gregladen | October 15, 2016The Outdoor Science Lab for Kids: 52 Family-Friendly Experiments for the Yard, Garden, Playground, and Park is a good guide to home science experiments for kids, usually with adult involvement, ranging across a fairly wide range of age but mainly, I'd say, middle school for unsupervised work, or pretty much any age if supervised.
All of the experiments can be done by adults with younger kids watching or being involved to varying degrees.
Most of he experiments cost little or nothing, depending on where you live (like, do you live near a pond?) and what the phrase "common household…
gregladen | October 14, 2016... until you have cleaned house and stopped embarrassing yourselves. And by clean house, I mean, take are of this deeply offensive bullshit your people are now spewing out.
You have turned a very bad situation into something ten times worse.
As background, this comes from a meeting of national level evangelical leaders who got together to decide what to do about Donald Trump. They decided to fully support Trump, and the woman in the video shown here is giving their arguments. I am not making this up.
See also:
Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately
Palm Beach Post…
gregladen | October 13, 2016First, Michele Obama's full speech earlier today:
You know two news outlets have produced confirming evidence of actual sexual assault by Donald Trump. So, naturally, Trump intends to sue.
But, this from Media Matters:
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s threats to The New York Times for reporting allegations that he committed sexual assault are legally far-fetched and provide a troubling portrait of how a Trump administration would handle the press, according to experts interviewed by Media Matters.
...
Several experts tell Media Matters his latest threats of legal action…
gregladen | October 13, 2016Andy Lee Robinson started the recent trend of making compelling graphics about climate change that move. He did a version of the Arctic Ice Death Spiral (a term coined by Joe Romm), which was highly acclaimed but that did not go as viral as it should have at the time. Then, a version with additive ribbon graphs about three years ago. He called that the "waterfall diagram" and it was picked up and used by the BBC at the time. Not long after, he came up with the disappearing block of ice motif. And now, Andy has an updated version, here:
This is ice VOLUME, not the oft cited surface area.…
gregladen | October 13, 2016Or so it is alleged. Rather credibly.
Trump talked about sexual assault in 2005, that was recorded on tape, those tapes released Friday. Trump denied that he actually ever sexually assaulted/groped anyone during the Sunday debate, just a couple of days later.
Meanwhile many Republicans running for Congress distanced themselves from Trump and condemned him.
Then, the rabid right wing Teabagging Republican Trump supporters warned those Republicans that they had to get in line and support Trump or else. So, of course, lacking courage of conviction or ethics or morals or, really, brains, those…
gregladen | October 12, 2016Update, MID PM Thursday
Nicole blew up to a category 4 storm by some reports, but I think was Category 3 at as it raked Bermuda.
As far as I can tell, Bermuda suffered 115+ mph winds,
The center of the storm was about 10 miles east of Bermuda (which is causing people to say, incorrectly, that the storm missed Bermuda by 10 miles, which is not true). Since the storm went to the right of the islands, things were not as bad as they could have been. But, Nicole is a very very powerful storm.
It will e a while before we get a bead on the damage there, but I've heard that power outages are…
gregladen | October 12, 2016First, for the record, I want one. But, since my current smart phone is a Nexus 6, I don't need one yet. I'm fine for a while.
Google essentially invented Android, and the Nexus phones were pretty close to being Google phones, but they were not. They were simply very well designed and powerful smart phones that generally came with unadulterated Android, and likely to work best with Android because of Google's involvement.
The new Google Pixel is an actual Google phone. So, this is a bit like the iPhone of the Android world, in the sense that there is excellent and carefully engineered…
gregladen | October 12, 2016The Royal Society is the world's oldest extant scientific society. And, it is a place where scientific controversy has a home. Both Huxley and Wilberforce were members back in the 19th century, when young Darwin's ideas were first being knocked around.
More recently, just a few weeks ago, the Royal Society accidentally agreed to host a talk by coal baron and formerly respected science writer Matt Ridley. Matt Ridley has been a great disappointment to us scientists and science teachers. Many of us used his book as a supplementary reading in our evolution courses, for example (Ridley was a…
gregladen | October 12, 2016There aren't any. But, aquaria have many times tried to make it so, and it always goes bad for the shark. The basic problem is that great white sharks are pelagic, and it is very hard to keep pelagic creatures in a confined space, and the largest aquaria are very confined from the point of view of a large pelagic animal.
Another problem would eventually become important in the event that an aquarium managed to keep a great white shark alive long enough. When they are young, great white sharks dine on fish. When they are adults, they seem to prefer mammals. So, imagine feeding time at the…
gregladen | October 11, 2016Above is my latest electoral college projection.
This uses the technique previously described. However, instead of using RCP averages for all polled states and then using extreme (non-tossup) states to develop the regression model, this method uses only polling from states with one or more recent poll, and only with good polls. these poll numbers are then "predicted" by black/hispanic/white/Voted_Romney numbers, and that generates a model, based on just over 20 states, designed to predict all the states.
As expected, the r-squared value is much lower using this method, but this method does…
gregladen | October 11, 2016... or furniture, or whatever.
I really needed one of these a few months ago. And I feel the need coming again soon as I do things to the walls of our new house, now and then.
The Color Muse is not a new technology or a new idea. It is a very expensive technology suddenly available for a few bucks.
The Color Muse is simply a hand held spectrometer that interfaces with your smart phone. You use it to get info about a color of wall paint (or something similar) that you can then take to the hardware store and match.
If you chunk out a bit of the wall, you can have the hardware store do it,…
gregladen | October 11, 2016There has been a lot of talk about Trump and Russia and Putin. I think most people watching this see some sort of connections. Some go so far as to say that Trump is literally a Russian agent. Here is an interesting perspective from intelligence expert Malcolm Nance, author of The Plot to Hack America: How Putin’s Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election ...
About Nance's book:
In April 2016, computer technicians at the Democratic National Committee discovered that someone had accessed the organization’s computer servers and conducted a theft that is best described as…
gregladen | October 10, 2016I've made my first stab at a prediction for the electoral college outcome for the US Presidential race, 2016. I use a roughly similar methodology as I did to accurately predict most of the Democratic primaries. However, since primaries are different from a general, the methodology had to be adapted.
For the primaries, I eventually used this methodology. I used results form prior primaries to predict voter behavior by ethnicity, in order to predict final behavior. That worked because primaries are done a few states at a time, and because all the people being modeled were Democrats.
It turns…
gregladen | October 10, 2016You can't say who really won the debate, because on Friday, news broke, confirming other news from the prior Monday (and general suspicians) indicating that Donald Trump is not fit to be President in Yet Another Way, and his campaign essentially imploded. So, instead, we'll ask, "who won the weekend?"
As you know, I'm the last person to write off Donald Trump. From the very beginning, without fail, I've been warning you that he'll do well, that he'll win the GOP debates, that he'll win various primaries, that he'll win the nomination, etc. All of it. I have never once been wrong about this…
gregladen | October 10, 2016It turns out that there is an untold story behind the "discovery" of the famous Hockey Stick graph by Mike Mann and his colleagues. It is an excellent example of how science works, worthy of repeating, say, in a science classroom.
Anthropogenic Climate Change is very serious business. And, therefore, there has been far too little humor applied to communicating about this problem. Mike Mann and his co-author Tom Toles have started to backfill that gaping hole in the collective effort to bring the most important existential issue of our time to everyone's attention.
Hurricane Matthew wasn'…
gregladen | October 10, 2016Climate change is a settled issue. It is now widely and recognized as real, and as one of the top, if not THE top, existential problems the world faces today. Americans want climate change stopped, and they want the next version of the US Government, the one that starts in January, 2017, to work hard to reduce the human release of greenhouse gas as rapidly as possible.
How do we know this?
Because no one mentioned a thing about it during last night's debate!
A few months ago, I would have expected presidential debates to have included climate change pretty much in every iteration. It…
gregladen | October 9, 2016I have no idea why so many smart people are saying that anything that happened over the last few days changes this election, or destroys the Republican Party. Pay attention, people. that is not what is happening.
The Republican Party has become the party that harbors racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, hate, politically expedient willful ignorance about all things science, classism, anything anti-PC, and dedicated service to the demands of the wealthiest Americans.
Most of that comes from the Tea Party the rest comes from the elite in the party. In this way, the Republican Party…
gregladen | October 8, 2016National Novel Writing Month Project
NaNoWriMo is an international project, or would be writers, who commit to writing an entire novel within the month of November. (I hear that you can finish a work already started, but you have to produce 50K words during the month for the novel to count). Since I've written a novel within a month once before, I figure I can do it again, only this time, better. Why will it be better? Because I can take my time, since I have a WHOLE MONTH to do it in. (I only had a few days to finish the last one.)
This post is a modified version of my novel's page at the…
gregladen | October 8, 2016You know the problem. Not just the release of the "I'd grab her ..." tape, but starting before that. Here, watch:
A roughly written Facebook comment by me, reacting to much of the reaction I'm seeing:
To everyone who is saying that Trump is out of the race because of his admitted preference for sexual assault as a way of getting women to like him: Sorry, you are wrong, and you may be living in a bubble.
Do a transect across humanity, in the US. You will find that a double digit percentage of both women and men (though I'll allow you the possibly true but possibly not true idea that more men…
gregladen | October 7, 2016A collection of tweets showing things #Matthew related
Las inundaciones a causa de #Matthew...Video of flooding from 11th Ave S, Jacksonville Beach. Vía: @wjxt4 pic.twitter.com/J5AAzMPXiM
— Webcams de México (@webcamsdemexico) October 7, 2016
Video of huge tree getting ripped out of the ground from #HurricaneMatthew in #Jacksonville FL.#Matthew #Hurricane pic.twitter.com/r6Wwd2aRS9
— DeeconX (@DeeconX) October 7, 2016
#Hurricane #Matthew death toll passes 800 in #Haiti, cholera takes lives https://t.co/QRx8HRPyx4
— Skep tickle (@Ellesun) October 8, 2016
Current look along A1A in St.…