gregladen | January 1, 2009Oldest American man dies at 112
America's oldest man, an African-American who befriended Louis Armstrong and voted for president-elect Barack Obama "because he's black," has died in Sacramento, California, his family said.
gregladen | January 1, 2009The current situation is this: We are waiting for a final decision next week on the outcome of the race, and most likely this outcome will start numerically with Franken's current 49 vote lead and be adjusted by the addition of several hundred absentee ballots. The exact number of these ballots to consider is still being fought out.
Following the board's decision next week, probably Wednesday, one of the candidates will be declared the winner (this is the job of the canvassing board .... to declare the winner) and sent to Washington. There may well be further court fights over this, but…
gregladen | January 1, 2009The best soccer team on the planet has just over a 1 in four chance of winning the world cup even it it makes it to the last stages of the season. I suppose this is because they play for, like, four hours and each side gets, like, zero or one points. So it's kinda like being really really good at flipping a coin. And I'm exaggerating only a little.
Or at least, that's how it is according to this blog post.
gregladen | January 1, 2009I do not have the vaguest clue what a Microsoft Zune is, but there are reports that they are all crapping out roughly at the same time for unknown reasons. Microsoft technical support is on vacation, so apparently they don't know about it. Details can be found here.
It is a good thing it is only the Zunes that are doing this, and not, say, the Microsoft Air Traffic Controller Thingie or the Microsoft Heart Implant Thingie.
gregladen | December 31, 2008New Year Resolutions
~ Resolution Number One ~
No Empty Promises!
~ Resolution Number Two ~
ACTIVITY TERMINATED
...
gregladen | December 31, 2008Naturalism is a potential source of guidance for our behavior, morals, ethics, and other more mundane decisions such as how to build an airplane and what to eat for breakfast.1 When it comes to airplanes, you'd better be a servant to the rules of nature or the airplane will go splat. When it comes to breakfast, it has been shown that knowing about our evolutionary history can be a more efficacious guide to good nutrition than the research employed by the FDA, but you can live without this approach. Naturalism works when it comes to behavior too, but there are consequences. You probably…
gregladen | December 31, 2008
... So, if you drive the boat downstream past the hippos they watch you go by, the big male feints attack a few times, you get past them, and everybody gets over it. Up ahead, the next pod of hippos has observed this, and they are waiting for your arrival....
Read the rest.
gregladen | December 30, 2008Who?
Yes, the Who too!
So, I'm watching a bit of the Kennedy Center's annual super duper awards. Morgan Freeman won an award. Did you know he was discovered as the driver in Driving Miss Daisy, though he had a long and undistinguished career before that? Did you know that B.B. King has gotten really huge and apparently can't stand up any more, but can still crank it out on Lucille? (Lucille is the name of the guitar.)
Twyla Tharp also got an award. I've always been impressed with her. I've seen her live numerous times. In case you don't know who Twyla Tharp is: Have you seen Michale…
gregladen | December 30, 2008From the BBC:
Wildlife officials in Australia are investigating how an alligator native to North America was found wandering around a campsite in New South Wales.
Campers at the site in Pambula managed to snare the beast in a volleyball net and held its jaws shut.
Police first issued a press statement saying it was an indigenous crocodile but later corrected their error.
The animal's origins remain a mystery as no owners are registered locally either for crocodiles or alligators.
Well, that beats my story.
gregladen | December 30, 2008... and other matters.
The following list represents widely held beliefs, either first order beliefs (things you hear people say) or second order beliefs (things implied directly by what people say):
Evolution is very slow.
It takes millions of years for a species to evolve into another species.
Evolution has stopped for humans.
Evolution occurs over "geological time scales."
Geological time scales are very long ... millions of years.
Geological and evolutionary time scales are similar to each other.
Evolution = Natural Selection.
"Macro evolution" is slow, "Micro evolution" is fast but…
gregladen | December 30, 2008Obamadog. Barack Obama's first serious mistake since the election.
A true story starring Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
gregladen | December 30, 2008The next few days will be the most interesting, potentially, in the Franken Coleman recount.
Notice that I do not use any words like "Debacle, Fiasco, Circus, Swampmire" and so on when speaking of the recount. This is because this is a democratic (as in America! The Greatest Democracy in the World Love it or Leave It" and all that democratic) process and I am a patriot and I refuse to malign our great nation and its constitutional government. The simple truth is that an election is a kind of adversarial process and when a recount is mandated by the processes, the adversarial parts keep…
The Scientific, Political, Social, and Pedagogical Context for the claim that "Race does not exist."
gregladen | December 30, 2008Without distinctions and boundaries, the race concept cannot apply to a given species. Species with observable geographical differences in one or more traits may be better described as having clinal variation. Without correlation among traits, the race concept has none of its usual utility, whereby we place individuals into categories and then predict invisible traits (like the likelihood of biting for dog breeds, or the likelihood of having a certain level of intelligence for human races).
HERE
gregladen | December 29, 2008The Bush Anti-Patriot Act and its paper minions across the states is nothing less than the undoing of the fundamentals of American freedom. Ironically, this has been done with the collusion of the poorly educated Libertarian and Rightist supporters of the conservative movement, who really, honestly, are primarily concerned with clinging to their guns and their religion, both protected by this same constitution they unwittingly dismantle. The right wing can be very smart about manipulating the preformed fodder for fascism that makes up the vast legions of Joe Six Packs.
Don't make me mad.
gregladen | December 29, 2008...I notice the door man take a quick glance up the street and subtly drop his smoke out of sight next to the stairs. He steps half way onto the sidewalk. Sure enough, Baronelli himself is coming down Hanover, walking his dog ... a tiny frenetic brown thing ... leash in one hand and an unlit cigar in the other. He's actually wearing a white ascot to complement his thousand dollar Italian three-piece and light brown cape....
As we have been saying all along ....
gregladen | December 28, 2008Why was this post so popular? Scantily clad athletes? Hair raising death denying stunts? Incredible writing and a fascinating story? People googling the Olympics a lot? We'll never know.
gregladen | December 28, 2008I'm not mentioning any names, and don't ask me any details. In fact, don't repeat this story.
Some years ago, when I was a mere graduate student, a fellow student working in an unnamed country in Africa discovered a very very old stone artifact. To this day, this bit of chipped stone debris, representing the activities of an ancient very pre-human hominid, is one of the oldest well dated, in situ objects of its kind known. ....
... and then, of course, the story get very interesting ...
gregladen | December 27, 2008To me, the key moment in CrackerGate was the posting by PZ Myers of the key, essential truth of it all: The same church law that mandated the sacredness of the Eucharist also mandated that Jews would always wear a mark indicating their Jewishness. The latter eventually lead to the holocaust, as you know.
That was important. Also important was my discovery that Jesus Christ can come to us in any one of several forms, and you should never be surprised at what can happen.
gregladen | December 27, 2008Many of my posts related to the Webster Cook Affair received a great deal of attention. In fact, the blogospheric activities related to the PZ Myers CrackerGate showed up as a noticeable bump in the internet and blew out a couple of those Middle Easter cables that are always breaking. This post is selected from this larger set, as is the next one I will post.