gregladen | March 5, 2008I'm kind of shocked. Well, whatever.
Some moron just blew 70 bucks, or whatever it takes to register a domain name, to anonymously post photographs of most of the scienceblogs.com bloggers (without linkbacks, and therefore in violation of Blogging Ethics and possibly copyright laws), dividing the bloggers into "Aryan" and some other category. I don't think I want to know what Mr. Moron would call this other category.
There are people such as Jews, other immediate descendants of the victims of Nazi occupation, G,L,B,T's and their A's who might take exception to this. This is probably why…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Brokered Conventions do not happen too often these days. This is partly because everyone remembers 1968 as a nightmare. But we also have to remember 1968 as a key moment in a kind of revolution that happened.
A very large number of voters today do not necessarily know what this is about. I've pulled together a selection of old videos (from YouTube, of course) that show some of the key events and give a feel for the day, mainly related to that fateful year and some of its consequences. These are not flashy or slick and for the young modern mind this will take some work to watch and…
gregladen | March 5, 2008At least, according to Clinton:
Asked on CBS's "The Early Show" whether she and Obama should be on the same ticket, Clinton said:
"That may be where this is headed, but of course we have to decide who is on the top of ticket. I think the people of Ohio very clearly said that it should be me."
gregladen | March 5, 2008This, obviously, is the removal of an entire mountain to get at the coal, to ship to a power plant near you so that you can get electrictiy. There is a movement to reduce the amount of mountaintop removal mining, and you can get the details here at Bootstrap Analysis.
You will also find a number of links to other discussions on the topic, as well as a handy widget to help you decide just how badly you should feel about this.
I was a little surprised to find out how much coal from Virginia powered us here in Minnesota. I see the coal trains coming down from Canada in large numbers, so I…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Several years ago, I had a conversation with a friend who at that time, like me, spent a lot of time in the Adirondacks in Update New York. This was in the 1970s. He had spent a week or so on cross country skis on the north slope (facing Canada) the previous winter. On his second or third day into the mountains, he picked up the trail of a large canid. He followed the trail for three days, and during that time the track of this dog-like animal did not veer even slightly. The animal was simply walking south. It did not veer back and forth, sniffing and peeing on things, inspecting and…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Our colleagues over at scienceblogs.com of Germany have a new cool video. My German is rusty but let me try to translate:
If you mix warm and cold (liquid or gas) you get a temperature that is in between. But what if the "warm" is burning thermite (at thousands of degrees C) and the cold is liquid N, at hundreds of degrees below zero?
What happens is that the temperature difference is just too high so that one can not be sure what to expect. And then my translation kind of trails off, but if you look at the video, I think what happens is that the liquid nitrogen is transferred into an…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Microsoft is encouraging its business partners to promote its Office Open XML specification (OOXML) to the Indian Bureau of Standards (BIS) and Ministry of IT. This move has incensed supporters of the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) who fear that the "soft" Indian state may not be able to stand up to Microsoft pressure tactics.
Open Source Initiative (OSI) board member Raj Mathur claims to have a copy of the Microsoft letter to NGOs. "Microsoft has 'persuaded' several non-profit organizations," Mathur writes, "to bombard the Indian IT Secretary and the Additional Director General of the…
gregladen | March 5, 2008I only heard this term recently, as one of my students is beginning a research project on the topic. The idea, of course, is that the more food you eat from local sources, the better your impact, or lack there of, on the environment. (Well, I had heard of this concept before, but not that particular term.)
"Buying local is like a hippie movement of 2008, but is it really a good use of a college graduate's time," asked food science professor Joe Regenstein. Indeed, is it not "indulgent and hedonistic?" He had just heard Cornell nutrition expert Jennifer Wilkins analyze claims made by "…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Given two pills, one that costs ten cents and the other that cost $2.50, with both being simple sugar pills with no possible medical benefit, the more expensive pill works better to ameliorate certain conditions. I'm sure that the pharmaceutical companies will like this!
Durham, NC -- A 10-cent pill doesn't kill pain as well as a $2.50 pill, even when they are identical placebos, according to a provocative study by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University.
"Physicians want to think it's the medicine and not their enthusiasm about a particular drug that makes a drug more…
gregladen | March 5, 2008In 1986, 22-year-old Boston Celtics forward Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose. This week, DrugMonkey argued that Bias' death--as opposed to educational programs like DARE--was the major reason why self-reported rates of cocaine use by 20-year-olds dropped from 20% in the mid-1980s to 7% in the early 1990s.
Go here to express your opinion.
gregladen | March 5, 2008The Obama Surge may still be real, but it has hit the hard rocky shore of the Clinton Campaign in Ohio and Texas. Or has it. I heard an alternative theory explaining the patterning of the election last night that I think is pretty interesting.
This was related by Chris Matthews during election coverage on MSNBC last night, and sorry to say, I did not catch the name of the person who came up with this idea. Simply put, it works like this:
Among typical mostly white Democrats who are working class and middle class, there is a fixed percentage, not a surging or shifting percentage, of support…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Jonathan Wells has launched a nasty attack on PZ Myers and Ian Musgrave on the discredited Discovery Institute web site.
Darwinist bloggers P. Z. Myers and Ian Musgrave hate me. In fact, Myers writes, "My animus for Jonathan Wells knows no bounds."...
The most recent outbursts by Myers and Musgrave were provoked by my February 29 blog on Evolution News & Views, in which I predicted that Darwinists would try to take credit for a recent French discovery regarding antibiotic resistance. And indeed they did.
In the course of claiming credit for Darwinism, Musgrave claims that I completely…
gregladen | March 5, 2008Voters told urologist Barney Maddox to piss off, leaving incumbent and former school teacher Pat Hardy in her position on the school board representing District 11. The people of that Texas District were too smart to be fooled by an excessively expensive campaign by Maddox who spent over $120,000 to Hardy's $10,000.
Incumbent Mary Helen Berlanga, also challenged by a hard right winger in her own party (Lupe Gonzales) appears also to be holding her own in District 2.
[source]
gregladen | March 4, 2008When certain space ships travel by the Earth they seem to demonstrate a shift in velocity that is not predicted. Space ships traveling parallel to the Earth's Equator do not seem to show this anomaly; It appears to be most readily observed in those that travel in a path unsymmetrical with respect to the equator.
The following is from a report filed with Physics News Update in September, 1998:
ANOMALOUS ACCELERATION. Data from several spacecraft, including Pioneer 10 and 11, Galileo, and Ulysses, provide evidence for an unexplained, weak, long-range acceleration, a new report shows.…
gregladen | March 4, 2008NASA is considering a trip to the moon, and this time, the destination would be the scenic South Polar Region. Pursuant to this, they have compiled a set of more detailed than ever high-resolution radar maps of the Man in the Moon's chin.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory collected the data using the Goldstone Solar System Radar located in California's Mojave Desert. Three times in 2006, JPL scientists targeted the moon's south polar region using Goldstone's 70-meter radar dish. The antenna, three-quarters the size of a football field, sent a 500-kilowatt strong, 90-minute long…
gregladen | March 4, 2008As spring approaches, so does fishing opener. My tackle is at the cabin. I'll go there soon and begin preparations, stopping at the Mule Lake Store to pick up a fresh License. The following is the preliminary draft of my list of things to do. This list includes both things to do in preparation, as well as New Year of Fishing Resolutions.
To Do List:
Take everything out of the tackle boxes and put it all back in, organized. <\li>
Throw out all the bits of live (now dead) bait and other bits of unrecognizable organic matter.<\li>
Cut the second and third hooks off of…
gregladen | March 4, 2008It is very common, across the U.S., for science teachers to dread the "evolution" unit that they teach during life science class. As they approach the day, and start to prepare the students for what is coming, they begin to hear the sarcastic remarks from the creationist students. When the day to engage the evolution unit arrives, students may show up in the classroom with handouts from anti-science sites like Answers in Genesis, to give to their friends. They may carry a bible to the lab station and read it instead of doing the work. If there is a parent conference night around that time…