gregladen | April 8, 2008
Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU - BirdLife in Germany) is protesting vehemently against the planned destruction of Lake Constance's only colony of Great Cormorants Phalacrocorax carbo.
"It is hard to believe that Freiburg local authority intends to commit such a destructive act, not only in a National Nature Reserve but especially within a European Special Protected Area (SPA)", said Dr Andre Baumann (chairman - NABU Baden-Württemberg). "This persecution of Great Cormorants not only contradicts common sense, it also contravenes European bird protection legislation and is…
gregladen | April 8, 2008
This is a photo of a Tympanuchus cupido male drumming away on the lek to find a mate. The lek is the traditional breeding ground of the prairie chicken (and many other animals uses lek's) on which the males display, and to which the females travel to pick a male with whom to mate.
This bird, the greater prairie chicken, is threatened, and there is now a move to employ ecotourism to save it.
Once prevalent in every Wisconsin county, prairie chickens have been on the state's threatened species list since 1979, as fragmentation and degradation of the birds' native habitat has reduced their…
gregladen | April 8, 2008A must read for those in the midsts of a decision about their operating system.
All your choices have their technical merits but, you really shouldn't select an operating system based solely on it technical merits. You should instead select one that best suits your usage case. To that end I have done my best to summarize the pros and cons of each operating system from the point of view of the average end user.
Here
gregladen | April 8, 2008Do you know what the Monty Hall effect is? Let me explain.
OK, I'm Monty Hall and you are a hapless game show guest. I show you three doors and tell you that behind one door is a nice brand new car, and behind each of the other two doors is a goat.
You get to pick one of the door. Say you pick Door Number 1.
Now, I have my lovely assistant Gwenda (assume her name is Gwenda) open Door Number 3 to show you that there is a goat behind Door # 3. I give you the option: Are you going to stick with Door Number 1, or are you going to switch to the only remaining unopened door?…
gregladen | April 8, 2008Iandthebird #72 is at Ecobirder Wow, this is a good one, and coming to us from Minnesota no less...
Festival of The Trees #22 is at Arvores vivas em Nossas Vidas.
Learning in the Great Outdoors Blog Carnival: Environmental Education Week Edition is at The Heard of Harmony
Zooillogix has the latest Carnival of the Blue, in this case, number Eleven
Carnival of the Cities is at A DC Birding Blog
gregladen | April 8, 2008Whence public access policy, and why?
Flashback. The year is some time in the 1980s. The place, southern Indiana. The setting: A meeting of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists.
We are being given a presentation, in the business meeting, by a publisher. The publisher points out that the maintenance of a journal (as we had been doing) is expensive and difficult, and the most efficient way to carry out this onerous task was to have the professional publishers do it. The society was promised that members would have inexpensive subscription rates to the journal, perhaps even free…
gregladen | April 8, 2008In a move that now sends the deceptively named "academic freedom" bill to the Florida Senate floor, the Senate judiciary committee voted 6-3 to approve it. It looks like some Democrats can see the potential (almost guaranteed) lawsuit pitfalls to come, but the bill marches on nonetheless. I'll have more later ...
What's wrong with you people? Do we not ridicule you enough? Do you not feel stoopid enough? Are your jaws not slack enough and your chromosomes not homogeneous enough?
Get out there and De-Elect these Senators!
Florida Citizens for Science may have more soon. Here.
gregladen | April 8, 2008I've not been good about posting current carnivals over the last week or so ... thus, some catching up:
Scientiae Carnival: Fools and Foolishness at Women in Science
The Second Carnival Of Mathematics: The Math Geeks are Coming to Town! at Good Math Bad Math
Tangled Bank #102 at Further Thoughts
Carnival of the Green at Conserve Plastic Bags
Circus of the Spineless at from Archaea to Zeaxonthol
Encephalon Goes to Paris (Hilton) at Of Two Minds
MedBlogs Grand Rounds 4:28 at GruntDoc
gregladen | April 8, 2008Tim Pawlenty has demonstrated, in many ways and on many occasions, that he is the worst governor the State of Minnesota has ever had. The most recent proof was his line item veto of funding for the Bell Museum of Natural History, and his line item veto of the funding necessary to further develop public transit in the Twin Cities. Neither surprises me. This is the governor who gave us a creationist education director, and this is the governor who let the bridge fall down. Education and transportation are not his bailiwicks. But one has to ask, if he can't understand these two important…
gregladen | April 8, 2008Florida Senate Bill S2692 is up for discussion and a decision to pass to the floor by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
BELOW YOU WILL FIND LINKS TO EMAIL EACH MEMBER OF THE COMMITTEE (except one, for whom I provide a phone number).
I'd say you don't need to be a Florida resident to let them know what you think. In fact, let them know that the whole world is watching!
I've got to say that this is one of the scariest bills I've seen in a while. Have a look:
The Teaching of Chemical and Biological Evolution [SPCC]; Cites act as the "Evolution Academic Freedom Act." Provides public school…
gregladen | April 8, 2008Planets are formed when a disk of dust orbiting a newly minted star condenses into blobs. The beginning and end of this process has been observed, but the intermediate steps have only been modeled. However, a team of astronomers now reports observations of this process in the intermediate stages. The conditions under which this observation is made are unusual, which is apparently the reason that the observation was possible.
Dust-sized material can be detected around distant stars because it gets warmed up by the star's light and emits infrared light,...Large planets ... have enough…
gregladen | April 7, 2008Ever since 3,599 years ago humans have been asking the question "Why did our furry elephant go extinct?"
What caused the woolly mammoth's (not to be confused with the also-woolly mastodon) extinction? Climate warming in the Holocene might have driven the extinction of this cold-adapted species, yet the species had survived previous warming periods, suggesting that the more-plausible cause was human expansion.
The woolly mammoth went extinct less than four thousand years ago. The bones of miniaturized woolly mammoths have been found in Siberia dating to about 3,600 years ago. Indeed,…
gregladen | April 7, 2008Oh, no, wait, I read that wrong...
.... "Creationist Book Pops Up .... In Scotland..."
Remember Harun Yahya's Atlas of Creation, the lavishly illustrated Islamic creationist book that first turned up in Turkey, then France and other European countries and prompted a disapproving resolution by the Council of Europe? It's now being mailed to universities in Scotland
The mysterious Istanbul writer Harun Yahya (actually Adnan Oktar) is clearly spending large amounts of money sending this unwelcome book around Europe. Where does he get it from?
[source]
Have you seen this book? I got my copy a…
gregladen | April 7, 2008Fifth grader Kenton Stufflebeam is smarter than the Smithsonian Institution. Since 1981, the Tower of Time exhibit has indicated that the Precambrian is an "era" ... when in fact it is not an actual era.
The student informed the museum, and now the Smithsonian is working on plans to paint over the word "era."
[source]
gregladen | April 7, 2008
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.
They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.
Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought.
story here
gregladen | April 7, 2008
In keeping with the theme of TED2008, professor Stephen Hawking asks some Big Questions about our universe -- How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone? -- and discusses how we might go about answering them.
Stephen Hawking's scientific investigations have shed light on the origins of the cosmos, the nature of time and the ultimate fate of universe. His bestselling books for a general audience have given an appreciation of physics to millions.
gregladen | April 7, 2008Our Overlord, Virginia Hughes, has just posted a new reader poll concerning book clubs.
Web Poll Powered By MicroPoll
More information on the book club concept here.
gregladen | April 7, 2008I have a theory that cinema and other forms of fiction often arise not from pure creativity, but from prescience. It is not the case, when this happens, that "life imitates art" but rather, that art predicts life. It is only a matter of figuring out which so-called 'creative' manifestations are predictive of reality in order to understand the deep secrets of nature.
After much analysis, the details of which I shall provide later, I have been able to determine that The Force ... yes, I'm talking about The Force as in Star Wars, is real, and is the determining element for evolution and for…
gregladen | April 7, 2008One of my students mentioned the other day that she was mortified when she found her house in Northeast Minneapolis on Google Earth. Just for fun, she was flying around on Google Earth and decided to stop in and see her own crib. It turns out that the local photograph of her home on Google Earth had been taken in the latter, very messy, phase of a giant yard sale. So her house looks like total trash. "Who cares?" you might ask? Well, anyone who might like to put their home on the market, for instance.
Well, it turns out that a Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for "mental suffering" and…
gregladen | April 7, 2008Remember the Science Diversity Meme? We had fun coming up with the names of women in science. Well, the meme has now mutated into a summary of itself. Here.