gregladen | September 20, 2010Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics, by Jennifer Ouellette, is an exploration of popular culture, including literature, movies, TV shows, and so on. Ouellette demonstrates a well studied knowledge of these areas of human endeavor, and she is an excellent writer. This means that when you have explored these aspects of day to day life, you will at the end have a reasonably good understanding...
... of quantum physics.
~ A repost for Back to School Special ~
Well, not really, though this is how Black Bodies is often described. In reality, Jennifer, in these re-…
gregladen | September 20, 2010There is an old joke motif the origin of which is obscure (to me, perhaps you can inform us): A highly technical, or perhaps mundanely boring, or perhaps very formal or conventional thing ... a police report, the new HR guidebook for a large company, the manual for your new programmable graphing calculator ... is being discussed, and someone suggests doing it as an "interpretive dance." I know I first heard that joke a very long tie ago. Since it probably predates Wikipedia, it is unlikely that we will ever know who first used this theme.
An aptamer is a molecular tool that is used to…
gregladen | September 20, 2010Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference ... many things have been going on and I have more to report than time to report it. But I will get to all of it, I assure you. Tonight, I just want to cover part of today's Education Symposium (moderated by your's truly) ... not all of it at once, thought, as it is kind of complex.
If you happen to work for the University of Minnesota or know anyone who does, best to not read this or let anyone know about it. This is a little to heavy to be spoken of openly. (Since there are only 11 of you who read my blog, I think we'll…
gregladen | September 19, 2010Replacing floors is a total exercise routine. Moving furniture out of the way, ripping up whatever is there, measuring and cutting new sub flooring, carting around heavy sheets of plywood, tacking and nailing, and so on and so forth works every single muscle in one's body. That's what we did last weekend. Also, I was able to demonstrate my special technique for testing if a particular floor is safe, or if it is so rotted out that it has to be replaced; You stand on it bouncing up and down a little bit and if you crash through to the basement, that part of the floor was bad.
Saw the…
gregladen | September 19, 2010And tells everyone else to kiss off?
Now, go here and vote up this video.
Bonus Rant:
Mwaaa, bitches!
gregladen | September 18, 2010A collection of meteor videos for your amusement and amazement:
Peekskill Bolide Fireball of 1992
Police dash cam of Meteor over Edmonton, Canada
Man hit by meteor (very rare footage)
Shower of comets right above some guy's apartment in North Carolina
Five state ongoing intermittent noisy meteor shower
Absolute proof that aliens are protecting us .... or perhaps saving us for later:
2006 Mexico
Blaire Witch Meteor
gregladen | September 17, 2010This is why we love Genie Scott:
The NCSE now has a channel on You Tube, and at this time you can see most, probably all, of Genie's testimony in Texas. It is very instructive.
GENIE SCOTT IS A MACHINE!!!
gregladen | September 17, 2010This might be a little unusual for me, being an American of my age and all, but over the course of my life I've had a small number of close friends who were Hitler Youth in Germany during World War II. I don't hold that specific fact against anyone. But, just in case you wanted to see it, I thought I'd post this photograph of The Pope giving the Nazi Salute something that looks exactly like the Nazi salute but is actually a Christian blessing thingie (which does not obviate the fact that he was a Nazi along with most of his Christian-German compatriots of the time):
But then, it turns out…
gregladen | September 17, 2010
Hitler wth Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, the papal nuncio in Berlin, 1935
On April 20, 1939, Archbishop Orsenigo celebrated Hitler's birthday. The celebrations, initiated by Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) became a tradition. Each April 20, Cardinal Bertram of Berlin was to send "warmest congratulations to the Fuhrer in the name of the bishops and the dioceses in Germany" and added with "fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars."
Photo and text from here.
gregladen | September 17, 2010Amy Binder and John H. Evans, associate professors of Sociology at the University of California at San Diego, have written a piece on efforts to force religion in the guise of Intelligent Design and Creationism down the throats of children in Texas.
a repost
A proposal before the Texas Board of Education calls for including the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution in the state's science curriculum. This initiative is understood by supporters and opponents to be a strategic effort to get around First Amendment restrictions on teaching religion in science class. The proposal is a new round…
gregladen | September 16, 2010
Summary of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII from Library Journal:
Relying on exclusive access to Vatican and Jesuit archives, an award-winning Roman Catholic journalist argues that through a 1933 Concordat with Hitler, Pope Pius XII facilitated the dictator's riseAand, ultimately, the Holocaust.
gregladen | September 16, 2010Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is a book well worth reading. I've read it and I think highly of the book.
I don' t have time to write a review right now, but here's the PW writeup:
Goldhagen's gripping and shocking landmark study transforms our understanding of the Holocaust. Refuting the widespread notion that those who carried out the genocide of Jews were primarily SS men or Nazi party members, he demonstrates that the perpetrators?those who staffed and oversaw the concentration camps, slave labor camps, genocidal army units, police battalions, ghettos,…
gregladen | September 16, 2010
Germany was a Christian nation long before the Nazi's came along in the 1920s. When the Nazi's took power in Germany, they were widely and generally supported. Even after the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, a majority of the German People (in a survey conducted by the US military) remained sympathetic to the Nazis and wished for a return of surviving Nazi leaders. Most Germans were either active members of the Nazi party or were sympathetic, and most were Christians, mainly Catholic. (There were a lot of non-Christian Germans at the beginning of this period, but the Christian Germans…
gregladen | September 16, 2010A new study identifies a likely cause of rapid degeneration in some Alzheimer's patients. The results of this study may lead to improved treatment.
But first, let's look at the method used in this study, because that may be almost as important as a development. And for this, we will use a sports analogy.
Let's say there's an allele (an allele is a variant of a gene) that can boost your ability to play baseball. It really works. It causes an eye-hand coordination thing that improves batting, catching, and also affects your perception of movement in 3D space so you never miscalculate…
gregladen | September 16, 2010I would hope not, but in fact there seems to be no effective mechanism in place to keep in check a not insignificant number of Google engineers who have full access to everyone's gMail contents and other private information. And, there is always David Barksdale.
David Barksdale was one such engineer. He fell in with a group of teenagers via a technology group, and used his powers to access pretty much anything he wanted to taunt and play with them like some kind of eight grade bully might taunt and play with "The Sevvies." Although there is a certain sexual overtone to what Barksdale did…
gregladen | September 16, 2010The following is an abstract from an article by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education called “WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE "TEACH THE CONTROVERSY" SLOGAN?” available here.
a repost
a repost
Teachers are often exhorted by creationists to "teach the controversy." Although such encouragement sounds on the surface like a proposal for critical thinking instruction, the history of the creationist movement in North America belies this claim. Rather than teach students to analyze and evaluate actual scientific controversies, the intent of "teach the controversy" exhortations is to…