gregladen | February 19, 2012I just got this email. I have no way of telling if it is authentic:
February 18, 2012
By e-mail to: greg@gregladen.com
By Federal Express to:
Mr. Greg T. Laden
Greg Laden's Blog
44788 265th Lane
Aitkin, MN 56431-4807
Re: Stolen and Faked Heartland Documents
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/02/heartlandgate_anti-science_in…
Dear Mr. Laden:
On or about February 14, 2012, your web site posted a document entitled "Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy" (the "Fake Memo"), which is fabricated and false.
On or about the same date, your web site posted certain other…
gregladen | February 19, 2012Kentucky's Creation Museum is in contention for listing as one of the "top ten" places to bring your child under 15 years of age on this travel and tourism site.
Feel free to go and vote your preference! Also, I
I think you can't vote something down, but you can vote something up. You know what to do.
The flying spaghetti monster museum does appear to be a choice. If it does not really exist, however, I don't recommend voting for it, as that would be stupid. Maybe pick a nice natural history museum.
gregladen | February 17, 2012If you know only a little bit about Charles Darwin, you know that he figured out Evolution via his study of the finches (and other birds) of the Galapagos. If you know a bit more than that about Darwin, you know that he totally messed up his collection of birds from the Galapagos Islands, and didn't really think up Evolution until much later in time. If you know more than that about Darwin, then you know that neither of these characterizations of the great man's work is accurate.
Read More
gregladen | February 17, 2012We're taking a break from live recording this week. On the podcast, we're talking science and storytelling. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan speaks to science journalist and author Deborah Blum about her national bestseller The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. The book tells the fascinating story of the way that chemical detectives started a revolution in the investigation of crime. And Desiree Schell talks to Bora Zivkovic, blog editor at Scientific American, about a new event that teaches science through personal stories.
The podcast will…
gregladen | February 15, 2012Mice with a certain laboratory variant of Alzheimer's disease have been shown to get much better with the use of an existing pharmaceutical. This is only in mice, only with a certain model of the disease, and is only one study, so we must be very cautious, but the results are on the face rather dramatic.
Here's the rundown.
gregladen | February 15, 2012Anti-science and creationist rhetoric, coming from organizations like the Discovery Institute, often paints Darwin as handmaiden to the Nazis and founder of racist biology. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century is uncritically melded with Darwin's writings that touched on race, and the genetic determinism of certain aspects of modern biology is uncritically melded with Darwinian theories.
I'm giving a talk this weekend for the Minnesota Atheists that will address Darwin's racism (or lack thereof) and explore the relationship between concepts of race and racism and evolutionary…
gregladen | February 15, 2012Years ago, my friend Rick Bribiescas and I got into a friendly debate about the cause of muscle atrophy and bone loss during space flight. We both felt that a homeostatic mechanism was thrown out of whack by the circumstances of weightlessness. One of us suggested that zero gravity caused to lose their ability to regulate tissue mass because gravity would be part of the mechanism for measuring this variable. The other of us thought the body was reacting as though it was falling, and transforming ingested material into bodily tissue would be forestalled until some time after hitting the…
gregladen | February 15, 2012You could read hundreds of pages of Darwin's work and easily come to the conclusion that he was a geologist. But a different selection of readings would convince you he was a biologist. In truth, he was neither and both. I'm giving a talk this weekend for the Humanists of Minnesota that will explore what Darwin really was: An experimentalist, a part time anthropologist, a natural historian and most impressively, an integrative thinker of the likes rarely to be seen again for a century after he lived. My talk will draw heavily on Darwin's own work and provide a sampling of some of his more…
gregladen | February 15, 2012It will take some time before the meaning of HeartlandGate is realized. The released confidential documents are not extensive, but they are current, mainly related to a meeting that happened less than a month before their release. They don't tell us anything that we didn't suspect, but they give details that people outside this science denialist "think" tank did not know. The most important thing about these documents is probably this: We can now say without equivocation that global warming denialism and other science denialism is, at the institutional level, funded by wealthy individuals…
gregladen | February 14, 2012The following is a subset of the LinuxQuestionsDotOrg's Members' Choice Awards:
Desktop Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (21.83%)
Server Distribution of the Year - Debian (31.15%)
Mobile Distribution of the Year - Android (69.43%)
Database of the Year - MySQL (49.54%)
NoSQL Database of the Year - Cassandra and MongoDB (26.23% each) <- first MCA TIE
Office Suite of the Year - LibreOffice (81.01%)
Browser of the Year - Firefox (56.60%)
Desktop Environment of the Year - KDE (33.01%)
Window Manager of the Year - Openbox (15.90%)
... some stuff I don't care about ...
Audio Authoring…
gregladen | February 14, 2012This seems to be fairly big news. The Heartland Institute is a conservative and libertarian "think" tank that cut its teeth on denying the dangers of cigarette smoking back in the 1990s. These days the Heartland Institute seems to be focused on Anthropogenic Climate Change Denialism and Science Denialism in general.
A piece of one of the revealed documents suggesting that the Heartland Institute wants to "dissuade teachers from teaching science."
Well, just a few hours ago, members of the climate change science, journalism, and blogging community received an interesting Valentine's Day…
gregladen | February 14, 2012We know that Darwin was a biologist, and in many ways he was the first prominent modern biologist. But many people do not realize that he was also a geologist. Really, he was mainly a geologist on the day he stepped foot on The Beagle for his famous five year tour. This is especially true if we count his work on coral reefs as a geological study, even though coral reefs are a biological phenomenon. After all, the standing model for coral reef formation at the time came from the field of Geology.
Here is a list of several of Darwin's first publications with their publication dates:
1839…
gregladen | February 12, 2012All of my Bird Book Reviews are Here, and some of the reviews include broader discussions that go beyond the book, so do browse through them.
Feeding Birds:
Should you even be feeding the birds to begin with?
Birders get annoyed at squirrels for obvious reasons. But you can be happier about the squirrels in your yard if you just change your attitude and see the gray squirrels as food!
Watching Birds
What makes for a good bird?
The falcon eats tonight ...
The Science of Birdwatching
Let the Eagle Soar
We Walk Among Ducks In Wolves Clothing. And Wolves.
Ducks Blowing In The Wind
When is a…
gregladen | February 12, 2012Charles Darwin's research and writing on Evolution and related topics is still very much alive today, modified and expanded on but only in a few details replaced. Here is a selection of writing about Darwin and his work to be found on this blog:
Darwin and his Formative Fieldwork
2008-02-13 Charles Darwin and Coral Reefs. Darwin's study of coral reefs was a defining project for him; he became the kind of scientist he was because of this study, and this helped define the nature of science itself.
2009-09-06 A conversation with David Dobbs about his book (reviewed here) on Charles Darwin,…
gregladen | February 11, 2012This is a lion:
Click the picture for a larger version of the photograph. Photo by Greg Laden.
And here are selected blog posts about lions and related beasts:
Amboseli Lions May Go Extinct
The Evolution of Cats: Sabertooth vs. Regular
Tarangire Lions
The Lion That Ate the Earthwatcher
Biker and Greg get Eaten by Lions
The Lion, The Tent, and the Anthropologist
The Evolutionary Dynamics of the Lion Panthera leo Revealed by Host and Viral Population Genomics
The Science of Lion Prides
Lions being all liony
Where the lion sleeps tonight
On the Ownership of Large Dangerous Wild Animals
http…
gregladen | February 10, 2012From Kristin Montalbano:
Mark Twain once said, the Mississippi River is a "wonderful book with a new story to tell every day." Well, Nat Geo WILD spent an entire year exploring the length of North America's longest and greatest waterway in Wild Mississippi and we can tell you the man was NOT exaggerating. We gave a few of our favorite science, animal and nature bloggers the chance to check out the miniseries before it airs this Sunday - see what they had to say below:
Check it out!