gregladen | February 16, 2008Certain Bloggers have been giving Floridians a hard time because of the opposition to teaching science in public science classrooms. Shame on those bloggers. (See here and here for examples). There are some local school districts in Florida that insist that excellent science, and not creationism or religion of any kind, be taught in public schools.
The Volusia School Board supports teaching of evolution. Here i what some of the school board members say about this issue:
School Board Chairwoman Judy Conte: "The home is a good place to teach religion, I think." .. don't "confuse the two…
gregladen | February 16, 2008
The Best Possible Hot Sauce
I believe that the hottest hot sauce you can get without a permit is Dave's Insanity Hot Sauce. It is also one of the best tasting.
That is an unsolicited product endorsement. If you think differently, fine, but you have not tried it so don't be so sure!!!
Why do I mention this?
Because every now and then I eat some (very carefully) and am reminded that everyone else must know about it. A few hints:
Don't handle this sauce directly. Do not let children near it. Shake well before opening. Shake a small amount into a container, and mix that with some…
gregladen | February 16, 2008Virtuoso Pamelia Kurstin plays and discusses her theremin, the not-just-for-sci-fi electronic instrument that is played without being touched. Songs include the classic "Autumn Leaves," Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and a composition by David Mash, "Listen: the Words Are Gone." Piano: Makoto Ozone.
gregladen | February 16, 2008Run Internet Explorer. Why would you want to do this? Well, normally, you would not, but there are some enterprise applications that stubbornly, and stupidly, insist on running in IE. I avoid such circumstances, and I lobby to undo such decisions when I can. But if you need to run IE, well, it's like having diarrhea and really having to go ... you gotta do it.
Or, if you are in the web design biz, this could be useful to test sites. You really have to test your sites on IE because, so often, Microsoft IE breaks web sites that were not designed in a way that panders to Microsoft's…
gregladen | February 15, 2008What if human consciousness isn't the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn's clever strategy game, the ultimate prize of which is world domination? Author Michael Pollan asks us to see things from a plant's-eye view -- to consider the possibility that nature isn't opposed to culture, that biochemistry rivals intellect as a survival tool. By merely shifting our perspective, he argues, we can heal the Earth. Who's the more sophisticated species now?
gregladen | February 15, 2008George Dyson tells the amazing story of Project Orion, a massive, nuclear-powered spacecraft that could have taken us to Saturn in five years. With a priceless insider's perspective and a cache of documents, photos and film, Dyson brings this dusty Atomic Age dream to vivid life.
gregladen | February 15, 2008Evolution: The Mind's Big Bang
I've known Shea for years ... since before grad school. Going out drinking with this guy was a little dangerous. Almost as dangerous as going out drinking with me.
gregladen | February 15, 2008Choose from a very wide range of software in certain application areas. For instance, the range of text editors and HTML editors is larger than in other systems. I'm comparing the free Linux applications to the non-free Windows applications. If you count only free applications on both systems, the difference is even greater.
Most (many?) major programming languages are available on Linux, at no cost. These versions of the programming languages are either similar to or superior to the versions found on other systems, for the most part, as far as I can tell. (There will be exceptions, and…
gregladen | February 15, 2008A survey conducted by the St. Petersburg Times shows that half of the respondents want "only faith-based theories such as creationism or intelligent design" taught in public school classrooms, and only 22 percent want evolution-only life science curriculum.
The Florida State Board of Education will decide next Tuesday to adopt ... or not ... new standards that would make a subtle but important change in the wording of life science standards. The change would place evolutionary biology (also known as "evolutionary theory") clearly at the center of the life science curriculum.
The survey…
gregladen | February 15, 2008Darwin published hundreds of pages of text, but he also kept notebooks many of which come down to us today. They can be roughly divided into two aspects, the Beagle field notebooks of 1831 - 1836, and his later notes. Sometimes these notes are found in a single book, and one way they are told apart (when otherwise undated) is by the orientation of the notes themselves. Darwin wrote "portrait" style in the field, but "landscape" style in the lab.
repost from gregladen.com
Many of the notebooks are preserved at Down House, Darwin's residence. Down House has 14 Beagle notebooks, one…
gregladen | February 14, 2008Katie Criss has a post critiquing home schooling.
When I asked myself the question, How do you feel about home schooling? I first thought "Why would anyone do that" So I researched exactly that, What are the reasons that people give of why they choose to homeschool and how valid are they.
Link died, has been removed.
gregladen | February 14, 2008Some time in the next few days the US navy will fire a rocket in order to shoot down a satellite carrying 454 kilograms of the very poisonous substance hydrazine. By blowing the satellite up, the hydrazine tank will explode dispersing the gas to a low concentration level If the tank is not blown up, it would likely survive re-entry. If it burst on contact with the earth, several city blocks could be covered with deadly gas.
Most likely, the satellite will not hit a few city block, and the military says it is most likely to come down in a desolate area. But, the military has said a lot of…
gregladen | February 14, 2008Contains brief nudity and sexually suggestive material.
This is very long, but if you are at home bored on Valentine's day, you might as well watch it.
gregladen | February 14, 2008Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival Number 34 is here, at Our Cultural World. It's a good one.
gregladen | February 14, 2008Beta. So, don't download this unless you want to play. Details here.
Here's the skinny:
Improved security features such as: better presentation of website identity and security including support for Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager.
Improved ease of use through: easier add-on discovery and installation, improved download manager search and progress indication in the status bar, resumable downloading, full page zoom, and better integration with Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
Richer…
gregladen | February 14, 2008Choose among a wide range of cool desktops. These are not "skins" or mods like in Windows. These are entirely different desktop systems that each have their unique characteristics.
What this means is that you can choose a desktop that does a lot of work for you ... like my main home computer, which is fairly tricked out. I've got drawers that contain icons to avoid clutter on a task bar, I've got a taskbar on the top and a task panel on the bottom, the weather and a box to put words to look up in a dictionary, and other cool stuff is on the task bar.
I've got a second installation in a…
gregladen | February 14, 2008
Darwin's finches are a classic and historically important example of a species radiation (sometimes called an "adaptive" radiation, but that implies a specific assertion about the cause of the radiation which may not be appropriate in all cases). During the five weeks that Darwin spent on the Galapagos in September, 1835, he made a number of observations of these birds, but they did not occupy his time or attention more than any other aspect of this remarkable archipelago of islands. It seems that Darwin did not recognize all of the finches as finches, thinking some were of an entirely…