gregladen | August 11, 2011Did we miss an opportunity over the last few months? For several months, since Last April, SETI has been in hibernation, not taking calls from aliens living in other worlds with radio sets. Phil Plait reports that SETI is back on line after a revival of funding. The question is, did we miss any calls? The funds are private donations. Phil "... was happy to see that people such as Jodie Foster (who played SETI astronomer Ellie Arroway in the movie "Contact") and science fiction author Larry Niven were among people who had contributed, as well as Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders. The $200k…
gregladen | August 10, 2011The Honshu tsunami of March 11th (the one that caused the Fukushima disaster) caused the otherwise stable Sulzberger Ice Shelf to calve giant hunks of ice. Climate scientists call this "teleconnection." I call it a big whopping bunch of whack knocking off a gigunda chunka stuff. Either way, this is important and interesting.
Scientists figured this out by modeling the movement of the tsunami's energy across the Pacific and correlating this with the calving event observed from s satellite. That sounds easier than it was: By the time a tsunami wave travels a few tens of thousands of…
gregladen | August 7, 2011This looks interesting: ATOMIC COVER-UP: Two U.S. Soldiers, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and The Greatest Movie Never Made. From the author:
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow. Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others. Within days, Japan had surrendered, and the US readied plans for occupying the defeated country--and documenting…
gregladen | August 7, 2011I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the "tribal" people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or soap box by those raising money to spread this or that word. Most Europeans and Americans don't know it, but many people who live in the Congo are quite convinced that the bazunga ... the white foreigners ... are cannibals. I've listened closely these assertions, made by many individuals, and I'…
gregladen | August 6, 2011We dropped the atomic bomb on japan today (in 1945) and that caused a lot of changes in the world. The idea of a bomb like this was so outrageous that it was actually possible to keep the project secret even though thousands of people worked for months on it, at many different locations. In one plant where nuclear material was being enriched people were told to make up whatever they wanted when asked what they were doing, as long as they avoided saying what they were doing. This was a bit risky because they didn't actually know, as mere cogs in a larger and incomprehensible machine, what…
gregladen | August 5, 2011Not wearing a life vest when you are on a recreational boat is about the same as not wearing your seat belt when driving on the highway: Perhaps 8 out of 10 water-recreation related deaths in the US in recent years would not have happened were the person wearing a life vest (as in wearing, not just having one near by). In 2008, about 700 people died in boating accidents in the US. Over 500 of those deaths were by drowning. Of those, abut 50 were wearing their life vest.
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gregladen | August 4, 2011Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars.
"NASA's Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, "and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration."
Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these…
gregladen | August 3, 2011I have a childhood memory of a troop of baboons, waiting among nearby rocks on a sun baked kopje, taking notice of nearby humans and watching and waiting until they saw a weakness and finally moving in for the kill, barking, grabbing, ripping livid flesh with long sharp canines, howling like wolves. And for the longest time I thought that memory was a scene from a movie called Flight of the Phoenix. But it turns out it was a scene from a movie that showed up on my doorstep this morning. And some time between that childhood memory forming and the DVD's delivery I actually went to the…
gregladen | August 3, 2011I'll bet you can't explain dark matter in less than one minute.
Whoa. Pretty good
Visit the Minute Physics channel for more.
gregladen | August 3, 2011In case you've been living in a well insulated cave, you need to know about Freethought Blogs Dot Com at http://freethoughtblogs.com/, which is where PZ Myers, Ed Brayton Digital Cuttlefish and some others are blogging.
Also, Sheril Kirshenbaum has departed from Wired and has started her own blog, A Culture of Science.
Check them out!
gregladen | August 1, 2011 The Herschel Space Observatory's large telescope and state-of-the-art infrared detectors have provided the first confirmed finding of oxygen molecules in space. The molecules were discovered in the Orion star-forming complex.
Individual atoms of oxygen are common in space, particularly around massive stars. But molecular oxygen, which makes up about 20 percent of the air we breathe, has eluded astronomers until now.
"Oxygen gas was discovered in the 1770s, but it's taken us more than 230 years to finally say with certainty that this very simple molecule exists in space," said Paul Goldsmith…
gregladen | August 1, 2011I have thought about writing a post on this topic, and I may well still do that, but so many have covered it so well already that I probably needn't bother. And needn't is not a word I use lightly. Anyway, this is an urgent issue and you can help resolve it but adding to some of the pressure to make Google do the right thing and follow their own motto of "not being evil." Because right now, they are.
Sign the petition!
gregladen | July 31, 2011I've updated the Skeptical Search Engine (on the left side bar of this site, as well as below in this blog post) to include more sites dealing with climate change.
Enjoy!
gregladen | July 31, 2011In the old days, canals, roads, train tracks, etc. were almost all privately owned in many countries. Some airports too, but not many. Now, most of these elements of our infrastructure are publicly owned or so regulated that they may as well be. Same with utilities.
I wrote a while ago about how Amazon Dot Com is a public good that should not be privately controlled. A lot of people got mad at me and pointed out how wrong I was, but that is because they did not understand that the vast majority of on line commerce is actually run by Amazon even though you don't know that while you are…
gregladen | July 30, 2011Falsehood!!!
Sometimes people say this because it seems reasonable to them ... what, with life originating so long ago and so much geological mushing-around happening since then. But sometimes people say this, and sound quite innocent saying it, because they want to throw the average person off track and make them think that Evolutionary Biology has this big gap -- at the beginning -- in which any-old kind of story can fit, including a supernatural or religious story, or even just a spiritual Jungian story, or anything but a story about molecules interacting.
So, the purpose of this blog…
gregladen | July 29, 2011...Louis Agassiz, the most famous scientist of his time, eclipsing Darwin in his stature and influence (up to a point) addressed this diversity across the landscape in one way. Darwin addressed it in another way. Today, most people don't even know what Agassiz said, even though it is a perfectly rational model if you are a creationist, and something like half of all Americans are. But, his ideas would be considered absurd even by modern Young Earth Creationists (YECs). Darwin's view, in contrast, is not absurd, but it is complicated....
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