gregladen | April 2, 2011At TEDxDubai, longtime English teacher Patricia Ryan asks a provocative question: Is the world's focus on English preventing the spread of great ideas in other languages? (For instance: what if Einstein had to pass the TOEFL?) It's a passionate defense of translating and sharing ideas.
gregladen | April 2, 2011Most evolutionary biologist have fully rejected the "hopeful monster theory" but it turns out they were wrong to do so.
Most mutations are deleterious, and are quickly weeded out of a population but in some cases not before they briefly cause hideous results that make everyone turn away in horror and disgust. But sometimes a hideous mutation can produce something new and amazing, something novel and wonderful, something never before seen and but which we could never imagine the world doing without. Here is an example:
Original Mutation:
F1 Generation:
F2 Generation:
Case closed.
gregladen | April 2, 2011Despite the deafening silence from TEPCO regarding questions over a physical breech in Reactor 2, it is now generally being considered that there is a breech in reactor 2. It is not clear if it is a hole in the containment vessel of some kind or just some disconnected or cracked pipes. Experts are estimating the percent of fuel in the reactors that were active at the time of the quake that has been damaged as fairly high (over half). The most significant news over the last several hours is probably the identification of a major route by which radioactive water is leaking from Reactor 2…
gregladen | April 1, 2011Curiouser and Curiouser .... the podcast. This is part one of three planned discussions with Theo Theofanous.
gregladen | April 1, 2011The experts monitoring and reporting on the Fukushima nuclear disaster have, for several days now, stopped talking about melting reactor fuel or breached containment vessels. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the Energy Collective, and other groups now merely pass along information about pressure and temperature and make a note here and there about water being sprayed on something or not sprayed on something. They have not stopped talking about melting overheated fuel because they have determined that there isn't any. They stopped talking about it because there isn't anything to say…
gregladen | April 1, 2011There's been about 90 or so significant nuke accidents. That's a lot considering that there are only some 400-500 or so facilities involved. But it's OK. Nuclear power is totally safe. We have backups on backups on backups. Nothing can go wrong. ... go wrong ... go wrong..
Oh, and Happy Birthday Rachel Maddow! Here's Rachel now ...
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | April 1, 2011The first step required to recall Wisconsin Republican Senator D. Kapanke has been completed; A petition with sufficient signatures to require a recall election has been filed. Challenges mus be filed over the next 10 days. If there remain enough valid signatures, the recall election is required.
I don't really have a link for this but you can try this.
gregladen | March 31, 2011Information gleaned form Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions seems to indicate that ripples seen in the rings of Saturn and Jupiter were caused by comets. Shoemaker-Levy 9 (famous for a multiplicity of impacts on Jupiter in 1994) left one set of ripples. Saturn's cometary clues date to a cloud of icy debris passing through the inner rings in 1983.
"What's cool is we're finding evidence that a planet's rings can be affected by specific, traceable events that happened in the last 30 years, rather than a hundred million years ago," said Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team…
gregladen | March 31, 2011Ralph Langner:
When first discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm posed a baffling puzzle. Beyond its unusually high level of sophistication loomed a more troubling mystery: its purpose. Ralph Langner and team helped crack the code that revealed this digital warhead's final target -- and its covert origins. In a fascinating look inside cyber-forensics, he explains how.
gregladen | March 31, 2011"The human voice: mysterious, spontaneous, primal." With these words, soprano Claron McFadden invites us to explore the mysteries of breathing and singing, as she performs the challenging "Aria," by John Cage.
gregladen | March 30, 2011The Anti-Evolution Bills in Tennessee have advanced.
Tennessee's House Bill 368 was passed by the House Education Committee on March 29, 2011, and referred to the House Calendar and Rules Committee, while its counterpart, Senate Bill 893, is scheduled to be discussed by the Senate Education Committee on March 30, 2011. These bills, if enacted, would require state and local educational authorities to "assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies" and permit teachers to "help students understand, analyze, critique, and…
gregladen | March 30, 2011For that special organization or person that makes you throw up a little in your mouth when you hear about their latest aggravating attack on our children's education, by way of making fun of something that is not really all that funny, DontDissDarwn Central annually awards the highly alliterated angs-ridden accolade: The Upchucky. And this year's award is bestowed, nay, foisted on Answers in Genesis, for their latest dumb-ass venture, the Noah's Ark Park.
"rooted in outright opposition to science...[this] hostility to science, knowledge and education does little to attract the kind of…
gregladen | March 30, 2011"Puppets always have to try to be alive," says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena's subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse, who trots (and gallops) convincingly onto the TED stage.
gregladen | March 30, 2011As I tune in to NHK live TV, and see the piece on using Twitter to aid in disaster relief being shown for the 20th time over the last 48 hours, I wonder about what appears to be a sudden and dramatic drop in the level of coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Over the last several days, the IAEA has stopped bothering to note that cooling systems are still not working and have shifted their attention to monitoring the rising radiation levels outside the plant on both land and sea. Meanwhile, TEPCO engineers are speaking of covering the reactor plant with a big blanket of…
gregladen | March 29, 2011It is said that it is physically impossible for the nuclear material in any of the Fukushima reactors to melt through the containment vessels. Despite a rumor of a crack in one of the vessels, nuclear power experts have maintained that it is impossible that there could be such a crack. Nonetheless, a US based GE-connected nuclear engineered who has ties to the Fukushima facility has boldly asserted that he thinks that the core in reactor 2 has "melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel ... and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell."
Richard Lahey was head of…
gregladen | March 29, 2011I am going to interview Neil deGrasse Tyson this coming Sunday on Minnesota Atheist Talk. Details of the timing and how you can listen to the interview live can be found here. Unlike my recent interview with PZ Myers, in which I literally asked him the very questions you posted on my blog, I've got a handful of topics I'd like to bring up with the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium and widely read author. However, I will be happy and honored to pick one or two (or three) questions among those you may post below. So go ahead and suggest a question or two.
gregladen | March 29, 2011Yes, yes, I know ... Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson did not just come out, and it is not part of any current news story, so I'm not supposed to mention it in a blog post, because blog posts are only about things that happened during the last forty-five minutes or so. But what did happen in the last few minutes is that I finished reading it, and I'm recommending it to you.
It is said that Neil deGrasse Tyson is a modern day Carl Sagan ... an astronomer who is superb at communicating science to the masses. That is sort of true but not exactly. Sagan…