gregladen | July 26, 2011I've spent a fair amount of time in Goma Congo (Zaire), trying hard to stay out of trouble, and I've flown around this mountain and driven around this mountain or its sister volcanoes, and the very existence of this volcano field has a lot to do with some of the research I've done. Oh, and for a while I had a truck with seats fitted to it that were taken from one of the many aircraft that had met its demise on the slopes of these cinder cones.
The reason I mention this at all is because NGS has a feature article with some amazing photos on Nyiragongo Volcano. Go have a look.
Looking back…
gregladen | July 26, 2011Butter Milk Creek is a Texas archaeological site and an archaeological complex located rather symbolically a couple of hundred miles downstream from the famous Clovis site in New Mexico. It is the most recently reported alleged manifestation of a "pre-Clovis" archaeological presence. The most important thing about this site is probably this: It is well dated (though the dates need to be independently verified or otherwise run through the gauntlet of criticism dates of important sites are always subjected to) and there are a lot of artifacts at the site. The importance of the number of…
gregladen | July 26, 2011Cool Planet is a community science-oriented organization located in Edina, Minnesota which "... strives to strengthen and empower the community of Edina by providing fun and engaging opportunities for citizens to join together in local homegrown solutions to climate change."
Interesting idea. If you are in the Edina Area or are just interested in local community organization and science, check out their home page.
gregladen | July 26, 2011Henry Reich is developing a YouTube channel for one-minute-physics presentations. Below the fold is one of the more recent productions.
Here is the minute physics channel.
gregladen | July 26, 2011Michele Bachmann doesn't really care about bullies, or if bullying leads to really bad things happening to children, because there is no bully bill in the US constittuion and it's natural anyway. Here's the audio of her senseless yammering about how an anti bulling bill could lead to the boys all turning gay.
Move over TED, make way for BILL.
Don't drop the anchor of a ship that is running if you're just some drunk guy on the cruise. Like this:
Hat tip Kevin
Interesting graphic on the deficit and what has made it as large as it is.
RIP, Len Sassaman: cypherpunk and anonymity hacker…
gregladen | July 26, 2011Pop the champagne corks. The Texas Board of Education has unanimously come down on the side of evolution. In 14-0* vote, the board today approved scientifically accurate high school biology textbook supplements from established mainstream publishers--and did not approve the creationist-backed supplements from International Databases, LLC.
Read More
gregladen | July 25, 2011Cut a hole in a watermelon! Brilliant!
I think Rebecca Watson makes a great skeptic and spokesperson for the skeptics community, but I think her real calling is in giving dating advice.
(From here)
You may also enjoy this bloggingheads:
gregladen | July 25, 2011President Barack Obama shut down dozens, possibly hundreds, of web sites of members of US congress moments ago when during a moving oration about the US Budget Crisis he suggested that people contact their members of congress immediately. In particular, Obama stated that it has become the norm to consider "compromise" to be a dirty word in American politics.
We've been checking on all the sites for our local representatives and they are all down.
gregladen | July 23, 2011Just an idea ... not entirely work safe ... below the fold.
Imagine that Rebecca Watson, Stef McGraw, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Barbara Drescher, Stephanie Zvan, All the Skepchicks, Me, all the other bloggers, and most of the commmenters on our blogs discussing Rebeccapocalypse all worked for the same big-giant company and this entire discussion happened at work. Imagine what the HR (Human Resources) department would be required to do, would want to do, would want to avoid. Imagine how they would handle the current discussion, and what they might do to avoid future difficulties like this…
gregladen | July 23, 2011I don't know if I should worship my backpack or drive a wooden stake through its heart and shoot it with silver bullets. For three days I obsessively looked through every pocket knowing my keys were in there somewhere, and never found them. Today, I was looking for something else and guess what popped out. I had the same backpack in Mexico a couple of years ago, and stuck a bottle of some cool looking hot sauce I picked up in a small market in one of the pockets. Forgot about it. That backpack then traveled with me, Julia, or Amanda to four cities and three or four countries over the next…
gregladen | July 22, 2011First, have a look at this video of Huxley dancing.
Now, have a look at this email I just got from YoutTube:
Dear gregladen,
Your video, Dancing, may have content that is owned or licensed by SME.
No action is required on your part; however, if you are interested in learning how this affects your video, please visit the Content ID Matches section of your account for more information.
Sincerely,
- The YouTube Team
Hahahahaha....
.... ah ... nope ....
gregladen | July 22, 2011After a little messing around with interesting emacs goodies, we might as well get right on to the good stuff.
emacs uses a concept called "modes." You'll learn about that if you use emacs. For now, what you need to know is that there are "major modes" and "minor modes" and we're only interested in major modes at this moment. There are several major modes that make emacs highly useful for specific purposes, and some of those modes are designed with writing in mind, such as the text-mode the outline-mode and what is known as muse-mode. But writers really want to use org-mode and not much…
gregladen | July 21, 2011
An Efe forest camp is usually dark and depending on the time of day, dripping from current or recent rain. The Efe live in dome shaped huts which may be more or less complete. A half dome might be a hut that was built quickly, or it might be a hut that was built more openly because it has been hot or it might be only a half dome to allow easier access in and out of the hut by children or individuals with injury or infirmity. A fully domed hut, with a small opening, keeps in more smoke (a fire is often kept in the hut) but it also keeps in the heat and keeps out the rain. So a rainy…
gregladen | July 21, 2011A Hadron is a kind of particle, made of quarks. There are two kinds of hadrons, baryons (made out of three quarks) and mesons (made out of a quark and a quirky quark known as an antiquark).
The particle of interest is made up of an up quark, a strange quark, and a heavy bottom quark. I've known a few bluegrass bands that fit that description, but this particle is called the Xi-sub-b baryon.
The observation was made at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) .
The neutral Xi-sub-b belongs to the family of bottom baryons, which are about six times heavier than the proton and neutron…
gregladen | July 21, 2011I have a new post up at 10,000 Birds: How much bird is there, anyway? Please have a look and leave a comment!
Also, as a reminder, there is still time to make your opinion known regarding the proposed Sandhill Crane hunt in Kentucky: Last Gasp for Sandhill Cranes--Act Now!. And if you want to know why I never shot any cranes you can find out here: The first crane and the last crane
gregladen | July 20, 2011For now.
When it comes down to it, benevolent dictatorship resting on a perfectly anarchistic base is the only way to go. Democracy is too easily bought. Free Market Forces do not make everything all nice and efficient and stuff. Wherever information can be OpenSource and OpenAccess it should be; No institution should be allowed to exist for more than a few years; Somehow the infrastructure needs to be efficient, effective, and free (OpenInfrastructure) and then, everything else, we'll let Google take care of.
Or at least that's the plan for now. And when Google goes evil? Revolution…
gregladen | July 20, 2011Gregor Mendel is the Augustinian Monk and Scientist who developed the model of genetics that held sway all the way through the Darwinian Synthesis (when, essentially, it was introduced and integrated) and right up until recently, when it has weakened considerably compared to other conceptions of genetics based on observations not possible in his time. "Mendelian Genetics" still "works" more or less, it just applies to fewer cases in its original simple form. Mendel's main contribution was probably to demonstrate that inheritance involves both parents in roughly equal ways ant that the unit…
gregladen | July 20, 2011They won't let Pluto be a planet but it still bears the responsibility of having moons, and until just now there were three known moons of the tiny non-planet, named Hydra, Charon and Nix.
Now there are four, and the fourth one is called Essslashtwoohoneonepeeone.
They are working on another name. Bad Astronomer has details about the new find.
There is some difficulty in coming up with a name since the theme of the existing names (night-based Roman mythical character) is tapped out. I was thinking it should be called one of the following:
Fifi
Dinah
Ronnie
Or, to be funny, Milton…