gregladen | March 6, 2012This is something that started last midweek, but that travels, a cold, and intermittent internet connectivity conspired to distract me from until now. Jerry Coyne was writing about human "race" and in so doing may have made a number of statements that some people disagreed with, and one of those people contacted me and asked my opinion, which I gave, etc. etc. etc. And, of course, the whole conversation got blogged HERE. The conversation in the comments is also very interesting. Go have a look.
gregladen | March 4, 2012That is the new name of the proposed NASA mission to mars to Explore the Interior using Seismic Investigations.
"We chose the name InSight because we would literally peer into the interior of Mars to map out its structure," said JPL's Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator. "With our geophysical instruments we will be able to see right through to the center of Mars, and will be able to map out how deeply the crust extends as well as the size of the core."
InSight is one of three missions vying to be selected for flight in the Discovery Program, a series of NASA missions to understand the…
gregladen | March 1, 2012With elements inside.
This is important if you need to get your dog's ears to lie flat.
gregladen | February 29, 2012So, it turns out that Heartland was behind the Heartland leak after all.
The evidence seems to suggest that Heartland's Joe Bast wrote a memo, then he and/or Heartland-symp blogger Steven Mosher sent it secretly to Peter Gleick. Peter Gleick then obtained additional material from Heartland, which came to him at his request but all to easily to be explained as a mere oversight on the part of some administrative or secretarial staff. The only thing missing here is evidence that Bast or Mosher or someone suggested to Peter that he verify the memo by asking for related documents from…
gregladen | February 29, 2012Davy Jones suffered a heart attack and died, in Florida, at 66 years of age.
Davy Jones, the lead singer of the 1960s group The Monkees, died of a massive heart attack Wednesday in Florida, his spokeswoman said. He was 66.
His publicist, Helen Kensick, confirmed that he died in Indiantown, where he lived.
Jones rose to fame in 1965 when he joined The Monkees, a British popular rock group formed for a U.S. television show. Jones sang lead vocals on songs like "I Wanna Be Free" and "Daydream Believer."
Jones was born Dec. 30, 1945, in Manchester, England. His long hair and British accent helped…
gregladen | February 28, 2012A report detailing an audit of a course called "Climate Change: An Earth Sciences Perspective" (ERTH 2402), taught at Carleton University, has been compiled by a team of concerned individuals and was released a few minutes ago. From the report:
The course... provides an unbalanced and, in many cases, factually inaccurate view of anthropogenic global warming which detracts from the high quality of teaching at Carleton University. We highlight 142 incorrect or equivocal claims and cite the relevant scientific literature to correct those statements. While the principle of academic freedom…
gregladen | February 28, 2012The EPA made what is called an "endangerment finding" a while back which asserts that it is appropriate to regulate the release of greenhouse gasses. This was challenged in court by science deinialists and energy interests via "the state of Virginia, the industry front-group Coalition for Responsible Regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Tea Party-industry front Southeastern Legal Foundation."
Brad Johnson has a post outlining the situation here.
The endangerment finding is based on a large and internally consist ant corpus of scientific findings. The argument against the finding…
gregladen | February 28, 2012The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund continues to receive donations and offers of help from various stakeholders. We are actively working with several organizations in order to make CSLDF a one-stop resource for scientists looking for legal resources and we are currently pursuing several educational and legal initiatives which will be made public in the future.
In the short-term, CSLDF would greatly appreciate your financial support to help Dr. Michael Mann. Funds are needed to:
1. Fend-off ATI's demand to take Dr. Mann's deposition, which is a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate…
gregladen | February 27, 2012The issue of diversity is being discussed, from several different angles, among the Freethoughtblogs community and others. This is a list of posts you might want to have a look at.
This is especially important in relation to maintaining or enhancing diversity when you are engaged in some sort of selection process: Hiring, making a list of authors, putting together a blog network, etc. etc.
They are listed in date order:
Getting It Right Early: Why Atheists Need to Act Now on Gender and Race
Tokenism Is Not Inclusivity
Thoughts From A Diversity Hire
How To Make Diversity Happen
On Diversity,…
gregladen | February 27, 2012Have you ever read Natural Theology by William Paley? One could say that in it he makes the famous "Watchmaker" analogy. But really, the entire book is little other than the watchmaker analogy. If you were to compare the boringess-interestingness factor of Paley's book with a similar number of pages of anything written by Darwin, it would look like this:
************************************************* Darwin
* Paley
where being over to the right is more interesting. And that could be ANYTHING by Darwin.
I have a small story to tell you (which you may have heard before) and then a…
gregladen | February 27, 2012Neil deGrasse Tyson has a new book out: Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier. It is (as one might guess) about space exploration, and assembles earlier speeches and writings with some new stuff. This is an interesting time to be talking about the space program, as NASA seems to be producing new results ever week, there are large and small space robots on their way to distant orbs, or soon to be launched, we are on the verge of understanding the potential of life on Mars on a basic level, we are finding more earth-ish Exoplanets and at the same time the sky is falling, or at least…