gregladen | February 22, 2011A 6.3 earthquake has just struck the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, killing dozens and leaving dozens more buried in rubble with rescue workers trying to dig them out. On the TV this morning, the mayor of Christchurch told his story: Having just left a series of meetings, he was sitting on a balcony outside the city offices in a tall building with his executive assistant planning their next activities when the quake struck. They tried to re-enter the building but were repeatedly thrown back away from the entrance way. When the powerful earthquake stopped, he picked himself up off the…
gregladen | February 21, 2011Is your car stuck in the snow? There are two ways to get it out. The wrong way and the right way. Here's the wrong way:
Ignore the snarky comment at the beginning of the video. According to sources with the SPFD and the News, this car caught on fire for the same reason about two or three dozen other cars caught fire over the last several weeks in the Twin Cities. The driver was under the impression that the best way to unstick your stuck-in-the-snow car is to go back and forth between reverse and forward as fast as possible. This is incorrect. Doing anything as fast as possible in the…
gregladen | February 21, 2011A child who is killed by an abusive parent is, in a sense, avenged by the law which seeks to identify, charge, try, convict, sentence and punish such a parent. Abuse might include something obvious like striking a child with a weapon, but it can also include starving the child to death or other forms of neglect, or failing to provide life-saving medical treatment. In other words, if your child is deathly ill and you don't take him or her to a medical facility or otherwise seek treatment, and the child dies, you are at fault.
Unless, of course, you are all religious and shit.
If your…
gregladen | February 21, 2011The son of Libyan leader Gadhafi/kadafi claims that the "government" (which is not really true but its complicated) will fight to the last bullet against people engaged there in an uprising.
Even as Seif al-Islam Gadhafi spoke Sunday night, clashes were raging in and around Tripoli's central Green Square, lasting until dawn Monday, witnesses said. They reported snipers opening fire on crowds trying to seize the square, and Gadhafi supporters speeding through in vehicles, shooting and running over protesters. Early Monday, protesters took over the office of two of the multiple state-run…
gregladen | February 20, 2011As Libya and Gaddafi move to a more prominent place in the news, I thought I'd point to a few posts on the topic. As an Africanist Archaeologist, I've got a special interest in Libya (though I've never worked there or visited). Haua Fteah is there. Haua Fteah is a cave facing north and overlooking the Mediterranean. It has sediments in it dating to over 120,000 years ago, which thus transcend the entire recent ice age, going all the way back to the last full interglacial. It was excavated by the guy who trained, at that site, two of the three archaeologists whom I had as advisors, Ofer…
gregladen | February 20, 2011The Skeptics Community is asking for people to help LaVerne. Bad things happened to her and her family. A few bucks from everybody would be nice. Please click here and make a small contribution.
gregladen | February 19, 2011Dinosaurs aren't the only source of fascination for paleontologists. Paleontology is a descriptive science that uses a variety of sources for information on how evolution has shaped life to what it currently currently consists of, and paleontologists look to the past through fossilized bones, mineralized records of the tracks and trails of botany, genetic records in modern DNA and geological records of the life that once populated the environments of the past.
Read more
gregladen | February 18, 2011Two local stories you might be interested in from my neighborhood.
First, a girl high school wrestler advanced yesterday but was beaten today in the state tournament in Iowa. Why is this interesting? Well, first, this is not a girl wrestling on a girl's team. It is a girl wrestling on the regular team which happens to be traditionally boys. Second, she advanced yesterday when one of the favorite to win, a boy, refused to wrestle a girl, apparently because he things the sport should be reserved for boys. (I dunno ... in his case, maybe wrestling really is a gay sport? Who knows?)…
gregladen | February 18, 2011A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals is an online drawing tool that lets users do just one thing - trace a line. Each new user only sees the latest line drawn, and can therefore only trace this latest imperfect copy. As the line is reproduced over and over, it changes and evolves - kinks, trembling motions and errors are exaggerated through the process.*
Once an accidental feature shows up, subsequent tracers try to reproduce it like good little replicators. Eventually you get a dancing chihuahua.
A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals from…
gregladen | February 18, 2011Don't Miss Skeptically Speaking #99 Quacks and Scams, with Dr. Stephen Barrett of QuackWatch , James Randi and Jamie Williams.
Details here
gregladen | February 18, 2011These stories are closely related at a philosophical level: Both stalwart entities have similar philosophies about what they think they can tell other people to do, how they do things, and what they fear:
Libyan dictator warns against use of Facebook, 40 protesters injured
Many Libyan Internet activists have declared their support for the pro-democracy movements and revolutions in the Middle East. After seeing the power of the people succeed in Tunisia and Egypt, they created groups on Facebook to call for political and economic reforms in Libya. Libya's dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, has…
gregladen | February 18, 2011Are you? If not, you can click here and be my Facebook friend. I don't need you to do that but it would be better if you did, just in case. It's good for you, it's good for me, really, you should do it. You need to do it. I don't really need it but maybe you do. You should, don't you think? Just click here.
Meanwhile,
Does Facebook Stress You Out?
The more Facebook friends people have , the more likely they are to feel stressed out by the site, according to a new study by Scottish researchers.
...
"The results threw up a number of paradoxes," said Dr Kathy Charles, who led the study…
gregladen | February 17, 2011Birders in every hemisphere spend this time of year preparing for the Great Migrations. It does not matter where you live, several species of birds are going arrive at your location, pass through, or simply come out of or flee to the woods or marshes as Spring or Fall approaches. This means it is time to brush up on your birdsong and vocalization knowledge because when the birds are en route or newly arrived they tend to hide and your best bet at identifying them is with the sounds they can't stop themselves from making.
So, for this edition of the I and the Bird blog carnival, you will…
gregladen | February 17, 2011From Mn Atheists:
Drs PZ Myers and Greg Laden will be our guests on today's show. PZ is in the Minneapolis/St Paul metro for a pair of talks this weekend. First he will be presenting "The Evolution of Cooperativity" to the Humanists of Minnesota on February 19th, and on the 20th he will be explaining the broader topic of Evolution to the Minnesota Atheists.
PZ Myers is not shy of controversy, as he seems to invoke and generate it at will through his blog, Pharyngula. He writes about atheism, science, politics from a liberal perspective, zebrafish, critical thinking, pirates, sexism and…
gregladen | February 16, 2011Did anyone notice the straw poll results from the CPAC convention? CPAC is the Conservative Political Action Conference. With all this talk about Palin and Bachmann and Palin/Bachmann and Bachmann/Palin and so on and so forth, one would be surprised if they didn't come in at or near the top of the poll. Here were the results:
Ron Raul: 30%,
Mitt Romney: 23%,
Gary Johnson 6%,
Chris Christie 6%,
Newt Gingrich: 5%,
Tim Pawlenty 4%,
...
Michele Bachmann 4%,
Mitch Daniels 4%,
Sarah Palin: 3%,
Herman Cain 2%,
Mike Huckabee 2%,
Rick Santorum 2%,
John Thune 2%,
Jon Huntsman 1%,
Haley Barbour 1%
gregladen | February 16, 2011Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show how 6-month-old babies use sophisticated reasoning to understand their world.
gregladen | February 16, 2011Wanna know what tabagging racism sounds like? Go to about 2 minutes, listen through 4 minutes or so.
Back story at Think Progress