gregladen | October 19, 2008It was predicted that Sara Palin would not be able to pull off laughing at herself. They were right. But that's OK, there were plenty of people tuned in to laugh at her.
The BEST part of the show was of course the Sarah Palin rap done during Weekend Update. Again, Palin showed an inability to laugh at herself. But again, we can ROFLOAO at her:
gregladen | October 19, 2008General Colin Powell, the African American former Secretary of State famous for winning the First Gulf War as Chief of the Amy and, later, for being duped by Dick Cheney and George Bush to convince the world that Iraq was harboring illegal weapons of mass destruction, oft considered to be a presidential candidate, running mate, or some other important thing, has endorsed a candidate for the presidency of the United States of America.
This is a man who knows George Bush and worked for years in Republican Administrations. He is a man people listen to. He is a man most believe does not play…
gregladen | October 19, 2008Yet another missing link has been found! This new find links whales to quadrupedal land mammals.
Thewissen et al. report in Nature new fossil material from the Middle Eocene of Kashmir, India. This species (in the genus Indohyus is represented by a remarkable set of remains, including cranial and post cranial material. Previous studies using DNA had linked whales to the artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates such as deer, antelope, and bison). However, there is a great deal of uncertainty, and some contradictory evidence, as to where exactly in this group the whales arose.
Thewissen et al.…
gregladen | October 19, 2008Plant and animal fossils recently discovered from an island in the Bahamas tell a story of habitat change and human involvement in local extinction.
These finds are reported in a paper by Steadman et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Most people with an interest in natural history know about one or more regions that were at one time covered by "a great inland sea." For instance, if you live in the American Midwest, you probably know that much of this region was covered by such a sea, evidenced by extensive limestone beds and other geological manifestations. As…
gregladen | October 18, 2008Minnesota Atheists' "Atheists Talk" radio show.
Sunday, October 19, 2008, 9-10 a.m. Central Time
World-renowned astrophysicist Lawrence M. Krauss joins us for the
entire hour to discuss cosmology and the new Origins Initiative that
he is heading at Arizona State University. Also a discussion about
the upcoming Science and Technology Conference at the University of
Minnesota and the Origins Symposium at Arizona State University.
"Atheists Talk" airs live on AM 950 KTNF in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
To stream live, go here.
Podcasts of past shows are available at Minnesota Atheists or…
gregladen | October 18, 2008You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online.
Here is the summary of the article:
Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in…
gregladen | October 18, 2008
Oh. It's you....
Well let's see. If you put lipstick on a pig, she still raises her kid to be like Michele Bachmann. Or something like that.
I got this here, thanks to SZ for telling me about it.
gregladen | October 18, 2008On the October 17 episode of MSNBC's Hardball, Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota claimed that Barack Obama and other members of Congress share anti-American views.
Bachmann thinks that anyone who disagrees with her personal political agenda is unpatriotic. But she is the one who has a lot to learn about what it means to love America.
Her fellow members of Congress need to take a stand and tell Michele Bachmann that her disgusting accusations have no place in our country. Tell Congress to censure Rep. Bachmann.
Sign the petition
Why censure? Watch the videos. I will have more to say about…
gregladen | October 18, 2008
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) today filed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) complaint against the Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park, MN for violating IRS law by openly endorsing state Senator Michele Bachmann's candidacy for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Read the rest here.
gregladen | October 18, 2008
And Pat Buchanan too. Buchanan is a thousand times smarter than Bachmann (as is the ant I just stepped on by accident in the garage). But Buchanan is scum. Sku-fucking-um.
Just in case you are interested in contacting MSNBC to respectuflly ask that Pat Buchanan be dropped from the team, click here.
Just in case you want to help show Michel Bachmann the door, consider donating to her opponent's campaign, click here.
gregladen | October 18, 2008Or, to be less crude, did modern humans, having already evolved in Africa, interbreed with the local Europeans who were Neanderthals, and if so, did they produce fertile offspring ... and, did this happen in sufficient degree to have mattered at all to the genetics of later (but not necessarily living) people?
In my opinion, the answer is, of course they interbred. There are many reasons to believe this if almost no way to prove it. Indeed, the evidence of this interbreeding is virtually nil. With every additional test of the interbreeding hypothesis using DNA, the null hypothesis of no…
gregladen | October 17, 2008What went wrong was exactly the kind of thing that used to go wrong for me almost every time I tried to build something like the LHC in my secret laboratory when I was a kid. The electricity got the better of part of the machine and ... ZAP ... a bunch of parts got ruined.
We now know, from a report dated two days ago and coming to light over the last 24 hours or so, the following:
An electrical connection between two of the all-important magnets arced. Sort of like a fuse blowing, but it was not a fuse and was not supposed to blow. The arcing of the circuit was sufficiently strong to…
gregladen | October 17, 2008John McCain has got to be the biggest moron this side of stoopidville. For so many reasons. The latest is his very public cozy-ing up to the now famous "Joe the Plumber."
We are at war in two countries. The economy is in a state not seen since the beginning of the Great Depression and no one really knows why. America's standing in the world is at a nadir, at a low point never ever seen in our entire history. And the best John McCain can do in the final debate with his Democratic opponent is to leverage the yahooistic ramblings of a man named Joe who claims to be a plumber but is not,…
gregladen | October 17, 2008UPDATE: Since Bachmann's appearance on Hardball, the Tinklenberg Campaign has received over $30,000.00 in donations! Much of this could be because of the link from Pharyngula, but I think a fair number of people also watch Hard Ball.
I'm sure Tinklenberg would appreciate more...
gregladen | October 17, 2008
The Trivers Willard Hypothesis predicts that under certain conditions, individuals will bias their investment in offspring differently depending on the sex of the offspring. It is believed that this can be as extreme as infanticide or as subtle as providing different amounts of breast milk.
A new study by Katherine Hinde finds that macaques may do this. However, I think this may be counterintuitive.
Hinde uses data from 106 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) to show that first time mothers produce richer milk when they have sons compared to when they have daughters. She suggests that "[t]…
gregladen | October 17, 2008This sucker is about 70 kilometers long:
Get the details here, from NASA
gregladen | October 17, 2008I have three neat news stories to report, including the oldest insect ever, all cool fossil finds being reported just now.
Walking Fish Helps Fill Evolutionary Gap
Some 375 million years ago, a unique fish existed with features in its head that helped pave the way for vertebrate animals to live on land, scientists said on Wednesday.
Now, new research is providing the first glimpse at the internal head skeleton of Tiktaalik roseae.
The transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyle involved complex changes not only to appendages (fins to limbs) but also to the internal head skeleton,…