gregladen | December 24, 2009If you liked the Congo Memoirs, and you live in New York City, you might want to check this out:
What strange new species lurk beneath? Join Museum Curator Melanie Stiassny, an ichthyologist, as she discusses her team's adventures and amazing discoveries in Africa's Congo River, the deepest in the world.
A science cafe at the American Museum of Natural History.
gregladen | December 24, 2009Ray Ingles pointed out this position paper which I think is worth looking at ...
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX pathnames and filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes. A pathname lets you select a particular file, and may include one or more "/" characters. Each pathname component (separated by "/") is a filename; filenames cannot contain "/". Neither filenames nor pathnames can contain the ASCII NUL character (\0), because that is the terminator.
This lack of limitations is flexible, but it also creates a legion of unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it…
gregladen | December 24, 2009I've assembled links to a few sites that people new to Linux should consider exploring.
About Knoppix
Knoppix is a special distro of Linux that focuses on being able to run on and manipulate all hardware. Knoppix was the first (or one of the first) "live CD's" A live CD is a cd you can boot from. If you put a Linux live CD in your computer and boot from it, you have a linux computer. This is actually not a totally dumb way to run Linux. Anyway, you can then use that Linux running on your system to fix or diagnose problems with your computer.
Klaus Knoppe, the inventor of Knoppix, has a…
gregladen | December 24, 2009I don't like it, but I'll take it. This bill lacks important features and includes some bad things. But, as Satan's greatest feat is to convince us that he does not exist, the Health Care Insurance Industry's greatest feat is to convince us that we can only revise the industry every 15 years. (Except that second item is true. I assume.)
This means that "something" had to be passed, even if the nose needed to be plugged by doing it. I fully respect and understand the alternative position of killing the bill because it is not good enough. But I also understand why it is good for Ralph…
gregladen | December 23, 2009Rather than demo another new technology, Tom Wujec reaches back to one of our earliest but most ingenious devices -- the astrolabe. With thousands of uses, from telling time to mapping the night sky, this old tech reminds us that the ancient can be as brilliant as the brand-new.
gregladen | December 23, 2009Wed - 15:40:
No snow yet.
Wed - 15:55:
Flurries, a little wind.
Wed - 17:01:
Roads are being glazed, numerous accidents reported.
Wed - 18:08:
Going out to check out the weather, buy ingredients for hot dish. And replacement cookies : (
Wed - 19:30 (32F):
Ack.... I lost an entry. I'll reconstruct it here.
Going out to the the store, there was no visible snow, just a light slushy breeze. Leaving the store with the hot dish ingredients, the air was full of snow and the storm was in progress.
Wed - 20:43 (28.4F):
It has been snowing steadily, not heavily, icy crystals rather…
gregladen | December 23, 2009Here in Minnesota, we don't get much snow. Minnesotans THINK they get lots of snow, because Minnesota is thought of as a wintry state. But the snowfall here is moderate, not great, in a typical year. If Minnesota were snowy, and Minnesotans could handle that, it would be hard to explain the 400 or so accidents that happen on the Twin Cities highways every time it snows.
Click to continue reading "What If Chicken Little Is Right?"
gregladen | December 23, 2009Why Greenhouses have nothing to do with the Greenhouse Effect, and more importantly, why CAN'T I microwave toast?
A greenhouse is a glass house sealed to keep air in but made of glass allow sunlight in. This sunlight contributes to the heat in the greenhouse by warming the ground or other material in the greenhouse, and of course the light energy is used by the plants. But the point of a greenhouse is to keep air that is warmed, by the sun and/or heaters that may be required in the greenhouse, from wafting away.
This is not how the so-called "greenhouse" effect works. There is no thing out…
gregladen | December 22, 2009Following our discussion of Twilight a while back, I thought it would be a good idea to get together a bunch of vampires to see what they had to say about it. The conversation got off topic the moment it started, but I did get it recorded with my flip:
In case you can't see the video, I also uploaded it to YoutTube, here.
gregladen | December 22, 2009While living and working as a marine biologist in Maldives, Charles Anderson noticed sudden explosions of dragonflies at certain times of year. He explains how he carefully tracked the path of a plain, little dragonfly called the globe skimmer, only to discover that it had the longest migratory journey of any insect in the world.
gregladen | December 22, 2009This is the third in our six or seven part series on how to use Linux if you are a regular smart person who needs a functioning computer but is not a geek. Today, a few items to know about files.
All computer systems keep your data and stuff in file, and you probably know that "programs" (applications) can be files (or sets of files) and that there are configuration files, etc. There are a few things about the Linux system, regarding files, that you should probably know, or at least, have a place to look up in case you need to. This is more of a list than a coherent story, so here's the…
gregladen | December 22, 2009This post started out as a comment that would have gone here (but would have done just as well here). But it became sufficiently long and possibly interesting that I figured it would make a good, if somewhat rough, blog post.
The presumption being examined here is that humans are divisible into different groups (races would be one term for those groups) that are genetically distinct from one another in a way that causes those groups to have group level differences in average intelligence, as measured by IQ. More exactly, this post is about the sequence of arguments that are usually made when…
gregladen | December 21, 2009People are very on edge today. More short and ill tempered than usual. I was walking along in Target and had that sense of tension and angst all around me, the feeling that everyone in the store would be happier if everyone else in the store was not there. As I was walking along I had the feeling that if I stopped walking the person behind me would just run into me.
So I stopped in my tracks next to an endcap.
Whump.
Just as I expected.
So for the rest of the day while I was doing errands I kept doing that. In Target a few more times. In the grocery store. In the parking lot.…
gregladen | December 21, 2009I just want everyone to know that I am awaiting resolution on an order from Trebonics, a used book seller on Amazon. Since I often link to books on Amazon from this site, I want you to know that I'm having trouble with this particular vendor. If they resolve the issue to my satisfaction (which would mean sending me the item I paid for) I'll be happy and I'll let you know. Otherwise ....
... I'll blog their freakin' asses!!!!!!!!!
gregladen | December 21, 2009Every now and then I get out my old Blog Epic on Global Warming and dust it off. I'm thinking it is time to do it again. This is a seven part series of Global Warming that covers much of the basics. Enjoy. Or get mad at me. Whatever.
About two years ago, a sea change occurred in the way that climate change news is reported, much to the annoyance of the Right Wing. It is an axiom that in reporting science, there are two (not one, not three or four, just two) sides to every issue, and one side is the plank nailed to the Democratic Party Platform, and the other side is the plank nailed to…
gregladen | December 21, 2009Senate Democrats won a crucial test vote on President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, putting them on track for passage before Christmas of the historic legislation to remake the nation's medical system and cover 30 million uninsured.
All 58 Democrats and the Senate's two independents held together early Monday against unanimous Republican opposition, providing the exact 60-40 margin needed to shut down a threatened GOP filibuster.
More
gregladen | December 21, 2009Fellow bloggers: You might find this resource to be very useful. I know I will.
Intelligence as a human characteristic and IQ as a measure of that characteristic are among the most misunderstood ... often willfully misunderstood ... concepts. Stephanie Zvan has put together an annotated bib of mainly web-based resources on the topic and posted it at Quiche Moraine.
Readings in IQ and Intelligence
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