gregladen | November 23, 2009Interview by Jimmy James Bettencourt
It was dark and the streets were wet as I pulled out of the ER where I had seen enough carnage for the night and found the highway heading straight into town. Right away there was a sense of trouble and randomness in the air as police cars careened desperately across the on-ramp and onto the grassy median in pursuit of something a bit more exciting than a box of donuts. Their flashing lights caused most of the cars on the ramp to squeeze sheepishly to the side, allowing me to pull around them and get out onto the road five minutes quicker.
I was going to…
gregladen | November 23, 2009A six-metre croc with three sets of fangs is among the five ancient relatives of modern-day crocodiles found in the Sahara Desert, scientists said Thursday.
Three of the fossils, discovered by researchers led by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago and Hans Larsson of McGill University, represent newly named species.
The fossil remains were found in a series of expeditions beginning in 2000.
All of the prehistoric crocs lived about 100 million years ago in the southern super-continent known as Gondwana, when the region that is now the Sahara featured dinosaurs and grassy plains criss-…
gregladen | November 23, 2009The Free Market is a god-like powerful force that we can rely on to solve our problems, especially those of supply and demand. So if, as the WHO estimates, about 2% of the population is going to be covered by H1N1 Swine Flu vaccine then ... shall we assume that the other 98% of the world's population did something wrong and angered the Free Market?
Everyone has seen this [shortage] coming. But everyone also decided that we would have to rely on the "market" and the private sector to solve it. Well, not everyone. We have been calling for years for ten or a dozen international regional…
gregladen | November 22, 2009Fellow Sbling Chad Orzel's book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, just might be out in time for you to give it to your dog for Christmas!
I don't know what the book is about, but then again, neither does your dog, really. Anyway, check it out, there is a picture of it here.
gregladen | November 22, 2009This week is Thanksgiving in the United States. This means that over the coming weekend many Americans will be putting up Christmas decorations in and outside their houses. Many children will be putting finishing touches on their letters to Santa. The shopping malls will start to fill and while economists examine and measure the retail sales bump for signs that the world will not end, we, as a nation, will come together to incrementally crank up the material contents stored in our homes and the corresponding mass of our public landfills.
But what do Atheists do on Christmas?
We declare…
gregladen | November 21, 2009The vote was 60-39 to bring the health care bill to debate. The Republicans failed to stop health care insurance reform on procedural grounds.
details.
gregladen | November 21, 2009Julia ended up with a minor concussion today.
Too many face palms during the movie 2012!
But seriously folks, we did just watch the movie 2012, and I can make a few comments on it. I'd like to start out by making a list of academic and applied areas that were butchered by the movie:
Ship building
Geosciences (all of them)
Aerodynamics
Physics (all areas)
Geography
Archaeology
Political Science
Psychology
But otherwise, it was fun. The premise of the movie is that the Mayans had it right: At the winter solstice 2012, which is the end of the 13th cycle of the current Long Count, the world…
gregladen | November 21, 2009Do not do this at home. This is for certified scientists only. Do not put your finger in this.
gregladen | November 21, 2009The Anthropocentric Global Warming Denialist Community is collectively creaming in its collective jeans over the release of zillions of emails that definitively prove that the whole global warming conspiracy thing was made up. Real Climate has the story:
There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to 'get rid of the MWP', no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no 'marching orders' from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put…
gregladen | November 20, 2009I have a few non-authoritative comments regarding recent and current medical developments. This concerns the flu (esp. the H1N1 Swine Pandemic Flu), and the two recent changes in screening recommendations, for breast and cervical cancer and related issues.
Regarding the flu, we are seeing more evidence that a peak has passed in the H1N1 outbreak. What you need to know if you are in the US is that as of today, the CDC has NOT declared that a peak has passed here. The number of states with "outbreak" level occurrences has dropped and the number of children who die per week has gone down a…
gregladen | November 20, 2009Artificial Intelligence as a term implies that there is a "natural" intelligence we wish to replicate in the lab and then engineer in any one of several practical contexts. There is nothing in the term that implies that "intelligence" be human, but the implication is clear that such a thing as "intelligence" exists and that we have some clue as to what it is.
But it might not, and we don't.
Read the rest here...
gregladen | November 20, 2009A high-voltage arc caused by a 500kV Switch opening up in the Nevada Desert. An enormous Jacob's Ladder
gregladen | November 20, 2009Some guy named David (but he would not give his last name) and his friends were handing around Ray Comfort's tricked-out version of Darwin's Origin of Species on the University of Minnesota Campus today. Thanks to my former student Becky for sending me these links:
Minnesota Daily: Creationists hand out Darwin's book with a twist
Huyffpo: Kirk Cameron's 'Origin Of Species' Plan: Ex-Actor To Distribute 50,000 Altered Darwin Books