gregladen | April 11, 2008
Storks, pelicans, ibises, and other rare waterbirds from Cambodia's famed Tonle Sap region are making a comeback, thanks to round-the-clock protection by a single team of park rangers. In a project established by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Ministry of Environment of the Royal Government of Cambodia, former hunters and egg collectors have found new employment in monitoring the breeding bird colonies. This novel approach guarantees an active role for local communities in the conservation of this important seasonally flooded wetland.
A new report shows that some of the…
gregladen | April 11, 2008Finally, something really important to blog about:
Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.
Here's Johnny Lee's site, where you can download the software.
See also The Whoops of Wii
gregladen | April 11, 2008Worst Person in the World Monique Davis, who has a thing against atheists, apologized for her recent rant against atheism. after widespread public criticism. She called the object of her tirade, Rob Sherman, and said she was sorry.
Sherman says Davis told him she "took out her frustrations and emotions on me and that she shouldn't have done that." Sherman says Davis' explanation was "reasonable" and that he forgives her.
According to Sherman and State Rep. Jack Franks....Davis claims her outburst was triggered by learning shortly beforehand...that there'd been another Chicago Public…
gregladen | April 11, 2008Because they are being charged with kidnapping.
(The "are social networking sites evil" poll is here.)
gregladen | April 11, 2008
It is said that scientists involved in the Manhattan Project to engineer and implement the first nuclear bombs seriously considered the possibility that such a bomb could initiate a chain reaction that would destroy the Earth. Now it is being claimed that the production of miniature black holes by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland could do the same. The LHC is scheduled to go on line in June.
This thought occurred to me the first time I heard that the LHC might be able to produce tiny black holes.
Apparently someone else had the same thought. Walter Wagner and Luis…
gregladen | April 11, 2008Minnesota Third Congressional District hopeful, Democratic candidate Ashwin Madia, was endorsed by Fifth District's Keith Ellison.
You will remember that Keith Ellison attained sudden national attention when he was first elected to congress last year because he is not a Christian, and many right wing fanatics thought maybe he'd swear his oath of office on the Koran, thus ruining everything....
Indeed, many hard right wing groups continue to spew anti-Ellison propaganda. He is everything the right wing hates ... non Christian, Muslim, and Black.
Ellison is a very popular figure in…
gregladen | April 11, 2008It had been assumed that Hillary Clinton would do very well in Pennsylvania against Barack Obama, continuing the relative ambiguity of which candidate should be chosen at the Democratic National Convention. However, recent polls show that Obama is closing the lead, and is now probably well within 10 percentage points of Clinton, with about 10 percent of polled voters undecided. The Real Clear Politics average of seven recent pols shows the spread at 7.8 percent. Most important, though, is a huge shift from 20 percent difference prior to late March to a 10 percent difference today. It is…
gregladen | April 11, 2008Le Petit Singly, a French company, now produces cheese made from human breast milk. And it is not really new.
Apparently they've been doing this for some time now.
"Small Singly is the only cheese made from a woman's breast milk, and has remained for a long time in the shadows of the more ordinary cheeses made of sheep, goat, or cow's milk. ... made with the expertise of master cheese maker Patrice Cosma ... With a tint of hazel nut and a subtle caramelized colore, its softness and texture will undoubtedly allure you. This cheese was discovered in the 19th century, and follows grandmother'…
gregladen | April 11, 2008Carnival of the Blue Eleven is at Zooillogix
Carnival of Space # 49 is at WillGater.com
Carnival of Homeschooling # 119 is at Pondering Heart
Friday Ark #186 is at Modulator
The 166th Carnival of Education is at The Elementary Educator
Grand Rounds Volume 4 No. 29 is at Dr. Wes
57th Carnival of the Feminists is at pandemian
gregladen | April 11, 2008What would a music video look like if it were purely directed by the music? Not driven by a concept, nor by a desire to build an image, but purely as an expression of a great song? Designer Jakob Trollback shares the results of his experiment in the form. The song is "Moonlight in Glory," from David Byrne and Brian Eno's classic album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, remastered in 2006.
gregladen | April 10, 2008
This is the first time we are forced to weather a major storm in the Twin Cities without Paul Douglas! We're doomed!!!! This storm is supposed to go for another 24 hours or so.
I am reminded of last spring when there was a particularly bad storm raging outside...
... and Amanda and I had the TV on with Paul showing all the cool radar signals and telling people what was going to happen next. Suddely, he zoomed in on our neighborhood, had a look at the radar, and got a very worried look on his face. He turned to us and said "If you're in Blaine or Coon Rapids right now, go to the…
gregladen | April 10, 2008... if you live in Baltimore ...
Details and a poll for you to take:
An art teacher at Baltimore's Reginald F. Lewis High School says she was beaten by a student in her classroom in an attack that was recorded on a cell phone camera.
Jolita Berry says the attack happened Friday. The chief of the Baltimore City school police said Tuesday he had not been notified of the attack and planned to begin an investigation.
The video of a classroom fight showed up on MySpace.com. Berry says the person being beaten is her.
She says the attack began when she told a female student to sit down and behave…
gregladen | April 10, 2008John Stossel is the woo-loving moronic co-host of the formerly not too bad but these days totally sucky tv "news" show 20-20.
It turns out Stossel is a libertarian home schooling supporter and reality denialist
Now, I should tell you that I am not against home schooling in principle. But I have come to believe that most home schooling setups involve either scary right wing fundamentalism or yahoo-istic libertarian political masterbation at the expense of the kids. But who cares what I think. What does John Stossel think?
The cat is finally out of the bag. A California appellate court,…
gregladen | April 10, 2008
A noted hurricane researcher predicted Wednesday that rising water temperatures in the Atlantic will bring a "well above average" storm season this year, including four major storms.
The updated forecast by William Gray's team at Colorado State University calls for 15 named storms in the Atlantic in 2008 and says there's a better than average chance that at least one major hurricane will hit the United States.
An average of 5.9 hurricanes form in the Atlantic each year.
"The Atlantic is a bit warmer than in the past couple of years," said Phil Klotzbach, a member of the forecast team. "That…
gregladen | April 10, 2008
Deep-sea sharks wired for sound from PhysOrg.com
Deep-sea sharks have been tagged and tracked and their habitats precisely mapped in world-first research to test the conservation value of areas closed to commercial fishing.
[...]
Shorebird numbers crash: survey alarm from PhysOrg.com
One of the world's great wildlife spectacles is under way across Australia: as many as two million migratory shorebirds of 36 species are gathering around Broome before an amazing 10,000-kilometre annual flight to their northern hemisphere breeding grounds.
[...]
A serious case of poaching of one of…
gregladen | April 10, 2008Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demos an amazing new way to use fMRI to show brain activity while it is happening -- emotion, body movement, pain. (In other words, you can literally see how you feel.) The applications for real-time fMRIs start with chronic pain control and range into the realm of science fiction, but this technology is very real.
gregladen | April 10, 2008Rube Goldberg is the inventor of the Mouse Trap ... the better mouse trap that is...
He was actually a cartoonist who made famous the Rube Goldberg machines, which were increcibly complicated, intricate devices to do something simple in as many unlikely steps as possible. The board game "mouse trap" is based on this concept. I have a vague memory or Rube Goldberg being featured on a PBS TV show called "The Great American Dream Machine" ... must have been some time before his death in late 1970. Anybody remember that?
Anyway, there is an annual compeition for the Rube Goldberg Prize that…
gregladen | April 10, 2008Shuttleworth is the man behind Ubuntu. He has written an essay on his blog (Here be Dragons) on playing nice with windows.
Windows is a very important platform, and our justifiable pride in Linux and the GNU stack shouldn't blind us to the importance of delivering software that is widely useful. I believe in bringing free software to people in a way that is exciting and empowering to them, and one of the key ways to do that is to show them amazing free software running on their familiar platform, whether that's Windows or the MacOS.
Read the rest here.
gregladen | April 10, 2008
Methamphetamine use in pregnancy changes learning ability of the offspring from PhysOrg.com
Studies have suggested that infants exposed to methamphetamines while in the womb can suffer irreversible brain damage, although the exact effects of these drugs during pregnancy have been hard to pinpoint due to many other negative behaviors that often occur in meth users.
[...]
How fast you'll age is written in the bones, research finds from PhysOrg.com
Perhaps the aging process can't be stopped. But it can be predicted, and new research from Tel Aviv University indicates that people may live…