gregladen | November 15, 2008So, for the next two weeks or so, an army of volunteers, state workers, and lawyers are going to be counting and observing the counting, and contesting and arguing about, every single one of the nearly three million ballots cast last election day in Minnesota in the race for Senator.
I had spent some time during the latter period of the election season working on the election, mainly for Ashwin Madia, but also for Al Franken and Barack Obama. The recount extends my own commitment, and that of thousands of others, to keep working on this. (Yes, I'm trying to make you feel a little bad if…
gregladen | November 14, 2008The paper I'm about to discuss is a minefield of potential misconceptions that arise from the way we often use language do describe natural phenomena. This is a situation where it would be easier to start with a disclaimer ... a big giant obvious quotation mark ... and then use the usual misleading, often anthropomorphic language. But I don't think I should do that. We'll address this research the hard way, but the result will be worth the extra work.
Here is the basic hypothesis. The null model is that genetic variation arises randomly and this variation is the raw material on which…
gregladen | November 14, 2008During the Franken - Coleman senatorial campaign in Minnesota, Republican Norm Coleman issues a number of very negative campaign ads filled with misrepresentations and lies about Al Franken. Meanwhile, Democrat Al Franken issued ads critical of Norm Coleman. There was a difference: Coleman's ads were lies, Franken's ads were accurate. Nonetheless, Coleman, known not only for is womanizing, graft-mongering, and other things I won't mention, but also known for a litigious streak, sued Franken over two claims made in campaign ads. One of these claims was determined by a judge to be a matter…
gregladen | November 14, 2008... or should I say "Archeology."
Analytical Archaeology by David Clarke is a medium size blue book about methods in archaeology that, during the 1970s and 1980s was probably required reading in all graduate level method and theory archaeology classes. It may still be in many cases. Clarke was one of the founders of "processual" archaeology. Processual archaeology represented a theoretical shift in archaeology to come into closer alignment with broader anthropological theory extant at the time, in the post Willey and Phillips (1958) period when every tenth paper about archaeological…
gregladen | November 14, 2008... which should not be a huge surprise. Here are a few quotes from the recently published ... then hastily removed ... column of Cynthia Dunbar, who is a member of the Texas State Board of Education. Yes, she's one of the creationists:
Can we truly even imagine an America under an Obama Administration? I sincerely believe that an Obama Administration would ultimately mean one thing...the end of America as we know her.... [some babbling about Obama not really being a citizen] ...
I perceive it [terrorist attack on U.S. soil in first six months of Obama Presidency] will be a planned effort…
gregladen | November 14, 2008What difference is there, really, between a roll, a muffin, and a croissant?
So what do we have in the blogosphere today, looking near the top of my blorg muffin...
You need to promise you are over 18 and an adult to visit A Blog from Hell, but if you get past the security, you can learn about Yet more evidence that right wing punditry causes brain damage.
More on Armistice Day
LRA: The Genocide We Missed
A quick summary of A few hurricane records, considered
I turns out that Barack Obama Is Not The Antichrist
New Homo erectus Pelvis, and it's a girl!
Some Archaeology News:
Iron Age…
gregladen | November 14, 2008An excellent read: Muslim Sailors, a Skeptical Redux
In a recent issue of Skeptic, Tim Callahan discusses the issue of ancient astronauts and lost civilizations.(1) This is perhaps one of the most frequent and popular theories of pseudo-archaeology, and certainly an area of concern ripe for a skeptical assessment.(2) Overall, Callahan does an admirable job in addressing the common theories of hidden secret civilizations, and it is good to see the inclusion of more recent Raelian ideas, which are generally seen as too off base for archaeologists to even bother discussing them. However,…
gregladen | November 14, 2008"I may not have won your vote," Obama said, "but I hear your voices, need your help, and I will be your president, too."
But the promise meant little to leaders of the religious right, who are undaunted by the Democrats' gains in the White House and in Congress.
"I knew, moments after the election results came in, that I was now part of the resistance movement," says Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America.
npr
Sore losers.
gregladen | November 14, 2008The government army in the Democratic Republican of Congo has pushed rebel forces five km back in the vicinity of Goma. These rebels are north and west of Goma. Of particular importance is the effect on some sixty thousand refugees who camped out in the vicinity of Kibati, which is north of Goma and between the rebel forces and the army forces. At present, opposing troops are essentially staring at each other across often very short distances. UN forces are trying to separate the factions, but the best they are likely to do is to reinforce Goma so that rebels do not take over that city.…
gregladen | November 14, 2008While on a trip to Nebraska, Blogger PZ Myers has has the worst possible thing happen to a blogger happen to him.
His laptop has bit the dust.
Please send PZ condolences, and if anyone is anywhere near Kearney Nebraska, with a spare laptop, GO SAVE HIM!!!!
gregladen | November 14, 2008 Maize weevil, Sitophilus zeamais [usda] ... or the corn rust or the corn root cutter or whatever pathogen that comes along that cannot be fought off with a cleverly concocted combination of chemicals. This is because all we eat is corn, or so it seems.
In a paper just published in PNAS, scientists use stable isotopes to estimate the contribution of corn to the standard American diet of meat and fries from fast food. They sampled a disgustingly large number of not so happy meals from Burger King, McDonald's, and Wendy's and used this form of analysis to determine that a very large…
gregladen | November 13, 2008Imagine that you are a bad guy running from the law, and the sheriff is about to catch up to you. If you want, you can be Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid or any other charismatic bad guy. Or maybe you're a wizard in Harry Potter and Dementors are about to catch up to you.
But then, just as the sheriff, or the Dementor, or whatever, catches up, you wave a magic wand and instead of killing or capturing you, your nemesis transforms into a big tent inside of which you can hide. And the tent is made out of food that you can eat.
This, metaphorically (and thus not exactly accurate, but…
gregladen | November 13, 2008UNISEF in the Congo:
NEW YORK (November 12, 2008) -- Insecurity persists in the North Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where more than 250,000 people have been forced from their homes in the last two months alone, due to fighting between the army and a rebel group.
Today, two more planeloads of emergency supplies landed in Goma to help address critical health and humanitarian needs of the displaced. A total of 10 shipments are expected over the coming days; six have landed thus far.
"These supplies will help contain the spread of cholera and diarrhea, both extremely…
gregladen | November 13, 2008Evidence is increasing that foreign forces are being drawn into the conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Eyewitnesses told the BBC Angolan and Zimbabwean troops were on the ground.
Meanwhile, journalists report that some of Laurent Nkunda's rebel fighters are in the pay of the Rwandan army.
This has renewed fears that the fighting will see a re-run of the five-year Congolese war, which involved nine nations, before it "ended" in 2003.
ironic quotes added by me.
Details here.
gregladen | November 13, 2008In July 2007, armed men entered the Democratic Republic of Congo's Virunga National Park and killed five critically endangered mountain gorillas at point-blank range, leaving the bodies where they fell.
Since September 2007, rebel forces have controlled the area, threatening to kill any conservationists or gorilla rangers who attempted to enter the area.
Recently, the rangers and their families had to flee from their homes and live in makeshift camps as the latest outbreak of violence engulfed the eastern part of the country. ...
Read the rest here.
gregladen | November 13, 2008Not just ANY planets, but planets outside of our solar system. Planets in another solar system! Observed by the Hubble Space Telescope, the other using other methods.
Visible and infrared images have been snapped of a planet orbiting a star 25 light-years away.
The planet is believed to be the coolest, lowest-mass object ever seen outside our own solar neighbourhood.
In a separate study, an exoplanetary system, comprising three planets, has been directly imaged, circling a star in the constellation Pegasus.
source
And they said it could never be done...
gregladen | November 13, 2008You all remember the PZ Myers vs. Chuck Norris meme. Well, Chuck Norris just wrote a letter to Barack Obama which makes me think we need a Chuck Norris vs. Barack Obama meme. First, the letter from Chuck to Barack (which I have because I was cc'ed, of course...)
Dear President-elect Obama:
First, congratulations on your victory. The historical magnitude of your presidential win is nothing short of stupendous and a colossal fulfillment of the American dream (an achievement embedded long ago in the equality clauses of the Declaration of Independence).
It's likely no big surprise that I don't…
gregladen | November 13, 2008In 1953 a student named Stanley Miller did an experiment showing that the simple chemicals present on the early Earth could give rise to the basic building blocks of life. Miller filled a flask with water, methane, hydrogen and ammonia--the main ingredients in the primordial soup. Then he zapped the brew with electricity to simulate lightning, and, voila, he created amino acids, crucial for life. Now, scientists have reanalyzed this classic experiment, and found that the results were even more remarkable than Miller had realized.
Jeffrey Bada, a former student of Miller's, preserved the…
gregladen | November 12, 2008
This image of the northern polar region of Saturn shows both the aurora and underlying atmosphere, seen at two different wavelengths of infrared light as captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
Energetic particles, crashing into the upper atmosphere cause the aurora, shown in blue, to glow brightly at 4 microns (six times the wavelength visible to the human eye). The image shows both a bright ring, as seen from Earth, as well as an example of bright auroral emission within the polar cap that had been undetected until the advent of Cassini. This aurora, which defies past predictions of what…