gregladen | March 3, 2008ESP is a new organization formed for the purpose of putting an end to the madness. The madness, of course, is the new corporate business model of patenting something utterly absurd, such as "click on something and something happens" or "computers can store data" or "tell the user there has been an error" ... then you get a team of lawyers in expensive suits to take down all of your competitors by suing them for having the audacity to steal your ideas.
ESP will be the ACLU of the software world. I hope they have a lot of money.
Here is their press release, in part:
Boston, Mass., February 28…
gregladen | March 3, 2008This is not new, but i is so good that I like to remind everyone of it once every eight months or so.
This is the Minnesota Citizens for Science Education Real Science Search Engine.
This engine searches the whole web, including commercial sites, but omits several hundred carefully chosen creationist URLs. When you want to see the science, published books, professional societies, etc., but skip most of the creationist stuff, use this one.
gregladen | March 3, 2008A colleague and grad student of mine, Rob, just sent me the following question, slightly edited here:
A student in my intro class asked me a good question the other day to which I had no answer. When did smiling cease to be a threat gesture? I have a couple of ideas. One is that with reduced canines, smiling became a way to say "look, I have small canines, I am not a threat to you." The other is that smiling is based more on a "fear-grin" than a threat. Under this idea, smiling might have been a way of showing deference to others. If everyone shows deference, it would be egalitarian, until…
gregladen | March 3, 2008The developers of Firefox ran into an interesting situation with Firefox 3.0 (in production). There are reasons for it to have run faster than Firefox 2.0 on a Mac, but in some ways it ran more slowly.
After a great deal of research, they figured out why. Essentially, there is a thing that happens to software running on a Mac that does not use certain native Apple system software ... causing it to run much more slowly. But a very simple change (which is somewhere between undocumented and very very poorly documented) in the software can fix it easily.
When this article was picked up on…
gregladen | March 3, 2008Joseph Lekuton, a member of Kenya's parliament, tells the story of his own extraordinary education, and then a parable of how Africa itself can grow. His message of hope for Kenya in particular has never been more relevant.
gregladen | March 3, 2008On one hand, we have the Huckabee factor ... Huckabee's draw on hard right voters in tomorrows primary may lead anti-evolutionists to victory. On the other hand, we have the Obama factor ... Obama's draw on moderate republicans may lead to a cleansing of pernicious liberal elements from the Republican party.
Hilary Hylton has an interesting and informative piece in, of all places, Time, about tomorrow's events in Texas. You need to know this.
Texas has a state-wide school board. This means that when it comes to textbook adoption, Texas is the largest single customer, and thus,…
gregladen | March 3, 2008My colleague Christian Reinboth (Frischer Wind) sent me this amazing video. Christian says it has been circulating on the European YouTube circuit (which, from our American perspective could be known as "TheirTube"). It has been very windy in Europe lately, as you know from the amazing Wind Turbine Catastrophic Failure videos (Wind Turbines Gone Wild).
This is an Airbus 320 trying to land in a very strong cross wind:
This reminds me of the old Sesame Street skit "Can you see wind?" ... maybe not, but if you are aerodynamic, the wind can certainly see you. That is some amazing flying. (…
gregladen | March 3, 2008
The Asus Eee Laptops being sold by Best Buy come featured with an Intel Celeron M Processor, 512 MB of DDR2 memory, 7" widescreen display, 4GB solid state drive, built-in webcam, and the Linux operating system. Weighing in at only 2lbs, the laptop is great for day-to-day traveling. The hardware might not seem much, if you're used to the high demands of a Windows-based PC, but for Linux, 512 MB of memory and a 4GB hard drive is plenty. You won't be using the laptop for much server-based work or playing any 3D accelerated games, but that's not what the laptop is about. It's about having e-mail…
gregladen | March 2, 2008What is your favorite scripting language?
(I don't think I can do polls on this site ... but if you click on this picture of a poll, you can go to that site and take the poll)
gregladen | March 2, 2008
Normally, I keep my blog away from Squid and other cephalopods because I know that if PZ myers feels threatened, he may charge, and the squiggly molluscs are his bailiwick.
But, this evening at the Laden household analog of the dinner table, the question came up: "How many species of cephalopods are there, anyway? Huh?"
So I went on line to look, and before I got anywhere near the answer to this interesting question, I came across the Vampire Squid, Vampyroteuthis infernalis. This turns out to be an animal of great extremes....http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/…
gregladen | March 2, 2008Right, I know, he just died so we have to pretend we did not loath him for a least two weeks. But I have the sense that William Buckley would not give me that courtesy, so forget that.
I am reminded that Buckley is often quoted as having said words to these effect:
I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty at Harvard University.
What a dummy.
The most recent instance in which I've seen the man with my own eyes, and heard him with my own ears, saying this (on TV, not in real life ... because he's dead and all…
gregladen | March 2, 2008Common Sense Tells us to try this drug:
Thank You British NHS. We needed th is.
gregladen | March 2, 2008Holy crap, where did this come from?
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is sending thousands of troops and tanks to the border with Colombia, marking a sharp escalation in regional tensions.
Speaking on his weekly television show, President Chavez also said Venezuela's embassy in Colombia would close.
Mr Chavez said he was reacting to the "cowardly murder" of a leading Farc rebel by Colombian forces in a raid just inside Ecuador on Saturday.
Later, Ecuador recalled its ambassador to Bogota in protest at the incursion.
Raul Reyes and at least 16 other rebels were killed in the operation,…
gregladen | March 2, 2008... according to mainstream Christian leaders.
This is about Larry King, who was fatally shot in the head on February 12 in a classroom. Larry was murdered by his classmate, Brandon McInerney. It appears that Brandon shot Larry because Larry was openly gay and a transvestite.
TUIBG notes on his blog that Bishop Fulton Sheen blames the policy of "tolerance" (a word rarely used because if its innate offensiveness by the GLBTA community). Larry was murdered because the community he lived in generally accepted him. Another way of putting it is that Larry was murdered because the community…
gregladen | March 1, 2008... at Further Thoughts.
Berry Go Round is a carnival for Plants. But you don't have to be a plant to submit a post. Just be interested in plants, generally from a biological and evolutionary perspective, not just, "I like plants, plants are cool."
The next edition will be hosted HERE, here.... where you are looking right now. So do send me your entries!
gregladen | March 1, 2008Interesting editorial in PLoS Genetics:
Reports that the Bush administration has expressed an interest in closing the Guantanamo Bay detainee facility in Cuba [1], colloquially known in the US as "Gitmo," could stimulate a new chapter in US foreign policy. By converting Gitmo into a biomedical research institute dedicated to combating the diseases of poverty in the Western Hemisphere, we can tap into a little known, but highly effective tradition of vaccine diplomacy that we first began 50 years ago at the height of the Cold War [2],[3].
In the 1950s, polio epidemics were ravaging the major…
gregladen | March 1, 2008Investor Steve Jurvetson talks about his awesome hobby -- shooting off model rockets. With gorgeous photos, infectious glee and just a whiff of danger.
gregladen | March 1, 2008The flu is caused by the influenza virus, of which there are several types. H1N1 is known as the "Spanish Flu," H2N2 as the "Asian Flu" and so on. These funny letters and numbers refer to specific genotypes. The H1N1 is the version of the flu that caused the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and 1919, which was responsible for the death of between 50 and 100 million people.
Considering that the difference between a bird or pig flu that may be hanging around in the background and a human pandemic causing flu can be a few dozen changes in the genome, understanding the evolutionary patterns…
gregladen | March 1, 2008Americans revel in violence. We have an excuse for almost any kind of violent or oppressive act. When a young boy poking around, on a dare, in what he thought was an abandoned house was shot dead by my neighbor last year, the boy was vilified as a threat and the trigger happy crazy guy lauded as a hero, by my other neighbors. Why would that be? Earlier this week, an event happened in a nearby town that helps us to understand the sorry state our culture has attained.
During a high school basketball game between local teams Shakopee and Prior Lake, a "fan" ran onto the basketball court…