gregladen | February 21, 2016When the Texas A&M University Press asked me to consider reviewing Feeding Wild Birds in America: Culture, Commerce, and Conservation by Paul Baicich, Margaret Barker, and Carrol Henderson, I had mixed feelings.
Was this just another backyard bird feeding guide? That would be nice, but not too exciting. After all, feeding birds is just a matter of getting a bird feeder and keeping it full, right? Was it an indictment of what some might consider a bad practice, because it brings birds in close contact with killer windows and cats, and causes them to become dependent on fickle human…
gregladen | February 19, 2016Tropical cyclone Winston is now a Category 4 storm and is probably going to make a direct hit on Fiji, tomorrow, Saturday. It will likely be a record storm for Fiji.
The storm is fueled by high sea surface temperatures, which extend to a significant depth, which probably caused the storm to intensify rapidly and to such a high state.
Jeff Masters and Bob Henson have written up the important information on this storm, here.
Fiji has been hit with a number of bad tropical storms, mainly concentrated in recent decades.
UPDATE (Friday PM Central)
Jeff Masters and Bob Henson are now…
gregladen | February 19, 2016Back in the old days, yesterday, making comments on the mobile version of Scienceblogs.com was sometimes difficult because the thingie at the bottom of the post that suggests the other wonderful blog posts you might want to visit tended to cover up the comments.
That has been fixed!
That is all, thank you very much for your patience.
gregladen | February 19, 2016It is far too early to predict the outcome of the Democratic Party primary. Personally, I like both of the candidates and will support whichever one is selected to run in the general election. Both candidates have strong reasons to vote for them, and each candidate has their own “electability” issues. I vote on March 1st, and have not yet decided whom to vote for.
Why would I start out an essay, an essay that is meant to be an objective analysis, with that statement? Because the validity of a statement, opinion, or analysis of the current primary process is inevitably evaluated in terms of…
gregladen | February 19, 2016Classic dinosaurs went extinct long before humans existed. But birds are dinosaurs, and birds still exist. So, no.
But birds are not classic dinosaurs mainly because they are not extinct (a tautology) and they are not big and scary. But some of them were.
One of the last (but not the last) big scary bird-dinosaur creatures may have gone extinct because humans ate them, or more likely, ate their eggs. In Australia. Perhaps.
Anyway, I wrote this new finding up here, at 10,000 birds.
gregladen | February 18, 2016Kamal Harris is running for Barbara Boxer's seat in the California Senate. She just received an endorsement from Climate Hawks Votes. This is not an easy endorsement to get. A candidate has to be a true "Climate Hawk" and have climate change as a top priority, and to be smart about it, to have actual policies and a record. Here is what Climate Hawks Vote says about this candidate:
One word explains why we’re endorsing Kamala Harris for US Senate in California:
Exxon.
Shortly after Kamala Harris announced she was running to replace retiring Barbara Boxer as California’s next senator, she…
gregladen | February 16, 2016Recently NASA GISS released the measurement of the Earth's surface for January 2016. I added this latest measurement to the long term database (from 1880) and calculated the running 12 month average of surface temperatures. This is the resulting graph:
These are anomaly values, as indicated. January was the warmest month recorded in terms of anomaly, and it follows December 2015 as the previous warmest month. The top warmest anomalies in the entire NASA GISS database (going back to 1880) are listed below.Notice that all of these years are recent, and notice that the warmest and most recent…
gregladen | February 15, 2016I have often made the argument that religiosity, a personal belief in god, spirits, the supernatural, etc., would emerge in human societies on its own if it wasn't there already.
Imagine taking an entire generation of people in a geographically isolated region, and wiping out their memory of religion, and also, removing all references to religion that they might ever encounter. They would be religion free for a while, maybe even for a number of generations, but eventually, they would reinvent it.
Everybody has a theory of why religion exists, what purposes it serves, etc. etc. Until proven…
gregladen | February 12, 2016Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are viable candidates to win the Democratic nomination to run for President of the United States.
There are polls and pundits to which we may refer to make a guess as to who will win. Or, we could ignore all that, and let the process play out and see what happens. But, spreadsheets exist, so it really is impossible to resist the temptation of creating a simplistic spreadsheet model that predicts the outcome.
But we can take that a step further and suggest alternate scenarios, based on available data. So I did that.
I have removed the so called "Super…
gregladen | February 11, 2016First, what is a gravitational wave?
I find it interesting that some people are expressing difficulty in understanding what a gravitational wave is, as though everybody (who is not a physicist) has a perfectly good understanding of what any kind of wave is. We don't need to go too deeply beneath the surface, as it were, to understand this well enough to be amazed at the discovery, but not well enough to get a job being a Gravitational Waveologist.
Imagine a perfectly flat pond. Imagine throwing a stone out into the middle of the pond. Now imagine ripples, tiny waves, spreading out from the…
gregladen | February 11, 2016Just a quick note that will be of interest to my local readers. Senator Leo Foley passed away at the age of 87, just a few days ago. Senator John Hoffman, who now hold Senator Foley's old seat, wrote this:
Last Friday, Feb. 5 former Coon Rapids Senator Leo T. Foley passed away peacefully surrounded by his loved ones; he was 87. Sen. Foley served the Coon Rapids area for 14 years, serving from 1997 to 2011. I took up the mantle of serving the area following Sen. Foley’s retirement.
I first met Leo in 2002, and ever since then I was incredibly proud to call him my State Senator. Leo Foley…
gregladen | February 11, 2016Sean B. Carroll is coming out with a new book called The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters.
This is the molecular biologist Sean Carroll, as distinct from the physicist (who wrote this).
Homeostasis is one of the basic principles of biology. The term can be applied broadly to mean that certain numbers are maintained within a certain range. This could refer to energy flowing through a system, numbers of specific cellular products like enzymes, numbers of individual organisms in an ecological system, etc. It is not so much that numbers don't change.…
gregladen | February 11, 2016I don't normally write about faith (I'm an atheist, I'd be bad at it), but I do often write about climate change. But my friend and colleague Paul Douglas happens to be an Evangelical Christian, Republican, and Rock Star Meteorologist. You've seen his work if you've seen the movies Jurassic Park or Twister. If you are from the Twin Cities area, you are probably still mourning his departure from WCCO TV, where he was famous for giving highly accurate weather forecasts, and acknowledging the realty of global warming.
Paul calls himself an albino unicorn, because he is a Republican and an…
gregladen | February 10, 2016I'm looking at an exit poll by NBC and I have thoughts.
Gender Gap
Much has been made of the fact that Sanders got 55% of female votes, more than 44% for Clinton. That is indeed significant. But little has been said about the fact that among males, 66% voted for Sanders and 32% for Clinton. (55% of the Democratic Primary voters were female, 45% male.)
Race/Ethnicity
93% of the Democratic Primary voters were white, 2% black, and the numbers are so small that almost nothing can be said about this important distinction among voters. This is unfortunate because this will impact several…
gregladen | February 9, 2016At about 9 PM eastern, with 90% of the votes counted in the Democratic primary, Sanders is showing a strong win. He is currently at about 60%, while Clinton is at 38%. That gap is significantly larger than what I had intuitively established at the cutoff for a Sanders "lower than expectation loss." So, congratulations Bernie Sanders! If those numbers hold, that is a decisive win.
(A lot of Sanders supporters were crowing about a 20% lead in the polls, which seemed kind of extreme at the time. They may end up being proven right!)
In the Republican primary, with about 90% reporting, Donald…
gregladen | February 9, 2016Over the last several years, ice fishing contests, which are a big deal in Minnesota, have been repeatedly cancelled due to insufficient ice thickness on the relevant lake. Some of these contests have been permanently cancelled because the annual cancelations were becoming more frequent. Just now, the Maple Lake Ice Fishing Derby has been cancelled. That's bad.
But even more disturbing is this:
Ice conditions for the Eel Pout Festival have created enough concern to prompt vehicle restrictions, according to the Cass County Sheriff’s Office.
Sheriff Tom Burch says vehicle traffic on Walker…
gregladen | February 8, 2016I wrote about what I thought might happen in the New Hampshire primary a few days ago, but enough new stuff has happened to make it worth revisiting.
Who will win the New Hampshire GOP Primary?
And, perhaps more important, who will come in second, third, and fourth?
We know that Donald Trump will win the New Hampshire primary. Polls show him up far above the other candidates, he has been on a modest upward trend since the beginning of the year, and the most recent polls show an abrupt upward swing. He now stands at about 17% above the second place candidates.
New Hampshire seems to like…
gregladen | February 5, 2016I watched the debate pretty closely, and in my opinion, both candidates did pretty well and it was mostly an even contest. (Note: I am not committed to one or the other candidate, I happen to like them both.)
Sanders did very well in getting his message across, but he demonstrated weakness in foreign policy.
Clinton did a good job at addressing the alleged Wall Street ties and addressing the email issue.
But there is another way to answer the question. How much did each candidate strengthen their own support, and how much did each candidate do to convince undecided individuals to prefer…
gregladen | February 4, 2016SEE THIS UPDATE
ADDED: Following the GOP primary, there has been another development. In most recent polls, Trump is clearly ahead in New Hampshire, with Marco Rubio a moderately strong second or third. In various polls he is second in most polls (by a few points) and tied in one. Kasich is generally right behind Rubio, with Cruz in third place in a few polls.
Rubio crashed and burned in last night's debate, according to most observers. And he really did. So, this may be reflected in New Hamsphire with Rubio moving down quite a bit. He crashed in part because Christie skillfully skewered…
gregladen | February 3, 2016Was the Iowa Caucus outcome determined by a coin flip?
We have seen several reports that Hillary Clinton won the Iowa Caucus by a coin toss, or by six coin tosses. Or some other number. We've also seen reports that six delegates were awarded to Clinton on the basis of coin tosses, implying that of the 44 delegates determined on Monday in Iowa a large percentage were chosen by the toss of an unfair coin, that somehow the Clinton campaign controlled the coin tosses causing them to all come out in her favor. And so on.
After a barrage of these reports, we are now seeing a small number of reports…