gregladen | November 24, 2009The test saw the Solar Impulse take some slow steps down the runway using four solar-powered electric motors. The plane taxied without landing gear -- just like in a normal takeoff. Now that the runway test was successful, the Solar Impulse team will taxi to takeoff speed and let the plane take off for some short "hops" in the air. Full-fledged flight tests will begin next year.
more here.
gregladen | November 24, 2009More on the CA tuition thing:
What do you think about this news story? It is a product of Newsy.com, which I think is new.
gregladen | November 24, 2009Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for being a reader of my thesis) wishes Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday, and assesses this question:
a repost
How has Darwin's theory of Natural Selection fared over the last 150 years, and what needs to be done to bring this theoretical approach to bear as we increasingly examine complex systems…
gregladen | November 24, 2009I hear the cries and the calls of the religious moderate, and they are as usual correct. We have been too uppity, and I apologize on behalf of all of us. We should have known better, of course but in our exuberance at the publication of books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and others, we forgot to realize that even though our numbers seem to be growing we are really riding the crest of a fad. It was something we should have recognized, and we should have told all those who heard that there are other atheists just to go home and pretend that they are…
gregladen | November 24, 2009With ID proponents increasingly and more loudly decrying Darwin as the reason the Holocaust happened, Bogused-Up copies of The Origin being circulated by Banana Loving Christians, and attacks on real science and real science education in the US continuing as though there were no Constitution or court system telling them to take it down a notch, it is appropriate to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species with a certain amount of noise and gusto. I won't say that is the only way to do it, but it is one way. There are not a lot of other days on which one…
gregladen | November 24, 2009REMOVED BECAUSE THE "AMAZING ATHEIST" IS A VERY VERY BAD PERSON AND HIS STUFF IS NOT ALLOWED ON THIS BLOG ANY MORE .
gregladen | November 24, 2009Perhaps we are all subject to falling into the trap of what I call the Hydraulic Theory of Everything. If you eat more you will be bigger, if you eat less you will be smaller. Emotional states are the continuously varying outcome of different levels of a set of hormones, forming "happy" or "stressy" or "angry" cocktails. Your brain is a vessel into which life pours various elixirs. Too much of one thing, and there will not be enough room for something else. Even political arguments are hydraulic. The 'balanced' middle view between two arguments is like the mixture of contrasting primary…
gregladen | November 24, 2009A podcast from earlier in the year, celebrating Darwin's birthday.
A few essays focusing on Darwin's Voyage on The Beagle
Bon Voyage HMS Beagle
The Voyage of the Beagle
Darwin Crossing The Atlantic
Charles Darwin and the Rain Forest
Darwin Gets his Wellies Wet
South America on Five Dollars a Day
Bugs (Darwin)
Darwin South of the Tropics
Darwin and The Gauchos
Fossil Quadrupeds
Rheas and the Birth of Evolutionary Theory
Elephants and Horses
gregladen | November 24, 2009Modally speaking of course. And those are utterly different modes so the title of this post is of course nonsense. But, we do have some interesting data.
This is from the Gallup Pole of weekly job approval by demographic groups. The main thing this poll shows is that Obama has high job approval ratings, and that his job approval ratings are high in relation to other presidents at this moment in their terms.
George Bush's rankings, for his first term, dropped as all President's ratings seem to do, in an almost identical pattern as Obama's. Then, when Cheney/Bush allowed the attack on the…
gregladen | November 24, 2009The The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin was published 150 years go as I write this. At the time, several different alternative theories of the origin and history of life were being discussed in the West. Some of these theories were theological. Theological ideas included a literal translation of the bible, with the flora, the fauna, and humans created in three separate but related creation events on a freshly made earth just a few thousand years ago. Another theological idea had an Abrahamic God's hand involved in the history of life but in ways we were not likely to understand until…
gregladen | November 24, 2009Honoring the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, Evolution of Evolution: 150 Years of Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" is a multi-disciplinary one-stop-shop of resources on evolution and Darwin himself that are available nowhere else--including eye-catching graphics; captivating interviews and essays by a team of international evolutionary experts; fast-read texts; a timeline that neatly summarizes major intellectual and technological achievements that advanced our understanding of evolution; and downloadable documents.
HERE
gregladen | November 23, 2009This is the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. I will be posting Darwin related items all day.
SOURCE OF VIDEO
gregladen | November 23, 2009The Large Hadron Collider has produced some data!
Geneva, 23 November 2009. Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions. With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the look out for collisions. Later,…
gregladen | November 23, 2009I recommend the following two blog posts for the latest thinking on the conspiracy to force the anthropocentrical global warming conspiracy on the conspirators.
Hacked emails, tree-ring proxies and blogospheric confusion
...As has been pointed out numerous times, nothing in the stolen emails and other documents that found their way onto the Internet last week in any way challenges the science behind anthropogenic global warming. But a lot of the material does deal with one particular subfield of climatology, dendrochronology, the science of which appears to confuse just about everyone who…
gregladen | November 23, 2009Over the last several years, the cost of a college education in Minnesota has gone up several percent, but the range of services and opportunities one may have access to has not gone up (and in many cases gone down). This is probably true across the country. Right now, in California, there is debate over a 32 percent student fee increase. Which reminds me: There was a time when you could estimate the cost of college by knowing "tuition" and then cost of living while in college, and throwing in a couple of hundred bucks a year for other stuff like books. Then the book prices went through…
gregladen | November 23, 2009A warning before going any further: This blog will not be used as a dumping ground for the text of climategate related "released" emails. I have surveyed my readers and overwhelmingly have been told that people would prefer to not see that. So don't do that.
Now, on with the show...
Just two items, recent blog posts on this issue:
Real Climate: The CRU hack: Context
This is a continuation of the last thread which is getting a little unwieldy. The emails cover a 13 year period in which many things happened, and very few people are up to speed on some of the long-buried issues. So to save…