gregladen | October 27, 2011This is the biggest thing since Justin Beiber's haircut! Video below the fold.
The Daily Show with Jon StewartGet More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook
gregladen | October 27, 2011... But he could have. Our local Young Earth Creationist group does run a dinosaur excavation in South Dakota and they do local field trips. But, Don does talk about this experience in a different city:
the 2010 meeting last year in Denver took the cake: there was a whole field trip run by YECs who did not identify their agenda, and pretended that they were doing conventional geology--until you read between the lines.
Read about it here.
gregladen | October 27, 2011Have you ever had a large lobster? I mean, a really large one, like five pounds or more? They are hard to get these days. Most of the good Maine Lobsters (and all lobsters are Maine Lobsters unless otherwise specified) come from Maine in the US, and Maine has a rule that you can't harvest large lobsters. But back in the old days, when I was buying lobsters off the boat or occasionally eating them on the boat, you could still get them. And you can still get large lobsters from New Hampshire and Massachusetts but a) they are not as good and b) they are too expensive to even consider for…
gregladen | October 27, 2011Maggie Koerth-Baker is a Twin Cities based journalist and science editor at Boing Boing. She has bee a guest along with me on Atheist Talk Radio,and I hope to interview her early next year in relation to her forthcoming book, which I am very excited about. Meanwhile, you can see Maggie on Dr. Kiki's Science Hour. That show will be at 6 central TODAY.
You can see Dr Kiki a number of ways. I watch her on Twit network on my Roku.
gregladen | October 27, 2011Well, now's your chance to put him on the spot!
Jim, who is famous for his book on the Physics of Superheros and more recently The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics: A Math-Free Exploration of the Science that Made Our World, though I knew him originally because of his work with emergent properties in complex systems, will be Desiree Schell's guest on Skeptically Speaking.
Seriously, if you have not heard or seen Jim speak you have missed something very enjoyable. If you have, I know you are simply going to tune in if you hear him once you'll be a fan. And, if you've not ever heard…
gregladen | October 26, 2011Suppose you are an intelligent, thoughtful person with a thirst for information, a desire to be challenged, and a tendency to not accept received knowledge at face value. You are embedded in a traditional Christian culture where most of your family, your child's teachers and friends and those friends' families, the people where you and your spouse work and most people in your social circles assume that Evolution is "only a theory" and should be taught, if at all, along side alternative theories such as that the earth is 6,000 years old and was created in seven days. But you don't want that…
gregladen | October 26, 2011You'll remember that I recently wrote up Shawn Otto's talk at The Loft. The talk was filmed and is now a major motion picture!
Now that you've seen the talk, here's your list of things to do:
Buy the book here.
Sign on to Science Debate.org here
Sign the American Science Pledge here
Join the Republican Party. Oh, and the NRA too!
gregladen | October 26, 2011According to this press release:
Scientists have proven that the fungus Geomyces destructans causes white-nose syndrome, a fast-spreading and highly lethal disease of bats.
Research published today (Wednesday, Oct. 26) in the journal Nature provides the first direct evidence that this fungus is responsible for a disease that is decimating bats in North America.
Research at the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and other institutions, showed that 100 percent of healthy little brown bats exposed…
gregladen | October 26, 2011Are you adopted or from India?
I have a friend who wants to know about her birthmother and family in India, and is seriously considering going to India to check into her own background. I assume she is not the first person who was born in India, adopted by a US family and then got interested in her own past. If you have experience or knowledge in this area, could you help her? I would appreciate that.
You can't link weather to climate change, right?
Wrong. Of course you can. You can even link specific weather events to climate change if you are willing to adapt the way your brain works…
gregladen | October 25, 2011It is called Comet Elenin.
Latest indications are this relatively small comet has broken into even smaller, even less significant, chunks of dust and ice. This trail of piffling particles will remain on the same path as the original comet, completing its unexceptional swing through the inner solar system this fall.
"Elenin did as new comets passing close by the sun do about two percent of the time: It broke apart," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office in Pasadena, Calif. "Elenin's remnants will also act as other broken-up comets act. They will trail along in a debris…
gregladen | October 25, 2011Please note, the whole "left side right side" brain thing is WRONG and we've known it has been WRONG for a very long time. Very. Long. Time. The reality is complex and interesting, but it is probably not what you think.
The following video on this topic is pretty good:
gregladen | October 25, 2011I have a few items for you from the Evolution Front.
First, you can have a free copy of an excerpt form the book Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating by Leslie Brunetta and Catherine L. Craig: Click here for the PDF file.
That was complements of the NCSE. Speaking of the NCSE, you can also have the latest copy of the Reports of the National Center for Science Education in its new on-line format:
CLICK HERE
And when you are done reading that, you can watch this:
"What Americans Think of Evolution"
gregladen | October 25, 2011A new study confirming the accuracy of existing global temperature records has been ignored by the all the major television news outlets, except for one mention in a CNN news brief. But the omission is most conspicuous at Fox News, which routinely casts doubt on the temperature data, accuses climate scientists of doctoring research to exaggerate global warming, and often just makes up its own temperature facts....
Read more
gregladen | October 25, 2011('born '1927)
('championed 'ai)
('created 'lisp)
('thought-up 'space-elevator)
('won 'turing-award)
('died 'oct-23-2011)
gregladen | October 25, 2011"No Child Left Behind" was doomed to be a failure, because it was ill concieved, politically cynical, and underfunded. But like the War in Iraq, the Patriot Act and Tax Breaks for the Rich, and all the other initiatives of the Bush Administration that never should have happened, we have been saddled with this melt down of a policy for over a decade. "NCLB" was one of the first policies implemented by Bush.
The evidence that the approaches developed under this policy have failed has been mounting for years, and the supporters of NCLB have been dropping like flies on no-pest strip. The…
gregladen | October 25, 2011Looks interesting, but so far my "highlighting" in ebooks is fairly quirky and has to do with specific objectives I have that others may not know. In other words, sharing them would be potentially problematic considering how easy and common it is to take anyone's words off the web and get all whingy about them.
gregladen | October 25, 2011w00t! My blog post on Urban Heat Islands has won the prestigious Editor's Selection Award from ResearchBlogging.org News!
See the awarding blog post here, and the awarded blog post here.
Thank you Sarah Kendrew.
Two other posts won the award as well: Ovarian Cancer at Microfluidic Future and In Praise of the Comet at the.soft.anonymous. I suppose we will be splitting the prize money.