gregladen | June 16, 2009Cloud Appreciation Society agrees. Scientists skeptical, but considering the possibilities ....
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
As Bill Nye says, it could all be a matter of perspective ...
gregladen | June 16, 2009The Republican Party is looking for direction. They want ideas about policy, and in particular, about how to react to the Obama administration's positions on a number of issues.
You can help them. This may take a few minutes of time but you may find it .... interesting.
Mike Haubrich has the details here.
gregladen | June 16, 2009Maddow on torture. "I make up stories."
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We need to just get these documents out now, in full.
gregladen | June 16, 2009
Deborah Halber, News Office Correspondent
April 11, 2007
The public persona of the Atom is mild-mannered physics professor Ray Palmer, who fashioned a lens that enabled him to shrink any object to any degree he wished. The lens's secret ingredient is a chunk of a white dwarf star, and a 1960s version of the Atom comic book shows the professor in a grassy field, huffing and puffing as he carries a grapefruit-sized piece of the star (which has miraculously fallen to Earth) to his car.
Palmer seems undaunted by the fact that a sphere of white dwarf star that size would weigh 500,000 tons.
Jim…
gregladen | June 16, 2009For those of you interested in Super Heroes, check this out:
Superhero alter-ego Steve Rogers - the original Captain America - is to come back from the dead in a new five-part Marvel Comic series.
The first part of Captain America Reborn will be out in the US on 1 July, but its makers will not say how Rogers will come back to life.
Rogers was apparently shot and killed in 2007 on the steps of a courthouse.
Since then, the 68-year-old series has continued with Rogers' sidekick Bucky Barnes taking on the superhero mantle.
bbc
Which reminds me, I've been meaning to repost my old post on Jim's…
gregladen | June 16, 2009Here is the Guinea Worm Movie, and for more information and additional links, click here.
Minor Africa Story hidden below the fold.
A small Jimmy Carter story: A friend of mine got a job, while in his first or second year of graduate school, as in intern for the State Department. Since he was studying Africa, he got sent to Uganda where, one would think, an inexperienced intern would be at the bottom of the pecking order.
And he was at the bottom of the pecking order, but he was also at the top. For whatever reason, the Ambassador and all the other people who were under the Ambassador…
gregladen | June 15, 2009This visual representation of the inside of a Linux Kernel build clearly had an image of Jesus Christ hidden in it.
(There is some context here.)
gregladen | June 15, 2009[On June 19th] we'll be talking about Astronomy with popular author and super-blogger Phil Plait!
And, as usual, we have a lot of questions.
Like, why is Pluto now not a planet? What's NASA up to lately? And what's the deal with the Hubble Telescope? How do we know we really landed on the moon? Is it likely that the world will be destroyed by asteroids, comets, black holes, or supernovae?
Ooh! Like in the Star Trek movie! When Spock is mind-melding with Kirk? He talks about a supernova that "threatened the galaxy"! Can that happen?
Um... the supernova part, not the mind meld.
Ask away on the…
gregladen | June 15, 2009is now available here, at Mauka to Makai. It is a great edition, plus the Mauka to Makai site itself is worth a look for a number of reasons. So go there.
Then, later, when you have a chance, go here and submit a post for the next Scientia Pro Publica, which will be hosted HERE at this blog. This one, here, the one you are reading right now. Use this handy dandy submission form.
email your submissions here
Thank you very much.
gregladen | June 15, 2009Imagine my surprise when I try to print a document, and nothing comes out of the printer. The printer isn't claiming it's processing the document - and in one instance, while waiting for my document, I saw the printer fire up and spit out someone else's document. On these occasions, if I go back to my desk and flip back to the Office application that was trying to print, only then does the document print. In fact, I can see Word finally display the status message "Printing page 1 of ..." at the bottom of the window.
Read the rest of the horror story here at Linux in Exile.
My own worst…
gregladen | June 15, 2009This is one of those science stories that is on one hand fairly simple, and on the other hand fairly complex, where the interface between simplicity and complexity causes little balls of misunderstanding to come flying out of the mix like pieces of raw pizza dough if the guy making the pizza was the Tasmanian Devil from the cartoons.
What is true: A scientist named Ryskin proposes that decadal or century scale minor wiggling in the measured Earth's magnetic field is influenced by changes in ocean currents. Plausible. Interesting. Could explain some things. Not earthshaking.
What is…
gregladen | June 14, 2009Republicans in congress bought and paid for by Big Pharma and the other nefarious elements of the health care industry are going to kill any attempts at reform.
Unless....
The same kind of organization at the grass roots level that put Obama in office is marshaled to force congress to do the right thing. This won't be easy.
Stand with Obama: Support a Public Health Insurance Option
On Wednesday, President Obama reaffirmed his support for a public health insurance option--the key piece of health care reform that will provide coverage for all Americans and help bring costs down.
But as the…
gregladen | June 14, 2009This just in from NASA:
PASADENA, Calif. -- Astronomers have at last uncovered newborn stars at the frenzied center of our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery was made using the infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
The heart of our spiral galaxy is cluttered with stars, dust and gas, and at its very center, a supermassive black hole. Conditions there are harsh, with fierce stellar winds, powerful shock waves and other factors that make it difficult for stars to form. Astronomers have known that stars can form in this chaotic place, but they're baffled as to how this occurs.…
gregladen | June 14, 2009Birdwatching might be a casual activity, a hobby, an avocation, or even a profession (often, perhaps, an obsession) depending on the bird watcher, but there is always a science to it, in at least two ways. First, there is the science of how to do it. In this sense, the term "science" means something vernacular. We as easily say "birdwatching is an art" as we could say "there is a science to it" and here we are using both terms( "art" and "science") in their older sense where science is how we approach things with our minds, and art is how we approach things with our hands.
Second,…
gregladen | June 13, 2009Atheists Talk #0074, Sunday June 14, 2009
Is there a direct correlation between atheism and liberalism? Why do so many atheists lean towards the left of the political spectrum? Many of our past shows have focused on the Conservative Christian influence over American politics, but does that necessarily mean that one needs to oppose their views in all areas? Politics, philosophy and atheism are the topic for today's show. Our guest is Massimo Pigliucci, who contacted us following our interview with Sunsara Taylor, because he wanted to address a few of the points she had made in regards to…