gregladen | February 16, 2011How do you separate harmless belief in religion or superstition and ... well, harmful belief in religion or superstition? We have been having a bit of a go-round* between some of my regular blog readers, including my Catholic but not anti-Evolution niece whose daughter recently acted in a commercial for the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Sondrah and I respectfully agree to disagree about certain issues, but clearly do agree on the importance of having real science, and not creationism, taught in public schools. That is what a lot of people who think of themselves as religious prefer,…
gregladen | February 16, 2011Youth for Tolerance, Invisible Children, Save Darfur coalition, Million votes against farc ... Who are these organizations connected to? There is a long list of them. Who is the US State Department working with? MTV? NBC? We need to keep an eye on them. We can't tell if they are right or clean or left or dirty. Are they front groups? There is a long list of them. You need to do your own homework but don't use a Google search. It seems like Google may be in bed with the government. Why is Google being kicked out of all of the other countries of the world? Is Google just a shill for…
gregladen | February 16, 2011I'll be interviewing PZ Myers on Sunday on Atheist Talk Radio in the Twin Cities. I can't think of a thing to ask him about ... what would YOU suggest?
Write your proposed questions or topics in the comments below.
gregladen | February 16, 2011On the left is the comet minding its own business. On the right is a blobish roundish area where NASA's impactor probe hit the comet.
I know, I know, it looks mainly like they just unfocused the image. It turns out that many of the images in the "after" sequence have a crappy focus, but there are enough of them here to prove that it really happened.
NASA's Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.
The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1…
gregladen | February 15, 2011But you won't stand for it.
Later this week the House will vote on HR 1, a "continuing resolution" (CR) to fund the federal government for the remainder of FY 2011. HR 1 would cut NIH funding by $1.6 billion (5.2%) BELOW the current level - reducing the nation's medical research budget to $29.4 billion! Everyone in the scientific community - researchers, trainees, lab personnel, etc. - must protest these short-sighted cuts. The cuts will slow the discovery of new treatments, lead to wasteful termination of projects, and ultimately cost some Americans their jobs. In addition, cutting the NIH…
gregladen | February 15, 2011
NASA's Stardust-NExT mission took this image of comet Tempel 1 at 8:39 p.m. PST (11:39 p.m. EST) on Feb 14, 2011. The comet was first visited by NASA's Deep Impact mission in 2005. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell
PASADENA, Calif. -- Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have begun receiving the first of 72 anticipated images of comet Tempel 1 taken by NASA's Stardust spacecraft.
The first six, most distant approach images are available at http://www.nasa.gov/stardust and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov. Additional images, including those from closest…
gregladen | February 15, 2011South Dakota would make the killing of abortion providers legal.
A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus--a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.
"The bill in South Dakota is an invitation to murder abortion providers."
The bill,…
gregladen | February 15, 2011I did not get on the Tiger Hating bandwagon when it was revealed that he had a wife and 19 girlfriends. First, I'm sure they were all having a great time at some point. Second, I can see where his wife would be pissed off but she did marry a golfer after all. What else was she expecting???? Finally, there's like a billion people in this world whose children just died or will soon die of some preventable disease and Tiger Woods, his wife and his girlfriends don't have a problem like that, so boo hoo.
I was unfazed by the big maneno over the car crash. Again, "first world problems" of…
gregladen | February 14, 2011House Bill 368 (PDF), introduced in the Tennessee House of Representatives on February 9, 2011, is the sixth antievolution bill introduced in a state legislature in 2011, and the first introduced in Tennessee since 2007. The bill, 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 review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific…
gregladen | February 13, 2011Everyone knows about Darwin's Finches, of the Galapagos Islands. But of course, Darwin made observations of birds throughout his travels on The Beagle. Here, I present a number of passages from The Voyage that include some of these observations.
Read the rest here
gregladen | February 13, 2011Charles Darwin wrote a book called Geological Observations on South America. Since Fitzroy needed to carry out intensive and extensive coastal mapping in South America, and Darwin was, at heart, a geologist more than anything else (at least during the Beagle's voyage), this meant that Darwin would become the world's expert on South American geology. Much of The Voyage is about his expeditions and observations. Part of this, of course, was figuring out the paleontology of the region.
Bahia Blanca is a port at the northern end of Patagonia. Chapter V of The Voyage begins:
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gregladen | February 13, 2011We're half way through Darwin Month, and only a tiny ways through the voyage. Need to hurry up! So, let's skip ahead a bit and hit the Gauchos.... (This is a modified version of a post from my old blog).
Well, you don't really want to hit at Gaucho ... they hit back rather hard....
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gregladen | February 12, 2011Thousands of Nokia workers walked off the job for the day in protest of the Microsoft-Nokia deal.
First there was the "Burning Platform" memo:
In Elop's 1300-word memo ... the ex-Microsoft exec likens the company to an oil platform burning at sea while the hands try to put out the fire by dousing it in gasoline instead of water.
We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses," Elop wrote. "We haven't been delivering innovation fast enough. We're…
gregladen | February 12, 2011Eventually, the Beagle headed south to the area of Uruguay and Argentina, still on the Atlantic Coast, where extensive mapping of the coastal waters was required.
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gregladen | February 12, 2011When reading the Voyage, it is impossible to miss the observation that much of the time Darwin was engaged in adolescent boy behavior: Pulling the heads off insects, noting how long they would wiggle after cut in half, closely examining the ooze and guts, occupied much of his time. Obviously, careful observation and a strong stomach were not all that was required to think up Natural Selection and his other theories, or the Origin of Species would have been written dozens of times by dozens of grown up kids.
In the following passages, Darwin is still along the Atlantic Coast, in "The Brazils…
gregladen | February 12, 2011What do you eat when you are travelling the world in search of truth about the natural world? Most of the time Darwin ate pretty well...
While traveling through the interior near Rio, Darwin makes note of some of the agricultural practices of the region. He is visiting farms ... plantations .. carved out of the forest.
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gregladen | February 12, 2011I became acquainted with an Englishman who was going to visit his estate ... more than a hundred miles [north] of Cape Frio. As I was quite unused to travelling, I gladly accepted his kind offer of allowing me to accompany him.
And so was the case with a number of Darwin's excursions into the bush.
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gregladen | February 12, 2011The first time I read the following passage from The Voyage, I was reminded of my own first experience in a rain forest (in Zaire). Evident in this passage is at least a glimmering of Darwin's appreciation for the complexity of ecosystems. Darwin could be considered the first scientific ecologist. Enough of my commentary ... this passage very much stands on it's own ...
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