gregladen | September 20, 2016White Supremacy, Climate Science Denial, Trump, Alt-Right
Peter Sinclair suddenly realized it is all one big interconnected complex hole! (Well, whole, but more like a hole because of what we are throwing into it).
Look at this classic video he made a while back:
Then, check out his post, here.
A lot of stuff about the MadHouse Effect
I reviewed the Madhouse Effect HERE.
Get Energy Smart notes that only a day after the Madhouse Effect authors highlighted nine key deniers (including Bjorn Lomborg) in the Washington Post, that venerable newspaper publishes yet another bogus editorial (…
gregladen | September 20, 2016Crows are smart. Anyone who watches them for a while can figure this out.
But that is true of a lot of things. Your baby is smart (not really). Your dog is smart (not really). Ants are smart (sort of).
It takes a certain degree of objective research, as well as some serious philosophy of intelligence (to define what smart is) to really address this question. But when the research is done and the dust settles, crows are smart.
We were all amazed (or not, because we already knew that crows are smart) to find that New Caledonian crows made and used tools. Now, we know (see my most recent…
gregladen | September 20, 2016Wouldn't that be great?
Many high end newspapers charge something like $10 a month to subscribe, just to the digital edition. But most people who use digital editions of newspapers scan several, pick and chose what to read, and end up reading them all for free because they don't reach the limit of number of articles provided to a certain web browser per month.
But sometimes, one runs into that limit and suddenly can't access articles for the last several days of the month. This hurts readers. (In some cases it hurts the papers. There are a half dozen items in the Washington Post right now…
gregladen | September 19, 2016I just watched, at a the Twin Cities Science Film Festival, a film called Nzara '76, which is about the first known Ebola outbreak, the one that gave it its name, in southern Sudan. That's about 150 miles, as the Mvo-Mvo flies, north of my long term project area in the Ituri Forest, an impassable distance over an unforgiving terrain if you are a person, well within the migratory range of an Ebola carrying fruit bat.
Back in the day, when Ebola would strike here and there, killing dozens, then disappearing back into the wild as quickly as it came, there was not much movement to get a…
gregladen | September 19, 2016"?There are two types of nation" a recent Nature editorial begins; "...those that use the metric system and those that have put a man on the Moon."
Such a pro-American jingoistic statement must be deep British irony. Anyway, the editorial continues ...
The reliance of the United States on feet and pounds, along with its refusal to embrace metres and kilograms, baffles outsiders as much as it warms the hearts of some American patriots. But it is time for the country to give up on the curie, the roentgen, the rad and the rem.
This is about measuring radiation. There are several ways of…
gregladen | September 19, 2016Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War by Mary Roach explores, from a scientific perspective, the gear, technologies, and methods used to keep soldiers alive, or at least less injured, overheated, starved or thirsted to death, killed by gasses, and so on.
Roach is a well known and quite funny science writer who also wrote Stiff, Bonk, and Gulp.
This is a fun book, well researched, engagingly written, and informative. Also, off beat. Does human blood really draw sharks? What is the virtue of maggots, medicinally? How does the military test dangerous devices and the protections against…
gregladen | September 18, 2016There was a dead rabbit in the middle of the road today. I suspected such a thing, nearby, just out of sight, and edible, because I noticed some crows taking off whenever a car went by. Then, when I went over, I could see the rabbit that they were feasting on between drive-bys.
I had been looking for rabbits lately, because of this: the cat had switched to hanging out by the upstairs window, the better to observe the just arriving Juncos (snow birds, it is fall). She had previously spent most of her time observing rabbits from the lower, ground level windows, until just the other day when…
gregladen | September 18, 2016Update:
From WCCO:
An Islamic State-run news agency claims the man who stabbed and wounded eight people at a mall in Minnesota before being shot dead by an off-duty police officer was a “soldier of the Islamic State.”
Original Post:
We know nearly nothing about the Saint Cloud attack, but I'm going to offer some preliminary context-related thoughts anyway. Not conclusions or guesses, just context. (See below for some basic info on the attack.)
One thing you need to know is that Minnesota is a state with the least racist and most socially and culturally enlightened people in it. And, some of…
gregladen | September 18, 2016Back to school special:
I'd like to note that not every teacher who "moves to a school in the suburbs" does so for bad reasons. Some of them do so after being handed a $10,000 per annum pay cut and a contract with zero chance of a raise for the indefinite future or something else along those lines. In other words, while I strongly agree with Olivia Fantini, she may have some unexamined privilege of her own in blaming teachers for their own victimization.
Taxpayers, anti-tax organizations, and the elected officials bought and paid for by them are at the root of most of our problems in…
gregladen | September 17, 2016Did you ever notice that Pluto doesn't have much of a tail? No, not that Pluto! This Pluto:
This has been known for a while. NASA noted this last year:
New Horizons has discovered a region of cold, dense ionized gas tens of thousands of miles beyond Pluto -- the planet’s atmosphere being stripped away by the solar wind and lost to space. Beginning an hour and half after closest approach, the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument observed a cavity in the solar wind -- the outflow of electrically charged particles from the Sun -- between 48,000 miles (77,000 km) and 68,000 miles (109,000…
gregladen | September 16, 2016In the old days, the words "art" and "science" did not mean the same thing they mean today, at least in academia. Today, unfortunately, they have almost come to mean opposites. You can't be doing both at once. Or, at least, that's what people who haven't thought about it much may think.
Art can be used to engage people in science, and science can provide a subject for art, and in various ways, the twain shall meet.
But in Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures, Erik Kandel does something both more extreme and more specific than simply joining the two endeavors.…
gregladen | September 16, 2016Watch this video on The Scene.
Here's the text.
Keith Olbermann is back.
gregladen | September 16, 2016"After years of peddling a false conspiracy theory that President Obama wasn't born in the United States, Donald Trump — just 53 days before Election Day — now says he believes the president was born in the U.S.
"President Obama was born in the United States. Period," Trump said at a campaign event in a ballroom in his new hotel in Washington. "Now, we want to get back to ... (bla bla bla)."
That's from NPR.
This is clearly going to hurt Donald Trump with his base. The accusation to begin with wad deplorable, after all.
That was today, a few minutes ago.
But yesterday ...
Start about…
gregladen | September 16, 2016As of October 11th: Samsung is now recalling ALL Galaxy Note 7 Phones. The previous recall and replacement program failed, the phone is basically dangerous, don't use it, get rid of it, make them give you a new one.
In my view. Samsung should be providing cash back for the phones so people can buy whatever phone they want. That seems to be an option but I doubt they will actually do this for many customers. You can try, though!
Here is the latest information from Samsung.
WARNING As of October 10th or so, it is now known that Samsung phones other than those recalled are ALSO OVERHEATING…
gregladen | September 14, 2016Ignorant hateful white men who worship a rising fascist dictator look like this.
gregladen | September 14, 2016Following up on one of the issues addressed in "How The Press Created FrankenTrump and Ruined Civilization", we have this:
gregladen | September 14, 2016Update (Mid day Wed):
The disturbance in the eastern Atlantic is now a depression, and it is reasonably likely that it will be a named storm by mid day tomorrow, Thursday.
The predictions for the next several days do not have this storm turning into a hurricane any time soon; it should remain a storm or a depression, possibly going back and forth between the two, for four or five days, but after that, perhaps it will turn into something. Or not. Keep an eye on Karl, if this becomes Karl.
Meanwhile Julia is annoying people in the Southeast, but not doing much. However, keep an eye out for…
gregladen | September 13, 2016This is a great cartoon by Randall Munroe that makes a very important point very effectively. Spread it around, love it, learn from it.
Here is an excellent video walkthrough of the cartoon, discussing its value as a communication tool.
But do ignore the details of the prehistory because the cartoonist has fallen into the same trap so many others have, well meaning in intention but simply a) not an expert on key things and b) unaware of the real consequences of getting certain things wrong.
When we represent prehistory, we represent humanity both past and present. It is not difficult to do…
gregladen | September 13, 2016ScienceDebate.org is an organization that, for years now, has been pushing to get the candidates running for President of the United States to engage in a debate over science policy, just as they debate foreign policy, or economic policy, etc.
And, ScienceDebate.org has had some success. Some of the candidates, at the primary level, have engaged in such a debate, and at the national level, some of the candidates have contributed written answers to citizen-generated questions about science policy.
And now, they've done it again.
The four main candidates (two actual main candidates and two…