gregladen | June 28, 2011I heard it said recently that "Evolution" and "Origin of life" are two separate issues. I know that this is a falsehood, and I'll discuss in a moment how and why it is not true. But first, I checked around with a few people that I know and love, and found out that some of them assumed this was true. I think it is something that has been said enough times that if you are not personally engaged in the research or just don't think about it enough, you can easily assume that this is what the experts say. But they don't.
It is possible that there is a nefarious force working here. And I'm…
gregladen | June 28, 2011And what do we do about it?
Global warming is for real, and it is important. Just as important is the fact that global warming is largely anthropogenic. Global warming is important because conditions for life on the planet are changing due to warming as well as other changes caused by the release of fossil carbon into the atmosphere, in ways that will have, on balance, negative impacts; That it is anthropogenic is important because this means we have identified a cause of an important negative effect and thus could potentially curtail it. The anthropogenic nature of global warming is also…
gregladen | June 27, 2011... And she still doesn't know where anything is ...
Michele Bachmann promised, in an interview associated with her announcement to run for President of the United States (POTUS) and Effective Leader of the Free World (ELFW), that she would become a professional clown and murder dozens of teenage boys and young men.
Or, perhaps, she is just confused ...
Michele Bachmann is from Iowa, though she had many of us here in Minnesota convinced that she was from here. Well, given that the Iowa Caucus and Straw Polls are early events in the presidential primary process here in the US, she'll…
gregladen | June 27, 2011The first nuclear power plant ever was built in Obninsk, Russia. It was the first electricity generating plant on a civilian grid. The plant operated until April 29th 2002.
The exact date of the plant's "birth" varies, but as I understand it, it began operating on the 26th and went to large scale production on the 27th.
gregladen | June 27, 2011My old friend Mark Moffett is one of the pioneers of high canopy research, dragging his cameras into the upper reached of the rain forest to learn amazing new things and take some amazing photographs. He's also spent considerable time on and beneath the forest floor studying ants. You know those research projects where they excavate an entire leaf cutter ant colony in order to understand how their underground labyrinths are laid out and function as a sort of earth-encrusted organism? That was Mark. Well, others have done it but he was a pioneer in that research.
I met Mark when he was in…
gregladen | June 27, 2011If elected president, Michele Bachmann promises to take care of herself; In surprise move, Bachmann backs off tea-party stance on Obama.
The Tea Party, which was essentially founded by Michele Bachmann, has a distinctly anti-Obama stance. The far right wing poorly educated and angry group of fair-weather activists is widely believed to have come into existence primarily because Obama is black, and was voted for by blacks. Even as progressive liberals have observed, head scratching, as Tea Party activists scream about Obama's (non-existent) ultra-liberal policies, the real explanation for…
gregladen | June 25, 2011... at first. But then, well, who knows?
Kathy Griffin had the extreme pleasure of bumping into Michele Bachmann at a political event; the two ladies recognized one another and when they started to speak an assistant filmed the exchange, supposedly for Bachmann's website....
And the rest is history. Here.
ROFLMAO
gregladen | June 25, 2011Apparently, when you make a movie, there's this box of stuff left over that someone has to own. It can include things like the original unedited film/video, from which the director and editors selected/cherry picked what they wanted to include, as well as various correspondences and documents and stuff.
The company that produced that horrid piece of drek known as "Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed" has gone out of business (a little Darwinian process at work, may we assume?) and the box of stuff that resulted from that film is now on the auction block. The auctioneer's gavel will strike this…
gregladen | June 24, 2011I can't believe that I'm like 50 something years old and never had one of these:
gregladen | June 24, 2011The Placebo Effect is rarely what people think it is, though it is often what people believe it to be. Unconvinced? Check it out.
gregladen | June 24, 2011For the next several weeks, I'll be contributing a weekly post at Birdingblogs.com. The informal title of this series of posts is Darwin's Other Birds. The idea is to identify particularly interesting passages from Darwin's writings and put them in an appropriate context. This week's post is an introduction to the series. Thanks to Gunnar for the interesting introduction to the Birdingblgos community!
I hope you enjoy the series, which will run every Friday. Next Friday, Darwin and the Andean Condor.
gregladen | June 23, 2011Apropos this, a timely repost:
This may or may not be a recent photograph of fugitive Whitey (James) Bulger of Boston's Winter Hill Gang. Most of you won't know who Whitey Bulger is. He is actually on the FBI's ten most wanted list. He may have been spotted in Italy last Spring, and the FBI is just now asking for assistance from anyone who knows where he might be. (That's not gonna work.)
Whitey was top dog in Boston's Winter Hill gang. His brother was a Senator for the Commwealth of Massachusetts, and served as Senate President for several years.
It is said that Whitey was an FBI…
gregladen | June 22, 2011Much of the current news is about exposure and fallout.
As a point of information, the Sievert is a unit of "dose equivliant" from exposure to ionizing radiation. It was designed to indicate relative levels of biological effects on living organisms. This measurement technique attempts to take into account the fact that radiation is absorbed differently by different tissues. Usually we speak in terms of humans unless otherwise specified. There are one thousand millisieverts in a sievert (mSv). Zero to 0.25 Sv in a day is considered to have no effect. At up to one Sv people feel sick…
gregladen | June 22, 2011There's been a fair amount of talk about the Miss USA interview question "should evolution be taught in schools," and a fair amount of attention given to the answers provided by the contestants. For the most part, people have gotten mad at these women because they are both beautiful in a classic patriarchal-normative-way and are handmaidens or hobgoblins or whatever of the sexist system in which we live, and because they are all wrong about evolution and whether or not it should be taught in schools.
But, it is not so simple.
I've actually seen it written that all but two, or all but one,…
gregladen | June 21, 2011Huxley learned a while back how to open doors by, of all things, turning the doorknobs. Amanda thought we should get the devices that go over the doorknobs to thwart his efforts. I thought we should just attach fasteners to the doors and seal them up until he's eighteen.
But, I respected Amanda's opinion, even though it was based on no data and conflicted with my opinion that was based on vast experience and such, and encouraged her to try the doorknob covers. So she got them and installed them and they worked. That was two days ago.
So earlier this evening, distant thunder combined…
gregladen | June 21, 2011She was taught evolution in her high school and she sees no problem with it today. In fact, she's a science geek. Move over Science Cheerleaders and make way for the ... no, wait, I don't think I want to go there ...
Anyway, here is the video:
One other contestant (of the presumably 51 or so) was also not a creationist, according to her answer to the question, which was asked of all of the contestants.
I couldn't hear a word she said... good think I'm an expert lip reader.
gregladen | June 20, 2011I just realized that in the recent confusion of travelling and home improvement activities, I forgot to point out to you'all that my third every-four-weeks post at 10,000 Birds (the blog) is now up for your reading pleasure: Birds Really Dinosaurs?