gregladen | April 22, 2011
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA is releasing the first images and sounds of an electrical connection between Saturn and one of its moons, Enceladus. The data collected by the agency's Cassini spacecraft enable scientists to improve their understanding of the complex web of interaction between the planet and its numerous moons. The results of the data analysis are published in the journals Nature
Scientists previously theorized an electrical circuit should exist at Saturn. After analyzing data that Cassini collected in 2008, scientists saw a glowing patch of ultraviolet light emissions near Saturn's…
gregladen | April 21, 2011In this interview with Karen Stollznow, Josh presents the "Three Pillars of Creationism", the beliefs and claims of creationists. He describes their rhetoric and propaganda, and the setbacks they cause for science, from legal cases to creationist theme parks.
Get it here!
gregladen | April 21, 2011Well, this applies more generally than just the Internet. What do you think, is she wrong???
gregladen | April 21, 2011Tennessee's Senate Bill 893 -- nicknamed, along with its counterpart House Bill 368, the "monkey bill" -- is on hold, "almost certainly postponing any action until next year," according to the Knoxville News Sentinel's Humphrey on the Hill blog (April 21, 2011). Its sponsor, Bo Watson (R-District 11), assigned the bill to the general subcommittee of the Senate Education Committee on April 20, 2011, which was the last scheduled meeting of the committee; he told the blog, "Practically speaking, I probably am not going to be able to run the bill this year," although it is still possible that the…
gregladen | April 21, 2011
A newly found, buried deposit of frozen carbon dioxide -- dry ice -- near the south pole of Mars contains about 30 times more carbon dioxide than previously estimated to be frozen near the pole. This map color-codes thickness estimates of the deposit derived and extrapolated from observations by the Shallow Subsurface Radar (SHARAD) instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The orbiter does not pass directly over the pole, and the thickness estimates for that area (with smoother transitions from color to color) are extrapolations.
Red corresponds to about 600 meters or yards thick;…
gregladen | April 21, 2011BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- More than 40 Nobel Prize-winning scientists are urging Gov. Bobby Jindal and Louisiana lawmakers to repeal a law that allows public school science teachers to use supplemental materials in their classrooms beyond state-approved textbooks.
In a letter released Thursday, the Nobel laureates say the "Louisiana Science Education Act" of 2008 creates a pathway for creationism and other non-scientific instruction to be taught in science classes.
"Louisiana's students deserve to be taught proper science rather than religion presented as science," says the letter representing…
gregladen | April 21, 2011Rally at the Capitol to Repeal Louisiana's Creationism Law
Mark April 28th on your calendars!
We will be holding a rally at the Louisiana State Capitol in support of repealing the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act.
The rally will take place at 11 am and the repeal will hold a table in the atrium of the capitol from 9 am to 4 pm.
Please contact repealcreationism@gmail.com if you're interested in meeting with legislators or in volunteering.
I hope to see you there, and please bring friends. We will show the legislature that Louisiana wants this law repealed!
Facebook group…
gregladen | April 21, 2011Tokyo Electric officials have noted that they can not rule out the possibility that fuel rods in the Fukushima reactors have melted, at least to some extent. No one else, as far as I can tell, thinks that fuel rods have not melted. A Question that is more important than that of Tokyo Electric's sudden revelation is, of course, are the fuel rods still melting? The answer is that they may well be.
As of a few hours ago, there is a 20 km offset no-entry zone around the Fukushima Power Plant. The evacuation zone has been reduced from 10 to 8 km. Coagulant continues to be injected into…
gregladen | April 21, 2011
"They charm the females by instrumental music of the most varied kinds"
And thus, Charles Darwin adapted the phrase "Instrumental Music," previously used to mean humans with instruments making music, to name one of the most important "secondary sexual characters ... diversified and conspicuous in birds" which, added to "all sorts of combs, wattles, protuberances, horns, air-distended sacs, topknots, naked shafts, plumes and lengthened feathers gracefully springing from all parts of the body" mediate avian sexual selection..
Read my first post at 10,000 Birds ...
For reviews of bird guides…
gregladen | April 20, 2011Description and identification of birds, or anything else, can be done in a rote manner with straightforward reference to details. If information about enough details is available, the identification will be accurate. But as humans we hardly ever do that sort of thing. If you ask someone to describe a car they saw recently, they will not refer to the angle of the back end or the overall dimensions or the specific layout of the headlights and tail lights. A person who does not know the make and model may say something like "It's a hatch back" or "It's an SUV" and in so doing provide…
gregladen | April 19, 2011... well, at least for me.
Starting this week, I will become a "Beat Blogger" at 10,000 Birds. I am not sure what a Beat Blogger is, but I think it's a real happening with bongo drums and highly esoteric poetry. I'll be scribing one bird-related post every four weeks, on a Thursday. Go have a look at 10,000 Birds. It's, like, totally loaded with blog posts written by the other hip Beat Bloggers, and they all seem to be about ... really hip birds.
10,000 Birds is run by Mike Bergin (who started it all) and Corey Finger. They operate their groovy birdwatching syndicate from New York,…
gregladen | April 19, 2011The abstract for a recent paper on Titan says:
...We propose a new Cassini state model for Titan in which we assume the presence of a liquid water ocean beneath an ice shell and consider the gravitational and pressure torques arising between the different layers of the satellite....
Titan's orbit, recently measured to a high degree of accuracy, looks more like an object with an ocean sloshing around than like a solid object. The story is expanded on in this blog post.
gregladen | April 19, 2011... is now on line.
Plus Mike Klymkowsky reviews Matt Young and Paul K. Strode's Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails); Joel W. Martin reviews Francisco Ayala's Am I a Monkey?; David A. Reid reviews Randy Moore, Mark Decker, and Sehoya Cotner's Chronology of the Evolution-Creationism Controversy; Robert H. Rothman reviews Allene S. Phy-Olsen's Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design; Stephen P. Weldon reviews Mano Singham's God vs. Darwin; and Matt Young reviews Joel W. Martin's The Prism and the Rainbow.
Check it out.
gregladen | April 19, 2011Senate Bill 70 (PDF), prefiled in the Louisiana Senate on April 15, 2011, and provisionally referred to the Senate Committee on Education, would, if enacted, repeal Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1, which implemented the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act, passed and enacted in 2008. SB 70 was introduced by Karen Carter Peterson (D-District 5), but the driving force behind the repeal effort is Baton Rouge high school senior Zack Kopplin, working with the Louisiana Coalition for Science. The repeal effort is endorsed by the National Association of Biology Teachers and the Louisiana…
gregladen | April 18, 2011
When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the case today. By the mere existence of his stomach everyone was condemned to participate in that chase. The stomach might well be satisfied by such participation, but not man insofar as he is a thinking and feeling being.
As the first way out there was religion, which is implanted…
gregladen | April 18, 2011Ana's Feeed starting Sunday mid day through last night:
TEPCO press conf. (NHK): Since the accident, we have caused a huge amount of trouble and inconvenience to residents and anxiety to the greater population in general ... Residents have been asked to evacuate and they would like to return home and we would like to assist the govt in planning for their return. Therefore, we release this plan:
To achieve cold shutdown in 6-9 months via 2 steps: 1) reducing radioactive material (3 months) and 2) controlling the release of radioactive elements (3-6 months)
3 areas of focus will be: cooling,…
gregladen | April 18, 2011Dozens of people died in tornadoes in the US over the last couple of days, and most of those deaths were preventable. The truth is, most of those killed died because of a decision they made, so their death is to some extent their fault. But, for good reason, no one wants to blame the victim, so we see very little discussion about how a death spree like this happened over the weekend could have bee avoided. Also, almost every single feature of avoiding similar deaths in the future touches on a difficult political issue or points to a costly solution. Therefore, those involved and those…
gregladen | April 17, 2011There is no evidence that they did, but abundant evidence that they didn't. One example of this is found in how business in the US handle the inevitability of future rising costs of energy, and along with this collection of individual behaviors, the way the free market, the most intelligent and powerful of human activities, optimizes our economy.
It is interesting to see how often proof of the non-existence of anything like a Free Market (anywhere) and proof that humans should stop taking credit for being an "Intelligent Large Brained Hominid" come together. Over the last few weeks, we…