gregladen | August 25, 2012This week on Skeptically Speaking:
This week, we’re discussing some fascinating science focused on the liquid portions of our big blue planet. We’re joined by graduate researcher Andrew David Thaler, founder of Southern Fried Science, to talk about the weird and wonderful networks of life that exist in the Deep Sea. And on the podcast, University of Alberta researcher David Schindler joins us to talk about the work, and the uncertain future, of Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area and its freshwater ecosystem research.
We record live with Andrew David Thaler on Sunday, August 26 at 6 pm MT. The…
gregladen | August 24, 2012Here's the last few news reports:
August 21:
NASA's Curiosity Studies Mars Surroundings, Nears Drive
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has been investigating the Martian weather around it and the soil beneath it, as its controllers prepare for the car-size vehicle's first drive on Mars.
The rover's weather station, provided by Spain, checks air temperature, ground temperature, air pressure, wind and other variables every hour at the landing site in Gale Crater. On a typical Martian day, or "sol," based on measurements so far in the two-week old mission, air temperatures swing from 28 degrees to…
gregladen | August 24, 2012According to data just now available, the total surface area of the summertime Arctic Sea that is covered in ice has reached the lowest point ever recorded.
Every (northern) summer the sea ice in the Arctic melts to some degree, reaching a minimum around the middle of September. Over the last several years, the amount of ice at this minimal point has been lower than previously recorded. Accurate records go back only a few decades, so this shift in ice cover reflects only the most recent period of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
Today, I got an email from my colleague John Abraham (the…
gregladen | August 23, 2012Soon To Be Hurricane Isaac
Isaac is a tropical storm currently located south of Puerto Rico and heading for Haiti and Cuba. After rolling over those land areas for several hours, and reaching the southeastern Gulf of Mexico, Isaac is expected to become a modest hurricane, likely to menace the west coast of Florida and the Florida Panhandle and nearby Mississippi. Conditions are actually right for Isaac to become a fairly strong storm, even though at the moment it is very poorly organized.
Arctic Cyclone
The other storm of interest is now historical, but worth a mention. This was the arctic…
gregladen | August 23, 2012There is a relationship between how much CO2 is in the atmosphere and sea level. More CO2 means a warmer atmosphere and that means less long term (glacial) ice and that means more sea water. Also, a warmer planet means the ocean water is warmer, and thus it expands, and that also contributes to sea level rise.
However, there is something of a falsehood generated when we read estimates of sea level rise. The straight forward link between CO2 and sea level (via heating oceans and melting ice) leads to estimates that are very small for sea level rise. We see things like “1.8 mm per year” which…
gregladen | August 22, 2012The State Fair is about to start up here in Minnesota, and the top epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota has very clearly stated that the swine should be excluded this year in order to avoid swine to human transmission of a flu virus that has been showing up in increasing numbers lately. I’ve blogged about this before, and here is an update with new numbers. Also, I’ll address a few questions I’ve heard asked.
How many people have been affected with the new Influenza A (H3N2) Variant Viruses (“H3N2v”)?
The CDC reports that 12 people were known to have been affected in 2011, and 225…
gregladen | August 21, 2012Mimicry is when one species has changed over time via Natural Selection to look like another species. Three commonly defined forms of mimicry are:
Batesian mimicry, named after Henry Walter Bates, a 19th century Natural Historian, where one species is poisonous or otherwise dangerous to a predator, and another species takes evolutionary advantage of that by looking like it but not actually being poisonous;
Müllerian mimicry, named after Fritz Müller who worked at about the same time as Bates, where two species that are poisonous or otherwise bad for predators evolve to look like each other…
gregladen | August 19, 2012... goes down, compared to other forms of insemination, because "the female body has ways to shut that down." That's according to Missouri Congressman Todd Akin. But this only works, according to him, if the rape is "legitimate." From this we can easily develop a sort of Witch Hunt method to determine if a woman accusing a man of rape was actually, "legitimately" raped or if she's faking it. If she becomes pregnant from the rape, the rape did not happen.
Is this clear?
OK, now that we have that straight, allow me to bring out this one piece of data I thought I'd never have use of. It is a…
gregladen | August 19, 2012Never mind the heat shield, the parachute, the thruster-guided landing, all of that. Curiosity went to Mars to carry out experiments using Big Science Gear and now it is confirmed that at least one set of gear works!
The method is laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, in which very high power but short burst laser light is focused on a thing, and the matter the thing is made up of is drastically altered in such a way that it gives of a signal that can be picked up by instruments also pointed at the thing, to produce a spectrosopic signature.
There is no useful analysis of the data yet,…
gregladen | August 19, 2012
Henry Gee, the Nature editor, has a novel in three parts ... Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy ... that I found hit home very closely like maybe Henry was me reincarnated and then transported back through time so his, er, our timeline would cross. This is not surprising since Henry and I have had overlapping interests in science for several decades, so his novel references a sense of understanding of the landscape, the kind of thing a geologist or archaeologist achieves either over time or because of an innate capacity. One of his characters is such an archaeologist. Another…
gregladen | August 18, 2012Not so fast …
85% of Americans want more funding for research renewable energy such as wind power.
In Iowa, a state leading in wind energy production, 85% of voters view tax credits for wind production as positive.
Also in Iowa, 57% of all voters would oppose a presidential candidate who wanted to end tax credits for wind energy, and 41% of GOP voters would oppose a Republican candidate who wanted to end tax credits for wind energy.
During Romney’s overseas trip, his campaign announced that “He will allow the wind credit to expire, end the stimulus boondoggles, and create a level playing…
gregladen | August 18, 2012The Angry Red Planet just gut a little angrier:
This sequence of images shows the heat shield from NASA's Mars Science Laboratory hitting the ground on Mars and raising a cloud of dust.
From NASA
gregladen | August 18, 2012You all know about CONvergence, and by now you've probably heard about or even seen or heard on the Internet one or more of the many panels that were done this year. But those recordings were impromptu and while useful, they are unpolished.
Also, the panels at CONvergence themselves tend to be informal, unmoderated or moderated by helpful volunteers, and everyone has a hangover. People attending the panels drew on important expertise and experience, but most panels were casual, with little preparation.
But a couple of the panels were different, most notably two panels on Climate Change.…
gregladen | August 18, 2012"World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet" by Michael Chorost will be the subject of discussion, with the author himself, on this week's Skeptically Speaking. The show airs live before an Internt Audience on Sunday, with the podcast coming out later in the week. Details and links will be found here.
gregladen | August 15, 2012We are becoming aware of two very important changes in the Arctic that you need to know about. These are separate thing but related, and both are almost certainly the outcome of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). They are:
The sea ice that covers much of the Arctic Sea during the winter is normally reduced during the northern summer, but this year, the reduction has been dramatic. There is less sea ice in the Arctic Circle than recorded in recent history.
The massive continental glacier on Greenland, the largest glacial mass in the Northern Hemisphere, has undergone more melting this…
gregladen | August 14, 2012Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories will be officially released on August 28th, though you can of course get it now if you click on this secret link (or this secret link for the Kindle edition).
I just received a press release for the book, and thought I'd pass it on to you.
Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories will be released August 28th
“A chorus not of arguments and positions but of shared human lives . . . At turns smart, funny, and deeply touching.” – Dale McGowan, author of Parenting Beyond Belief
ST. PAUL, Minn. (8/14/2012) —…
gregladen | August 12, 2012I just wanted to remind you to check The X Blog.
Being Sunday, there are Sunday Funnies.
Also, a post-Mr. Paul Aints commentary is HERE.
gregladen | August 11, 2012In late November, 1899, a British military unit which included an embedded reporter was ambushed by an Afrikaner unit in what is now Natal Province, South Africa. This was during the Anglo-Boer war, which was to be the largest military adventure to date in the history of the United Kingdom. The British had been traveling in an armored battle train, a kind of tank-train hybrid that was being used in that war mostly with poor results. The train was partly derailed, and the British were under fire, their only hope to make a break for it, or to hunker down and wait for reinforcements which may…
gregladen | August 11, 2012Barbara Forest Wrote Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design. Here is a recent talk by her:
gregladen | August 11, 2012G is for Galaxy: An Out of This World Alphabet (Alphabet Books) is one of a series of kid's alphabet books with an interesting twist. The pages have the usual big letter, a picture of something that starts with that letter, and a short sentence or two referring to that word. But on the same page is anywhere from one to a few paragraphs of extra text written at a basic level but seeming targeted to the adult who is reading the book to the kid, providing additional context, background, and details. For instance:
"G is for Galaxy, a big family of stars so bright. Our is called the Milky Way…