gregladen | March 5, 2009It turns out that Dolphin Safe Tuna is bad for sharks. And visa versa. More or less....
Let's as BlogFish about it...
Who's right depends on what you value more, dolphins or broader ocean ecosystem health. At least that's the way I see it. We could protect dolphins totally during tuna fishing only if we're willing to allow other animals like fish and sea turtles to suffer harm and become depleted (or further depleted).
Details Here.
gregladen | March 5, 2009 In this illuminating talk, Richard Pyle shows us thriving life on the cliffs of coral reefs and groundbreaking diving technologies he has pioneered to explore it. He and his team risk everything to reveal the secrets of undiscovered species.
gregladen | March 5, 2009NASA's planet-hunting space telescope Kepler is slated to launch the night of March 6 from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to find Earth-sized planets that could have liquid water at the surface and potentially harbor life.
"It's not just another science mission. This one has historical significance built into it," said Ed Weiler of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. "It very possibly could tell us that earths are very, very common, that we've got lots of neighbors out there. Or it could tell us that Earths are really, really, really rare."…
gregladen | March 5, 2009
Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, will reportedly not leave his television career to become Surgeon General.
I read it here.
gregladen | March 5, 2009 Ed Ulbrich, the digital-effects guru from Digital Domain, explains the Oscar-winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create the older versions of Brad Pitt's face for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."
gregladen | March 5, 2009It is a long way from Kazakhstan to Kentucky, but the journey to the Derby may have started among a pastoral people on the Kazakh steppes who appear to have been the first to domesticate, bridle and perhaps ride horses -- around 3500 B.C., a millennium earlier than previously thought.
Archaeologists say the discovery may revise thinking about the development of some preagricultural Eurasian societies and put an earlier date to their dispersal into Europe and elsewhere. These migrations are believed to have been associated with horse domestication and the spread of Indo-European languages…
gregladen | March 5, 2009Dawkins gave a talk that could be criticized as not particularly new, in that his main idea is that human brains are too powerful and adaptable to continue to function primarily within an adaptive program serving as a proper adaptive organ. Instead, human brains think up all sorts of other, rather non-Darwinian things to do. This idea has been explored and talked about in many ways by many people. Kurt Vonegut Jr.'s character in Galapagos repeatedly, in a state of lament, quips "Thanks, Big Brain..." as evidence accumulates that our inevitable march towards extinction is primarily a…
gregladen | March 5, 2009A unique ecosystem of plants, birds and monkeys thrives in the treetops of the rainforest. Nalini Nadkarni explores these canopy worlds -- and shares her findings with the world below, through dance, art and bold partnerships.
gregladen | March 5, 2009... again ... This just in from the NCSE:
Antievolution law proposed in Florida
It's not a hurricane or even a tropical storm. But a small knot of ignorance is twisting through the Florida state senate.
Late last week, Stephen R. Wise (R-District 5) filed Senate Bill 2396, which if passed, would require "[a] thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution." Like other "academic freedom" bills that aim to smuggle creationism back into the classroom, this bill would let educators teach the supposed scientific controversy swirling around evolution.
"…
gregladen | March 4, 2009Richard Dawkins came to Minneapolis and gave a talk, sponsored by CASH, the primary atheist/humanist group on the UMN campus, on "The Purpose of Purpose."
Before the talk, several of us got together at Annie's Parlour. It was harmonic convergence, in a sense, of numerous independent groups all planning to go to Annie's and ending up at the same table, including but not limited to Amanda and myself, PZ and his wife and daughter, Stephanie, Mike, Mr. and Mrs. Linux in Exile, Lynn, and a few others who don't have links. After the talk, we spent close to an hour hanging around with Amanda and…
gregladen | March 4, 2009...My friend Carl and I went out to the Berne Grange Hall, up on The Heldeberg, one evening to see them. I remember my brother, in his white lamé suit, holding up a Jimmy Hendrix album and saying, "If any of you can tell me who this is, you win the album." (Silence.) "OK, now we're going to play a song by this guy." (Silence.) They play the song. No one knows. Adrenalin gets to keep the Hendrix album for one more week. At least....
at quiche moraine dot com
gregladen | March 4, 2009 A Texas-sized battle over scrapping a longtime requirement that Lone Star State students be taught weaknesses in the theory of evolution has split politicians, parents, and professors who teach biology at the state's Christian universities.
"I hope to reach others on the weightier matters of the Resurrection, hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven while I work out how evolution does not have to conflict with Christianity," said Daniel Brannan, a biology professor at Abilene Christian University.
Brannan joined hundreds of scientists in signing a 21st Century Science Coalition…
gregladen | March 4, 2009A RIVETING and hugely satisfying report on BBC Radio 4 today tells the story of a missionary who was charged by an American missionary group with taking the Gospel to the little understood Pirahãs tribe in the Amazon - only to realise how ridiculous his faith in Christianity was.
... read about it at The Freethinker
H/T: August Berkshire
gregladen | March 4, 2009A computer model of the formation of Olympus Mons (a big giant mountain on Mars) indicates that this geological formation should contain pockets of water.
The scientists explained that their finding is more implication than revelation. "What we were analyzing was the structure of Olympus Mons, why it's shaped the way it is," said McGovern, an adjunct assistant professor of Earth science and staff scientist at the NASA-affiliated Lunar and Planetary Institute. "What we found has implications for life - but implications are what go at the end of a paper."
This water would be liquid. Warm, in…
gregladen | March 4, 2009...The war has just ended, both are finding their way home on foot, still in uniform, bedraggled, soul-weary. The only thing keeping them putting one foot ahead of the next is the thought of home and family. Meeting on the road, they recognize each other through the grime and dust for the brothers they in fact are. There follows a reconciliation, joyful that each has survived, each forgiving the other for taking the part they did in the war. United, they return home to their family....
Read The Picture, at Quiche Moraine.
gregladen | March 4, 2009And with this, a five year old catapulted back in time, say 10,000 years in West Asia or Southern Europe, encountering two people, would make perfectly intelligible sentence that wold be understood by all. Assuming all the people who were listening were at least reasonably savvy about language and a little patient. This is because a handful of words, including Who, You, Two, Five, Three and I exist across a range of languages as close cognates, and can be reconstructed as similar ancestral utterances in ancestral languages.
It's like an elephant and a mammoth meeting up in the Twilight…
gregladen | March 3, 2009
"We'll be in the Hudson." Holy crap. I've been in the Hudson. But not like that.
gregladen | March 3, 2009..Dr. Michael Behe is a biochemist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He's also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a well known creationist think tank whose purpose is to disguise religious doctrine as science in order to avoid the Constitutional ban on promoting religion in public schools. It was Behe that we were heading down to see....
From Lou's "Brief History of Moonbats"