gregladen | January 11, 2010When working with a personal trainer, the first thing you have to do is to calibrate. Then, if the trainer does not crank it up to a higher level, she's probably not worth her fee.
Continued ..
By this time it had become clear that I was joining this gym with a life membership. I'd lay out a few hundred bucks and be a member for about $50 a year forever after. That may seem like a lot and these sorts of things are not always good deals. But part of my motivation for choosing the super-membership was to put the money down up front so I would be motivated to stick with the program for a…
gregladen | January 11, 2010I don't know what I want for christmas
... Or what I want to be when I grow up, or what to major in in college.
But I can write a poem with Google Search Box:
I am going crazy
I am going to die.
I am going in
I am going to be a big sister.
I am going in Spanish
I am going to die alone.
Hat Tip Science Punk
gregladen | January 11, 2010First, following Ethan's Fitness Challenge (to which I responded here) there is another new entry by Dunford here.
Discovering Biology in a Digital World gears up for Science Online 2010: Citizen Science: all fun and no data? ScienceOnline 2010
Isis is branching out from the realm of incivility to the world of diversity, also at Science Online 10: Dr. Isis Continues to Ponder Diversity for #scio10. She's asking for your ideas as to how to respond to certain question about diversity.
EM Johnson has the third (and I think final) installment of his Social Darwinism posts.
gregladen | January 11, 2010If you follow the race-IQ discussion, you'll note that the entire edifice is calibrated to questions of work and class. As long as classism stands, the arguments of inherent ability will be plausible to far too many people, and the problem of blacks in poverty will be used to justify itself. Just as racism has always been used to justify poverty.
Read: At the Corner of Race and Class at Quiche Moraine by Stephanie Zvan.
gregladen | January 11, 2010Science Online 2010 is coming up in a few days. There is a post at A Blog Around the Clock that is a veritable clearing house for all of the blogospheric information on this conference, including ways for you to participate in the conference even if you do not attend in physical form. I'm sure I'll be blogging from the conference. For now, I just want to talk about conferences in general, as part of my mental preparation for the impending event.
There was a time, for several years, that I went to three or more full blown conferences a year, plus a couple more smaller less formal…
gregladen | January 10, 2010
Continued from here
Back from South Africa and with some time on my hands, I was hell bent on keeping the promise I had made to myself to get back into shape. For most people I know, this would mean eating better and going to the gym more often. But for me, it meant eating better and going to a gym for the first time in my life.
I went to an elementary school with no athletic program. In Junior high, there was a minimal program but the other students I hung out with and I had figured out how to skip gym. Always. I did not attend high school. I did not attend college. I never joined a…
gregladen | January 10, 2010Did you ever watch cattle? I mean, really watch them, for a few hours? Mostly they just sit or stand around munching on grass, chewing their cud, or snoozing. But every once in a while a handful of them will stand up and point in one direction. And they may take a few steps in that direction. Then a few more will join them. And once a critical mass has been reached, the whole herd will just go. Domestic cattle, wild African cape buffalo, whatever. This is what they do.
And as the cattle do, so do Scienceblogs.com bloggers. And the current stampede about to form up is about fitness. I'm…
gregladen | January 10, 2010What is the answer to this age old question?
Round 1:
cats:
dogs:
Round 2:
dogs:
cats:
gregladen | January 9, 2010Nevada Democratic Senator and Senate Leader Harry Reid apparently stepped in it:
The US Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has apologised for private comments he made about Barack Obama before the 2008 presidential election.
He is quoted in a new book as saying Mr Obama could win since he was a "light-skinned" African-American "with no Negro dialect", unless he wanted one.
The Democrat said he now regretted "using such a poor choice of words" and apologised to any Americans offended.
President Obama quickly accepted the apology and said "the book is closed".
source
Technically, Reid was…
gregladen | January 9, 2010Please make yourself aware of this situation described on Phil Plait's blog.
gregladen | January 9, 2010And here we are not really talking about the operating systems, but the philosophy that derives decision making and development. An OpenSource system, according to J.H., is "real people oriented." Read "There's a problem on your computer"
gregladen | January 9, 2010As previously noted, J. Philippe Rushton has made the argument that the brain size of "Blacks" is about 1267 cc's, and for whites it is about 1347 CC's. It has also been noted that Rushton claims that the average IQ of Blacks is 85 and he average IQ of whites is 100. But does Rushton say that there is a link between the two?
Yes, explicitly so. In his widely distributed editions of Race, Evolution, and Behavior : A Life History Perspective (2nd Special Abridged Edition), Rushton makes the claim that the African IQ is 70, and that the reason that "Black" American IQ is 80 is because of the…
gregladen | January 9, 2010The process of using critical thinking involves several steps. These steps work formally in experimental design and analysis, studying and mastering new concepts as we learn and in making decisions that people need to make in the various aspects of our lives. They also work informally and people process these steps often when we are not aware of them, nor even that we are following them.
Mike Haubrich on Critical Thinking, a propos Science Online 10
gregladen | January 9, 2010Is it true that
intellectual dishonesty would get anyone canned from a tenured university position.
Maybe. but being an unmitigated racist asshat is apparently not.
gregladen | January 9, 2010Some people say yes, some people say no. Either way, Glen Beck is a Racist Moron.
First, watch this:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
(I love the fact that Rachel appreciates "Get Smart" .... but I digress)
Then watch this....
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
(The book referred to here is: Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics)
What do you think should be done about the issue off who gets counted where in relation to prisons? That is a very interesting question. Given that so many…
gregladen | January 8, 2010Denailists have a repertoire of gambits they use to spread their denialism and make their points. They need these gambits because they otherwise lack facts, cred, usable theory, or any of the other good stuff that makes science, history, etc. work.
James Hrynyshyn has written a post about a publisher trying to pretend to be the victim of kool-aid drinking scientists, which is a ploy to increase sales of a dumb-ass AGW denialiist book. It is a very interesting development: The climate change boycott gambit
gregladen | January 8, 2010Sci Curious takes a poke at the recent G-spot research (which we discussed here) in this post: Friday Weird Science: the "reality" of the G Spot and the mainstream media. Sci reviews the actual, original research paper.
gregladen | January 8, 2010Ubuntu, Imma gonna let you be my operating system, but first, I gotta ask you to stop acting more like Windows with every new release. K?
... as time goes by two things remain annoying about Ubuntu. One is off and on, and varies over time, and that is the lack of certain essential automatically installed apps and drivers and such. These are things that should be installed to make the system and software work for many users, but that are not included in the distribution because of some misplaced and rather perverse sense of "freeness" of software. For many potential Linux users, this makes…
gregladen | January 7, 2010
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