gregladen | March 10, 2011What happened in #Wisconsin, and what happens next by Laura Conway:
Last night, Wisconsin State Senate Republicans stripped most public employees unions of most collective bargaining rights. After insisting for weeks that busting the unions was essential to balancing the state's budget, they broke Governor Scott Walker's "budget-repair bill" into two parts. One part contained the anti-union provisions, the other the items that Republicans now deemed fiscal.
Read the rest
The Uptake on Wisconsin Senate
Koch Industries Employs PR Firm To Airbush Wikipedia, Gets Banned For Unethical 'Sock…
gregladen | March 10, 2011Senate Bill 1854, introduced in the Florida Senate on March 5, 2011, would, if enacted, amend a section of Florida law to require "[a] thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution" in the state's public schools. The bill is sponsored by Stephen R. Wise (R-District 5), who in February 2009 introduced SB 2396 (PDF), which would have amended the same section of Florida law in the same way. Before Wise introduced SB 2396, he announced his intention to introduce a bill requiring "intelligent design" to be taught in Florida's public schools. "If you're going to…
gregladen | March 9, 2011"Disingenuous efforts by creationists to portray themselves as persecuted in mainstream academia for their anti-evolution beliefs are getting a boost from a Texas lawmaker," reported the Texas Freedom Network in a March 9, 2011, post on its blog. House Bill 2454, introduced in the Texas House of Representatives on March 8, 2011, would, if enacted, provide, "An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member's or student's conduct of research…
gregladen | March 9, 2011Apparently, they voted without the Dems present. Oh hell, who needs teachers and stuff anyway.
gregladen | March 9, 2011You may have noticed that Scienceblogs.com has been loading slowly lately. Also, in the "back end" .... where we write the blogs and stuff ... the servers have been slow, and eventually, useless. Well, the crack technical team that takes care of these things have determined that we were experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoSA). I have no idea from or for what reason. Anybody out there know?
Meanwhile, the Overlords have asked us to pass on a request for help to you. The IP addresses whence the attacks originate have been blocked. But this means that you may be…
gregladen | March 9, 2011I did not have a chance to write about the Anthropology fracas that erupted several weeks ago, and I probably won't for a while. But Jamie Jones did.
When I met him Jamie was a grad student in the Anthro department at the small eastern college I got my PhD at. He and I taught together and got along quite well, and we were both co-authors on what turned out the be in the top 20 as measured by citation frequency of papers ever published over the last century (or whatever) in the flagship journal of anthropology, which makes both of us pretty hot. Indeed, we are steeped in Ivy League…
gregladen | March 9, 2011I'm reminded of Boobquake because of this
Obligatory photograph related to Boobquake:
Photograph from "A Fatwa on Purdah"
When boobquake happened, I checked the USGS for earthquakes and found, if memory serves, a quake of about 7.0 magnitude. Such quakes happen just over once a month, so that seemed important. However, either memory does not serve or the magnitude of the earthquake was adjusted (initial estimates are often revised) and it turns out that the only 6+ earthquake to occur over the three day period before, during, and after April 26 2010 was a 6.5 magnitude quake (on Boobquake…
gregladen | March 8, 2011The video comes from Project Veritas, and is another in political activist James O'Keefe's undercover exposes (he most prominently took on ACORN -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). In the video, Schiller and NPR institutional giving director Betsy Liley are at lunch in Washington with two Project Veritas "investigative reporters" identified as Shaughn Adeleye and Simon Templar, who posed as "Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik." They were allegedly interested in having their organization donate $5 million to NPR. O'Keefe's organization says the recording was made on Feb.…
gregladen | March 8, 2011From the IWD web site:
International Women's Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, International Women's Day is a national holiday.
I remember in the 1980s passing through Nairobi on or about IWD during the Year of the Woman (a UN thing) and seeing slogans on all the busses noting that "A crime against a woman is a crime.
Kenya has lots of misogyny and many women there are treated very badly. On the other hand, there are piles of women in elected…
gregladen | March 8, 2011Courtney Martin examines the perennially loaded word "feminism" in this personal and heartfelt talk. She talks through the three essential paradoxes of her generation's quest to define the term for themselves.
gregladen | March 8, 2011These masses of ice are now contributing more new meltwater to the world's seas than all other melting ice combined.
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace, according to a new NASA-funded satellite study. The findings of the study -- the longest to date of changes in polar ice sheet mass -- suggest these ice sheets are overtaking ice loss from Earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted.
The nearly 20-year study reveals that in 2006, a year in which…
gregladen | March 8, 2011Jen McCreight writes the blog Blag Hag and became famous last year for attempting unsuccessfully to prove that if a large number of women wore low cut shirts there would be a major earthquake. (It turns out that there was a 7-point-something earthquake on "Boob Quake" day, which requires that the experiment be repeated.)
(It is interesting to note that most people seem to have not noticed that earthquake for some reason. And they call themselves Skeptics!)
Anyway, Jen will be a guest on Atheist Talk Radio this coming Sunday, March 13th.
I predict that if an atheist talks about how god does…
gregladen | March 6, 2011And historical exploration, from DOS to Seven
"Daddy, what's a floppy drive?"
gregladen | March 5, 2011The other day, Julia and I decided to install SimCity 4 Deluxe for Windows on one of our Linux boxes. Using Wine, the install went fine, but the program would not run. It would kind of start up but then die with no obvious explanation. With a bit of work I can probably find the reason and fix it, but first I went to the Wine site to see what it said there, and I found, do my disappointment, mostly Geeksnarkese blithering among the amateur IT experts who had been playing around getting the once-popular city-simulation game running with the Linux program that stands for Wine Is Not an…
gregladen | March 4, 2011You do know that other people can read your thoughts, right? (What? I can see by what you are thinking that no one told you! Oh dear.)
Did you also know that Dark Matter is really just the sides of the jar that someone keeps our universe in? If you've ever worked with certain kinds of computer simulation then you'll know what I mean. If you create a two dimensional world for simulated creatures to move around in, there is a problem with the edges. If, for practical reasons, the world you create is a big square matrix of possible spots something can "live" on, then there must be an outer…
gregladen | March 4, 2011Or worse. Below the fold. Not work safe. Don't be holding the kitty or you might squeeze it by accident:
UPDATE: My friend Aseem points out that this is the original on which the little christian kids base their song:
gregladen | March 4, 2011So, a while ago, Ben Zvanwas talking about doing something with the Bible, which would involve processing the text through some filters and recompiling it. This sort of thing has always interested me: Not recompiling the bible, but rather, textual analysis in general using the basic material stripped of intended meaning by classifying and ordering arbitrarily. What, for example, is the vocabulary of the Rosetta stone, or the Kensington Rune Stone (a probable fake Viking misssive on display in west-central Minnesota). Does the rune stone sample the lexicon of a particular time period or…
gregladen | March 4, 2011I've always felt that if Wally the Wanker came back with his old, stupid and obnoxious trick, that I would out him. He came back. I considered outing him but have been quite distracted with important things like changing diapers and feeding tiny bits of chicken to Huxley. Meanwhile, blogger Ophelia Benson has spilled the beans, here.
I did not destroy Wally's pathetic excuse for a blog, but he/they blamed me for it, and that's how I got the nickname Teh Blogslayer. I did not out him today, Ophelia did. But Wally will probably blame me for that to. Or at least, I hope he does.
I'm not…