gregladen | October 8, 2009Lately, creationist rhetoric seems to increasingly mention the idea that if scientists really understood evolution, life, and biology, then why don't they just create it themselves, as a kind of proof of concept? This rhetoric usually includes a statement like: "They can't even create a simple cell ... "
A repost
This is very annoying, and displays either creationists' excellent ability to frame their arguments or their utter stupidity. In fact, a cell is the most complicated thing going in biology. A cell is more complicated than an organism that is made up of cells, assuming that you don…
gregladen | October 8, 2009We are the angry left. Don't get us mad.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | October 8, 2009James Hall has a post on Collective Imagination that you will want to read if you are interested in FOSS.
gregladen | October 7, 2009Yes, Laelaps on Scienceblogs Dot Com is two years old today! Can you believe it?
What? You never heard of Laelaps? Inconceivable!!!!
Start here and read everything. It's really great.
gregladen | October 7, 2009OK, you can go back to lower ground now. The warning has been canceled.
From the BBC:
A tsunami warning has been issued for 11 nations in the south-west Pacific, including Papua New Guinea, after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake off Vanuatu.
The epicentre was 295km (180 miles) north-northwest of Vanuatu's largest island, Santo, at a depth of 35km (21.7 miles), the US Geological Survey said.
Here is the USGS data for the earthquake:
Magnitude
7.8
Date-Time
Wednesday, October 07, 2009 at 22:03:15 UTC
Thursday, October 08, 2009 at 09:03:15 AM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time…
gregladen | October 7, 2009... Collectively. By visiting the new Scienceblogs.com blog "Collective Imagination."
Collective imagination pairs an individual science blogger with an individual scientist or engineer type person from G.E. to discuss stuff. Currently, the science blogger in the Collective Imagination Steel Cage is Yours Truly, and the GE Engineer is my Arch Nemesis Peter Tu.
Go over to Collective Imagination and watch as Peter and I wrestle around in the mud and try to choke each other, metaphorically, over issues of Security and Technology.
gregladen | October 7, 2009When I hear the words "We are a Microsoft shop" I cringe. And I usually look at the person who just said it funny. Here is one reason why.
gregladen | October 7, 2009is HERE.
There's no way this is up to number 77 already. I don't believe that.
gregladen | October 7, 2009Have you arrived to read this post because you don't like the sound of the title? Does it piss you off? Good.
A repost from last election season.
Listen. When I was a child, in Catholic School, I was told (by the nuns, older kids in school, and some other adults) not to trust the Jews. It was literally true that the Catholic rhetoric in this small but significant city in an an Eastern US state was that "The Jews killed our God."
I was told to not go near the Jewish Temple, especially on Friday or Saturday, because it would be too easy to stumble on a ceremony. In second grade, I was…
gregladen | October 7, 2009A new investigation of the sedimentology and ichnology of the Early Jurassic Moyeni tracksite in Lesotho, southern Africa has yielded new insights into the behavior and locomotor dynamics of early dinosaurs.
The tracksite is a pont bar in an old river that had a lot of variation in slope and the nature of the sediment on which one would walk. There are trackways of numerous different kinds of dinosaurs that walked across this surface over a very short period of time (of several days or a bit longer). The different dinosaurs responded to the different surfaces differently. That is not a…
gregladen | October 7, 2009Tiny little cameras were attached to albatross as they flew around over the open ocean hunting. This is important because it is really hard to study albatross at open sea, and virtually impossible to follow individuals one might like to track from, say, a nesting grounds out many miles (they fly fast and far). By attaching cameras, temperature and depth gauges to the birds one gets some VERY interesting results.
I've written a review of a paper that just came out in PLoS on this topic and posted it at Surprising Science, here. Please have a look.
gregladen | October 7, 2009Pursuant to the recent discussion on the safety of carrying guns, I thought I'd throw this on the table:
According to this web page there are numerous studies demonstrating that increased firearms carrying decreases crime. The argument is being made that armed students will generally stop an attack in progress on a campus, if there are armed students but also notes that "in homes, in businesses and on the streets, ... people use guns to stop violent crime--without hurting themselves or any innocent bystander."
The study goes on to say:
The landmark study by criminologists Gary Kleck and…
gregladen | October 7, 2009
This is for all your nascent researchers about to head off to remote places to engage in your very first fieldwork, and for all you eco-tourists or educational travelers about to embark on a trip through strange lands afar.
A Repost
When I was preparing to start my graduate research in Africa, I was already very experienced in fieldwork, but all of it was in the United States, and although there is cultural variation across the land even in old New England and New York, the work I was planning was at a field site in Africa originally selected precisely because of its extreme remoteness.…
gregladen | October 6, 2009Because they won 6 to 5 in the 12th inning, and are thus the American League Central Division Champions.
gregladen | October 6, 2009You read about it here ... now you can see the music video version:
I think those guys might be related or something.
gregladen | October 6, 2009Do these look similar to you?
According to Apple corp, th e one on the left may be too similar to the one on the right.
The other day Julia and I went to a coffee shop together to work on our stuff. When she opened her laptop I was shocked to see the Apple Logo on it! I thought she was still using the old hand me down laptop from grandpa on which I had installed Linux.
"Where did you get the Mac???" I said.
"What?" she looked at me quizically. Then a grin as she realized what I was talking about. "That apple thingie came with my iPod. I stuck it on this old clunker so I'd look cool…
gregladen | October 6, 2009Early Friday Morning, plus/minus one half a day depending on where in the world you are, two alien space craft are going to crash into the moon. It will be visible from earth with a small telescope.
Read about it here!