gregladen | April 17, 2008The I and the Bird #73: The Other Diary of Samuel Pepys web carnival is up at A Snail's Eye View
gregladen | April 17, 2008A couple of weeks ago, Bayblab blog requested that I join a discussion on their site regarding pseudonymous blogging. It was obvious to me given the reputation of Bayblab that this was likely an ingenuous request, but I went ahead and joined the discussion anyway.
In the course of that discussion, the question of an individual's credentials being important came up. Very quickly, the anonymous blogger known as "Anonymous Coward" suggested that I was in favor of the idea of "appeal to authority," which was a misrepresentation of my position. I actually wrote a reply to this in the comments…
gregladen | April 17, 2008The Seattle Times, which as far as I know is a regular newspaper, has published a guest editorial by Bruce Chapman in their opinion section.
Chapman has published a lot of editorials in the Seattle Times, and in sum, they make him look like (I'm just sayin') he's on the payroll of both Microsoft and the Discovery Institute
His editorial is loaded with the usual creationist crap ... claims that Darwin was forced on him in college, noting Haeckel's embryos, quote mining from Dawkins, etc.
...Darwinists have avoided debates, and in universities have stooped to denial of academic tenure,…
gregladen | April 17, 2008A huge archive of Darwin's unpublished material has been put on line this week at The Complete Works of Charles Darwin. Many of his notebooks were already on line, but much of that was previously published (so the notes that were on line were actually published. The newly netted material has no previously been available to anyone who did not go to the original archives.
This is the raw stuff, scans of the actual papers.
The main link to access this material is HERE. This is the same site that I have used in my earlier posts on Darwin's writings.
gregladen | April 16, 2008A survey of the Western Area Peninsula Forest (WAPF) in Sierra Leone has discovered two new breeding colonies of the Vulnerable White-necked Picathartes Picathartes gymnocephalus, in addition to the 16 sites already known.
The survey was part of a one-year project carried out by volunteers from the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone (CSSL, BirdLife in Sierra Leone), the University of Sierra Leone, and the government's Forestry Division, with help from local communities.
The project, funded by the Disney World Conservation Fund (DWCF), also established a network of trained wardens in…
gregladen | April 16, 2008Apparently, this did not used to be true. TV news viewers in the past did not pick their news station in a way that correlated with party affiliation in the US. But now, increasingly so, they do.
This is from a study from the University of Georgia, Athens, based on data from the Pew Center for the People and the Press from 1998 to 2006. In 1998, Fox News was watched byt 18 percent of Democrats and 14 percent of Republicans. But in 2006, 26 percent of Republicans watched Fox, compared to 19 percent of Democrats.
What I want to know is, why are these Democrats still watching Fox News?
The…
gregladen | April 16, 2008 Several thousand intelligent beings have surrounded two funny looking blue trees. On some planet. Elsewhere. [Image source] Back in the old days, when Carl Sagan was alive and at Harvard, there was an annual (or at least frequent) debate between Sagan and my adviser, Irv DeVore. The debate was about the possibility of intelligent life having evolved on other planets.
You already know Sagan's argument: There are billions and billions of Galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, so there are billions and billions and billions and billions of stars. Even if the probability of…
gregladen | April 16, 2008He was 90 and worked at MIT. From the MIT press release:
Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.
A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere--or a model of the atmosphere--could trigger vast and often…
gregladen | April 16, 2008
There are so many lessons in this story it is hard to know where to start. First, don't throw away data. Second, scientists do question their own dogma and in fact get rather excited about it. Third, Click and Clack (Car Talk) glossed their answer to a question the other day (sort of) ... it turns out that running the heater in your convertible does affect the entire planet. A little.
Pioneer 10 and 11 left the the main part of our solar system a long time ago. As they headed on their journey to other worlds, they seemed to slow down in comparison to predictions of their actual rate of…
gregladen | April 16, 2008At this moment (noonish central time, April 16th) if you type "Expelled" into a google search, the results in order are:
1: The expelled movie site.
2: Another page on the expelled movie dite
3: The wikipedia entry for Expelled
4: A blog by PZ Myers at Pharyngula for when he got expelled from Expelled
5: The National Center for Science Education site Expelled Exposed.
gregladen | April 16, 2008Speaking at the first TED Conference in 1984, Nicholas Negroponte waxes prophetic on the converging fields of technology, entertainment and design. Years before anyone was using the word "convergence," Negroponte was thinking about TV screens as the "electronic books of the future" and computers as the future of education. In excerpts from his 2-hour talk (this was before TED's 18-minute time limit), he foreshadowed CD-ROMs, web interfaces, service kiosks, the touchscreen interface of the iPhone, and his own One Laptop per Child project. Oh, and there's also a fascinating project called Lip…
gregladen | April 15, 2008The following video is on the NCSE Expelled Exposed web site, but that site is getting so much use it is broken! So enjoy the video while we wait for ExpelledExposed to come back up...
Expelled exposed is here.
gregladen | April 15, 2008Let's have some LOL cats...
see more crazy cat pics
But wait, there's more...