gregladen | March 13, 2009The crew of the international space station had a close call with a spent satellite engine in Earth orbit Thursday, forcing the crew to take shelter aboard its return capsule before the object passed harmlessly, NASA said.
cnn
Well, as George Carlin would say, "That was not a near miss. It was a near hit."
gregladen | March 13, 2009Coleman, that is.
Stephanie Zvan kicks Norm Coleman's ass all the way from here to Bognor Regis.
Read it here.
gregladen | March 13, 2009A 24-year-old ski lift operator who fatally shot the general manager of the Eldora ski area was determined to kill co-workers who weren't Christian, according to court records obtained Thursday.
Ed's got this covered.
gregladen | March 13, 2009... Not politically better, not feel good better, not any of that. Well, yes, that too. But for all areas where Open Source is developed, it it simply better technologically. Anybody telling you different is selling you a bill of goods.
I tried to say something of this sort here, on Bill Hooker's blog post "On science and selfishness," but his #%$@$#$ (presumably OpenSource) blog software would not accept my comment!!!! (Hey Bill, get that fixed, man, you're ruining it for everybody!!!). So, instead of saying it there, I'll say it here. This is my comment:
~~~
Bill:
I deeply disagree…
gregladen | March 13, 2009.... Not to pick on Norm's physical appearance or anything, but those of use who find his continued existence in Minnesota politics both enigmatic and unconscionable (for us, for allowing it) are starting to see him like that. Anyway, somebody who is too busy to blog sent me this interesting item: Wikileaks comes back at Coleman on donor database exposure. The long and the short of it: Norm Coleman's campaign donor database, including such interesting items as name and credit card number, became internet-visible a couple of months back. Since that time, this error was exposed, and Norm…
gregladen | March 13, 2009March 12, 2009 (Computerworld) WASHINGTON -- While new federal CIO Vivek Kundra gave a speech here this morning on his vision for the U.S. government's use of technology, the FBI conducted a search of the District of Columbia's IT offices -- where Kundra worked until last week -- and arrested an employee and another person who works for an outsourcing vendor, according to published reports.
There was no indication that Kundra was connected in any way to the FBI's raid,
details here
gregladen | March 12, 2009And his name is Charley Brown. Chapter one of a novel set in bustling Pembina North Dakota is here, at Quiche Moraine.
gregladen | March 12, 2009The following post has been slightly revised in response to commentary below and elsewhere. I thank all those who commented for the helpful critique.
The question of diversity in science, and more specifically, success for women, is often discussed in relation to bench or lab oriented fields. If you read the blogs that cover this sort of topic, they are very often written by bench scientists, for bench scientists, and about bench scientists. Which makes sense because most scientists probably are bench scientists.
But a lot of scientists are fieldworkers, and the problems, challenges and…
gregladen | March 12, 2009Yes, it is the Mendel's Garden Frankenpeople edition, at Biofortified. This is a web carnival all about genetics and stuff. Enjoy it here.
gregladen | March 12, 2009A colleague and grad student of mine, Rob, just sent me the following question, slightly edited here:
A student in my intro class asked me a good question the other day to which I had no answer. When did smiling cease to be a threat gesture? I have a couple of ideas. One is that with reduced canines, smiling became a way to say "look, I have small canines, I am not a threat to you." The other is that smiling is based more on a "fear-grin" than a threat. Under this idea, smiling might have been a way of showing deference to others. If everyone shows deference, it would be egalitarian, until…
gregladen | March 12, 2009The FBI "raided" the Washington DC (city) office of Vivek Kundra, who is just finishing his term as Chief of Technology for the district. Kundra had been asked to to to the Federal Government to be the federal chief information officer.
Later in the day, the FBI agents arrested two people, a DC worker, Yusef Acar, and an employee of Advanced Integrated Technologies Corp, Sushil Bansal.
Reasons for the raid and the arrest are not currently known but should be soon because the two arrested men will be in court momentarily.
source: Faux News.
gregladen | March 12, 2009There is new information from an older idea (from about 2000) by Paul Sherman and colleagues. The idea underlying this research is simple: Symptoms of illnesses may be adaptive. Indeed, this may be true to the extent that we should not call certain things illnesses. Like "morning sickness."
Broadly speaking, there are two different kinds of reasons that a woman may experience nausea in association with pregnancy. 1) This pregnancy thing is a complicated mess with all kinds of hormonal (and other) things going on, so you puke; or 2) a woman who is pregnant feels nauseous for good…
gregladen | March 12, 2009The phrase "genomic imprinting" has come to refer the turning off of a gene (a particular instance of a gene on a particular chromosome duplicated across the cells in a body) so that the gene is not expressed at all, with the turning off of the gene not caused in the body in question, but rather, during the previous generation by a process happening in the soma of one of the parents. A maternally imprinted gene is passed on to junior, but will not be expressed in junior. a paternally imprinted gene is passed on to junior, but will not be expressed in junior. Typically (as far as we know) a…
gregladen | March 12, 2009Federal agents this morning are searching the Judiciary Square office of Washington, D.C.'s Chief Technology Officer.
The search is part of "an ongoing investigation," said a spokeswoman for the FBI's D.C. Field Office, Lindsay Gotwin, said. She declined to comment further.
The outgoing Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, was appointed last week Chief Information Officer by the Obama administration. His last day at the city government office was February 4, a spokeswoman for D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Leslie Kershaw, said.
"We know the FBI is over there but that's all we know," said a…
gregladen | March 12, 2009It has long been known that incest is not as bad as you think. Anti-cousin marriage laws are like prohibition laws and blue laws. They arise from a Christian conservative movement that swept Western Civilization from the late 18th century through the 19th century, up to about the time of the repeal of Prohibition.
Sure, marrying, or just plain having sex with, your sibling is disgusting. I mean, think about it. No, wait, don't even think about it. But cousin marriage? That depends. Your cousin may be kinda cute, you never know.
(a repost)
But seriously, anthropologists have long known…
gregladen | March 11, 2009Don't overlook the awful news from Germany, in which a taunted and bullied crazy person killed 15 people and self. He started out in his old High School where he gunned down 9 people, so quickly that many of the dead were students found with their head on the desk and their pencils still in their hands. He took off, initiating a huge manhunt, hijacked a car, killed a bunch more people, had a shootout with the police, ran away and finally killed himself.
The weapon was a handgun from his father's gun collection.
Since the Germans have stricter gun ownership rules than the Americans, and…
gregladen | March 11, 2009Bill Gates is now (once again) the richest person in the world, even though he lost a personal 18 billion dollars since last year.
In other words, Bill Gates lost more than the GNP of Kenya, El Salvador, Iraq, Qatar and about a hundred other countries. If Bill gaes was a country, he'd be about the fiftieth richest, give or take. (For reference, there seems to be about 224 countries in the world at the moment.)
more of the gruesome details
gregladen | March 11, 2009Mother ship? No, I'm not talking about Target! I'm talking about SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, the web site of Seed Magazine, which in turn, is inextricably (much to their horror, I'm sure) entangled with Scienceblogs.com.
The home page of the venerable purveyor of Science as Culture is HERE. Have a look at, and play around with, the new layout.