gregladen | February 3, 2011The advise I'm about to give you is something I've figured out my own and seems to work, but I do not know why, if it is necessary, or if there is a better way to manage this problem. If you have a better recommendation, please add it to the comments!
Some web sites can't be safely closed. If you visit such a site and try to close the browser or tab, a dialog box pops up asking if you really want to close the page, or some such nonsense. It seems to be the case that if you click on that box, only bad things happen and the web page does not go away. The only thing you can do is crash your…
gregladen | February 3, 2011... they weren't scared, but the guy trying to rob them sure was.
...
Wally was sitting at his computer when the man entered his home.
"He just stood there in that doorway, standing there with a shovel," said Wally. "I thought, 'what the hell is going on here?' I thought it was a joke!"
After hearing all the commotion, his wife, Betty, went to the front of the house and found him on the floor. Wally had been punched in the nose and it was bleeding.
"I sat on the edge of the bed. He says, 'give me your hands! I'm going to tie you up!' And I said, 'No, I don't think so," Betty said.
What? Who…
gregladen | February 2, 2011Once you've killed the monkey, you need to carry it back to camp. Slit the tail, near the end, and poke the head through the slit, so the tail makes a handy strap.
Here's a detail:
gregladen | February 1, 2011And there weren't any!
No, only kidding...
NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 45 million kilometers (28 million miles) of Earth's path around the sun.
Read Even More
gregladen | February 1, 2011Carnival of Evolution No. 32 is now at Denim and Tweed. Here.
At Ed Brayton's blog: American Teachers Often Ignore Evolution
I'll be doing another edition of Everything You Know is Sort Of Wrong on Skeptically Speaking on Friday. Details here.
gregladen | February 1, 2011How Homeopathy Works. And, is pronounced.
Michele Bachmann Hates Our Veterans.
Michele Bachmann has a plan to cut the budget and it starts with freezing funding to the VA for health care for veterans and cutting spending on disability payments to those injured during war.
The Anything Goes Carnival of Politics is HERE. All kinds of great stuff there.
gregladen | January 31, 2011... if you live in the Red River or Minnesota River basins near anything that looks like water.
This morning, I heard a TV weather forecaster, speaking of the potential flooding in the Red River Valley in Minnesota/North Dakota. He said of this possibility, "Flooding is not a certainty." But he's wrong. It is a certainty. This raises issues related to your flood insurance if you live in the vicinity, to questions of long term human land use planning in the region and generally, and of the skeptic's approach to life. And, this discussion applies not just to the Red River but to its…
gregladen | January 31, 2011An Efe (Pygmy) man making poison arrows for use in killing monkeys.
Ituri Forest, Zaire. Photograph Copyrighted 1986 Greg Laden
The arrows are thin darts of wood, often made of palm. Large marantacae leaves serve as a bowl and as a ladle. The poison includes a large number of ingredients, and the specific recipes vary a great deal (and are often guarded). This concoction included the juice pounded from a vine that contains strychnine. About seven arrows are fired at a monkey, up in the trees, per strike (on average) and it takes about two strikes to bring down a monkey. Several dozen…
gregladen | January 30, 2011New Apple Friend Bar Gives Customers Someone To Talk At About Mac Products
gregladen | January 29, 2011Do not visit web sites if your computer is running Windows. Recent reports indicate that your computer could be taken over by malicious forces.
Egypt vs. the Netizins.
Model predicts 'religiosity gene' will dominate society. OMG. Ooops, did I say that?
And finally, the Antikythera Mechanism was a computer built in Greece at around 100 BCE. It is an astronomical device for ascertaining the positions of celestial bodies and it is quite accurate. Some crazy scientists bult a fully-functional Lego replica of the device:
gregladen | January 29, 2011As an ex-Catholic, I can appreciate a good movie involving Satin1 or his Minions. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, I get the jokes.2 Some of them are rather subtle and require an understanding of church dogma. Also, I can relate to the stranger side of the belief system from personal experience. When the book The Exorcist came out, everyone in my family read it, we all discussed it, and we considered the question: "Is it true or not?" And we decided that it was true. It probably helped that my cousin was a trained Exorcist, though I don't believe he ever actually…
gregladen | January 29, 2011Climate Science in a Nutshell #9: How Bad Could it Get? from Planet Nutshell on Vimeo.
Hat Tip Class M Planet
gregladen | January 29, 2011Creationism may seem like a joke to most atheists. After all, how could the univerese and everything in it be only 6000 years old, when the light from galaxies 10 billian light years away takes (you guessed it) 10 billion years to get here?That was the question I had initially asked when I heard that there are serious people who insist that the Biblical story of creation should be taken literally in all ways. I was using Man's Reason on which to base my beliefs that the universe is old. I wasn't going to the "true source" of all knowledge to get the straight dope on Creation.
Details
gregladen | January 29, 2011These two things are only indirectly connected:
What this all means:
On Friday the 4th, Skeptically Speaking will have a pre-recorded interview with Sheril. On that same show, I'll do a pre-recored installment of "Everything...". You can go to the link and click on "ask a question", but do it before Noon EST on Tuesday. If there are too many questions, I'll address some of them in a blog post.
I believe Sheril's spot has already been recorded. But if you have a question for her just ask me and I'll answer it in falsetto. No, not really.
gregladen | January 28, 2011Fife Wikileaks Hactivists Arrested in UK
Police have arrested five people over their alleged roles in an online campaign to support WikiLeaks.
Five males - aged 15, 16, 19, 20 and 26 - were arrested under the Computer Misuse Act in raids across the country at 7am this morning, with the suspects held in local police stations for further questioning.
source
Sony determines that having autism is "cheating"
Jennifer Zdenek, the mother of an 11-year-old boy who lives with autism, is outraged at Microsoft Xbox Live for labeling her son a "cheater" and taking away everything he's earned online.…