gregladen | April 21, 2012Speaking before a packed lecture theater at MIT yesterday, Neal Stephenson worried that the gloomy outlook prevalent in modern science fiction may be undermining the genre's ability to inspire engineers and scientists. Describing himself as a "pessimist trying to turn himself into an optimist," and acknowledging that some of his own work has contributed to the dystopian trend, he added "if every depiction of the future is grim...then it doesn't create much of an incentive to building the future."
Consequently, Stephenson is trying to make a literary course correction...
Well, since he ruined…
gregladen | April 21, 2012I have it on good authority that this is going to be great.
Jeff Masters has a writeup.
Penn State climate scientist Dr. Richard Alley hosts parts II and III of Earth: the Operator's Manual on PBS beginning at 7pm Sunday, April 22--Earth Day. Part I of this excellent series aired in April 2011. The series gives an overview of climate change, but primarily focuses on what we can do to help slow down climate change though smart energy choices....
I've seen some bits and pieces and it looks good.
gregladen | April 20, 2012
It's almost like the guy had had nooklar meltdown right there.
Hat tip: Barbara Forrest, author of Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
gregladen | April 20, 2012Picasa sucked. Make no mistake about it. Whether on Linux or Windows, Picassa took the worst of all the different photo management software and combined it into a single app that I would never recommend anyone install.
Except one thing; Picasa was good at enhancing photos. It had a couple of automatic buttons that would take iffy photos and spruce them up pretty automatically, and it had a killer red-eye reduction function. But these are things that can be done on other software. If you know how to use The Gimp, you can get the same results there. If you use a Mac, you can get better…
gregladen | April 20, 2012Isn't something like this thought to have happened in California as well, in recent years?
gregladen | April 20, 2012There is a study that shows that people who sit more per day die sooner, despite other factors such as overall health. It is reported in The Atlantic and written up here.
From the study:
Prolonged sitting is considered detrimental to health, but evidence regarding the independent relationship of total sitting time with all-cause mortality is limited. This study aimed to determine the independent relationship of sitting time with all-cause mortality.
... We linked prospective questionnaire data from 222 497 individuals 45 years or older ... to mortality data ...
During 621 695 person-years…
gregladen | April 19, 2012This week, we're joined by Robert FitzPatrick, founder of Pyramid Scheme Alert, and co-author of False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverance in Multi-Level Marketing and Pyramid Schemes. He'll discuss the promises and pitfalls of schemes, and how to tell legitimate direct selling from multi-level marketing scams. And on the podcast, we'll speak to Paul Piff, researcher at the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley, about his research on the relationship between social class and unethical behavior.
We record live with Robert…
gregladen | April 19, 2012John Hawks is one of the nation's leading palaeoanthropologists, and has lately been working with ancient DNA, recent and earlier Human Evolution, and an interesting project that is a sort of casting call for extinct humans and their relatives.
Most of you know John from his famous Internet site called "John Hawks Weblog: Paleoanthropology, Genetics and Evolution." John is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which is one of the better known and respected for this sort of research.
Unless you've been living in a cave, you know that there are many…
gregladen | April 19, 2012Most of the world's mountain glaciers are either totally melted or reduced significantly in size. For every one of these glaciers, there's somebody who will tell you that that particular glacier has disappeared or is disappearing for some reason that has nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming. Once, some guy tried to convince me that one of the world's major tropical glaciers was melting away as a result of global cooling.
It used to be that I thought of people like that as poorly informed. Then, I changed my mind when I realized that you can't be THAT poorly informed, and that…
gregladen | April 19, 2012One of my favorite musicians ever died today at the age of 71. I happen to play two songs with him singing and playing today. I do that most days because they are on my gym tape.1
Levon was a member of The Band, but he was also in The Hawks (with Ronnie Hawkins) and worked on his own. The early proto-band was Dylan's backing band. Levon is not the first member of The Band to die.
Here's a couple of items to remember him by:
Turn your volume up. Here's Levon playing the drums and singing. This is from the concert movie and album The Last Waltz, though it was not part of the concert:…
gregladen | April 19, 2012... only worse, apparently.
The Lousy Canuck has it covered. I think you should go read his post and get the conversation going. I don't know enough about it to say much more than Jason has already said.
I'm not a big Mike Rogers fan. He has called for the execution of those involved in the wikileaks leaking of classified military documents. Nice guy.
gregladen | April 19, 2012I live near a highway. All winter, I almost never went west on that road, only east, but a couple of times I did go west. And, in a tree off to the right in that direction, I noticed a mass of stuff that resembled a Bald Eagle's nest as much as any mass of stuff ever could, but of course, it was not a bald eagle nest.
... or was it?
gregladen | April 18, 2012Joey Bernard, who writes about science under Linux, has just started a multi (as in two?) part series on GSL, the GNU Scientific Library. It is here. Just browsing through the files of GSL is fun. You find little gems like this:
const size_t npidigits = 5000 ;
const double pidigits [5000] = { 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, 5, 3, 5, 8,
9, 7, 9, 3, 2, 3, 8, 4, 6, 2, 6, 4, 3, 3, 8, 3, 2, 7, 9, 5, 0, 2,
8, 8, 4, 1, 9, 7, 1, 6, 9, 3, 9, 9, 3, 7, 5, 1, 0, 5, 8, 2, 0, 9,
7, 4, 9, 4, 4, 5, 9, 2, 3, 0, 7, 8, 1, 6, 4, 0, 6, 2, 8, 6, 2, 0,
8, 9, 9, 8, 6, 2, 8, 0, 3, 4, 8, 2, 5, 3, 4, 2…
gregladen | April 18, 2012... Huffington, by Shawn Otto:
Dear Arianna,
Congratulations on the Huffington Post's Pulitzer prize. That is an important feather in the paper's cap.
I want you to know how much I value your publication, and how I think the dust up over the antiscience HuffPost article "NASA Global Warming Stance Blasted By 49 Astronauts, Scientists Who Once Worked At Agency" is an opportunity for a broader discussion, which you could lead. The story has garnered wide attention in both science and journalism circles. Why is an important discussion.
It is a discussion that I think is critical to our…
gregladen | April 16, 2012Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Otto has won the prestigious Minnesota Book Award. The award is very well deserved.
Here's my writeup of the book, and here's a radio interview with the author that we did a couple of months back.
Shawn's book is a critically important analysis of science policy, its potentials and failings, in a world of denialism and politics. As you know, Shawn has been involved with Science Debate (see the big badge on the sidebar?) and the Science Pledge. I'm pleased to announce that in the political campaign that I was recently…