gregladen | February 28, 2009... Being interviewed by ME! (So don't expect this to go well!!!!)
Sunday March 1, 2009
Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, of the Stonybrook Institute in New York, is a biologist and a philosopher who has published about a hundred technical papers and several books on evolutionary biology. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, selected "for fundamental studies of genotype by environmental interactions and for public defense of evolutionary biology from pseudoscientific attack." Massimo is also an atheist, and has published articles in Skeptical Enquirer,…
gregladen | February 27, 2009Perhaps we are all subject to falling into the trap of what I call the Hydraulic Theory of Everything. If you eat more you will be bigger, if you eat less you will be smaller. Emotional states are the continuously varying outcome of different levels of a set of hormones, forming "happy" or "stressy" or "angry" cocktails. Your brain is a vessel into which life pours various elixirs. Too much of one thing, and there will not be enough room for something else. Even political arguments are hydraulic. The 'balanced' middle view between two arguments is like the mixture of contrasting primary…
gregladen | February 27, 2009 This barking dog is not very smart. But it could make a good Republican. The only thing harder to understand than Michele Bachmann is the Republican Party. Bachmann is hard to understand in this way: How can a person with her mind be an elected member of congress?!?!??? The Republican party is hard to understand in this way: How can a party that is trying to become more rather than less relevant keep putting Michele Bachmann on the podium in places like the National Party Convention and, most recently, at CEPAC??!?!?!?
I can't explain any of this, but I can at least redescribe the…
gregladen | February 26, 2009A "pre-existing condition" in the North Indian Ocean stoked the sudden intensification of last year's Tropical Cyclone Nargis just before its devastating landfall in Burma, according to a new NASA/university study. The cyclone became Burma's worst natural disaster ever and one of the deadliest cyclones of all time.
Scientists at the National Taiwan University, Taipei; and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., used data from satellite altimeters, measurements of ocean depth and temperature and an ocean model to analyze the ocean conditions present at the time of the catastrophic…
gregladen | February 26, 2009An Open Letter to All Software Developers,
I don't like changing, shifting, cutsie, idiotic date formats, and I don't like rounding off much either.
Many systems that provide information on date and time make unwrarented and embarrassingly stupid assumptions about what you want to know. In Movable Type, the system designers assume that if a post is set up for the future by a few days, that I don't care what time of day it is scheduled for. WTF is that all about??? A scheduled post for two hours from now is listed with the date/time "2 hours from now" but a post scheduled for 48 hours from…
gregladen | February 26, 2009This week we touched on the adviser/advisee relationship between faculty and students in class, and by coincidence blogger k8andcat has posted a very insightful and useful post on this topic. If you are a student (grad or undergrad) or a potential mentor, please read it.
It is here.
gregladen | February 26, 2009We are expecting the storm of the year today in the Twin Cities. I'm looking at a weather map, and there is snow everywhere around Minneapolis and Saint Paul, including where I am. Events have been canceled. The whole nine yards (important planning related sports metaphor).
Yet when I look outside, I see not one flake of snow, and when I look at the news on TV I only see stories about a revolution happening in Mexico.
What is going on here, people???
gregladen | February 26, 2009Bash 4.0 includes associative arrays, a superwildcard called "**" and a new redirection operator. Details are here.
gregladen | February 25, 2009The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such things as the ability ... or lack thereof ... to bear offspring. But this is hardly ever considered in the parodies we see of these differences.
[Repost from Gregladen.com]
You have all seen the sometimes funny, sometimes not cartoon depictions of these differences, for example this one:
Obviously,…
gregladen | February 25, 2009Go to any bar and you'll see a lot of males standing and sitting around not mating. I'll bet you would have guessed that the reason they are not mating is that no females will mate with them for one reason or another. But there is the distinct possibility that they are very inconspicuously resisting mating opportunities. It turns out that males can do this .... avoid mating without conspicuous resistance ... more easily than females. For obvious reasons.
This could be why what has become (inappropriately) known as "reversed sexual aggression" often goes unnoticed, and a recent study of the…
gregladen | February 25, 2009Lizzie, got a job. It's a pretty nice job, with benefits and a salary and everything. Not in her field (biology), but it is a job she likes. So I took her out for a congratulatory dinner, which ultimately gave me a chance to try a new restaurant. Also, we had been in a routine for a few months of meeting almost every week to work on a project, and those meetings had stopped due to scheduling issues (like, that she went and got a job ...). It was time for another dose.
... continued ...
gregladen | February 25, 2009So Ana IM's me, and I can tell through the text that she was almost out of breath with excitement or fear or something. But then I remembered shes been observing the Minnesota Senate court challenge. Turns out something rather interesting happened. Luckily, TPM has it covered:
Norm Coleman's lawyers just had a very awkward moment in court, in their attempt to prove that absentee ballots were double-counted -- it turns out they've failed to share evidence with the Franken camp, involving a key witness.
The Coleman camp called Pamela Howell, a Republican election worker in Minneapolis, who…
gregladen | February 25, 2009When will the madness end? When the Republicans dry up and blow away, of course.
In the Republican response to Obama's State of the Union 2.0 address, by Bobby Jindal, governer of Louisiana, we heard this:
"Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.,"
The reason why volcanoes have been picked out of some speech writer's anal sphincter zone is because they erupt and they wanted the metaphor. Or because Jindal believes he has no volcanoes in his state (but he would be wrong) or because of some other rhetorical reason…
gregladen | February 25, 2009 Why is there no Birth Control Pill for men?
The answer I'd like to propose can be summed up in two closely linked words pilfered from the question itself:
Men. Control.
Myriad aspects of life can be understood by recognizing a single critical fact, and the layered, sometimes complex, deeply biological effects of that fact. Males, by definition, can't have babies.
All mammalian males contribute to the reproductive endeavor, but often this contribution consists of a single cell, one per offspring. True, that cell contains a haploid copy of the male's DNA, the quality of which is…
gregladen | February 24, 2009Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex?
One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized as potentially significant for some time, it was probably the Africanist archaeologist Glynn Isaac who impressed on the academic community the importance of the origins of food sharing as a key evolutionary moment. At that time, food sharing among apes was thought to be very rare, outside of mother-infant dyads. Further research…