gregladen | September 14, 2012From NASA:
...astronomers have, for the first time, spotted planets orbiting sun-like stars in a crowded cluster of stars. The findings offer the best evidence yet that planets can sprout up in dense stellar environments. Although the newfound planets are not habitable, their skies would be starrier than what we see from Earth.
The starry-skied planets are two so-called hot Jupiters, which are massive, gaseous orbs that are boiling hot because they orbit tightly around their parent stars. Each hot Jupiter circles a different sun-like star in the Beehive Cluster, also called the Praesepe, a…
gregladen | September 14, 2012President Obama experienced a significant post-convention bounce. Already a little bit ahead, this places Obama more firmly ahead of Romney. But, the news would be so much more interesting if the two were much closer. How does one solve this problem if you are CNN? Make stuff up!
Yesterday CNN reported polls that showed Obama ahead of Romney by several points in key swing states of Virginia, Ohio and Florida. Then, according to Steve Singiser, "CNN's Gregory Wallace, writing up the polls on the media outlet's website, categorized Florida and Virginia as a tie. A tie.
gregladen | September 14, 2012The median income for Americans is about $50,000. Thus...
Question: Is $100,000 middle income?
Answer: No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less.
The question was being asked by George Stephanopoulos and answered by Mitt Romney.
source
gregladen | September 13, 2012When I look at the Atari Arcade, I get a bunch of gobbledygook but if I click on individual links to individual games, I get an interesting experiment in HTML 5.0 demonstrating old fashioned character-based-graphic style games. Here are the links, but I suggest right-clicking and opening in a new window or tab so you can more cleanly shut them down if you get stuck. In other words, attempting to use the most advanced web-based programming language/markup tool to emulate ancient games is kind of like Dr. Who crossing his own time line and all sorts of bad things can happen.
The Atari Arcade…
gregladen | September 13, 2012Have you read, or at least acquired your copy of, Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories? Just so you know, it is an anthology of (just like the title says) personal stories of individuals' journey to atheism. And, those people are writing from a Minnesota perspective. There are a lot of really great stories in the anthology, and a forward by Greta Christina.
Anyway, this Sunday, at the Southdale Library in the Greater Minneapolis area (just south of the city), at the monthly Minnesota Atheist meeting, there will be a special event involving the reading out loud of…
gregladen | September 13, 2012
Fusion Wallpaper
There comes a time in each person’s life when it is time to change the wallpaper. And the drapes, but we’ll focus on wallpaper here. And by wallpaper I mean the picture on your computer screen that is normally covered by icons and open windows. I came across a few neat individual wallpapers, as well as some good sources, and thought you’d like to see them. Since these wallpapers are from sites run by the artists who designed the wallpapers, it is appropriate that you go to those sites to get them, so here I’ll just show a few thumbnails but mainly talk about topics and…
gregladen | September 13, 2012My friend Adria Richards on why you should learn to code:
More details, especially if you are a girl, here.
Books mentioned in the video:
Learn to Program, Second Edition (The Facets of Ruby Series)
The Book of Ruby: A Hands-On Guide for the Adventurous
Eloquent Ruby (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series)
Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
gregladen | September 12, 2012It has been a while since we've done a recipe. And, it has been a while since we had a huge internet fight over something. Therefore, we will discuss:
how to cook corn on the cob!
First, you have to get some very fresh corn and do everything you can do to minimize the time from picking the corn to cooking the corn. Or, just go to the grocery store and get Genetically Modified Frankencorn. It will taste fine.
Then, decide which basic method you want to use. You can steam it (I have no idea how to do that), you can roast it (which we will not cover here, but it is a great way to cook corn on…
gregladen | September 12, 2012NASA's Earth Now Android App
One of the top iPhone education apps in the iTunes store is now available for Android. The free NASA "Earth Now" Android app immerses cyber explorers in dazzling visualizations of near-real-time global climate data from NASA's fleet of Earth science satellites, bringing a world of ever-changing climate data to users' fingertips. Available HERE.
TruthMarket by Rick Hayes-Roth on Point of Inquiry
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to make American politics just a little more rational, just a little more evidence based?
Wouldn't it be even nicer if there was a…
gregladen | September 12, 2012The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has acquired data that seems to indicate that Mars has dry-ice snowfalls.
From a press release by NASA:
Frozen carbon dioxide, better known as "dry ice," requires temperatures of about minus 193 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 125 Celsius), which is much colder than needed for freezing water. Carbon-dioxide snow reminds scientists that although some parts of Mars may look quite Earth-like, the Red Planet is very different. The report is being published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
"These are the first definitive detections of carbon-dioxide snow clouds,"…
gregladen | September 12, 2012Katherine Bagley of InsideClimate News has an interesting commentary on the idea that only in America do climate scientists face organized harassment.
She notes:
The harassment faced by U.S.-based climate scientists has been well documented in the media—but not the harassment of scientists in Europe, Canada or the rest of the world.
That’s because there hasn’t been much to report.
While outspoken scientists of human-caused climate change in the United States endure torrents of freedom of information requests, hate mail and even death threats from skeptics, their counterparts abroad have…
gregladen | September 12, 2012A number of lines of evidence have converged on the apparent fact that how you feel about Cilantro is a relatively simple genetic system. That Cilantro hatred is inherited genetically and not culturally has long been suspected, but now it is becoming clear enough that this could be a new module in the Science Classroom where kids are forced to taste it and record their level of disgust. It's all written up here, in Nature.
In hopes of identifying the genetic basis for these traits, researchers led by Nicholas Eriksson at the consumer genetics firm 23andMe, based in Mountain View, California…
gregladen | September 12, 2012I love the iPad, but it is not really suitable for young kids, because it requires an adult perspective on life to operate it correctly. For example, for a two year old, there is nothing more fun than figuring out how to make all the little icons dance, and once you do that, there is nothing more fun than making them disappear one by one by clicking on the little X's. The iPad would benefit greatly with a kiosk mode.
So, as Christmas comes and no matter what your culture or belief system you being to search for presents to give the little ones, you should know that there is a growing list…
gregladen | September 12, 2012Some interesting news from the Open Access front:
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) today announced the membership agreement with BioMed Central and SpringerOpen. Publication costs for research articles published by researchers funded by NWO for articles published no later than 2008, who chose to publish via BioMed Central will now automatically be covered (up to the maximum as defined by the NWO Incentive Fund Open Access Publications)
Bev Acreman BioMed Central's Commercial Director said, "We are delighted that the NWO has taken this significant step to broaden…
gregladen | September 11, 2012It is said that the national conventions of the two main parties in the US influence polls. This is sometimes called the "Convention Bump" but that term is used for a lot of other things, like a network getting more viewership during a convention, or a candidate getting more funding or larger crowds for a while.
The convention bump probably has two different causes. One is the tendency of the party about to have the convention to pile on lots of ad time on many TV markets, and to continue those ads during the convention. The other is the added attention to the candidate from the convention…
gregladen | September 11, 2012A young woman was driving along the road, at night, and needed to focus her attention on a cell phone call, so she pulled into an open parking lot of a closed restaurant along side the road and visible to passing motorists. She pulled her car into a parking space, switched it off, and made the call.
A passing police officer noticed the young woman alone in her car talking on the cell phone. He pulled into the parking lot and switched on his emergency lights, got out of his police cruiser and approached her. He started asking her questions about what she was doing, who she was talking to,…
gregladen | September 10, 2012For various reasons, it has been difficult for the Democrats in Minnesota (called "DFLers") to unseat Republican Congressional Representative Michele Bachmann. This has been partly because the candidates put up were not properly selected (probably) and partly because the people in her district simply liked her. Personally, I think her district started to like her less before the last Congressional election but supported her anyway because of her celebrate. But I have another theory as well, which is that the Tea Party is done. Out of date. No longer relevant. Michele Bachmann's district's…
gregladen | September 10, 2012A while ago, I wrote Who is to blame for politically shaded shootings? in which I made this rather extreme statement which was only weakly opposed by any commenters:
Generally speaking these days, progressive movements and for the most part the “left” in America speaks out against violence, is more or less either anti-gun or pro gun regulation, mostly anti-war, and mostly pacifist, while the right wing tends to form heavily armed paramilitary militias, is totally against almost any kind of gun related regulations, is pro war, and bellicose. So when someone from the right shoots someone on the…
gregladen | September 9, 2012Romney would replace Obamacare with a law that would require insurers to do what they were already doing before Obamacare, but makes it sound better than it is:
The key phrase here is "continuously insured."
As pointed out by Jonathan Cohn via Think Progress:
the federal government already forbids insurers from denying coverage to the continuously covered through the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). But the measure has been seen as a failure because “there is no limit on what insurers can charge under HIPAA” and the law does “little to regulate the content…