gregladen | July 23, 2009Who would think that men of the cloth or elected officials would be involved in graft?!?!?
NEWARK, N.J. - Three New Jersey mayors, two state lawmakers, a deputy mayor and five rabbis were among 44 people charged Thursday in a two-track corruption and international money-laundering probe, the U.S. Attorney's Office for New Jersey announced.
FBI and IRS agents arrested most of the suspects Thursday morning in what is being described as one of the biggest investigations of its kind in New Jersey history, according to NBC affiliate WNBC.
Details here
Remember Abscam?
This appears to be a…
gregladen | July 23, 2009Over the last week two vacuum leaks have been found in sectors 8-1 and 2-3 (Sector 7g is still holding). The leaks are similar to each other in position and therefore in likely cause. Unfortunately, these leaks are in already chilled down parts of the LHC and they will have to be warmed up to make repairs.
The delay will probably be a couple of weeks, so a planned (hoped for) October startup will now likely be mid November.
The details can all be found in this report.
gregladen | July 23, 2009Do we use nuclear power to get us past the current climate change crisis?
Fight it out here with Jonas Meckling.
gregladen | July 22, 2009An exclusive KIRO 7 Investigation reveals an alarming number of Apple brand iPod MP3 players have suddenly burst into flames and smoke, injuring people and damaging property.
details
gregladen | July 22, 2009Vaccine
Human trials of a vaccine to protect against the H1N1 swine flu virus have begun in Australia.
Riots spread in South Africa
Violence in South Africa's townships has spread as residents protest about what they say is a lack of basic services, such as water and housing.
Scientist will make human brain. Mwahahahahah!
A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed.
New Zealand, Australia, expected to collide. Eventually.
A massive earthquake last week has brought New Zealand closer to Australia, scientists say....The…
gregladen | July 22, 2009Don't worry, it is not as bad as it sounds, but it is somewhat contagious.
Abwrackpraemie is German for "car scrappage bonus" which is what you get if you turn in your older lower mpg car for a new higher mpg car, I assume.
The word was added to the German Language earlier today as five thousand words in total were loaded into Das Dictionary. Other words include Konjunkturpaket (stimulus package) and "After-Show-Party" (that one is from English). Oh, and we have a new verb in German as well: Twittern. Not sure what it means, though.
There is a story on this here at the BBC or you can…
gregladen | July 22, 2009... or something. You will recall that Michele Bachmann has lambasted Americorps, the Bill Clinton Legacy program like the Peace Corps, as a political re-education camp in the service of the Liberal Left Wing. WEll, Harrison Bachmann, son of Michele, entered the program just a couple of weeks ago.
Details at DMB, who has broken this news exclusively. (Chalk up one for the Blogosphere.)
gregladen | July 22, 2009And commenting is back on. We may expect some slowness at the beginning as fine tuning happens, and RSS feeds and channels are not on yet.
gregladen | July 22, 2009There has been some recent discussion on the blogs and on Facebook about the tension an adviser might experience between paying attention to graduate students and doing the other stuff you are supposed to do, or from the student perspective, how to deal with getting that quality time from your adviser.
Much of this discussion is in the area of standard NIH funded lab-ratty science which is a world that I am only marginally familiar with. But that is not the only kind of science that is done, and these issues permeate academia beyond the sciences. There are built-in tensions between doing…
gregladen | July 21, 2009In any event, more people seem to like Al Franken than who voted for him ... if we compare the 42% of the vote he got with the 49% approval rating he now has. (details)
This is partly a function of increased favorablity following the nasty recount process, but is also reminds us of something else: There was a third candidate in this race. If Dean Barkley was not in this race, would the outcome have been so close? And, who would have won?
The common knowledge on the street at the time of the election is that about two thirds of Barkley's votes would have been for Franken had Barkley not…
gregladen | July 21, 2009Appropedia, like Wikipedia, lets anyone contribute or edit articles. Its goal is narrowly focused on collaborating to find solutions that can reduce poverty, increase sustainable living, and help people in developing countries. If you have ideas that you can contribute, consider submitting an article. If you are passionate about these topics and are a great editor, consider editing one of the many articles that are sitting in editorial limbo.
Details at Digital Rabbit
gregladen | July 21, 2009...Mentally and socially, we begin our lives as tabula rasa, empty vessels waiting to be filled and develop our sense of selves based on the totality of interactions we have while developing. This then affects the way that we approach questions. As people we decide what to accept and what to discount based on how the information we receive incorporates into our accumulated experiences and understandings and the sorts of feedback that we have gotten on the way that we process information....
By Mike at Quiche Moraine. Please have a look.
gregladen | July 21, 2009It has become axiomatic that the use of adornment by humans is some sort of symbolic act, and thus is linked to the human symbolic and linguistic mind. The human symbolic and linguistic mind is the trait that we axiomatically believe to be the derived human feature ... the cladistic apomorphy that makes us human (as opposed to other-ape). Therefore, the use of adornment is seen by early 21st century archaeologists as evidence of modern human behavior.
Some artifacts from early archaeological sties might be adornment, or they might be 'art' (or at least "arty") and they might be related to…
gregladen | July 21, 2009A three part conversation between two women overheard on the University of Minnesota campus.
Part 1 of conversation:
"So, did you read that obnoxious post that that Isis the Scientist, that Goddess blogger, did and her yelling at ERV and all?"
"Yeah, I did. What a bunch of stupid."
"If you listen to Isis, all you get is 'misogyny this, misogyny that, he touched me, he looked at me, yadayadayada' but if you listen to ERV you get a whole different thing about what working in a lab is like."
"Yeah, I know. S'all stupid shit."
"You work in a lab, right?"
"Yeah."
"You're hot, right?"
"Yes, baby,…
gregladen | July 21, 2009... by Skepchick by "carr2d2" ... touch on a wide range of topics that make TAM7 seem like a microcosm of the blogosphere, academia, and to some (limited) extent the broader society.
"...a lot of men in the skeptical movement, well intentioned as they may be, have a tendency to look at women as though we are some sort of separate species; monolithic and mysterious..."
Regarding commentary on women's dress at the conference by Drescher, "I honestly find it difficult to know where to begin here. You want more women in skepticism, but when they show up without properly camouflaging their…
gregladen | July 20, 2009It would appear so. We see it in a ...
Preliminary image showing a black mark in Jupiters South Polar Region (SPR) which is almost certainly the result of a large impact - either an asteroid or comet - similar to the Shoemaker-Ley impacts in 1994.
This is on Anthony Wesley's web site, and what appears to be the outcome of an impact event has been photographed by him.
A bit of his post reads:
I started this imaging session on Jupiter at approximately 11pm local time (1300UTC). The weather prediction was not promising, clear skies but a strong jetstream overhead according to the Bureau of…
gregladen | July 20, 2009Because some of you are not my facebook friends ....
Here are the instructions....
Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you.
First 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.
Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you.
If you can't read, just list the picture books you looked at.
1. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Signet Classics)
2. Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories
3. The Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches (Penguin Classics)
4. The Golden Book…
gregladen | July 20, 2009Mendel was born on July 20th, 1822. He is famous for his discovery of peas and genetics.
Here is his stuff translated into English.