gregladen | August 9, 2010Yeah, I used to go to the Town Hall a lot, when I worked a couple of blocks away. I still stop there for lunch now and then when I've got something to do on the West Bank campus of The U or nearby downtown. But no longer. Recently, an atheist-linked event was scheduled there, and the owners of the brewery/restaurant canceled it because "they don't want you're kind 'round here."
Or so it seems. Details here.
I've booked events at the Town Hall, and on other occasions, the Town Hall was on my short list. Not any more. And I understand Ben's point about going back to the Town Hall (see…
gregladen | August 9, 2010Oh sure. Like I'm going to click on THAT!
All I did was to plug in a USB memory stick.
gregladen | August 9, 2010From Skeptically Speaking:
We talk to author Christopher Ryan about his new book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. We'll discuss the most recent science and theories, and how social norms compare to our biological impulses.
This Friday. Details here. I may have to read this book.
gregladen | August 9, 2010Or, more specifically, will my rep, Erik Paulsen, vote against the Recovery Act extension today which will fund, in part, Medicade and Education (167 mil in Minnesota)? We need this. But we don't meed Erik that much. If he votes against it, I may have to do something about that.
Which will probably consist of spending a bit of time working on the campaign of his hopeful replacement, Jim Meffert. Meffert supports the bill, and generally, education. Paulsen, on the other hand, does whatever Michele Bachmann tells him to do, or so it would seem.
gregladen | August 9, 2010Untrained people (that would be YOU) often fail to recognize drowning. In this way, people often drown mere feet away from those who could rescue them. One in ten children who will drown this year will drown with their parents watching the process, not knowing what they are looking at.
The Instinctive Drowning Response - so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just…
gregladen | August 9, 2010An adjunct community college professor had a bit of a problem when it came time to teach evolution, according to certain sources:
Student Bryan Jaden Walker wrote on his blog, ... that the professor "glossed over the scientific explanation very quickly (less than 20 seconds), then explained Creationism for about five minutes (5,000-year-old Earth, no evolution, etc)."
...
"Evolution was not taught at all in his class," Weis said. "When he hit that unit, instead of discussing it himself he had a single slide that had both creationism and evolution. When I spoke up and asked him about it, he…
gregladen | August 9, 2010A tight little disturbance currently known as "Area 1" in the absolute middle of the Atlantic, and bering a 70 percent chance of forming a nameable feature.
If it does, it will be a "D" ... so consulting the list, that would be ... Danielle.
gregladen | August 9, 2010... and sundry related topics.
If you use a Kindle to read these mostly older and thus free-ish books, please add your favorites in the comments.
Africania, history, and other early works
Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Burton: First footsteps in East Africa
How: People of Africa
Kingsley: Travels in West Africa
Shipman: To the Heart of the Nile
Early science and natural philosophy
Brues and Melander: Key to the families of North American insects: an introduction to the ...
Darwin: On the Origin of Species, first edition
Darwin: The Voyage of the Beagle or a Naturalist's Voyage Round the World…
gregladen | August 8, 2010Georges Bank is a very large shallow area in the North Atlantic, roughly the size of a New England state, that serves as a fishing ground and whaling area (these days for watching the whales, not harpooning them) for ports in New England, New York and Eastern Canada. Eighteen thousand years ago, sea levels were globally at a very low point (with vast quantities of the Earth's water busy being ice), and at that time George's Bank would have been a highland region on the very edge of the North American continent, extending via a lower ridge to eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and…
gregladen | August 7, 2010Oceanographer John Delaney is leading the team that is building an underwater network of high-def cameras and sensors that will turn our ocean into a global interactive lab -- sparking an explosion of rich data about the world below.
gregladen | August 7, 2010Conversion is the process through which a person's orientation on reliigion changes. How do people turn from and to new religious groups, ways of life, systems of belief and modes of relating to a deity or a the nature of reality. Dr. Grant Steves will be with me in the studio to discuss faith, conversion and deconversion with a dollop of religious indoctrination.
Dr. Grant Steves is a member of the Minnesota Atheists. He has a doctorate in Theology, and is an atheist. Mike Haubrich is a director on the board of the Minnesota Atheists, a former Catholic and deconverted evangelical…
gregladen | August 6, 2010Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.
gregladen | August 6, 2010On Thursday, Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of Operations, blogged on the official Google Blog (which, funnily enough, is just some blogspot blog, but whatever) that Google would no longer be developing Google Wave. Key elements of the technology are OpenSource so they may continue to be used and developed but Google itself is phasing out the project.
When Google Wave had been out for about five months, I noted that I did not like it much because at the same time, I was in the process of moving towards more basic text for day to day tasks, and Google Wave, which allows someone else to…
gregladen | August 5, 2010Wanted: A bash command that undoes the previous bash command. The name of the command shall be "oops." It will be written in an object oriented programming language.
See the whole "WANTED" list here.
gregladen | August 5, 2010The Carnival of Evolution #26 is Here on The Thoughtful Animal.
Submit your posts for the next carnival here.
gregladen | August 5, 2010After he swam the North Pole, Lewis Pugh vowed never to take another cold-water dip. Then he heard of Lake Imja in the Himalayas, created by recent glacial melting, and Lake Pumori, a body of water at an altitude of 5300 m on Everest -- and so began a journey that would teach him a radical new way to approach swimming and think about climate change.
gregladen | August 5, 2010Check out the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" web site.
Get rid of the senate method of fillibuster.
If you are in CA, work against Prop 23.