gregladen | January 3, 2012Obviously! But they mostly don't. Check this out:
New Hampshire scientists call on "all candidates" to "acknowledge" cliamte change
In 2008, one of the little acknowledged political subtexts was how significantly global warming played in the Republican primary process. Both independently and as part of organizational efforts, individuals asked questions at events (and on street corners) and many events has signs about voters' concerns over the need for climate change action. John McCain stood alone in discussing climate change forthrightly. In terms of impact, John McCain might just have…
gregladen | January 3, 2012In April, we continued to look at the disaster in Japan, focusing entirely on the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Miller and I were criticized for not focusing on something other than Fukushima. It became apparent that TEPCO had ignored warnings that Fukushima was poorly cited with respect to tsunamis, and despite the assertion that the nuclear material at the site was 'contained' the amount of radioactive material in the nearby ocean was rising. Much of the debate of whether or not Fukushima was a problem (this debate would sputter out by the end of the month or early May) shifted to…
gregladen | January 2, 2012Despite tens or hundreds of thousands of years of very strong Natural Selection, wildebeest do not arrive at the Mara River with a genetically determined brain mechanism or module that helps (much) to keep them from being eaten by the crocodiles that live in the river. Most of the wildebeest that try to cross the Mara in the annual migration have never seen a croc, or a river, before in their lives, or have encountered this situation only once. This would be a very good situation in which to evolved such a mechanism.
Where is evolutionary psychology when you really need it?
gregladen | January 1, 2012March was a particularly important month for this blog, and for everybody in the world, really, because it is when the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, and Fukushima meltdown started. Although I blogged early on about the quake and tsunami, my colleague and friend Analiese Miller and I eventually focused on the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and to date we've produced 41 numbered updates, part of a larger set of over 60 posts. And we shall continue.
We were able to identify, from the very beginning, a problem in the skeptical community's reaction to Fukushima. For historical reasons, most…
gregladen | January 1, 2012One of the most read posts of the month was titled Justin Bieber's New Haircut but it was actually about something else. It was about a bunch of things, including #Occupy (even though #Occupy had not happened yet) and the end of civilization as we know it.
In February, we also explored the question "Why is my poop green?" or, more exactly, why is YOUR poop green. The answer may surprise you, and likely, you are not gonna die.
Also this month, Desiree Schell, of Skeptically Speaking interviewed Sheril Kirshenbaum about her new book, and on a related topic, I did one of my "Everything You…
gregladen | January 1, 2012In January I noticed, and blogged, that Michele Bachmann is an Unmitigated Idiot and Racist. And I proved it. Also, during the winter of 2010-2011 there were a handful of die-offs of birds and some other critters that happened to get into the news, and for some, caused great anxiety. We explored the question of Why are all the birds dying? and considered Dead Birds in other ways as well.
We also explored the universal question of "Human Universals." Are they real or are they some kind of falsehood? I said that there are Human Universals but that it is complicated, and noted that people…
gregladen | January 1, 2012Last night, a Minneapolis woman gave birth to twins. Two of them. But labor was tough. The first one was born just before 7PM on December 31st, 2011. The second one was born just after midnight, Januray 1st, 2012. This will get interesting in about 12 years.*
The following tragic news story appeared on this morning's WCCO Web Site. I've highlighted certain parts of it:
Are you tired of Tebow Tebowing? Well, one answers a gesture with a gesture, a symbol with a symbol. Next time you score at Touchdown during an NFL game, or whatever the normal human equivalent of that might be (…
gregladen | January 1, 2012If you have a touch screen device that requires a password to unlock, and the location of the password is fixed on the screen, add repeating digits to you PIN. For obvious reasons.
gregladen | December 29, 2011I mention the New Hampshire anti-evolution bills at The X Blog. Here's an update from the NCSE:
The two antievolution bills in the New Hampshire legislature attracted the attention of the Concord Monitor (December 29, 2011). As NCSE previously reported, House Bill 1148, introduced by Jerry Bergevin (R-District 17), would charge the state board of education to "[r]equire evolution to be taught in the public schools of this state as a theory, including the theorists' political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism," while House Bill 1457, introduced by Gary…
gregladen | December 29, 2011The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, which will neither be recovering gravity or being inside the moon but "GRAIL" apparently sounds good, is coming into Lunar Orbit as I write this.
As you know from watching Apollo 13 the travel distance to or back from the moon is a matter of several days ... Apollo crews got there in about three Earth Days. But the GRAIL mission has taken months to get there, because of the kind of orbit they wanted to achieve. Also, the long duration allows for other things to happen, like temperatures to stabilize within the machinery.
GRAIL is two space ships…
gregladen | December 26, 2011You may have noticed very little activity on this blog (and other Scienceblogs) over the last few days. We had a technical difficulty somewhere around the Christmas. What happened was our main communication antenna was sheered off by an unidentified flying object. After the reindeer and elf parts were removed, it was discovered that a couple of parts had to be upgraded, and then, of course, all the connections to the SQL database were borked so it took a little time to fix. Our front end kept running but I believe commenting and certainly new blogging was impossible for a while.
I am…
gregladen | December 26, 2011The presumption being examined here is that humans are divisible into different groups (races would be one term for those groups) that are genetically distinct from one another in a way that causes those groups to have group level differences in average intelligence, as measured by IQ. More exactly, this post is about the sequence of arguments that are usually made when people try to make this assertion.
The argument usually starts out noting that there are dozens of papers that document group differences in IQ. I'll point out right now that most of those papers are published in journals with…
gregladen | December 24, 2011Me too. But in the old days, they made them to last, even if they were stuck in your stomach for 25 years!
gregladen | December 24, 2011This is a rewrite and amalgamation, into one post, of a series of earlier posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. The idea is to provide the gist, a few important facts, and some fun suggestions, slowly and easily.
At some level all operating systems are the same, but in some ways that will matter to you, Linux is very different from the others. The most important difference, which causes both the really good things and the annoying things to be true, is that Linux and most of the software that you will run on Linux is OpenSource, as opposed to proprietary AND it is…
gregladen | December 23, 2011SpaceX CEO & CTO Elon Musk discusses the difficulty of making a reusable rocket. Filmed at The National Press Club.
gregladen | December 22, 2011A strange 1.1 meter circumfrence hollow metallic ball appears to have fallen from space, or somewhere, onto Namibia. The pertinent facts:
The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.
Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said.
With a diameter of 35 centimetres (14 inches), the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of "two halves welded together".
It was made of a "metal…
gregladen | December 22, 2011The farther away you look, the farther back in time you see. So, GN-108036, a galaxy spotted by NASA's Spitzer and Hubble scopes, is 12.9 billion light-years away, and thus, about 12.9 billion years ago (not counting adjustments for cosmic expansion). It turns out that GN-108036 is producing stars at the rate of about 100 per year. In contract, the Mikly Way (our galaxy), even though it is 100 times bigger in mass than GN-108036, produces about 30 new stars per year.
This image shows one of the most distant galaxies known, called GN-108036, dating back to 750 million years after the Big…