gregladen | November 17, 2008Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics, by Jennifer Ouellette, is an exploration of popular culture, including literature, movies, TV shows, and so on. Ouellette demonstrates a well studied knowledge of these areas of human endeavor, and she is an excellent writer. This means that when you have explored these aspects of day to day life, you will at the end have a reasonably good understanding...
... of quantum physics.
Well, not really, though this is how Black Bodies is often described. In reality, Jennifer, in these re-worked and updated entries from her regular…
gregladen | November 17, 2008Amid calls by the rebel leader in the Congolese war, intensive fighting has broken out along the front lines among troops north of Goma, between Goma and Vitshumbi. This is a fairly large area of the Western Rift Valley nestled between the western rift wall and the Virunga Volcanoes (which is where the famous mountain gorillas live).
Details here.
I was once arrested for attempting to overthrow the government of Zaire in Vitshumbi, but was able to talk my way out of it pretty quickly. I was arrested by the Navy because, well, the Navy guy did not have a boat, and I did. In fact, I had…
gregladen | November 17, 2008
Burlington, Vt., is healthiest city, CDC says from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- What's the healthiest city in America? It appears to be Burlington, Vt. Vermont's largest city is tops among U.S. metropolitan areas by having the largest proportion of people - 92 percent - who say they are in good or great health.
[...]
W. Virginia town shrugs at poorest health ranking from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- As a portly woman plodded ahead of him on the sidewalk, the obese mayor of America's fattest and unhealthiest city explained why health is not a big local issue.
[...]
gregladen | November 17, 2008Or, so says Drew Sandlin, in a letter to Oklahoma Christian University's student newspaper, ironically named Talon.
When I was a kid, I had an uncle who was a Franciscan Priest. I come from a long line of priests and nuns, mostly Franciscan. That's why I'm good with animals. Anyway, I liked this Uncle because he lived in foreign lands, fished, was a ham (I was a budding ham myself) and he was kind of exotic, being a priest and all.
Someday, I thought, I'd be a priest too. But I also had other interests, and some times there was a conflict....
One day I made mention of the fact that we…
gregladen | November 16, 2008... dum de dum de dum de dum ... something something ... Alma Mater true.. crap, I can't remember the words.... Anyway:
Overheard in the schoolyard. The Milne School, 1970something.
Miles: "So, Greg, did you ever wonder why you are only a fraction as smart at I am?"
Greg: "Well, no, not really, Miles ...."
Miles: "Breeding. For two thousand years, your ancestors took the best and the brightest males out of the population and made them into priests who were not allowed to have children. For five thousand years, my ancestors took the best and the brightest out of the population and made…
gregladen | November 16, 2008Even though I know this isn't really funny at all. In fact, it is quite tragic.
Over recent years, several states have enacted drop-off laws, allowing parents (=mothers) to drop off their unwanted children (=babies). Forever. Some of the impetus for this kind of law is to promote lousy sexual health. Go ahead and have unprotected sex and never mind abortion, you can always drop the baby off at the hospital if you live in Nebraska or one of those other terribly confused red states.
Whatever. It is probably a good idea to have a drop off law because it reduces the number of babies that get…
gregladen | November 16, 2008
Eberswalde Crater is an approximately 65-kilometer diameter, closed basin crater. It contains a delta, which indicates that flowing water was present for an extended period of time in the past.
Parts of the crater have inverted channels that have higher relief because a more resistant material was deposited in the channel and therefore it was less susceptible to erosion than the surrounding area. The image also shows resistant knobs and mounds as well as a scoured surface.
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gregladen | November 16, 2008DR Congo rebel leader Laurent Nkunda has told UN peace envoy Olusegun Obasanjo he will support a peace process with the government.
Gen Nkunda also said he would respect a ceasefire if the Congolese government did. Mr Obasanjo said it would take effort from both sides to keep a truce.
We'll see.
BBC
gregladen | November 16, 2008
This observation shows small, branching channels that are part of the larger Athabasca Valles channel system.
These side channels are "distributaries" because they bifurcate from the main channel, which is located to the northwest of this image. The distributaries flowed from north to south when they were active.
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gregladen | November 16, 2008
Praxis #4 is up at The Lay Scientist; and ...
... Oekologie returns! at The Infinite Sphere
gregladen | November 16, 2008That's how fast it is!
In yet another installment of: "Oh, I can't believe people use USB when Apple's Firewire is so superior" .... ti ti ti ti ti* ... "Apple no longer supports firewire, you will now all use USB" ... USB 3.0 will be released Monday. USB 3.0 will transfer 25 GB in 70 seconds.
To put that in perspective, the same transfer would take 13.9 minutes with the current USB 2.0 protocol and 9.3 hours on USB 1.0. Looks like the future of wired syncs and backups is bright and blazing. [LH]
Well, my next external hard drive is going to have that ... it will probably be faster than…
gregladen | November 15, 2008 The priest at St. Mary's Catholic Church in downtown Greenville has told parishioners that those who voted for Barack Obama placed themselves under divine judgment because of his stance on abortion and shouldn't receive Holy Communion until they've done penance.
The Rev. Jay Scott Newman told The Greenville News on Wednesday that church teaching doesn't allow him to refuse Holy Communion to anyone based on political choices, but that he'll continue to deliver the church's strong teaching on the "intrinsic and grave evil of abortion" as a hidden form of murder.
source
So, anyone from the IRS…
gregladen | November 15, 2008
This image shows layered sedimentary deposits in Candor Mensa, a broad plateau of thickly stacked sedimentary rocks in Candor Chasma, part of the giant troughs of Valles Marineris.
Valles Marineris is a system of tectonic depressions formed by down-dropping faults; the floors are among the lowest points on the surface of Mars, and may have once held lakes. Some sites show evidence for streams or rivers. The troughs may have also been sites of volcanic activity.
Currently, the deep floors contain massive deposits of bright sedimentary rocks. Some of the deposits are several kilometers thick,…
gregladen | November 15, 2008What? You've never heard of a Mosasaur? Imagine a crocodile with flippers and you're superficially there. See, way back around 100 million years ago the North American continent was split by a vast epeiric sea (a shallow, salty, inland sea) called the Western Interior Seaway (really creative science people).
You will not want to miss this post from Analyze Everything.
gregladen | November 15, 2008Atheists are smarter than Calvinists in Dutch Study. But, the Calvinists are quicker at identifying small shapes than the Atheists.
Despite the abundance of evidence that human perception is penetrated by beliefs and expectations, scientific research so far has entirely neglected the possible impact of religious background on attention. Here we show that Dutch Calvinists and atheists, brought up in the same country and culture and controlled for race, intelligence, sex, and age, differ with respect to the way they attend to and process the global and local features of complex visual…
gregladen | November 15, 2008From Amanda Carpenter
... conservative leaders convened for a meeting of the minds to plot a way to reinvigorate the Republican brand ...
Bozell saw the 2008 election as a decision between a "moderate" and a "far-left" candidate. The moderate lost. Therefore, "the moderate wing of the Republican Party is dead, it is finished," Bozell said.
...
Bozell pushed [for] "whole new generation of organizations, particularly on the grassroots level" and "massively increasing the fundraising."
Others demanded that conservatives, rather than moderate Republicans, be appointed to fill leading roles on…
gregladen | November 15, 2008Here is a list of current blog carnivals, for your enjoyment:
The Giant's Shoulders #5 - The Magic (Blog) Circle! at BodBlack Cat
Friday Ark #217 at The Modulator
Cento: I and the Bird is at Aimophila Adventures
Tangled Bank #118: Yes We Did Edition at STACWDIA
Change of Shift: Volume 3, Number 10 at CrazGrl
Carnival of Education, Transition Team Edition mis at The Core Knowledge Blog
hourglass V, a carnival about the biology of aging, is at psique.
Molecular and Cell Biology Carnival #4 is at the Skeptical Alchemist.
Grand Rounds: Job Advice is at Musings of a Distractible Mind
Here…
gregladen | November 15, 2008
This image shows an exposure of the north polar layered deposits (NPLD) within the northern residual ice cap. The polar layered deposits are thought to have been formed by recent climate changes on Mars, like ice ages on Earth.
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