gregladen | February 12, 2011Behold this humble passage by Darwin, which is what immediately follows his discussion of the octopus. This passage is a touchstone to several important aspects of what Darwin was doing and thinking, and is a poignant link to what Darwin did not know:
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gregladen | February 12, 2011Of his time on the Beagle (1832 - 1836), Darwin wrote, "The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career." Of the manuscript describing that voyage, he wrote, "The success of this my first literary child always tickles my vanity more than that of any of my other books."
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gregladen | February 12, 2011And, for your birthday I'm going to repost my epic (as in long) series on Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle. And, to save electrons, each of the following (see above, because this is the blogosphere where everything is upside-down) will be a pointer to the original post. Enjoy!
gregladen | February 12, 2011... by not having a blog that gets lots of spam.
The following items were trapped in my spam filter over a period of several minutes, this morning. Each from a different IP address, each signed by a different author, each has a different fake email (provided), each points to a different web site (not provided) and each has a slightly different set of grammatical mistakes but all of the messages are of the same form.
rubber mulch [Frierson147506@yahoo.com] says:
Can I just say what a reduction to find someone who actually knows what theyre talking about on the internet. You positively know…
gregladen | February 12, 2011In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I'd like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of biogeography and evolution.
In the vicinity of Rio Tercero...
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gregladen | February 10, 2011If you do something wrong, you should be fired or killed. Whether you should be fired or killed has nothing to do with what you did, but rather, the context in which you did it. If you do something wrong in the presence of a legal gun owner with a Conceal Carry permit and a loaded weapon, you simply need to die. If, on the other hand, you have a job and do something wrong, the only possible outcome is your being fired, no matter what it was you did. If the thing you do wrong happens in a context in which you have a job AND are in the presence of a gun-holding conceal-carry permitted person…
gregladen | February 10, 2011And I have proof:
The Idaho Press Tribune has an abysmally stupid editorial for you to read and discuss. Do you know what "Tribune" means. Clearly, they don't at the Idaho Press Tribune.
Why is there so much hype about finding "life-friendly planets" (Page A7, Feb. 3)? Because evolutionists want support for their theory. If life evolved here, it surely evolved elsewhere in the millions and billions of years of the universe's existence.
Not only does scientific evidence abound showing there must be an intelligent creator of everything, but our solar system cannot be billions of years old.…
gregladen | February 10, 2011Just as I suspected. Viewed in a different light, North America vanishes. In the upper left is the North American Nebula as seen in the visible light spectrum. Obviously, it looks just like North America:
But when viewed in different parts of the spectra, it goes away. Read the story and see the pretty pictures at NASA.
gregladen | February 9, 2011As a member of MNCSE I object to Steven Newton gratuitous opening statement but otherwise you might find this useful.
gregladen | February 9, 2011I just posted the following comment on this article in MinnPost:
Thanks for covering this. As Randy says, this has been known for decades, but for some reason every time it hits the news (because of a new study that shows the same thing again) everyone seems to have just heard it for the first time.
I promise you: Creationist students (there are many) and/ore creationist parents of students (and no, parents and students are not always on the same page as each other) DO make themselves known the the teachers who are teaching evolution, sometimes quite aggressively. I have yet to hear of a…
gregladen | February 8, 2011A Better Grip: T Cells Strengthen Our Hand against Influenza Clinical Infectious Diseases, 52 (1), 8-9 DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciq018Flu vaccines are important and useful, but also relatively ineffective compared to many other vaccines. Immunity is imperfect, there are many 'strains' of influenza in a given year only some of which are addressed by the available vaccine (though often the most common ones) and one year's vaccine does not provide immunity to subsequent years' influenza because the virus changes so much. Well, actually that's not exactly true: The influenza virus has various…
gregladen | February 7, 2011I went to the gym today and spent about an hour on the treadmill (yeah, I know, good for me) and from where I was I could see the CNN-playing TV and the Fox-playing TV. I usually position myself so I can't see Fox because I find it disturbing and annoying, but the gym was crowded so I did not have that choice.
One of the main news stories that cycled through the CNN show was this one:
Former President George W. Bush was forced to cancel a planned trip to Switzerland this week over concerns of protests linked to the Bush adminstration's treatment of detainees.
...
Activists also planned to…
gregladen | February 7, 2011Why Does the Superbowl Hate America?
Watch the girl sing while you follow the ... revisions below:
Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming reaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming? Oh so proudly we washed at the twilight's last reaming
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our a flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of…
gregladen | February 6, 2011He is the author of NM House Bill 302 which is designed to protect teachers who want to teach anti-evolution or climate change denialism. This is not too different than the bill Michele Bachmann, who is also an idiot, introduced when she was a Republican member of the State legislature in Minnesota some years ago.
House Bill 302, as it's called, states that public school teachers who want to teach "scientific weaknesses" about "controversial scientific topics" including evolution, climate change, human cloning and -- ambiguously -- "other scientific topics" may do so without fear of…
gregladen | February 3, 2011The Superbowl of Birding is out, and by that I mean I and the Bird Web Carnival number CXLIII. Pronounced like Cthulhu but with an "i" sound at the end. You will find it here at the Slugyard blog.
The next edition of I and the Bird is set for February 17th, and I will be hosting it here, so please send me your bird blogging. It would be helpful if you put IATB in the subject line of your email to me.
The Bobo Carnival of Politics is out as well. Bobo is a clown, so be careful. Click here.