gregladen | November 19, 2010If you ever get to see "Millhouse" do so! I'd love to watch it along side any similar documentary on George Bush. I don't have the film, but here is a documentary about the documentary.
Part I
Part II
Part III
gregladen | November 19, 2010Ecologist Eric Berlow doesn't feel overwhelmed when faced with complex systems. He knows that more information can lead to a better, simpler solution. Illustrating the tips and tricks for breaking down big issues, he distills an overwhelming infographic on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan to a few elementary points.
gregladen | November 18, 2010We laugh at the idea of you burning in hell and we hope you get hit by a church van tonight!!"
... Richard Dawkins reads some of his hate mail while relaxing at the hearth.
gregladen | November 18, 2010First, this one that Julia just sent me:
Then, this one I just made. It's experimental.
gregladen | November 18, 2010From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.
gregladen | November 18, 2010The distinguished evolutionary biologist Morris Goodman died on November 14, 2010, at the age of 85, according to the Wayne State University School of Medicine. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 12, 1925, Goodman attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before enlisting in the United States Air Force in 1943. Returning to Wisconsin, he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in zoology. After a series of postdoctoral appointments, in 1958 he took a position at Wayne State University, where he remained for fifty-two years. In the late 1950s, he became interested in…
gregladen | November 18, 2010Paul was a real live scientific meteorologist who accidentally ended up a TV weatherman. (The regular one was sick, the substitute was sick, so they threw him in front of the camera.) He then became so popular that they fired him during a budget crunch. He was one of the first weather reporters anywhere, and certainly the first in Minnesota, to tell people that AGW is real.
Don't worry he didn't die or anything. (Don Shelby is retiring thus this conversation):
gregladen | November 17, 2010Murkowski Wins Alaska Senate Race
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Wednesday became the first Senate candidate in more than 50 years to win a write-in campaign, emerging victorious over her Tea Party rival following a painstaking, week-long count of hand-written votes.
details
Nancy Pelosi elected House Democratic Leader, 150-43
...Nancy Pelosi was elected House Democratic Leader by the overwhelming margin of 150-43. This is a crushing, more than 3-1 defeat for her Blue Dog challengers. It's even a bigger margin than Dick Gephardt's post-1994 victory of 150-58. No matter how much press…
gregladen | November 17, 2010Let's have a look and see if we can decide.
Sciencedaily.com has this piece on a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in which the claim is made that "US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research." The problem is that the statistics given don't show that.
The study is said to look at papers withdrawn according to PubMed between 2000 and 2010. Which means 2001 through 2009 inclusively (though I'm guessing that is not what was meant). Here's the data:
Papers retracted: 788
... because of error: 545
... "attributed" to fraud (no indication in the write up what…
gregladen | November 17, 2010Denis Dutton is a philosophy professor and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In his book The Art Instinct, he suggests that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty.
gregladen | November 15, 2010The first order of business of the lame duck House of Representatives was to pass a resolution (as far as I know resolutions have no meaning) to oppose through federal legislation (which only has meaning if it is written, passed, signed into law, etc.) to 'address' (ban? regulate? tax? allow under only certain conditions?) the interstate sale and distribution of videos showing small animals being slowly crushed to death by women, using their bare feet or high heeled shoes.
The reason that this is a Tea Party defeat is that any such legislation would be valid under the Interstate Commerce…
gregladen | November 15, 2010Last year, the American Freedom Alliance, a California based Don't Think Tank, attempted to insert, Trojan style,* a creationist film called Darwin's Dilemma into the repertoire of films shown at the California Science Center.
The film is a pro-Intelligent Design film, and behind this insulting and immature ruse was, you guessed it, the Discovery Institute.
When the California Science Center reviewed the film, they found its science content lacking in accuracy, truth, integrity, and stuff and canceled the showing. In so doing, the CSC was carrying out its obligation to promote excellent…
gregladen | November 15, 2010No, wait ... not exactly. Well, sort of.
We all thought Facebook would be announcing Facebook.com, the email server to end all googles. But instead it launched something else. It is called a "Modern Messaging System" and it combines email, instant messages, and SMS.
Hold on, I'll be right back.
OK, I looked up SMS because I didn't know what that was. It's texting.
There are exactly two people with whom I regularly text, and by regularly I mean an average of something like one message per ... week. But my phone system does not support more than a few free ones, so I think I like the…
gregladen | November 15, 2010It has been with us all along. In movies, on TV, documentaries. We wuz lookin' 'em right in the face and never done nowd it.
I recommend that you stop watching around six minutes. You have been warned.
gregladen | November 15, 2010In a recent blog post, Krazy Kristian Guy Ray Comfort (the "Banana man") notes that atheists are planning a billboard campaign that will point out the barbaric nature of passages from the Christian and Muslim texts. He goes on to note that anyone who offends Islam is likely to get their heads cut off, and he tastelessly uses a photograph of a living, smiling Daniel Pearl (who was beheaded by his terrorist captives in 2002) to make his point.
Comfort goes on to say that Atheists may be captured by people of Islamic faith and beheaded, and that would be bad for the Atheists. Therefore, he…
gregladen | November 15, 2010 And, is that necessarily a bad thing?
Sometimes I feel like I'm watching Ubuntu running quickly towards a big cliff.
Recently, it was hinted/announced that Gnome would be dropped as Ubuntu's default desktop, and x.org dropped as the x server. The mint Distro has forked itself to produce a pure Debian distro, which was what Ubuntu was supposed to be (sort of) when I signed up for it, which I take to be a reaction by the minters of Mint to Ubuntu's increasing non-Debian-ness. At the same time Ubuntu is trying to be all forward moving and stuff, yet it is unable for some reason to provide…
gregladen | November 14, 2010The question recently came up as to whether the term "Moslem" (as opposed to "Muslim") is considered insulting or somehow anti-Moslem*. More specifically, I made the claim (though I did not put it this way exactly at the time) that "Moslem" was a dogwhistle signifying teabagging anti-Obama racist scumpuppies.
I have since been told by various teabagging anti-Obama racist scumpuppies that I was wrong, but I was told this in such a way as to convince me that I must be right, even though I was going on gut feeling at the time.
Subsequently, I decided to do some research.
I separately entered…
gregladen | November 14, 2010Yesterday in Minnesota, 546 vehicles drove off the road and 461 vehicles crashed into something (often, another vehicle) due to storm conditions. In one of those incidents, a person died. In neighboring Wisconsin, there were over 400 crashes and two dead.
If this was a disease epidemic over the same time period, it would be way worse than the H1N1 flu or the cholera epidemic currently hitting Haiti. Yes, yes, I get that this is a temporary short term phenomenon, but if we put all the stormy weather end to end in time it would be an event of a week or two duration (depending on the year).…