gregladen | April 24, 2010Learn the name. She's the next governor of Minnesota.
There were a lot of great candidates in the race for the DFL (Democratic Party) endorsement this year. The party, at the primaries, has chosen Margaret Anderson Kelliher among them.
Now, what will ideally happen is this: The other candidates who were running for the DFL endorsement will step aside and support Kelliher. And, we all work for Kelliher, and she wins.
Or, what COULD happen is that one or more candidates will continue to run (because the system here in Minnesota makes that easy) and the liberal/progressive vote is split,…
gregladen | April 24, 2010Notice that I didn't say that the medium IS the message. Just that some of the message is in there. In the medium.
I am forever amazed at how easily compelled my fellow skeptics, and/or my fellow atheists, and/or my fellow feminists, and/or my fellow anti-racists are to tell each other that they are doing it wrong. It was once said (by a straight white male Christian, probably), that "If half the people who make speeches would make concrete floors, they would be doing more good."
Well, in an effort to promote sanity in this discussion, I'd like to point you to yet another voice in…
gregladen | April 24, 2010In their own words ...
They call themselves Teabaggers, but really, they are nothing other than Republicans. Out of the box, run of the mill, nothing special Republicans.
You might think that these conversations are cherry picked, a rare set of unusual views held by a small number of the people at this rally.
I spent hours on the telephone last election speaking to randomly chosen voters in a high-SES Republican district in Minnesota. A minority of people with whom I spoke were pretty serious Democrats supporting the Democratic slate. The rest of the people with whom I spoke with…
gregladen | April 24, 2010Twenty years ago today, the rocket ... The Discovery .... blasted off, carrying the Hubble Space Telescope.
And, to celebrate, NASA has released one of the most astonishing photographs ever.
gregladen | April 24, 2010Open Sourcing Genetic Research
Counting Gorillas and Elephants; The study of pain; Yet Another Complete Genome; The winter plumage of grouse; and much much more.
Open Access in Canada (PDF File)
gregladen | April 24, 2010Biblical anti-Obama slogan: Use of Psalm 109:8 funny or sinister?
There's a new slogan making its way onto car bumpers and across the Internet. It reads simply: "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8"
A nice sentiment?
Maybe not.
The psalm reads, "Let his days be few; and let another take his office."
Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with "1/20/09" commemorated President Bush's last day in office.
But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."
gregladen | April 24, 2010Men circumcised at birth saying that they prefer being circumcised makes as much sense as a man deaf in one ear extolling the virtues of monophonic sound.
That is a quote from one of many interesting comments on the equally interesting article Is male circumcision a humanitarian act? by Jesse Bering. Worth a look.
Bering concludes on the basis of a couple of very preliminary studies that show large effects in terms of percentage but small effects in terms of hazard, in a dynamically changing situation, supporting circumcision to mitigate against HIV infection risks. Bering has…
gregladen | April 22, 2010Lady Duff Gordon (Lucie) traveled to Cape Town in the 1860s, and chronicled her trip with letters home, which are available from various sources as "Letters from the Cape."
From that volume:
From ship board on the way to the Cape:
The children swarm on board, and cry unceasingly. A passenger-ship is no place for children. Our poor ship will lose her character by the weather, as she cannot fetch up ten days' lost time. But she is evidently a race-horse. We overhaul everything we see, at a wonderful rate, and the speed is exciting and pleasant... We tried to signal a barque yesterday, and…
gregladen | April 22, 2010This was expected:
THE US GOVERNMENT has released open source code that it has been working on.
In an unusual move for government transparency, the White House is letting developers get their mitts on its open source code. The US executive branch has been working on its custom code as part of its ongoing efforts to "develop an open platform for Whitehouse.gov."
"This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify. We're excited to see how developers across the world put our work to good use in their own applications," it announced.
More
H/T/ Virgil Samms
(That was Open Source…
gregladen | April 21, 2010 ... continued ...
In the US, political parties have what is called a "platform" which is a list of assertions ... "we want this" and "we want that" sort of assertions. The "platform" is made up, quaintly, of "planks" with each plank being about one issue. Like for my local Democratic Farm Labor party unit, one of our Planks is to get the damn road fixed over at Devil's Triangle, a particularly bad intersection down on Route 169. That's a local plank, but if we go to a party event, and a gubernatorial candidate is answering questions, she or he is expected to know what the heck is being…
gregladen | April 21, 2010 ... continued ...
So, it seems that Arlo Guthrie was hauling firewood or something with his tractor out on his place in western Mass, and he took the usual shortcut across the pond. The pond was too deep for the tractor to drive in unless, of course, it was frozen, as it always was in mid January. And, as Arlo drove his tractor across the pond, in mid January, the ice gave way bit by bit, in stages, and his tractor went in. Somewhat comically, or so he tells it.
Arlo blamed that event on anthropogenic global warming.
So, a couple of years after that happened, when I asked him to…
gregladen | April 21, 2010 ... continued
The flames were so hot that we could feel it on our faces over 300 feet away as we stood near the corner of Delaware and Whitehall avenues. At first we gawked at the burning factory from about 100 feet away, but a large explosion caused us all to turn and run. But not too far. While watching from some 200 feet away, the police came by and pushed us back to the 300 foot mark just before several explosions in a row came along. The stuff that came down on us out of the sky was cooled enough to not burn, and some of the bits were recognizable as small fragments of colored…
gregladen | April 21, 2010The first Earth Day was a red letter day in the long, hard struggle to make being good to the environment ... to the Earth ... normal instead of a fringe idea held only by quirky college professors and stoned-out hippies. This year, the first significant health care insurance reform bill was passed and it will be a red letter event in a long, hard struggle to make universal quality heath coverage and care normal instead a fringe idea held only by Kenyan born socialist Negros from Chicago. Or whatever the teabaggers are calling it now. So today, at the beginning of a true change in how we do…
gregladen | April 21, 2010The venue, Minneapolis, is well chosen as it is very hard to get an earthquake going on this nice stable bit of crust.
I know it is a bit early, but I'll remind you of this now and then ... as you are making your plans for the summer, consider attending the Skepchicon track at the Convergence thingie in Minneapolis this July.
There will be many other things going on a Convergence. It's one of those fantasy/sci fi conventions where you wear the Star Wars suit. Well, you don't have to wear the suit if you don't want to. And the Skepchicks have a series of things going on:
Join us for a…
gregladen | April 21, 2010NEW YORK (AP) - Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world got stuck repeatedly rebooting themselves Wednesday after an antivirus program identified a normal Windows file as a virus.
McAfee Inc. confirmed that a software update it posted at 9 a.m. Eastern time caused its antivirus program for corporate customers to misidentify a harmless file. It has posted a replacement update for download.
McAfee could not say how many computers were affected, but judging by online postings, the number was at least in the thousands and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.
Details are…
gregladen | April 21, 2010C.E. Cupp is Ann Coulter before the bottle-blond crap is poured on her head, but maybe slightly less vile.1 She just came out with a new book: Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity, which explains everything you had wrong if you were a progressive liberal in the education business. The book even comes with forward by Mike Huckabee.
Well, Steve Levingston of Political Bookworm on the Washington Post web site has reviewed the book, and seeing as how he does not have a lot of background in the Creationism vs Reality struggle, he interviewed Joshua Rosenau of the NCSE…