gregladen | September 22, 2009The main reason that a government shouldn't be run like a business is the profit motive. There is a key point here that the "government should be run like a business" people miss. The goal of government is decidedly not profit. The purpose of government is ...
Mike's post at Quiche Moraine is chock full of insight on this question.
gregladen | September 21, 2009An American scientist studying the origins of Black Death has died from an infection linked to the disease.
Professor Malcolm Casadaban was killed by a strain of the bacteria responsible for millions of deaths over the centuries, officials at the University of Chicago revealed.
An autopsy on the 60-year-old professor showed no obvious cause of death, except for the presence in his blood of the bacteria Yersinia pestis.
This strain of the plague is not thought to be fatal. It has actually been used as a vaccine. Obviously, there may have been complications of some kind. There is no known…
gregladen | September 21, 2009Erik Klemetti notes that Mt. Rainier has been experiencing increased seismic activity as of late. (details)
Overall activity level is up since the last month and the little earth quakes are a little bigger. No particular explanations are forthcoming yet. Current seismic data are here.
gregladen | September 21, 2009Imagine finding the following quote on the wall of your teenage child's social studies classroom:
"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God."
- George H.W. Bush
What would you do?
gregladen | September 21, 2009Featuring one of our local caribou bou bou.
More about Dark Dark Dark at a later time.
gregladen | September 21, 2009I just found out that Scienceblogs has a facebook page.
You should join it!
gregladen | September 21, 2009NCSE: National Center for Science Education
STOP RACISM!
STOP RACISM Minnesota
The Friends of Charles Darwin
Minnesota Atheists
The Beagle Project
gregladen | September 21, 2009This is yet another in a series of posts on falsehoods. To refresh your memory, a falsehood is a belief held by a number of people that is in some way incorrect. That incorrectness may be blatant, it may be subtle, it may be conditional, it may be simple, it may be complex. But, the unraveling of the falshoodosity of the belief is a learning experience, if it is accomplished in a thoughtful manner and without too much sophistry. In order for a falsehood to "work" as a learning opportunity it is important to define the statement in terms of the thoughts the falsehood invokes in the target…
gregladen | September 21, 2009Good question. A recent paper in PLoS ONE looks at H1N1 in foreign travelers in order to estimate the incidence of this virus in Mexico.
When a new disease comes on the scene, it is easy to underestimate how widespread it is, and to overestimate its severity. This is because at first the sickest people are noticed by the system. SO, everybody known with the disease is sicker, on average, than everybody who actually has the disease, and the extrapolation from known clinical cases to the general population is likely to be a low-ball estimate.
In this paper, the researchers report an…
gregladen | September 20, 2009If you have not yet read Goldilocks, a Very Cold Winter Night, And a Strange Sense of Empty-ness then please do so now. Only then will you have the background necessary to understand and appreciate The Mystery of the Returned Outboard Motor. As told to us by Jimmy James Watson Bettencourt ...
...
I came as quickly as I could on Laden's request. He was at the cabin, and the note dropped off at my practice by one of his boys was terse. "Come Watson!" and that is all I generally need to be compelled to arrive at my friend's side. When I entered the cabin he did not acknowledge my presence…
gregladen | September 20, 2009So we arrive at the cabin, and something seems amiss. With each new clue uncovered, we are at first disturbed, then aghast, and finally, astonished. None of it made very much sense until we found the note. Wow. The note.
A repost ... reposted for a reason (see next post)
The reason we were there at all was to drop off an old refrigerator and to check on things. There are two cabins, one semi-heated for winter, the other closed down, and into the second of these we would haul the fridge, staying for the night in the first.
Someone noticed a bag of cans, mostly soda, and some beer bottles…
gregladen | September 20, 2009Yay!!! Wooohooo!! Yipeeeee!!!!
OK, let's see what Kirk has to say about it:
gregladen | September 20, 2009First, some important business. If you have a science post, send it to Scientia Pro Publica. . They are due NOW and, I assume owing to the beginning of the school year, there is a shortage.
Second, check this out: Something interesting happened the other day when Almost Diamonds produced this post on purity movements (or, purity as a trait of a community. For convoluted reasons, this led to two largely separate communities bumping a little into each other, which is probably a minor fender bender, but that event resulted in THIS POST at Almost Diamonds, which is a list of posts that…
gregladen | September 20, 2009It turns out the war of Gog and Magog starts tomorrow, so I'm going to spend the rest of the time before The Rapture cleaning out my father-in-law's Scotch Collection which I happen to be alone with right now. Details here.
KTHXBYE
gregladen | September 20, 2009If you watch a fake hand standing in for your right hand, and it is touched with a brush while at the same time your left hand, hidden from view, is similarly touched, you feel your right hand being touched. This spooky finding is called "phantom touch" and was reported in a recent issue of PLoS ONE.
...we report a perceptual illusion where people experience "phantom touches" on a right rubber hand when they see it brushed simultaneously with brushes applied to their left hand. Such illusory duplication and transfer of touch from the left to the right hand was only elicited when a homologous…