gregladen | November 26, 2011A frail elderly woman would have a hard time walking a few blocks, from her apartment to the subway, then from the subway to the MET, with winds gusting to near hurricane strength. So, the patron of the arts and of archaeology, who happened to be a cousin of my first wife, called around to find a worthy pair to use her tickets to the private opening (for major patrons) of The Treasures of Tutankhamun, the exhibit of King Tut's tomb. The public opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City would be several days later. When it was found that the two only archaeologists in the…
gregladen | November 26, 2011Today is Huxley's Birthday. He'll be spending the day in bed chillin' to some tunes.
gregladen | November 25, 2011This is not a manual or even a how-to blog post, but rather, what I hope to be a few helpful suggestions that may or may not have already occurred to you. I was motivated to write this because of a series of recent events in which it became obvious that a lot of people, myself included in certain instances, were not managing some of the basic information linked to their on-line identity in the best way.
Let me give you a simple example, which happens to be the first one I came across in this recent series of encounters with eInefficiency. I was working with a group of people at a non-profit…
gregladen | November 25, 2011Several weeks ago, my friend and colleague, Shanai Matteson asked if I'd get involved in a project she was working on along with several other people. If you have been reading my blog, or for that matter, Pharyngula, for a while you'll know of Shanai even if you don't know you know: She was for many years the public outreach coordinator person (not sure of her exact title) for the Bell Museum of Natural History, so it is she who organized the Great Smackdown at The Bell (with PZ Myers, Chirs Mooney, Matt Nisbet and me), as well as several Cafe Scientifiques that I've done, as well as a…
gregladen | November 24, 2011From Google Wave:
More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any…
gregladen | November 24, 2011I remember my first solar eclipse. I was a kid, and it was the one Carlie Simon sang about, in March 1970.
(The eclipse reference is just past three minutes. Some other time we can argue over whether or not Carlie, singing in this video on Martha's Vineyard, was referring to the March 1970 eclipse or the July 1972 eclipse, but I'm sure it was the former, because that's the one everybody got all excited about.)
I was such a geek that I actually missed the eclipse because I was busy collecting data. There was a phone number you could call and a lady's voice would give you the time and…
gregladen | November 24, 2011Time for the thanksgiving story. But first, when you are preparing your Thanksgiving Turkey, you might want to keep this in mind.
And now ... a feast.
The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white flagging to indicate a peaceful intent attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into your…
gregladen | November 23, 2011If you are looking for some recipes, here are a few suggestions.
Theory and background
Thinking Thanksgiving I
Thinking Thanksgiving II
Homemade Thanksgiving
How to do a Godless Thanksgiving
Cooking Thanksgiving Turkey
What is a turkey, really?
Brining the bird
How to cook a turkey
How to NOT cook a turkey.
The True Meaning of Thanksgiving: Gravy
First, make stock
How to make gravy
Stuffings
Carmelized Onions, Mushroom, and Sausage Stuffing
Obviously, we need more on this list.
Thanksgiving Side Dishes
Squash Ravioli
Grandma Lylah's Cranberry Relish
Ad Hoc Soup
Thanksgiving Deserts…
gregladen | November 23, 2011Lynn Margulis died yesterday at her home in Amherst at the age of 73.
Margulis is best known and best remembered for her endosymbiotic theory. You know what this is because you took basic biology and it is now part of every textbook. Notably, at the time Margulis published this idea, it was rejected and continued to be shunned for some time, but eventually was accepted. Margulis made a number of other important and accepted contributions to evolutionary biology.
Margulis has also pressed forward with a number of other theories (either hers, or as an advocate for others) that are just…
gregladen | November 22, 2011For reasons that are entirely beyond my comprehension, some time ago, people started to deep fry their turkeys. Don't do it unless you know what you are doing. And you probably don't know what you are doing.
Here's what William Shatner has to day about it:
gregladen | November 22, 2011I may or may not have written a blog post called "Manspace."
Its relationship to "Womanspace" and "Womanspacegate" will be only partly obvious.
gregladen | November 22, 2011We know that the right wing revels in stupidity; Willful stupidity and well practiced stupidity are thought to be the way elitist anti-populous tax-the-middle-class Republicans capture support from the masses. Seems to work rather well. But increasingly this trope of (ig)noble ignorance is being supplemented by large doses of mean spirited in your face angry verbal assault. Imagine a member of congress saying to an expert witness at a committee hearing "As long as I'm sitting here and you're sitting there, I can call you whatever I want."
Seriously. The last time I heard that kind of…
gregladen | November 22, 2011For now, a press release. More later:
WASHINGTON (Nov. 22, 2011)--In an apparent effort to discredit climate science, hackers again posted stolen emails from leading climate scientists online today, just days ahead of a United Nations climate meeting. According to the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, the emails released today are part of the same batch that was stolen from the university years ago. Only some of those emails were released in November 2009. Since then, multiple investigations exonerated scientists who had their emails stolen of misconduct.
"These leftover…
gregladen | November 21, 2011This video was produced to allow scientists to explain, in their own words, the importance of evolution to science -- and the related importance of teaching evolution in schools. Our goal is to convey the fact that evolution is an amazing, uplifting discovery that has served as the genesis of countless advances in many fields of science. We also wanted to highlight female role models in the science community.
For information on what you can do to support evolution in education, please visit these sites. These organizations are not associated with this video in any way, but we think they do…