gregladen | September 5, 2008You asked for it, here it is. It gets especially good at 2 minutes and beyond, but it is all good.
gregladen | September 5, 2008
A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin--author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement--made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.
"I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits," said Darlene Freiberg, one among a growing crowd assembled here to see the mysterious stain...
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Apparently, the image is the product of differential growth patterns of…
gregladen | September 5, 2008Final notes on the election
This is it. This is the last time I'm talking about the election. I'm quite worn out and the Republican National Convention was the last straw. I am still feeling nauseated from it. So other than a few comments below, this is the LAST political commentary you will see on this blog. Ever. Back to science only.
Unless something interesting or important happens, of course.
I do want to point out a few posts that I think are worth looking at for a perspective on current issues. The first is Pharyngula's version of a recent John Stewart bit explaining how…
gregladen | September 5, 2008Read the following text. As you read it, try to empty your mind. When you encounter grammatical errors or jargon that is impossible to understand, do not try to translate what you are reading. Rather, become one with the obscurity. Read slowly, thoughtlessly, with emptiness of purpose, as though the words were entering your eyes, traveling through your head, and leaving through your ears. The ultimate understanding will be achieved when you reach the end of the abstract and have understood nothing:
Recent neuroimaging studies have identified a set of brain regions that are metabolically…
gregladen | September 5, 2008It is raining cats and dogs in Florida, thanks to Tropical Storm Hanna. Ike remains a real threat. Josephine is a giant question mark. Details below the fold.
Hanna is a really large tropical storm that is eventually ... by tomorrow AM ... be more or less over land, where it will quickly move north/northeast not straying very far from the coast. It will probably jump over the coast at least once (its current track has its center going over Cape Cod) but that hardly maters as it is so large. When it passes cape cod, if it is still strong enough (which it likely will be) the folks in…
gregladen | September 4, 2008Former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has been sentenced to four years in prison for corruption.
A Washington court found Abramoff guilty of trading expensive gifts, meals and sports trips in exchange for political favours.
bbc
In a possibly related matter ...
A review of campaign finance filings shows that .. Arizona Republican [John McCain] has accepted more than $100,000 in donations from employees of Greenberg Traurig, the very firm where Abramoff once reigned.
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gregladen | September 4, 2008Ike is now a Category Four Hurricane, and quite a nice looking one at that.
Hurricanes are giant engines made of air that are driven by the transfer of heat from the sea surface to the top of the troposphere. The greater the difference in SST (sea surface temperature) and higher altitude temperature, the more power in the engine. But, there are some very strong wind currents in the atmosphere above the troposphere, and that matters as well.
When you fly in a commercial air liner over a long distance, sometimes (depending on the airline) they display a chart that shows current location,…
gregladen | September 3, 2008Webster Cook is the young man attending a Florida University who was assaulted by Catholic Host Watchers because he did not chew the sacred cracker fast enough in church several weeks ago. This led to the incident that became internationally known as Crackergate. The internet itself became the venue for a major kerfuffle involving PZ Myers and The Catholic Church, but in the mean time, back in Florida, Webster Cook was charged, as a student in the University's own Kangaroo court, with various crimes, but acquitted a few weeks ago. More recently, he (as a member of student government) was…
gregladen | September 3, 2008Just so you know. Bob Dylan's original name was Bob Zimmerman and he is from the Iron Range region of Minnesota. He actually named (it is said) the busy business student neighborhood by the main campus here at The U: "Dinkytown" ... because he thought it was like a town, and it was dinky. The Watchtower (as in "All along the...." is a big ol WPA (I guess) built stone tower overlooking University Avenue in the elite Prospect Hill neighborhood. And so on.
Roy Zimmerman is much funnier than Bob Dylan, and he is here in the Twin Cities making fun of the Republicans. (Hat Tip PZ Myers).…
gregladen | September 2, 2008Have you ever visited a culture entirety different than your own (or even moderately different, like you're from New York and you visit Kentucky, or you're from Belgium and you visit Italy)? You will see things .... things people do differently, right away. Then you leave and you figure these things are what 'they' ... the people in that culture do. And you are probably right most of the time.
But one or two of your observations might have been spurious. You observe an outlier ... an odd behavior, an odd person, whatever. In fact, I think that this happens far more often than people…
gregladen | September 2, 2008How can Google be taken seriously if a) it runs it's own business on LAMP servers using mainly Python; b) develops a multi-threaded browser with a memory-conservative development API; c) call it all open source and d) make it available only on Windows?
Since Google Chrome is probably very good competition for the remaining users of Microsoft Internet Explorer (which apparently is some kind of a web browser) I'll refer you'all to THIS very interesting cartoon (hat tip: Joe) that will convince you, if you are a Windows user, to install Chrome. But if you are a Linux/Unix (including Mac) user…
gregladen | September 2, 2008Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the…
gregladen | September 2, 2008GOP's Secret Internal Talking Points For Delegates About Palin Family are HERE. So if you are with the GOP and don't have these, better have a look. Otherwise, STAY AWAY THIS IS SECRET.
Futures Trading in Palin's Likely withdraw from the VEEP sweepstakes have started, details here.
But don't worry, it's OK. She's ready to lead. She has made several important decisions. See, like this:
gregladen | September 2, 2008"It is true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could abort every black baby in this country..."
Republican Secretary of Education William Bennet, 1985 to 1988
Hat tip: Javier,who tells me that this video is "from the same guy who did the Expelled/astrology parody."
gregladen | September 2, 2008How do athletes in Olympic level endurance competition do it?
From the abstract of a paper -- How Do Humans Control Physiological Strain during Strenuous Endurance Exercise?:
To evaluate the physiologic strain during competitions ranging from 5-100 km, we evaluated heart rate (HR) records of competitive runners (n = 211). We found evidence that:
1) physiologic strain (% of maximum HR (%HRmax)) increased in proportional manner relative to distance completed, and was regulated by variations in running pace;
2) the %HRmax achieved decreased with relative distance;
3) slower runners had…