gregladen | May 21, 2008That's the invitation list to a special party coming up in a couple of days where McCain will have a conversation with a few possible Veepers.
The absence of Pawlenty is a great disappointment to us Minnesotans.
We were really, really hoping that Tim Pawlenty would go away. Also, since he IS the Governor who let the bridge fall down...
And not just any bridge. He let Gods Bridge -- the I 35 God's Highway Bridge -- fall down. What a chump.
[source]
gregladen | May 21, 2008This is not a funny Linux video. This is an actual educational video. And it's long. Only for serious Linux scholars ...
Produced by the Computer History Museum.
Hat Tip: Linux Journal
More on Linux
gregladen | May 20, 2008According to Really Linux writer Andrea W. Cordingly, "Chicks Love Linux" ...
There I was standing around the LUG booth at the annual Linux expo when I realised that unlike years past, there were considerable numbers of female attendants. No, I am not referring exclusively to those female models hired to promote an OS (I won't mention which one) wearing skimpy demon costumes.
I was truly encouraged to find that women from all backgrounds and ages were making up an increasingly larger portion of those attending such Linux conferences.
Microsoft blames YOU
A recent study shows that Microsoft…
gregladen | May 20, 2008Microsoft has a deal with the government of Hungary which costs the government billions and traps university students in the Microsoft Gap. This is the usual monopolistic evil corporate policy that makes thinking people dislike Microsoft (everyone else is a mindless clone. Sorry, but, well, I'm just sayin').
Anyway, Microsoft Strong Man Steve Ballmer had the audacity to visit a Hungarian University. And what he got, he had coming.
Ha! I love watching Ballmer ducking behind the desk. Now he knows what the average Windows user feels.
You may remember, something similar happened to…
gregladen | May 20, 2008 Could even this bird be reanimated, gene by gene? When you are extinct you're extinct. Everything about you is dead and gone. There are no more of you, every individual in your species is kaput, non existent, used up, as the Pima Indians would say, you are hokum (like a car with a flat tire). In fact, you are hohokum (like a car with no tires). Your existence is erased. You are as blotto as a budgie in Burbank.
Indeed, every bit of your being, every gene in your genome, every base pair in your DNA, is no longer extant.
...
Or is it?
Well, scientists have recently taken a bit of…
gregladen | May 19, 2008A talk by Mark Decker!
May 20, 7 p.m.
Bryant-Lake Bowl, Uptown
$5-$10 (pay what you can)
Darwin wrote about the competition between individuals that results in the survival of the fittest. But what about competitions within individuals, between the cells inside our bodies? In that struggle, cancer cells could be considered the most successful since they are the most prolific. Can Darwin provide us with a novel approach to understanding cancer? How might Darwin explain the degenerative diseases of old age? Some biologists suspect that evolution actually favors diseases of old age. In fact, an…
gregladen | May 19, 2008I was fifteen or so years old. That was back in the old days, before everyone who was 15 was world-wise and even world weary. I was a bit world wise for my age, though, as I was living on my own and was fully supporting myself with a couple of paying jobs.
Waling home from work one day, a pretty young woman approached me, as though she was asking for directions. She was foreign and her English was poor, but I eventually came to understand that she wanted me to come over to her house later that evening for dinner. She promised a nice dinner, and she promised more. She was using words like…
gregladen | May 19, 2008Quirky Pulsar System Challenges Theories of Binary Formation; Observing Stem Cells at Work; Large scale carbon sequestration
Quirky Pulsar System Challenges Theories of Binary Formation
From a Cornell Press Release:
An ongoing sky survey using the Cornell-managed Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico has turned up a massive, fast-spinning binary pulsar with a mysterious elongated orbit, researchers say.
The pulsar and its companion star challenge currently accepted views of binary pulsar formation and give researchers a new opportunity for understanding the fundamental properties of highly…
gregladen | May 18, 2008 Impacts from warming are evident in satellite images showing that lakes in Siberia disappearing as the permafrost thaws and lake water drains deeper into the ground. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory A new study led by NASA links anthropogenic climate change to a wide range of effects. The study involved scientists from about a dozen institutions and agencies, and looked at biological impacts arising from global temperature increase since the 1970s. The article is published in Nature. According to lead author Cynthia Rosenweig, "This is the first study to link global temperature data sets…
gregladen | May 18, 2008How big is a blue whale?
A blue whale is so big that a person can swim through it's largest blood vessels. A blue whale is so big that there are cars smaller than its heart. The blue whale is the largest animal on earth, now or ever, as far as we know. Its tongue is as large as the largest land animal on the present day earth (elephant). Oh, and it can go faster than most ships.
A blue whale is so big that when it dies, it takes YEARS to rot. And it smells REALLY bad.
And that is why people are moving out of a certain neighborhood in Canada.
NAIL POND, Prince Edward Island - In…
gregladen | May 17, 2008Every now and then there is a moment ... I see something, hear something, learn something ... that makes me want to jump to my feet (if I'm not already standing) and shout "To the blog mobile!"
Well, I don't actually have a blog mobile. So when that happens, I just run into the basement.
What sent me to the basement this time was a news story on the local Fox station. Now, I have to tell you, I don't watch this station. I was actually watching Ask This Old House (my favorite show on TV) and when that was over, I was flipping over to the station that sometimes has the weather radar to…
gregladen | May 17, 2008Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he's come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal
(repost)
gregladen | May 17, 2008Next Week's Four Stone Hearth will be hosted at Remote Central. Please have a look here to find out about submitting stuff.
This is the most diverse of all of the blog carnival that I know. So you probably have something. So send it in, OK?????
gregladen | May 17, 2008Mycologist Paul Stamets studies the mycelium -- and lists 6 ways that this astonishing fungus can help save the world.
...Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms can save our lives, restore our ecosystems and transform other worlds
gregladen | May 17, 2008... or at least, according to the Discovery Institutes's own Michael Medved.
The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide - between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here [the source of the distinctive american DNA signal], and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self…
gregladen | May 17, 2008 MIT researchers found that phalaropes depend on a surface interaction known as contact angle hysteresis to propel drops of water containing prey upward to their throats. Photo by Robert Lewis The Phalarope starts out as an interesting bird because of its "reversed" sex-role mating behavior. For at least some species of Phalarope, females dominate males, forcing them to build nests and to care for the eggs that the females place there after mating. If a female suspects that a male is caring for eggs of another female, she may destroy the eggs and force the male to copulate with her a few…
gregladen | May 16, 2008I only gave half the story in my recent post about how you are a big fat baby.
Here's the rest of the story...