gregladen | July 26, 2012Lewis Black has a formula for addressing creationists. You carry around a fossil. Then, when someone starts talking about creationism, you pull it out and hold it up in plain view and say "Fossil!" Then, if they keep arguing, you throw it over their head. That makes me laugh.
Despite the fact that I am a raging secularist and activist atheist, not all of my friends are. And, I have a friend for whom I have nothing but love and respect who happens to be a fundamentalist evangelical Christian. Personally, I'm sure that down inside she is also an atheist, and I know she knows I think that…
gregladen | July 26, 2012UPDATE: The initial info I got clearly stated that this kind of magnet was being generally banned, but Nanodots, a brand name, and possibly some other brands are not being banned. "Buckyball" is the brand being banned. I wonder, can a company call themselves "buckyball" and trademark that name?
Original story:
I actually suggested this as a holiday gift NOT FOR KIDS a while back, so I want to tell you the latest news.
Neodymium magnets are ver powerful magnets that use the rare earth neodynium element. They are very powerful. The toys consist of little round balls that stick to each…
gregladen | July 24, 2012... older than a few days so that I can do something other than deal with a new spate of spam. This spam is different from other spam, so it is quite possible that I'll accidentally delete real comments. If you think a post of yours is taking too long to get posted let me know, and I'll see if I can dig it out of the spam folder.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
gregladen | July 24, 2012Curiosity Rover is now tweeting its stuff. Things are going to get pretty exciting over the next few days as the space ship comes in for a landing on the Planet Mars. Meanwhile, the Mars Orbiter has made positional adjustments that will facilitate sending information back about the 15 minutes of terror.
NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has successfully adjusted its orbital location to be in a better position to provide prompt confirmation of the August landing of the Curiosity rover.
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft carrying Curiosity can send limited information directly to Earth as…
gregladen | July 24, 2012I have always felt that sea level rise would be quicker and higher than my colleagues in climate science have suggested. My reasoning for that is simple. Sea level rise has in the past not followed overall climate change in a perfectly simple manner such that the present era has lower sea levels than it should. When this was noticed in the mid 20th century up through the 1970s, in the form of high wave cut benches along various rocky shore lines, the explanations usually invoked moving land masses, such as a continent buoying upwards as it eroded, so the same sea level would cut benches that…
gregladen | July 24, 2012Just to let you know, I've got a couple of new posts up in the "weblogue" series on The X Blog:
My career in music: The Early Years
We put a chair there, and we would take turns sitting in the chair and listening to the sound effects record.
A train coming from one side to another. A pin dropping on one side then the other. A voice coming right from the middle even though there was not a speaker right there. The voice was saying “Hey, there’s no speaker right here, but you hear my voice like there is a speaker there. Isn’t stereo amazing!”
>
and
OK, I didn’t really have a career in music…
gregladen | July 24, 2012In 2008, John O'Sullivan wrote a novel called "Vanilla Girl," which is actually a big giant blog post on blogger.com, about "A teacher's struggle to control his erotic obsession with a schoolgirl."
Blogger "About" Page of John O'Sullivan, "Vanilla Girl" author and climate change denialist. O'Sullivan was acquitted of sex related charges with exculpatory testimony supplied by his 17 year old step-daughter.
A few years earlier, it appears, the same John O'Sullivan, who was a teacher, was cleared of charges that he had sent 36 "sex txts" to a 16 year old girl within a three week period,…
gregladen | July 23, 2012Dr. Sally Ride is reported to have died today after a long battle with cancer. She was 61. Ride was the first American woman to go into outer space, and the youngest at the time, at age 32. She was also a pioneer in STEM promotion, and a prolific author.
gregladen | July 23, 2012The question came up: If referring to a person as a word for a female body part in an insulting manner is sexist, then isn't calling a man a "boob" sexist?
(I may or may not have referred to some guy as a boob.)
My first reaction was to simply say, "No, because a boob, in this sense has nothing to do with female body parts. It is a dunce, idiot, stupid or bumbling person, etc." However, often, when we make assumptions about the origin of a word we are wrong. And since part of that conversation was about whether using the word "hysterical" was sexist, even if one did not know the origin of…
gregladen | July 22, 2012Dropbox is still the best way for most users to store their files on multiple computers and in "the cloud" in part because it is system agnostic and not linked to a corporate entity that has other plans for you. And, using Dropbox you can share files pretty easily as well. However, there is another way to share files that is amazingly cool that I just found out about. It's called "Drop Canvas." With Drop Canvas you drag and drop files onto a "canvas" (it's a web page) and then send the canvas to someone.
I've implemented a test already. A couple of other people and I are planning to make…
gregladen | July 22, 2012The minor league baseball game is on Friday, August 10th, and it is sponsored by the Minnesota Atheists. The local team, the Saint Paul Saints, will change their name to the Mr. Paul Aints for the occasion. If you are in the greater Twin Cities area please try to get to the game! I'm not sure if the discount Minnesota Atheists tickets are still available, but there will certainly be some seats still for sale somewhere in the stadium.
Now, you are probably already guessing that when an organised Atheist group gets together with a sports team to do something together, there will be...well,…
gregladen | July 21, 2012I've started a new, modest but I think good, project on The X Blog. I've dragged out and dusted off, and rewritten and reorganized, a selected series of essays that I wrote few years ago but were not widely read, especailly by you if you are fairly new to this blog. I'm going to be posting a few a week. The original corpus is about 40 or so essays in total but I'm combining some and it is quite possible that I'll toss some aside as I get to them because I am trying to be selective.
Originally, these essays were written in batches, or as part of a theme, and there are several different…
gregladen | July 21, 2012The smartest radio talk show in the world addresses ignorance, Sunday.
Skeptically Speaking # 174: Ignorance
This week, we’re looking at how the basic condition of not knowing things provides the motivation to keep science moving. We’re joined by Stuart Firestein, Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences, to talk about his book Ignorance: How It Drives Science. And on the podcast, we’re joined by Toronto attorney Adam Wygodny, to talk using the law to protect consumers from ineffective and untested alternative medicine products.
We record live with Stuart Firestein on…
gregladen | July 20, 2012Joe Romm of Climate Progress gave testimony to the US Congress on the relationship between the release of long-trapped Carbon into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels and drying conditions that lead to an increase in wild fires. Joe notes "... we're already topping Dust Bowl temperatures in many places -- and the Earth has warmed only about 1 degree Fahrenheit since the 1930s Dust Bowl. Yet we are poised to warm some 10 degree Fahrenheit this century if we stay on our current path of unrestricted carbon pollution emissions."
Here's the testimony:
gregladen | July 20, 2012You know what I'm talking about. Here's the video:
The Eagle has landed. Holy crap. Excellent driving. Neil.
I love that Armstrong checks to see if it will be possible to get back up the ladder in his space suit before stepping off. Good move. That would have been...interesting...if they could only step onto the moon and not step off of the moon.
That was July 20th, 1969. Where were you? I was in China. You can see me in the video at about 9:10.
Only kidding. I was in Albany, NY glued to the TV. I remember the rug I was sitting on. I remember who was in the room. I remember…
gregladen | July 20, 2012This from Slashdot:
"Microsoft has apologized and promised to rectify the fact that one of its developers slipped a sexist phrase into Linux kernel code supporting Microsoft's HyperV virtualization environment. In that code, the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor reads '0xB16B00B5,' or a slightly camouflaged 'BIG BOOBS.' After Linux developer/blogger Matthew Garrett criticized Microsoft for the stunt, the predictable debate over sexism in the technology world ensued. Microsoft issued a statement to Network World apologizing and added, 'We have submitted a patch to fix this issue…
gregladen | July 20, 2012Climate gate involved the criminal theft of computer based data from University of East Anglia (UEA) researchers by global warming deniers. According to Julian Gregory ,Detective chief superintendent, "the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack" and that there was no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with UEA was involved in the crime." However, the criminal perpetrator, we assume a member of the global warming denialist community, was not discovered and the statute of limitations for this particular criminal act runs out in…
gregladen | July 19, 2012The Washington Post has an article out (an "exclusive") about three drugs used to treat anemia that their investigative reporting seems to show are less effective and more dangerous than people thought. Here's the dramatic intro from the WP's article:
On the day Jim Lenox got his last injection, the frail 54-year-old cancer patient was waiting to be discharged from the Baltimore Washington Medical Center.... a nurse said he needed another dose of anemia drugs.
His wife, Sherry, thought that seemed odd, because his blood readings had been close to normal, but Lenox trusted the doctors. After…