gregladen | August 29, 2011Reporter Gives Update Covered In Sea Foam: MyFoxNY.com
Given the location, New Jersey/New York metropolitan area, this part of the wikipedia definition may be most pertinent:
Where polluted stormwater from rivers or drains discharges to the coast, sea foam formed on adjacent beaches can be polluted with viruses and other contaminants, and may have an unpleasant odour.
If crude oil discharged from tankers at sea, or motor oil, sewage and detergents from polluted stormwater are present, the resulting sea foam is even more persistent, and can have a chocolate mousse texture.*
Hat Tip Joe
gregladen | August 29, 2011And I'm only half joking:
Three degrees warming doubles risk of civil war
Global patterns of civil conflict are directly associated with planetary-scale climate change. Specifically in tropical countries, the risk of civil war have just been shown to double in warmer El Niño years (to about 6% risk per country per year) compared to cooler El Niña years (when the risk is about 3%).
A Not so Splendid Table
I love NPR, though I'm not a regular Splendid Table listener. This morning's show featured a guest who claimed that all GMO's are bad with no potential benefit to feed the developing world…
gregladen | August 29, 2011Linux probably has a lot more FOSS tools for editing PDF's than other platforms. ImageMagick will do basic manipulation from the command line. But for a GUI interactive kind of editing, you should look at PDFedit
sudo apt-get install pdfedit
You can do what I'm pretty sure is one of the most often required tasks: Take a page or two out of an existing PDF file and put a page or two into an existing PDF file. Like when you mark up one page of a document, and need to scan the marked-up page and stick it back in the original, replacing the pre-marked up page.
It worked great for me!
gregladen | August 28, 2011
No, no, not that kind of addition... What, are you crazy?
I'd like to announce a new page on Evolution ... not just a theory anymore blog. It is a "media page" which consists of podasts and stuff that I've done.
The page is in its infancy, and I've only got a few items listed so far. Soon it will include everything I can remember.
Please have a look!
Thanks to bradrundage for letting me use his baby.
gregladen | August 28, 2011I am not specifically recommending the book Created Equal becuase I've never seen it up close and cannot vouch for its qualities (and it is not cheap) but it was mentioned, with several photographs from the book, here, some time ago.
In Created Equal, photographer Mark Laita pairs images that are in some way "opposite" (though it is not always the case, in my opinion) such as this one of a country fair livestock show contestant and a Cajun guy with his gator, or a ballerina and a boxer, or a homeless man and a real estate developer.
Might be a good coffee table book for the person who has…
gregladen | August 28, 2011I like the way the godfather smiles when they talk about git.
The Orgfather
Hat tip: Got Emacs.
gregladen | August 28, 2011Continuing with the theme of eating insects ...
The people of the eastern Congo plant African rice around June so that it will grow through the wettest part of the wet season, and then they harvest it in the "dry season" which starts about mid or late November. That is around the same time that a "locust" (actually a katydid of some sort) emerges in the grasslands to the north, in the Central African Republican and the Sudan, to spread across the region. And eat rice.
It is rather annoying to have locust descend on your crops. Some years it is not too bad, some years it is bad enough to…
gregladen | August 27, 2011At present, Irene is a Category One hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph. In 24 hours from now, mid-afternoon on Sunday, Irene will be on or near the coast of New Jersey near Long Branch, and over the subsequent 12 hours she will be captured by mid latitude meteorological forces, converted to a tropical storm, and splayed across New York and New England. She's heading straight for Springfield Mass, then over Vermont and New Hampshire and into Maine and points beyond, but she will be big and wide and wet and windy, so a large area will be affected.
Are you in Irene's path? Have…
gregladen | August 27, 2011From ants to aphids, mosquitoes to mantises, entomology blogger Bug Girl has covered all kinds of things that creep, crawl and fly. This week, she joins us to talk about her favorite bugs, and why she finds them all so fascinating. And anthropologist and blogger Greg Laden joins us to discuss the cultural taboos surrounding eating insects.
Go have a listen!
__________
Please visit the other posts in this series:
No Place to Sit Down
The reason the Efe won't normally kill an insect ...
"We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans"
"Excuse me, there's some food in my bugs!"
Bug Girl and Greg Laden…
gregladen | August 27, 2011Congress is in charge of the federal budget. That is a constitutional reality. However, since members of Congress are elected and elections are, well, political, the federal budget is a political artifact. And this is often bad news for science.
It all started with William Proxmire. I still run into people now and then who extol Proxmire's virtues when it comes to making government more responsible, but they are not remembering correctly. What Proxmire did was this: His staff would comb through federally funded science project grants looking for names of projects that could be made to…
gregladen | August 26, 2011Hurricane Irene is probably at its strongest moment at this writing, as a Category Two hurricane, and will become weaker over time as she moves north. However, Irene is very large and will be moving very slowly. So, which is worse? Category Two hurricane winds passing quickly through an area or Tropical Storm force winds hanging around for a day? I suppose it depends of if you are a well built jetty or a fast food sign at a strip mall.
In 24 hours from now, by late afternoon on Saturday, Irene will be a Category One storm on the sitting on top of the Outer Banks of North Carolina.…
gregladen | August 25, 2011I remember one day when Richard Stallman, a nobody, was featured on a local news story. Since I was living in Cambridge, some local news stories were about work being done by Harvard or MIT researchers, and in this case, Stallman was an MIT Hacker who had just started to talk about this strange idea: Writing computer programs for free.
Here's the thing: At the time, I was looking at the idea of working as a computer programmer to make money in order to fund a career of studying evolution and teaching and stuff. Then this Stallman guy gets on the TV and says, essentially, that writing…
gregladen | August 25, 2011Category Three Hurricane Irene has just passed over Abaco Islands in the Northern Bahamas, and is generally affecting the northern Bahamas. Widespread damage is reported. Over the weekend Irene promises to be a very significant weather event in the US. In order to understand the events that will take place between today and early next week, it will be necessary to revisit the concept of "landfall," which we have discussed here in the past.
Here's the deal. "Landfall" is the moment in time when the eye of a hurricane contacts the land, including any barrier island or mainland. "Landfall"…
gregladen | August 24, 2011Hurricane Irene is currently located in the strip between the greater and lesser Antillies, heading west-northwest where it will seriously affect The Bahamas and related islands north of Cuba and east of Florida. By late afternoon, Irene will likely be a Category 3 Hurricane.
The storm will turn northerly over the next couple of days. Its exact track is very uncertain as it moves north along the Florida coast and roughly in the direction of the part of the US East Coast that sticks out to the east around South Carolina.
The current most likely track (with a fair amount of uncertainty)…
gregladen | August 23, 2011Apparently there's been a ca 5.9 magnitude earthquake in northern Virginia about 30 miles east of Charlottesville. The earthquake was shallow so it's effects were felt widely. It is reported that buildings in NY City were evacuated, as well as the Pentagon. The USGS page is here.
gregladen | August 22, 2011First of all, I want you to know that I've devoted my life to this blog post so now you have every reason to love it more than any other blog post. Sniff sniff.
Or, could it be that I've been watching too much America's Got Talent (which, clearly, it does not, except that yo-yo guy was pretty good). I mean, seriously, if America's Got Talent then why is there Country Western Music? Anyway, I have noticed this trend of the argument for Not Being Voted Off The Island being that I've Invested Myself Emotionally Beyond Belief and I think that's a bad trend.
Speaking of time, this was one of…
gregladen | August 22, 2011Speaking of people eating insects ... as we were ... I do have this fun story from the Ituri Forest.
One day something funny happened. I was traveling in the most remote part of Central Africa, several days walk from any place you could possibly drive a car, visiting uncharted villages mainly occupied by people who had moved into the deep forest because they were in trouble with the "law" in some way (usually for perfectly good reasons in this lawless country). I was traveling with a Lese Villager and his sister, who was hired as our cook, and three Efe Pygmy men. We visited a village that…
gregladen | August 22, 2011The Inspector General of the National Science foundation has completed an investigation into falsifying research data, concealing or deleting emails or other data, misusing privileged information, and seriously deviating form accepted practices in relation to climate change research by climate scientist Michael Mann. This investigation, just completed, confirms what has been determined by other previous investigations:
An Investigatory Committee of faculty members with impeccable credentials has unanimously "determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in,…
gregladen | August 22, 2011The deadline is approaching for you to submit your preferences for the Linux Journal Readers' Choice Awards. For purposes of discussion, here are (most of my) choices:
Best Linux Distro: I'm sticking with Ubuntu, even though I'm increasingly annoyed at several aspects of it. I chose Unbuntu because it was the distribution that allowed me to transform from someone who kept trying to make Linux work but never could to someone who uses Linux almost exclusively. The few times I've tried to use a distro other than Ubuntu, I've not had much success, and thus it remains as my choice, though I hope…
gregladen | August 22, 2011I agree with Shawn Powers that Unity has offended all that is good in this world by aggressively grabbing so much of my screen real estate much like Hitler grabbed the Rhineland.
Well, OK, S.P. is not so Godwinesque in his language, but still.... Unity = Microsoft-like marketing oriented philosophy in a FOSS world. I predict Unity will die the death of misuse except in all those commercially marketed end-user systems that force Linux on the owners at places like Best Buy.
Here's Shawn Powers on Unity…