gregladen | August 11, 2012Two days ago, according to the NCSE, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 2 which protects the right of citizens to pray and express religious beliefs, which was already the case because of the US Constitution. However, the Amendment will have other effects that were not mentioned at the voting booth. For example, "no student shall be compelled to perform or participate in academic assignments or educational presentations that violate his or her religious beliefs." What do you think THAT is going to lead to?
gregladen | August 11, 2012Romney's choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate does little more than changing one aspect of the election dynamic for the Presidency. But it an important change.
Have you been to an even any time over the last several months at which a Federal level Democratic candidate gave a speech? Unless you were not paying attention or sleeping through part of it, there is a good chance that you heard the candidate, or perhaps someone speaking on behalf of a candidate, mention Paul Ryan. Of all the Republicans who are not famous for being perennial losers (such as Newt Gingrich) or batshit crazy…
gregladen | August 10, 2012NASA did an amazing thing a few days ago, landing a big giant amazing Science Robot on the Angry Red Planet, Mars. But to get to that point, to have The Ultimate Omelette, as it were, you've got to break a few eggs.
Here is what an egg looks like when NASA breaks it:
It doesn't just sit there and burn...it keeps blowing up and stuff, so you may want to watch the whole video if you missed the Fourth of July.
This is/was the Morpheus Lander.
Morpheus is a vertical test bed vehicle demonstrating new green propellant propulsion systems and autonomous landing and hazard detection technology.…
gregladen | August 10, 2012Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories, a book that I have a chapter in, is now available for the Kindle and the Nook.
gregladen | August 7, 2012A whole bunch of photographs rom Mars have bee posted by NASA, here. I thought the following one was pretty cool because it shows how accommodating the Martians are, cleaning the dust off the lens and all.
This image comparison shows a view through a Hazard-Avoidance camera on NASA's Curiosity rover before and after the clear dust cover was removed. Both images were taken by a camera at the front of the rover. Mount Sharp, the mission's ultimate destination, looms ahead. The view on the left, with the dust cover on, is one quarter of full resolution, while the view on the right is full…
gregladen | August 7, 2012If corporations are people, there is an argument that Scripps News Service should have a restraining order placed on it. The news service repeatedly took down the hourly postings by NASA, made by NASA, on the NASA YouTube channel, because they thought somehow, by mistake, that NASA was violating Scripps News Service's rights. Later, Scripps News Service apologized, but that is not enough. No apology can undo the fact that an ongoing real time event was repeatedly disrupted by what can only be seen as a grave error.
Imagine that there is an event happening where getting certain information…
gregladen | August 6, 2012Curiosity landed on Mars last night (I assume you were watching). Well, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter managed to take a picture of Curiosity with its parachute! This is so cool. Look:
NASA's Curiosity rover and its parachute were spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as Curiosity descended to the surface on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
How cool is that???? More details here form NASA.
gregladen | August 5, 2012OK, I only have a minute to watch while I'm having lunch.
A women's basketball game has just ended.
Americans playing Olympic basketball is like kids pulling the legs off grasshoppers.
"So, are you ready for your next game, do you have any strategy?"
"I don't even know who we're playing. I only need to know who the next team we're playing is."
"So, do you know who you're playing next?"
"No, I don't even know that."
"You'll be playing Canada."
"OK, whatever."
Hahaha. The American Women's basketball team just beat whomever they were just playing (nobody can remember) by 46 points. In games…
gregladen | August 5, 2012This evening, Skeptically Speaking will have Sam Kean, author of The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements and The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code. Details here.
The Sunday Funnies are here.
And while you are over there, check out Atheism 101 and the latest crazy from our friends on the other side of the culture war that they imagine exists.
gregladen | August 5, 2012You can watch along with NASA and see briefings and stuff on Curiosity Cam. The Exploratorium also has a page with a web case and various videos.
In case you haven't seen the Seven Minutes of Terror video, here it is:
Updates and a countdown clock will be found here on the NASA site.
gregladen | August 5, 2012A newly-published paper reveals how highly-reactive Fluorine Gas has been found in nature, due do a process which takes place within fluorite.
gregladen | August 5, 2012
Left: Efe (Pygmy) man. Right: White guy.
Some of the people who live in the rain forest of Central Africa are known widely as "Pgymies." That word...Pygmy...is considered problematic for a few different reasons. It refers to a person's physical appearance, because it means "small." The word is sometimes used in biology to refer to the smaller species among a group of closely related species, as in "Pygmy Hippopotamus" or "Pygmy Chimp." In English and probably some other languages, the term is used in a derogatory way to refer to someone who is perceived as not very smart, as in "Pygmy…
gregladen | August 5, 2012This just in:
Curiosity Closes in on its New 'Home'
Sat, 04 Aug 2012 06:20:24 PM CDT
With Mars looming ever larger in front of it, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft and its Curiosity rover are in the final stages of preparing for entry, descent and landing on the Red Planet at 10:31 p.m. PDT Aug. 5 (1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6). Curiosity remains in good health with all systems operating as expected. Today, the flight team uplinked and confirmed commands to make minor corrections to the spacecraft's navigation reference point parameters. This afternoon, as part of the onboard sequence of…
gregladen | August 4, 2012Researcher and science writer Jesse Bering delights in being provocative. From the description of his new book, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human:
Why do testicles hang the way they do? Is there an adaptive function to the female orgasm? What does it feel like to want to kill yourself? Does “free will” really exist? And why is the penis shaped like that anyway?
In Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?, the research psychologist and award-winning columnist Jesse Bering features more than thirty of his most popular essays from Scientific American and Slate,…
gregladen | August 4, 2012I'd like to give you a very small selection of references and discussions about the link between global warming and drought.
Global warming probably has two major effects. First, more moisture gets into the atmosphere because warmer air passing over the oceans can take in more water. This can cause more rain and possibly more severe storms and flooding. But the atmospheric system also changes in another way. The hydraulic cycle, as it is called, intensified in both directions, wet and dry. If you live on the East Coast of the US and you move to where I live in the upper Midwest, you'll…
gregladen | August 4, 2012
Caption from NASA: "This artist's scoreboard displays a fictional game between Mars and Earth, with Mars in the lead. It refers to the success rate of sending missions to Mars, both as orbiters and landers. Of the previous 39 missions targeted for Mars from around the world, 15 have been successes and 24 failures. For baseball fans, that's a batting average of .385."
NASA acknowledges the fact that most missions to Mars fail. The rocket goes off course or crashes, or the device lands broken, or works for a while then stops.
According to the latest press release, which has some interesting…
gregladen | August 4, 2012It seems like everybody in the Old Testament is either married, about to get married, or was recently married but something went terribly wrong. This may be becasue the bible is about marriage. The Old Testament is a history, it is a set of laws, and it is an enthnography, and the themes themes that hold the whole thing together are warfare, resorces, marriage, and a heavy dose of odd cultish rule-making about food and blood. Marriage is a central theme of cultural life, so of course it plays an important role in a culture's own history and ethnography. But is the bible, as one example of…
gregladen | August 3, 2012There is a novel strain of swine flu of the H3N2 type with a lot of infections in humans over a short period of time but over a large geographic area.
The CDC reports 12 cases this week, 1 in Hawaii, 10 in Ohio, and one in Indiana. Seventeen more cases were reported since about one year ago. Most of the cases are found in individuals who had direct contact with swine, but some cases appear to be person to person transmission.
A large number of the recent cases seem to have been in individuals who had contact with swine at a fair. This is fair season across much of the US, and apparently…
gregladen | August 3, 2012The Mars Science Laboratory Mission has piles of cool equipment on board Curiosity Rover, which is closing in on Mars as we speak. The landing is expected to be next Sunday/Monday, 10:31 p.m. Aug. 5 PDT (1:31 a.m. Aug. 6 EDT, 05:31 Aug. 6 Universal Time) plus or minus a minute.. But not really, because the event is happening a it far away in spacetime; those are the times that the signals from Mars will arrive on the planet Earth, about 13.8 minutes after the event has happened. The mission is expected to last one Martian year, which is close to two Earth years. The weather at the landing…
gregladen | August 2, 2012One in three or four women in the United States will have been raped or seriously assaulted sexually by the time they reach a few decades in age. That will have been done by one or more men. Most people who are killed by another person are killed by a man. This is true whether the killing is legal or illegal. Very few people in Western society get through their entire lives without being affected either directly or nearly directly by some sort of violent crime of some kind or another, and that crime was almost always committed by a man. Wars are mostly fought by men, and are typically…