gregladen | December 10, 2010Everybody loves to give or to get a book as a present, right? They are small, interesting, there is a wide selection in every price range. As gift giver, it is a way you can impose your will on others, which is always true for gifts, but specially so with books. As a recipient, you can easily get rid of it by claiming that you loaned it to your cousin Leo who just moved to Borneo.
Also, books are very easy to order on line. Well, you can order anything on line, but with books you know what you are getting.
The following is a list of books that I happen to have on hand (or recently…
gregladen | December 10, 2010It is probably true that every culture has child safety devices. It is also probably true that all of these devices are very limited in their effectiveness.
As an anthropologist living with the Efe Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, I often found myself observing some thing ... an object, a construction of some type, or a behavior ... that utterly baffled me. I learned to avoid asking about things as questions occurred to me; The very asking of a question, especially if you are roughly the equivalent of an alien visitor (an extraordinarily wealthy giant scary white being with highly advanced…
gregladen | December 9, 2010Which is very handy if you are a Department of Motor Vehicles desk clerk who hates Teh Gay. Or a Senator.
Thomas Demartini does or did work for the California DMV in San Francisco. A while back he refused to process a change of gender on the license paperwork for a transgender person. That apparently caused a bit of a stir but he kept his job and, apparently, was never retrained. Or maybe he was.
Anyway, when Amber Yust, recently transgendered herself, applied for the male to female change in status with the DMV, and she ended up with the same anti-gay desk clerk, things got weird.…
gregladen | December 9, 2010At its December 9, 2010, meeting, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted 8-2 to approve high school biology textbooks, despite the ongoing complaints of creationists objecting to their treatment of evolution. As NCSE previously reported, a decision on the textbooks, expected initially in October 2010, was deferred by the board, which sought a recommendation from its Textbook/Media/Library Advisory Council. On November 12, 2010, the council voted 8-4 to recommend the textbooks. Then, on December 7, 2010, a committee of the board voted 6-1 to move forward with the…
gregladen | December 9, 2010Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | December 9, 2010Now that Mythbusters is on Roku and Netflix via various venues, I've been watching it. Previously I've only seen a few. They're pretty good. And now, President Obama will be on Mythbusters: "The Discovery Channel has announced that the Commander-in-Chief will be doing a cameo on "Mythbusters" tonight. He'll be asking hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to redo one of their projects." *
Meanwhile, with the holidays fast approaching, you may need to find a good therapist. Lemondrop has a post on that.
gregladen | December 9, 2010Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | December 9, 2010Here's a picture:
Well, ok, actually, they didn't exactly say this in their press release, but they didn't not say it, neither, so shame on them!!! They put this picture that they KNOW imma think is mitosis and FAILED to say it wassn! FAIL I say!
But seriously, folks, the real news and as far as I know this is total, NASA-loving news-pimping hype of the kind all us science lovers love, is this: "By the middle of next week, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter will have worked longer at Mars than any other spacecraft in history."1
The rest of the press release is here. Even if you don't want to…
gregladen | December 9, 2010It's a great idea that I found on a new blog called Notes from the Pondonome, (which from the photograph in the blog's banner must be some kind of remote church and graveyard near a river in South Dakota): It involves bacteria.
gregladen | December 9, 2010This is interesting. Well, the whole conversation is interesting, but it gets especially interesting around 6 minutes ...
Question: ... there's this US Intelligence Analyst Bradley Manning arrested and it's alleged that he confessed in in a chatroom to have leaked .... 280 thousand classified us embassy cables. Did he?
Answer: Well, we have denied receiving those cables. He has been charged, five days ago, with obtaining 150k cables and releasing 50. We have released early in the year a cable from the Reykjavik us embassy but not necessarily connected...
What is really interesting…
gregladen | December 9, 2010
"Carbon dioxide is natural, it is not harmful, it is a part of Earth's lifecycle. And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance, reduce the American standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occuring in Earth."
gregladen | December 9, 2010Or at least, I think he was trying to make a point, but I'm not entirely sure.
Joel Rosenberg, author of Everything You Need to Know About (Legally) Carrying a Handgun in Minnesota and proprietor of the web site "Jew with a gun," entered the Hennepin County Office Building to keep an appointment with Sgt. Bill Palmer, a Public Information Officer for the Minneapolis Police Department.
Apparently, Sgt. Palmer noticed Joel's holster, hand gun, and a big knife.
I presume that Joel being a white Jewish guy (though I don't quite get the "Jew" theme as he has developed it) was at first politely…
gregladen | December 8, 2010Christians fear werewolves and wizardry. Oh, and vampires. A Canadian Salvation Army center throws away Harry Potter and Twilight toys that are donated to them, rather than passing them out to kids for Christmas or even giving them to a different charity with less hypocritical standards. "The Salvation Army is based on Christian principles, so these things are not in line with those" says a Salvation Army officer, though guns and other toys of violence are, if the local ministry likes. People who work in the local ministry where this was discovered throw the Potter and Twilight toys away,…
gregladen | December 8, 2010Just a quick note. As the Minnesota Governor's Race recount proceeds, it became apparent, as many of us predicted, that Emmer's standing in that context has moved in the wrong direction from his perspective. He will end up losing this race by more votes than had he simply conceded to begin with. It is now expected that Emmer will concede the race any moment now, which has apparently (though this is unofficial) prompted the Electio Canvassing Board to cancel today's meeting at which the contested votes would have been examined.
This allows the Republicans to say "We lost by fewer than 9,000…
gregladen | December 7, 2010I did a little (very little, very short) newsroom debate on Fox 9 with a guy named Tom who appears to represent conservative Christians regarding the question of "Does Christmas have place in schools?" I quickly add that even though that was the planned focus of the discussion, it was quickly revised to be "Oh, no, not just Christmas, but Kwanza and Hanuka and stuff too." That particular bit of backpedaling is, of course, ingenuous and annoying, because nobody from Hanuka or Kwanza is trying to force their religious holidays into public schools, only the conservative Christians. So if we…
gregladen | December 7, 2010Elizabeth Edwards -- who catapulted into the public eye in 2004, when her husband, Sen. John Edwards, ran for president and was John Kerry's running mate on the Democratic ticket, has died, a close family friend tells NPR. She was 61.
Over the past few years, Edwards wrote two best-selling books, fought a well-publicized battle against cancer and saw her marriage crumble after her husband fathered a child with another woman.
NPR
gregladen | December 7, 2010Yes, there is a connection ...
The Imperial Japanese of World War II and the Nazi Germans of the same era held one thing in common: You were with them or you were nothing. Non-Japanese prisoners were treated very poorly. The lives of non Japanese who did not swear allegiance to the emperor were not valued at all. For instance, when the Japanese exited Manila near the end of the war, they killed hundreds of thousands of Philippine people. The Nazi's slaughtered millions of Russian prisoners, those they considered "unfit" or otherwise different from them, and of course, attempted to…
gregladen | December 7, 2010I am ashamed that this individual is a member of my own species. Well, maybe he isn't. Who knows. It gets really bad around 2:30.
Hat Tip Ed
gregladen | December 7, 2010One day, about ten years ago, we were having a strong southerly fetch with small tornadoes popping out of the stormy front, so Julia and I were keeping an eye out the windows, watching wall clouds form and unform over our heads. Then, suddenly, there were these two ducks flying south, coming up over the houses across the street. They flew up into the air and beat their wings against the strong wind, not making any ground at all, and then finally, fell back out of our view. I'd seen these ducks before. By day they foraged to the north on the Metronics property, but roosted to the south,…