gregladen | October 1, 2011Freethoughtblogs.com has just added seven new bloggers, and I thought you'd want to know. With this new group of bloggers, FTB.com has become too big for our own sidebar listing us! Gonna have to go drop down soon.
Here's the rundown:
Dana Hunter is a science blogger and writer of science fiction, and she's into geology. If you don't know her blog, you should, it is one of my faves and one I regularly check. The name of Dana's blog is En Tequila es Verdad which I think is some kind of drink. You will find her blog here.
Al Stefanelli is the Georgia State Director for American…
gregladen | September 30, 2011A friend of mine send me this:
This was my letter to Raytheon and the National Science Foundation
To whom it may concern.
I am writing on behalf of my mother, Renee-Nicole Douceur. I am trying to figure out by what standard you consider a stroke a non-emergency. Almost a month ago I received a phone call from my mother informing me that she had a stroke the week before. As I am sure you can imagine, my heart dropped and my emo...tions kicked in because I was unable to be by my mother's side during this scary time. I know that she has put in almost 3 years of dedication for Raytheon and…
gregladen | September 30, 2011I want you to know that certain blogging and conversations are going on at the X Blog. For instance, we are speaking of The Things That Shall Not Be Named here and here. A little Dawkins, a little Watson. Go joint the fun.
Life, Death, Teenagers and Guns. A sad story but an important topic.
And a bunch of other fun stuff.
Today was a Huxley Day so my blogs are quiet but there are some interesting thing going on, including something biggish on climate change and the EPA. Also, again on the subject of The X Blog, big things are brewing over at Freethoughtblogs.com. Two things, actually…
gregladen | September 29, 2011Holy crap! I was just randomly pushing buttons on the TV Remote (I never actually watch TV, of course) and there was LeRoy! He's so talented! LEAN ON ME LEROY!
Musician LeRoy Bell
Very nice job, they loved you. Knocked it out of the park.
gregladen | September 29, 2011Study hard and get this guy's job:
I love that book, but when I was a kid they didn't have dinosaurs yet.
gregladen | September 29, 2011Thanks for visiting!The contents of this post have been updated and moved to THIS LOCATION. Please click through. Sorry for the inconvenience!
gregladen | September 28, 2011Three words used to describe "others" in Western literature. This topic came up in a previous post, and made me wonder what Google Ngram had to say about it. I made three different graphs because the scales are so vastly different (owing among other things, I'm sure, to multiple uses of the words). Here they are:
Cannibal:
Tribal
Indigenous
Interesting.
See more on Cannibalism
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Other posts of interest:
How to get rid of spiders in your house
Why is your poop green?
How many cells are there in the human body?
Is there really a plot hole in Harry Potter Goblet of Fire?
How long…
gregladen | September 28, 2011A man "lies crumpled on the sand ... Behind him a dark trail leads back to the spot from which he has just been dragged. Looking closer, we notice something slightly odd about the figure crouching over the wounded man. His posture does not suggest a doctor attempting to staunch bleeding, or even to check heartbeat or pulse. Look a little closer still, and you may be inclined suddenly to reel back or to close your eyes. The man sprawled at such an odd angle beside the injured [man] has his face pressed against a gaping tear in [his] throat. He is drinking blood fresh from the wound..."…
gregladen | September 28, 2011Damn them. The Kindle Fire is about the same price as the higher end Kindle that I bought Julia just before her trip overseas.... oh well.
The Kindle Fire is an android based tablet designed to be an ebook.
Here's why I want one: An iPad, which is also an eBook reader but that does a lot more stuff than a Kindle Fire, weighs 1.33 pounds. The Kindle Fire weighs 14.6 ounces. That puts the Kindle Fire just under the threshold for comfortable reading where you don't have to prop it up. I'd like it to be lighter, but that's a good start. (The regular Kindle, by the way, weighs about 6…
gregladen | September 28, 2011One of the interesting items we have this week is a study by Greenpeace in which various organisms from the sea near Fukushima were sampled for radioactive isotopes. Let's take a closer look.
The data in the table provided (see the first item in Ana's feed for the link) show the amount of radiation (radioactive decay) by isotope type per kilogram of plant or animal tissue from various samples. On the higher end is a fish with 357 bq/kg of radiation and some seaweed with 190 bk/kg.
What does this mean? Hard to say. I can tell you this: A normal human has about 4,000 or more bq (in total…
gregladen | September 27, 2011Animals eating1 people has always been an interest of mine, and bear attacks are among my favorite. As you know, I've got a few of my own stories, though I don 't know if I ever told this one. There were two of us canoe-camping in a state park in the Adirondacks. You had to park your car at a ranger station, sign in, get a canoe, and paddle across the lake to a distant spot. Turns out, I left the lights on in the car during that first part. This will become important in a moment.
So, I'm sitting there in front of a little camp fire cooking up some stew. To my right is a bag of food…
gregladen | September 27, 2011NASA will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT) on Thurs., Sept. 29, to reveal near-Earth asteroid findings and implications for future research. The briefing will take place at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, launched in December 2009, captured millions of images of galaxies and objects in space. During the news conference, panelists will discuss results from an enhancement of WISE called Near-Earth Object WISE (NEOWISE) that hunted for asteroids.
Details here.
gregladen | September 27, 2011It seems like every time I take Huxley (now 18 months old) to the doctor, the following things happen: 1) Somebody says "Well, he won't need to get stuck with any needles for a long while now .... his next scheduled immunization is [insert phrase indicating 'a long time into the future']"; and 2) Huxley gets stuck with some needles.
The last time, a few days ago, was especially bad.
[A repost in honor of Get Your Damn Flu Vaccine Week]
We hung around in the exam room for a while, and Huxley was in a very happy mood. He learned to say "Elmo" and how to point to the "Otoscope" when asked…
gregladen | September 26, 2011
I don't have the same circle Google Girl has but I do have a Circle of Shame. You want to stay out of there.