gregladen | November 24, 2008Gardening Like The Forest: Home Scale Ecological Food Production
Learn how you can grow an abundant food-producing ecosystem in your backyard!
Join us and learn how to grow food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizers, farmaceuticals, and fun. We can meet our own needs and regenerate healthy ecosystems at the same time!
Friday January 16, 7pm to 9pm
$10 Cover charge. All are welcome.
Minneapolis College of Art and Design
2501 Stevens Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55404
AND
Gardening Like the Forest: Fundamentals of Ecological Gardening A Workshop for Gardeners, Designers and Students
Explore the theory,…
gregladen | November 24, 2008And on behalf of John Lennon, I say: "Kiss my ass, Vatican..."
(Though I'm sure John would not have said exactly that.)
A Vatican newspaper has forgiven the late English singer John Lennon for saying four decades ago that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
In an article praising The Beatles, L'Osservatore Romano said Lennon had just been showing off.
Lennon told a British newspaper in 1966 - at the height of Beatlemania - that he did not know which would die out first, Christianity or rock and roll.
At the time, the comparison sparked controversy in the US.
... which then led to the…
gregladen | November 24, 2008From the bbc:
A US couple is suing McDonald's for $3m (£2m) after nude photos of the woman, which were on her husband's mobile phone, ended up on the internet.
Phillip Sherman says he accidentally left his phone, with the photos, at a McDonald's in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
He says staff promised to secure the phone until he could retrieve it.
The Shermans claim they had to move to a new home after the woman's name, address, and phone number appeared online along with the photos.
gregladen | November 23, 2008Here is the film of the space tool bag floating away.
Apparently, a veteran sattelite watcher ... this is a guy with a telescope who watches satellites from earth ... has filmed the bag from a different angle. From his back yard!
... Last night, Nov. 22nd, veteran satellite observer Kevin Fetter video-recorded the backpack-sized bag gliding over his backyard observatory in Brockville, Ontario ... "It was easily 8th magnitude or brighter as it passed by the 4th magnitude star eta Pisces," he says. Spaceweather's satellite tracker is monitoring the toolbag;
Here's the video
Click here…
gregladen | November 23, 2008FiveThirtyEight is a pretty good web site dealing with polls and other election realted number crunching. They predicted the outcome of the race for president almost as accurately as I did, so I figure they're pretty good. And now, FiveThirtyEight has a reasonably good analysis suggesting that Franken is going to win the recount.
Here's the argument in a nutshell. Franken is going to win because of all the reasons we've been saying all along (see this and this). But in some precincts, the Republicans are challenging a LOT of votes that are likely to be called as Franken votes, so they are…
gregladen | November 23, 2008In fact ...
Linus Torvalds can run kill -9 and kill Chuck Norris.
Linus Torvalds doesn't die, he simply returns zero.
Linus Torvalds runs Linux on his wristwatch and toaster.
There is no theory of probability, just a list of events that Linus Torvalds allows to occur.
In the tradition of PZ Myers and Obama vs. Chuck Norris, we now have Linus Torvalds vs. Chuck Norris.
hat tip
gregladen | November 23, 2008
Carnival of the Recipes Turkey Recipes Edition
The 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: The trouble with Orac
The Carnvial of the Liberals: The Post Election Blues
Gene Genie Edition #40
Four Stone Hearth
gregladen | November 23, 2008... a culinary repost.
You've got your turkey all planned out, and you've got some stock. Now, it's time to explore the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Gravy. (And maybe something to put it on.)
I will tell you how to make excellent gravy with no stress and guaranteed success. Without lumps.
I don't do recipes. I do theory. But this theoretical approach will get you through. Its very simple.
You are going to need the following:
A stick of butter or two, and an equal volume of regular flour. You can use special fancy dancy flour if you want, but that is not necessary.
Several cups of a…
gregladen | November 23, 2008There are a little more than 300 people in the world with the condition Laron dwarfism, a third of whom live in remote villages in Ecuador's southern Loja province.
Sufferers of Laron - believed to be caused by inbreeding - lack a hormone called Insulin-like Growth Factor 1, or IGF1.
Research uncovered during an investigation by Channel 4's More4 News suggests this is the reason for their longevity and apparent immunity to cancer. In ordinary humans, too much of the hormone can lead a person to develop breast, prostate or bowel cancers at an early age.
I have not yet located the peer…
gregladen | November 23, 2008The genome of the extinct woolley mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) has been sequenced, and reported in Nature. This confirms that elephant genomes are large, like the elephants themselves. It confirms previously proposed relationships amongst the elephants (see phylogeny below) and refines the known phylogeny. Interpopulation differences among mammoths were also demonstrated.
Here's the phylogeny:
Comparison of phylogenies of elephants and hominoids. "We show estimated divergence times, that is, times to the common ancestor averaged across autosomes (see Methods). Red circles at the…
gregladen | November 23, 2008According to Julia. Here, I'm speaking of the books (Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1), New Moon (The Twilight Saga, Book 2), Eclipse (The Twilight Saga, Book 3), and Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga, Book 4)) not the movie. Julia went off yesterday with my sister in law to see the movie, and I've not heard from either since, so I cannot report that to you.
Here's one review. A metareview, actually:
gregladen | November 23, 2008PZ Thinks this is for real:
I'm not so sure. What do you think? (Click on Fidel to visit the site. If you dare.)
gregladen | November 23, 2008Here's the graph:
The explanation for the graph is here.
This is a little misleading. The number of votes counted yesterday and contributing to this right-most point is very small ... hardly any counting was going on during the day Saturday. The Monday data, added to this, will be more useful. (In fact, some of you may have noticed, that while this graph is fun, there are major violations going on here statistically ... which is why there is no R-squared or p value being given!)
I've changed the Republican Party Line to be a third order polynomial for maximum absurdity.
See this post…
gregladen | November 23, 2008 "Finding Family" with Dr. Matt Kaplan
Do you have questions about your ancestry before written time? When you've sent your DNA to a lab to find out about your ancient ancestors, are you curious about how they get the data? National Geographic was one of the first organizations to answer these questions. The result is the story of our deep ancestry -- the true human lineage traced to 60,000 years ago.
To get the story, the world famous Genographic Project has tested DNA from over 260,000 people. The results tell the amazing story of our species migration from eastern Africa to all parts of…
gregladen | November 23, 2008Really, the news media is a meat grinder. It is a semi-intelligent powerful automaton meat grinder, where the meat is almost any kind of information and the stuff it puts out is the sausage they call reporting. The meat grinder must make a certain number of sausages (separated by commercials) per day so it will therefore suck in information regardless of its quality and produce output regardless of its accuracy or relevance. Furthermore, if you graded the average news source on accuracy over, say, a week, it would rarely get a grade above D minus.
This morning, considerable effort was…
gregladen | November 23, 2008I once read a novel by John Le Carre about Inguhetia (Our Game). For quite some time, if I mentioned Ingushetia to anyone they assumed I was making it up. But it is quite real. You've heard recently of the problems in Georgia vis-a-vis South Ossetia. Well, Ingushetia is nestled along side of North Ossetia. It is part of Russia.
And now ...
Human rights activists and opposition politicians in Russia's southern republic of Ingushetia have told the BBC that the predominantly Muslim region is now in a state of civil war.
It is reported that more than 800 people have been killed in an…
gregladen | November 22, 2008A man has been attacked by a panda at a park in southern China, after he climbed into its enclosure hoping to cuddle the creature.
The 20-year-old student had ignored warning signs and scaled a two-metre (6.5ft) barrier to get into the pen.
State media say the panda bit him on his arms and legs, and he had to be rescued by the animal's keepers.
Speaking from his hospital bed, the injured man said the panda had looked so cute he had just wanted to hug it.
bbc
gregladen | November 22, 2008This is hyst-fucking-erical.
OK, we've been recounting ballots pursuant to the implementation of actual Democracy in the Coleman-Franken race for U.S. Senate.
So what do you think the standard JOKE among the Democrats ... working as volunteers to observe the count for Franken ... has been? This:
"I challene this ballot because the voter filled in the bubble for Norm Coleman. Obviously, this voter is delusional."
Ha ha ha. Well, even if it is not the funniest joke you've ever heard, it IS a joke. Right?
Right?
Well, no, not if you are a Republican. The Coleman challengers have…