story. Look it up in Wikipedia, where all knowledge resides, and you will not find it there.
There are things, it turns out, that The Great Knowing Web Site does not know. My source is a combination of primary and secondary documents, written histories, and a documentary that is not generally available.
Barney Barneto nee Barnet Isaacs was a…
gregladen | October 31, 2012I know elections are stressful and even annoying, and this year it is worse than ever because there is so much at stake, especially here in Minnesota where we have two boneheaded ballot amendments to deal with. Sometimes it just feels like this:
I'm hoping Bronco Bamma wins!
gregladen | October 31, 2012... Continued ...
One of the main reasons we were staying in Kimberley at all was to assist the museum staff with a particular, and rather singular, survey and excavation. The location and circumstances of this field project were quite remarkable.
This was on the location of an historic hunting reserve, where every one of the buildings where guests were quartered and entertained was built well before World War II. Even the huge ancient charcoal refrigerator was intact and in use. This was a large cylindrical structure with double mesh walls. When the game was afoot and dozens of buck…
gregladen | October 31, 2012Earlier this year a paper was published in the journal Nature in which a team of scientists looked at changes in storm surge potential under conditions of global warming, and they used the New York City area in their modeling. Combined with resent research adding to the growing body of data and studies that show increased storminess with global warming, this research suggests that the increased possibility of a hurricane causing a storm surge that would actually flood the subways in Manhattan is not only possible, but pretty likely to happen in the near future. Perhaps as soon as ....…
gregladen | October 31, 2012... Continued ...
I wrote earlier about the graves that were dug daily to receive the dead. In truth, the details of this procedure are still being worked out by archaeologists at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, but when we were there on this particular trip, part of the grave yard to which I refer had been just discovered, accidentally uncovered during a public works drainage project. I've never seen anything quite like it in all my years as an archaeologist.
It should not have been terribly surprising that there were graves in this particular patch of land, just across a small road…
gregladen | October 31, 2012Storms of My Grandchildren is a book by James Hansen that outlines the science behind increasing storminess associated with global warming, and covers key events in the recent history of the politics of climate change science denialism. It is a good book. The National Center for Science Education is now giving away a preview exerpt of the book, in a PDF file, which you can have by clicking here and it will be magically delivered to your computer. So there you go!
When you're done with that and you have this feeling that you want to keep reading, go ahead and check out this novella!
gregladen | October 30, 2012... Continued ...
Well, we were living with this ghost who would walk up and down the hall in the middle of the night, invisibly leaving behind only the sound of its footsteps. But before I tell you how this all came out, I want to tell you a related side story.
As I had mentioned, I had the "hallway extension" room. Let me explain.
To get into the apartment, you would walk up a set of stairs and through a lockable doorway. Then to the right was a bedroom, and to the left a bathroom. Moving on ahead down the hallway were two more bedrooms on the right for a total of three. On the…
gregladen | October 30, 2012Check it out:
Thank you Sarah!
Here's the Sungudogo Page in case you want to experience the pain of reading it too! (I mean the good kind of pain, of course.)
gregladen | October 30, 2012... Continued ...
So there we were in the Haunted Guest Quarters of the Old Infirmary, and I had already heard the ghost once. In the morning, my colleague and BFF Lynne who was staying with us for a couple of days noted that she had heard the mysterious footsteps as well....
"Greg, one, maybe both, of your students are really afraid of ghosts," she said.
"Why were they even talking about ghosts?"
"They've talked about little else since finding out that the ghost tour business is the biggest thing in town! And sooner or later they're going to hear whatever that was walking down the hall…
gregladen | October 30, 2012Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is true.1 This is a long story, so it will span more than one blog post. You might not want to read this story while you are alone or while sitting in the dark.2
Kimberley South Africa is said to be the most haunted city in the world, and it certainly is a city with a remarkable and dark history. The culture of Kimberley is constructed from the usual colonial framework on which are draped the tragic lives of representatives from almost every native culture from thousands of kilometers around.
The city's very existence is highly questionable…
gregladen | October 29, 2012Reports from Lower Manhattan are sketchy, but the tide gauge shows that the Atlantic Ocean is receding, but not before filling the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel with several feet of water, probably flooding several subways, and covering the New York Stock Exchange floor with a few feet of water.
So far five or so people in the New York City area and one person in Maryland have been killed, including the very tragic case of two kids killed instantly when a large tree crashed through their house, where they were inside playing.
The power outages are extensive and the storm is not anywhere near…
gregladen | October 29, 2012Sandy was originally scheduled to pass over the Gulf Sream, intensify, then back off a bit in intensity as it spun closer to the cost, with the midpoint of the thousand mile wide tropical storm passing over the coast in the wee hours of the morning, Tuesday. Instead, Sandy has sped up and is heaving itself landward as a full blown Category One hurricane of unbelievable extent. Since the hurricane is hitting New Jersey, it's right punch is heading for New York City, and as I write this, the storm surge at The Battery (that's the lower, southernmost tip of Manhattan, where you catch the Staten…