gregladen | June 29, 2009Bing, son of blogger and politico Mike Haubrich, has just arrived in Japan where he will spend several months assisting in a linguistic research project in the Greater Tokyo Metro area. And hopefully getting around the country a bit to see some cool stuff.
He's got a web site tracking his trip here.
Please note that there is a little donation button on that site. I think he's short of cash.
gregladen | June 29, 2009UPDATE: grrrrrrrrrr.....
The original story, now retracted, is below the fold.
Somebody is dicking around on the internet. It is possible that the Daily Express article is a "hoax" or a "fiction" ... at least, this is what some are claiming. See the updates here on Bad Astronomy.
I'm not sure if I would use the word "hoax" if this is simply inaccurate reporting. A hoax is different (sort of like the difference between a mugging and a hate crime?).
I also don't like the phrase "it is a fiction." What does that mean exactly? This story has several elements to it, including the…
gregladen | June 28, 2009On this day in 1885, Thomas Henry Huxley died at the age of 70. He is most famous for his sideburns, but in addition he was also involved with the study of evolution and the defense of Darwinism.
He also invented the term Agnostic. Which he was.
T.H. Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog
gregladen | June 28, 2009DOS stands for Disk Operating System.
In the old days it was how you ran your PC. You booted up the computer and you had a prompt much like today's Linux command line in appearance. If you typed "wp" at the command line, a text-based non-GUI version of WordPerfect would run. If you typed "dir" you'd get a list of files in the current subdirectory. If you typed "nc" you'd get norton commaner. Maybe. Can't remember exactly. And if you typed something like "term" .... well, you were on the internet, checking your mail in pine and maybe mining data with gopher.
Then, one day, it became…
gregladen | June 28, 2009As you know, there has been quite a bit of discussion about missionaries in the Congo on this blog. This is the central post pointing to everything else, and at Minnesota Atheists you'll find a link to today's radio show on the topic.
It turns out that a number of calls and emails did come in to the station today but we were unable to get to them. Among the emails, there is this two parter from from Jason Thibeault:
I have a two part question for Greg Laden. In conversations on your blog related to the topic prior to this show, you mentioned that there are secular missions to many of…
gregladen | June 28, 2009The best of last June
Triatoma infestans, Chagas vector This is the conclusion of a report to be published in the June 2008 PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal. The report, by Peter Hotez of George Washington University and the Sabin Vaccine Institute, is a clear indictment of economic disparity in the United States. The bottom line: Many poor Americans are, effectively, living in a poorly managed third world country.
Poor people in the United States are subject to a mostly ignored burden of diseases "caused by a group of chronic and debilitating parasitic, bacterial, and…
gregladen | June 28, 2009previously reviewed
Birds: Nature's Magnificent Flying Machines is a book by Caroline Arnold and illustrated by Patricia Wynne for, I'd say, Pre-Elementary School kids and first/second grade. This is a good book to read to a pre-literate kid. Then put it away for later when the first grade academic report on birds is due ... it will be an excellent reference.
This is a well done and highly recommended book.
Birds... is highly specialized. It deals with only one topic: Bird flight. I like that. Who needs just another book on birds. Demonstrating to the little ones that there are…
gregladen | June 28, 2009Whenever I sat at Joseph and Mary's dinner table, Mary showed a great deal of interest in my work. In between her frequent forays away from the dining room table to get this or that food item, or to issue instructions to a servant, or whatever, she would sit at the table across from me and ask questions.
"So, have you found anything interesting?" which is a standard question to which the answer was always "no" ... we do not want to give people the idea that they should head out into the bush with a shovel. "So, what to the Pygmies think of your research." And so on.
I remember that during…
gregladen | June 28, 2009Prisoners, nuns, do the wave for Jacko:
I concur with BGF's opinion on this.
Except I've got to add: When the nuns came out I kind of freaked. Also, as I've mentioned before, I totally missed the "we ae the world we are the Coke Commercial" event because I was in the jungle with the ... starving and dying children that year. Everybody was humming this song when I got back but no one could remember why.
gregladen | June 27, 2009The best of last June
... is certainly still in the future. But we have seen a step in that direction in a new paper, coming out this week in Science. This research applies intensive and extensive genomic analysis to the avian phylogenetic tree. The results are interesting.
This paper is summarized in a number of locations, most notably here on Living the Scientific Life. Here, I will summarize it only very briefly. However, there are two observations I would like to make about this paper and its apparent meaning. One has to do with the nature of science, and the other has to do with…
gregladen | June 27, 2009Let us not let the death of Ed McMahon and some other stars overshadow the anniversary of the death of one of the greats. In memoriam, let's talk bullshit:
gregladen | June 27, 2009The long running Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio air's its very last show tomorrow morning at 9:00 Central Time. Details of how to listen to the show, which will also be a podcast, are here.
This week's show will feature yours truly, and I'll be interviewed by Stephanie Zvan. The subject will be Missionaries in Africa. This interview should be considered an extension of this series of blog posts on the same topic.
My understanding is that the people who have produced this radio show up until now are planning to produce a podcast in the future. I will let you know as soon as I hear anything…
gregladen | June 27, 2009Joseph and Mary, and Little Joe and Mary, and Grinker and I, sat around the table where most of the dinner had been laid out. Additional bits and pieces of the dinner would be brought out as needed shortly, but now it was time to pray.
So we held hands and bowed our heads, and Mary led a prayer to Jesus for the bounty we were about to receive and stuff, and we all said Amen and were about to dig in, when Mary interrupted with a tone of voice and a hand signal that made everyone stop with their forks in mid air.
"We have a new tradition we'd like you to participate in," she said. Her husband…
gregladen | June 27, 2009In case you didn't know, the marriage proposal launched by Jodi (asking Jason) and largely organized by Stephanie, has resulted in an answer.
Congratulation Jodi and Jason!
Not long before this internet round robin was launched, Jodi made a limited distribution, organized by Stephanie, of some background on their situation, and a version of this is what you see in the proposal itself.
That prompted me to think about marriage related issues a bit, which in turn prompted me to sit down with Jodi and have a private little talk with the girl. Which, of course, I will now share with the entire…
gregladen | June 27, 2009previously reviewed
It utterly shocks me every time I make a reference to plastic alligators, Macy's bags with poisonous snakes in them, a guy named Skink or my favorite Bass Lure .... the Double Whammy .... and people look back at me with blank stares. Like, don't you get it? "To be or not to be" jokes or allusions to Sherlock Holmes are always understood. Or at least, people pretend to get them. But does no one read contemporary literature?
It is impossible, actually, to explain Carl Hiaasen's novels to anyone without sounding like a fool. All such attempts, made by anybody, start out…
gregladen | June 26, 2009I have obtained a document that describes the secret, inner workings of the on line publication PLoS ONE. The document also exposes future plans for the enterprise.
The link is below the fold.
The link for the PDF of the document is here. Don't tell anyone where you got it.
From the Abstract, which I have decoded for you:
PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed Open Access academic journal published by the Public Library of Science, was founded in 2006 with the intent of reevaluating many of the aspects of the scholarly journal. As a result, PLoS ONE has taken elements of the traditional publishing…
gregladen | June 26, 2009Diane Benscoter spent five years as a "Moonie." She shares an insider's perspective on the mind of a cult member, and proposes a new way to think about today's most troubling conflicts and extremist movements.