gregladen | December 4, 2008Windows OS last month took its biggest market share dive in the past two years, erasing gains made in two of the past three months and sending the operating system's share under 90% for the first time, an Internet measurement company reported today.
source
In the mean time, Linux grew from 0.71 to 0.83%, and Mac OS X grew by 0.66 percent to reach 8.9 percent.
That's a whopping big change for Linux, percentage-wise.
gregladen | December 4, 2008Lions are more diverse than many may think. Indeed, recent research shows that lions may be comfortably divided into races. An expert on lions can tell you what part of Africa a particular lion is likely from by how it looks. Have a look at these lions:
Anyone who knows anything about lions knows that these are Tarangire lions. Tarangire is a park in Tanzania that I think is somewhat underrated. It could easily be the first choice among parks to visit in Tanzania, rather than the second or third. It has its own migratory system (you can also tell the wildebeest of Tarangire from those…
gregladen | December 4, 2008"Henry G. Molaison, 82, of Windsor Locks, CT died on Tuesday. He is known in the medical and scientific literatures as "the amnesic patient, H.M." He was born in Manchester, CT and graduated from East Hartford High School. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation at the Hartford Hospital to relieve his seizure disorder. Immediately after the operation, Mr. Molaison showed a profound amnesia, which became the topic of intense scientific study for more than five decades....he is the most widely studied and famous case in the neuroscience literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.…
gregladen | December 4, 2008I want the peek.
Watch CBS Videos Online
Hat tip: Bora, a real technology ladies man.
gregladen | December 4, 2008A kopje is a manadnock. Which, in turn, is an inselberg. Indeed, it may sometimes be called a Kakba, but that is the most obscure of all the terms for a very large lump sticking out of the earth all by itself. Like this:
In South Africa, this is called a "kopje" (pronounced "Cop eee" a lot like the English word "Copy" like "I am going to the Xerox machine to make nine copies of this thing"). The term Kopje is actually used across a wider range of English speaking Africa. Monadnock is a North American term and this phrase comes from a Native American (I think an Algonquian language,…
gregladen | December 3, 2008... or at least much improved.
Two packages arrived today. One containing samples of the Cafe Press merchandise that I created in order to provide a suitable award for the 20 thousandth commenter on this blog plus or minus one. The central commenter and her/his standard deviates will each receive a hat or a mug or whatever. Right now I'm sitting here wearing my iThink hat and my iThink shirt and sipping a cappuchino from my iThink coffee mug.
But who cares about any of that. The other package contained my Avant Stellar keyboard! My original Avant Stellar keyboard totally crapped out…
gregladen | December 3, 2008On Change.org, the site where you can submit ideas and/or vote on ideas and then Obama has to do them ... or at least listen ... a college student named Griffin Jeffrey has suggested that we create nationalliy required science standards.
National standards on the teaching of Evolution and the origins of life, decided on and created by top scientists from significant scientific organizations, should direct curricula of all schools nationwide, overriding any state laws on the subjects.
We want this. Go vote for it. Here.
gregladen | December 3, 2008I absolutely love this:
I've been accused of refusing to review Ben Stein's documentary "Expelled," a defense of Creationism, because of my belief in the theory of evolution. Here is my response.
Ben Stein, you hosted a TV show on which you gave away money. Imagine that I have created a special edition of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" just for you. Ben, you've answered all the earlier questions correctly, and now you're up for the $1 million prize. It involves an explanation for the evolution of life on this planet. You have already exercised your option to throw away two of the wrong…
gregladen | December 3, 2008The 54th edition of Four Stone Hearth, the Anthropology Web Carnival, is up at International Cognition and Culture.
gregladen | December 3, 2008New species, thousands of them, have been discovered on a tiny island in the Pacific. Click on the picture of the blog to read all about it at Zooillogix:
Then, when you are done looking at that blog post, get yourself to a magazine stand and pick up the November-December issue of American Scientist, where there is a really cool article on Silurian fossils that are being reconstructed in 3D. These are soft body part remains nearly perfectly preserved. The only way to 'see' them is to shave the rock slice by slice, digitize the visible cross section, a zillion times then create a 3-D image…
gregladen | December 3, 2008Everybody's talking about the Body Swap Illusion. So why should I bother. Here's what you need to know:
The original paper is here, at PLoS.
Here are some blog posts on the topic:
Neurophilosophy: The Body Swap Illusion
Not Exactly Rocket Science: The Quantum Leap effect.
gregladen | December 3, 2008Tramplings. Sounds like the title of a Stephen King novel. And it may as well be.
When the news of the Wal-Mart empoloyee being trampled to death was coming out, the thought occurred to me "doesn't this happen every year? Why would the fact that this happens every year not be part of the story? That would seem important!" So I figured I was just wrong and that it dosn't happen every year.
Then, I came across Sciencewoman's post, and that made me think of this again.
And this time I googled it. I put "Trampled" and "Black Friday" into google, and here's what I got (not in order):…
gregladen | December 3, 2008On Monday, Birmingham mayor Larry Langford was busted by the feds for bribery and fraud in connection with a multibillion-dollar sewer bonding that has caused the county in which Birmingham is seated to end up in near bankruptcy.
Langford, Montgomery investment banker Bill Blount and lobbyist Al LaPierre were charged in the 101-count indictment. The charges also include money laundering and filing false tax returns.
Langford is accused of receiving $230,000 in bribes from Blount, some of them routed through LaPierre, to influence the bond deals while Langford was president of the Jefferson…
gregladen | December 3, 2008There is increasing evidence, or at least informed conjecture, that there will be a redistricting in Minnesota leading to the vaporization of a congressional district. If this happens, even if the Republicans are in charge for that process, there is a reasonable chance that Michel Bachmann ... loved by the undermenchen masses of her white trashy sixth district, but perceived liability for the ubermenchen Republican Big Chiefs ... will be squeezed out of the House of Representatives like so much peppermint flavored goo from a sample-size tube of toothpaste.
But the undermenchen are known to…
gregladen | December 2, 2008
And this is how they try to show you who is boss:
Hippo plays with kitty:
gregladen | December 2, 2008A new paper by Kevin Padian of UC Berkeley is just out in Comptes Rendus Biologies, a French peer reviewed journal, on American creationism.
Padian summarizes the history of creationism in the US. From the abstract:
The history of anti-evolutionism in the United States begins only in the early decades of the 20th century but has evolved considerably since then. Various versions of the movement ("equal time" for creationism, "creation science", "intelligent design") have developed over time, but they have made few positive contributions to serious discourse about science and religion. Their…