gregladen | March 3, 2011Follow Blake Freeman as he takes 69 year old Leroy, across the country on a hilarious journey for the truth about Aliens, Psychics and the Paranormal.
gregladen | March 3, 2011s a second subcommittee hearing on Tennessee's House Bill 368 approaches, the author of The Evolution Controversy in America and the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee are speaking out against the bill....
Details at the NCSE
gregladen | March 3, 2011Or, on some other bridge or other flat spot next to a major body of water...
Global Water Dances -- June 25, 2011 @ Yahoo! Video
Global Water Dances is a world event planned for June 25, 2011. On this day, a 24 hour series of dances around the globe will be danced, centered around water issues. Beginning in the Western Pacific Rim, and encircling the globe, the series of dances will also be broadcast online. Check out the web site.
gregladen | March 3, 2011Hateful people. Stupid people. The "I don't even care if you think I'm crazy any more" kind of person.
OMFG. I am sorry, fellow humans, who happen to be Muslim.
Reminds me of this.
gregladen | March 3, 2011Skeptically Speaking on Friday will be: Brain Games with Tom Stafford, who co-wrote Mind Hacks: Tips & Tricks for Using Your Brain. Friday evening. Details here!
Also, "Dr. Sarah Brosnan explains her study of game theory, and how humans compare to other primates when it comes to cooperative play." Same show.
Don't forget to download and listen to the Zebrafish and Dictionary Atheism conversation with PZ Myers. Here
Science Friday is going to cover a number of interesting topics this week a well. Will rising sea levels and melting sea ice change the way the Navy operates? and A…
gregladen | March 2, 2011Mental maps are interesting. I recently heard about reserch being done at the University of Minnesota in which it can be shown that rats develop a mental map of a maze, then later, when faced with moments of decision, pause in real space to run through alternative routes of the map in their heads. They have also been observed to dream the maps. We know that certain birds develop mental maps of their long distance migration routes, and these maps can be identified and differentiated in the neural tissue. Now, there is research showing that sharks have mental maps.
Some shark species make…
gregladen | March 1, 2011Use the following search box to find information from primarily "skeptical" blogs.
I'm currently in the process of adding sites, but you should find it useful as it is.
I've also placed the Skeptical Search box in the left sidebar for your easy access.
gregladen | March 1, 2011Ohio Senate Schedules a Fetus to Testify About Abortion Bill
In support of a bill that proposes banning abortions after the first heartbeat (something that can happen within eighteen days of conception), the anti-abortion group Faith2Action has scheduled a nine-week-old fetus to testify as a legislative witness before Ohio's House Health Committee. ...
Details
gregladen | March 1, 2011"Hey, look! I've located my first love! Cool, maybe we can go have dinner or something!" ... precisely the words a newlywed husband was hoping to hear from his wife ...
Amanda was sitting on the couch discovering Facebook, a place on the Internet she had been assiduously avoiding until only a day or two earlier. Finally, she became convinced that she could do this and keep it under control ... keep her professional life (as a teacher) separate from it (if any of her students are reading this, don't even try to friend her!). It was fun watching her learn the ins and outs, and to reconnect with…
gregladen | February 27, 2011The Uptake-org reports that "protesters remain inside Wisconsin's State Capitol building tonight. They may be getting what they want. In this video the crowd erupts when told of a rumor that Republican Senator Dale Schulz has decided to vote against a bill to strip public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights."
I can't show you the video because it starts with an ad, ends with an ad, is plastered over with ads, and you can't see or hear anything on it. I can't link to the uptake because their web site is currently so badly behaved it may crash your browser and I don't want…
gregladen | February 27, 2011An inquiry by a federal watchdog agency found no evidence that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated climate data to buttress the evidence in support of global warming, officials said on Thursday.
The inquiry, by the Commerce Department's inspector general, focused on e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 ...
Read about it here.
gregladen | February 26, 2011How old is the earth?
Short answer: 4,540,000,00/H30 Earth-years, plus or minus 1%.
Long answer: We don't know exactly because direct dating of the earliest material on the surface of the Earth will only tell use a minimum age; Prior to that, the Earth's surface was probably molten, and even after that, it may be that the earliest non-molten material has been recycled into the planet's interior by tectonic processes. Also, the earth is a big round ball of stuff that condensed into this shape from part of a large disk-shaped blob of stuff known as the Solar Nebula. When exactly, given this,…
gregladen | February 26, 2011Many years ago, during The Roe v. Wade Fight (Part II: The Rise of the Right Wing Yahoos) a student came to me and asked for a break because she wanted to join a bus full of Brandeis students heading down to DC to protest stuff. I told her not to worry about the quiz coming up, just go and do her civic duty. That's when she chose to casually mention that "at least these days, we know how to do it, not like in the old days when protesters against the Viet Nam War were violent.
This caused me to whup her up side the head. Verbally, of course.
I explained that in the old old days, when the…
gregladen | February 26, 2011First of all, it is not "your teenager" and if that is how you view the teenager, you've totally lost. Second, remember the ultimate truth that you knew when you were a teenager and that "your" teenager knows now: Teenagers know things that adults don't understand. Most adults think this is something you "grow out of" but really, it is something that is ruined by getting old. So just keep that in mind.
But that isn't really what I wanted to blog about.
I was just sent this post on "how to speak teenage" (which should really be called teenagerese) and as an anthropologist (who studies…
gregladen | February 25, 2011Not long after Yellowstone Park was officially created, a small group of campers were killed by Nez Perce Indians on the run from US troops1. More recently, the last time I was in the area, a ranger was killed by a Grizzly Bear (so was his horse) on the edge of the park. A quick glance at my sister's newspaper archives (Lightning Fingers Liz a.k.a. Caldera Girl has been running newspapers in the region for nearly forty years) shows a distinctive pattern of danger in the Caldera, mainly in relation to the lack of turning lanes on highways with poor visibility and other traffic related…