gregladen | February 26, 2012Budget Travel is running one of those ill-fated Internet Polls to help make a list of the top 15 places to go for kids before they are 15. Sort of like bucket list but instead of dying you turn 15. One small problem is that the Creation Museum of Kentucky has been intruding in the top ten, even top five, of this list. You need to go there and vote for something else! Like, all the attractions that you happen to like that are lower than the Creation Museum at the moment.
Click here to help save the Youth of North America from certain doom!
gregladen | February 26, 2012Watch the whole thing:
Brilliant. Click here for the background on this nice video.
gregladen | February 25, 2012In September, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and soon after Jews living in ghettos in Poland's cities were identified, sequestered, rounded up, shipped off to work camps or concentration camps, and exterminated as part of what we know of today as the Holocaust. Several Jews managed to avoid being arrested by pretending to be something else, and some of those stories have been written up as histories or biographies.
One such story is that of Sabina S. Zimering. Sabina lives in the western suburbs of the Twin Cities today, and her grand daughter was in Amanda's class a few years ago. Sabina…
gregladen | February 24, 2012Before our Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation devices can tell us where we are, the satellites that make up the GPS need to know exactly where they are. For that, they rely on a network of sites that serve as "you are here" signs planted throughout the world. The catch is, the sites don't sit still because they're on a planet that isn't at rest, yet modern measurements require more and more accuracy in pinpointing where "here" is.
To meet this need, NASA is helping to lead an international effort to upgrade the four systems that supply this crucial location information. NASA's Jet…
gregladen | February 24, 2012A clay cylinder covered in Akkadian cuneiform script, damaged and broken, the Cyrus Cylinder is a powerful symbol of religious tolerance and multi-culturalism. In this enthralling talk Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, traces 2600 years of Middle Eastern history through this single object.
gregladen | February 23, 2012From the Christian Science Monitor:
You may have an opinion on climate change, evolution education, stem-cell research, and science funding. But do you have the facts to back up your opinion? This quiz will test your basic scientific literacy.
Go take the quiz and report back!
gregladen | February 23, 2012A compendium of selected posts written about the Ituri Forest, the Efe Pygmies, and other folks and other things in the region:
In the matter of insects:
No Place to Sit Down
The reason the Efe won't normally kill an insect ...
"Excuse me, there's some food in my bugs!"
Day of the locust. Yum!
"We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans"
The curious world of bugs
Life in the forest
How to kill a monkey
How to carry your monkey home once you've killed it
A story of my friend Kobou
Camp life
Cultural Wanderings
A look at some traditional medicine, cross culturally
Total eclipse of the sun and…
gregladen | February 23, 2012As you know, there is much discussion about whether or not a "strategy memo" leaked from the Heartland Institute is a fake. We are told by a trustworthy source that this policy memo was leaked to him, and that he then tricked the Heartland Institute to supply him with additional documents, which he then used to verify the "strategy memo" based on cross reference of factual information. Only after the apparent veracity of the memo was determined did that individual, Peter Gleick, release all of the documents to the public.
Subsequently, a number of untrustworthy sources, such as Heartland…
gregladen | February 23, 2012TED Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz asks: How often do you see the true beauty of the night sky? At TEDxPhoenix, she shows how light pollution is ruining the extraordinary -- and often ignored -- experience of seeing directly into space.
gregladen | February 23, 2012... Well, everything is in space, but I mean outer space!
Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It's smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.
Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and colleagues made the observations of the planet GJ1214b.
"GJ1214b is like no planet we know of," Berta said. "A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water."
The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA's David Charbonneau, discovered GJ1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is…
gregladen | February 22, 2012You know about the Heartland Strategy memo. It is one of several documents produced and used internally by the Heartland Institute, a minor Libertarian "Think" Tank, demonstrating some rather unsavory activities, which are now under preliminary investigation by the US Congress. The memo contains little that is not found in other documents already admitted by Heartland to be genuine but there are a few details added and a much finer point is put on such nefarious programs as intruding into the public school system to trick teachers into "not teaching science" in science classes.
This memo is…
gregladen | February 22, 2012The Heartland Institute, a smallish Libertarian "Think" Tank recently made famous by the leak of a rather embarrassing set of incriminating documents, is now slated for investigation by the Congress of the United States.
The chair and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijavla, has initiated an investigation of Indur Goklany, an administrator at the Science and Technology Policy of the US Department of the Interior. It appears that Goklany was being paid by Heartland which raises a significant potential for conflict of interest.
The story broke at Think Progress.
gregladen | February 22, 2012From Science Insider, there is a possible explanation for the recently observed "faster than light" neutrinos. The Neutrinos were clocked at faster-than-light speeds on their way form CRN in Switzerland to a detectors site in Italy. I had originally proposed that the neutrinos were merely very hungry but unwilling to eat Swiss food, and since they were on their way to Italy, why not go FTL?
The research at first was assumed to most likely be some kind of mistake, but a Mulligan Redo Procedure clearly demonstrated that the most obvious errors could not explain the observation, which violates…
gregladen | February 22, 2012PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have, for the first time, discovered buckyballs in a solid form in space. Prior to this discovery, the microscopic carbon spheres had been found only in gas form in the cosmos.
Formally named buckministerfullerene, buckyballs are named after their resemblance to the late architect Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. They are made up of 60 carbon molecules arranged into a hollow sphere, like a soccer ball. Their unusual structure makes them ideal candidates for electrical and chemical applications on Earth,…
gregladen | February 21, 2012A bill in Oklahoma that would, if enacted, encourage teachers to present the "scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of "controversial" topics such as "biological evolution" and "global warming" is back from the dead. Entitled the "Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act," House Bill 1551 was introduced in the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 2011 by Sally Kern (R-District 84), a persistent sponsor of antievolution legislation in the Sooner State, and referred to the House Common Education Committee. It was rejected there on February 22, 2011, on a 7-9 vote. But, as The…
gregladen | February 21, 2012Featuring my brother-in-law, Damion:
(The Town Hall is also mentioned.)
gregladen | February 21, 2012The best available evidence now suggests that the most damning of the "Heartland Documents" -- the strategy memo which explicitly states that Heartland's strategy is to interfere with good science education in order to advance their political agenda -- is legitimate. The legitimacy of the document was being questioned because it was physically and stylistically different from the other documents with which it was released. We now know that the strategy memo was sent to climate scientist Peter Gleick and that Peter then took steps to acquire corraborating documents from Heartland (see "The…
gregladen | February 20, 2012
Because the situation is alarming.
There is still a great deal of uncertainty about where the melted-down fuel at Fukushima I's reactors is resting. TEPCO and various NPA's have insisted all along that they know where it is, and everything is under control. The most recent information from TEPCO is that the fuel is contained in the containment vessel, but they won't be able to confirm that for ten years when it cools down enough to go have a look. Recent efforts to peek inside the rubble have been hampered. One attempt resulted in very blurry photographs ... apparently the high levels of…
gregladen | February 20, 2012While I recover from several days of intense activities that have made it hard to blog much, and as I prepare some good stuff for you, we can amuse ourselves with the following animations from the usual source of not-so-amusing events:
Three killed, one survivor in Washington avalanche
British couple cheat death in cliff collapse
Swedish man trapped for two months in snow-covered car
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVkFc7Kbnj8
Discuss