gregladen | November 2, 2011In a recent study, 35,533 prostate cancer-free men in a higher risk age group for prostate cancer in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico were given various treatments of Vitamin E, selenium, and placebo in order to see if claims that Vitamin E and/or Vitamin E with selenium were effective in reducing prostate cancer risk.
8752 received selenium alone - 575 developed prostate cancer.
8737 received Vitamin E alone - 620 developed prostate cancer.
8702 received both - 555 developed prostate cancer.
8696 placebo - 529 developed prostate cancer.
It turns out that Vitamin E may increase the risk of…
gregladen | November 2, 2011Not that I'm trying to influence you or anything, but you BETTER DO IT!!!
LeRoy Bell is clearly the best singer of the bunch. You can vote for him using any of five different methods.
... we are giving you a handful of ways to cast your votes for your favorite 12 finalists. And they are...
1) PHONE: You can vote via calling a toll-free phone number. Each act will be assigned their own toll-free number, which will appear on screen after their performance.
2) TEXT: You can vote via Verizon SMS/text voting. Each act will be assigned their own four-digit short code, which will appear on screen…
gregladen | November 2, 2011Freethought Blogs is growing at an insanely fast rate. Glorious, says I! However, a lot of you may not be aware of all the authors on FtB. Even if you are, you may not know who their celebrity crushes are or what they think of Kim Kardashian's marriage. In an effort to acquaint everybody with the rabble here at FtB, I'm going to be conducting interviews with the bloggers.
The first up is author of the X Blog, Greg Laden.
Here
gregladen | November 2, 2011You've heard about "ClimateGate." ClimateGate was a very successful but illegal campaign by anti-science to discredit climate science and climate scientists. Rest assured, the climate science is fine and the climate scientists are just trying to do their jobs, and doing quite well at that. Nonetheless, a combination of inaccurate representation of the contents of various emails written between climate scientists and what amounts to unethical treatment of climate science by the press resulted in a shift among the general populous in the US from about half of the people thinking that Global…
gregladen | November 1, 2011My nephew, LeRoy Bell, is a finalist on the X-Factor talent show.
He's quite a good singer, a talented musician, and an excellent song writer. In addition to this, a lot of people have remarked about how such an old codger like LeRoy can look so young. Here, we have LeRoy's beauty tips.
Stop eating beef or pork after you turn 25!
Exercise as much as possible, no less than 3 times a week!
Push away from the table every now and then; concentrate on quality food not quantity!
Drink plenty of water also drink a glass of red wine with dinner, but no more!
Don't feel you have to look, act,…
gregladen | October 31, 2011
The McGregor Museum is a complex building with several wings surrounding an inner court yard, a multi-layered roof, balconies everywhere, and numerous trees in the court yard close in to the building. So, a cat can spend the heat of the day in the shaded crown of a tree, and the cool of the evening up on the building's sun-warmed metal roof.
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The interior of the McGregor museum houses numerious exhibits. The old period rooms and hallways focus on the late 19th century, and other newer areas (not shown) have an excellent set of exhibits on archaeology, human evolution, and "San" rock…
gregladen | October 31, 2011Finally, without any further interruption ...
One morning I was up a bit earlier than usual, and I was in the bathroom shaving. It was an hour or so before sunup. The lighting in the bathroom was poor, but there was a security spotlight outside the window, as I recall, so I had opened the frosted glass pane to let in a little more light, as well as the clean, cold but dry night air, which would keep the fogged over bathroom mirror clear.
As I was just starting to scrape the razor against my face in the bathroom, I heard the ghostly footsteps walking one way down the hall .. away from me…
gregladen | October 31, 2011Since we are talking about geology, I do not want to give up the opportunity to bring up one of the coolest stories of geology ever, given the present day discussion of science and religion. You will be asking for a source for this story. Look it up in Wikipedia, where all knowledge resides, and you will not find it there.
There are things, it turns out, that The Great Knowing Web Site does not know. My source is a combination of primary and secondary documents, written histories, and a documentary that is not generally available.
Barney Barneto nee Barnet Isaacs was a key player in the…
gregladen | October 31, 2011One of the main reasons we were staying in Kimberley at all was to assist the museum staff with a particular, and rather singular, survey and excavation. The location and circumstances of this field project were quite remarkable.
This was on the location of an historic hunting reserve, where every one of the buildings where guests were quartered and entertained was built well before World War II. Even the ancient charcoal refrigerator was intact and in use. This was a large cylindrical structure with double mesh walls. When the game was afoot and dozens of buck were killed by sports…
gregladen | October 31, 2011I wrote earlier about the graves that were dug daily to receive the dead. In truth, the details of this procedure are still being worked out by archaeologists at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, but when we were there on this particular trip, part of the grave yard to which I refer had been just discovered, accidentally uncovered during a public works drainage project. I've never seen anything quite like it in all my years as an archaeologist.
It should not have been terribly surprising that there were graves in this particular patch of land, just across a small road from an existing…
gregladen | October 31, 2011Well, we were living with this ghost who would walk up and down the hall in the middle of the night, invisibly leaving behind only the sound of its footsteps. But before I tell you how this all came out, I want to tell you a related side story.
As I had mentioned, I had the "hallway extension" room. Let me explain.
To get into the apartment, you would walk up a set of stairs and through a lockable doorway. Then to the right was a bedroom, and to the left a bathroom. Moving on ahead were two more bedrooms on the right for a total of three. On the left side past the bathroom was a…
gregladen | October 31, 2011So there we were in the Haunted Guest Quarters of the Old Infirmary, and I had already heard the ghost once. In the morning, my colleague and BFF Lynne who was staying with us for a couple of days noted that she had heard the mysterious footsteps as well....
"Greg, one, maybe both, of your students are really afraid of ghosts," she said.
"Why were they even talking about ghosts?"
"They've talked about little else since finding out that the ghost tour business is the biggest thing in town! And sooner or later they're going to hear whatever that was."
"Nah, they'll just get drunk and pass…
gregladen | October 31, 2011Everything I'm about to tell you in this story is true.1 This is a long story, so it may span more than one blog post. You might not want to read this story while you are alone or while sitting in the dark.2
Kimberley South Africa is said to be the most haunted city in the world, and it certainly is a city with a remarkable and dark history. The culture of Kimberley is constructed from the usual colonial framework on which are draped the tragic lives of representatives from almost every native culture from thousands of kilometers around.
The city's very existence is highly questionable…
gregladen | October 31, 2011I received the following email and urge readers to call your Senators and encourage them to support the National Science Foundation! Here's why. Having worked in a Senate office, I can assure you that every call matters. The details:
Call your Senators by 5:00 ET today to urge them to support the House Appropriations Committee funding level of $6,859,867,000 (same funding level as for FY 2011) for the National Science Foundation (NSF) in fiscal year (FY) 2012.
Details here.
gregladen | October 31, 2011... the cast and crew special for the end of David Tennant's tenure as the Doctor.
gregladen | October 30, 2011What they say we get:
What we actually get:
1) 35% of every viewable surface of everything is an ad. Including the sky and the moon.
2) The technology pauses for several seconds every now and then because, well, it never works like on the ad.
3) A new EULA pops up several times a day asking you to approve a 43 page document and re-enter your passwords.
4) Passwords have become a minimum of 64 items long with a least 7 numbers, 7 symbols, and 7 difficult to remember hand and foot gestures.
5) The entire interface changes half way through and the rest of the video is people contacting each…
gregladen | October 29, 2011The radiation at the Fukushima plants has gone up, rather than down, since June. This may be because contaminated water has become more concentrated due to evaporation. The release of radiation from the plant into the air continues, although a covering over Reactor 1 is almost completed. The release of radiation from the plant into the sea continues, and plankton are shown to be contaminated to a level that raises some concern. Mid month, the plant was measured to be releasing about 100 million becquerels per hour. The reactors are still not uniformly shut down to less than boiling.…
gregladen | October 29, 2011More and more, nations are waging attacks with cyber weapons -- silent strikes on another country's computer systems that leave behind no trace. (Think of the Stuxnet worm.) At TEDxParis, Guy-Philippe Goldstein shows how cyberattacks can leap between the digital and physical worlds to prompt armed conflict -- and how we might avert this global security hazard.
gregladen | October 28, 2011Physiatrist and engineer Todd Kuiken is building a prosthetic arm that connects with the human nervous system -- improving motion, control and even feeling. Onstage, patient Amanda Kitts helps demonstrate this next-gen robotic arm.