gregladen | December 22, 2007On Mars (they do have a sky there, right?)
The planet Mars may be in for a collision from an asteroid headed its way. Scientists from NASA have been tracking the 160-foot-wide asteroid for some time now, and say the odds of it hitting the Red Planet are about 1 in 75. Back in 1908, Earth was hit by a similar asteroid, near Tunguska, Siberia. That impact flattened millions of trees and is thought to have left a crater that is now a lake.
Details here.
gregladen | December 22, 2007I generally dislike year end reviews ... they make me nervous somehow. But this is one I truly enjoyed and strongly recommend:
The Year in ID - 2007 Edition.
Twelve months ago I offered a roundup of the "advances" made by the intelligent design movement in 2006, a month-by-month roundup which differed significantly from the assessment of John West. I had started to do the same for this year, but quickly realized that the ID movement achieved absolutely nothing over the past twelve months....
Sounds strange? It should. It is from Stranger Fruit. Here.
gregladen | December 22, 2007
Felon Became COO of Wikipedia Foundation from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- The foundation that runs and accepts donations for - the online encyclopedia Wikipedia neglected to do a basic background check before hiring a chief operating officer who had been convicted of theft, drunken driving and fleeing a car accident.
[...]
gregladen | December 21, 2007I'll just show you some of the reviews of this product, and then give you the link, and I'm sure you will purchase one instantly!!!!
I was stuck for a present this christmas, so promptly ordered 5 of these ... for my child after reading the positive reviews.
Great for gouging my ex boyfriend's left eyeball out when I caught him cheating with my best friend.
Me Tarzan, This is incredible, I have been burning the end of sticks ... for years, then for my last Christmas Jane bought me this! Me love Jane.
This product is not edible.
Do not make the same mistake I did and with the lack of warning…
gregladen | December 21, 2007
Dec 21
Benjamin Disraeli born, 1804
Dec 21
Phileas Fogg completes his trip around the world in less than 80 days
Dec 21
Women gain the right to vote in South Australia, 1894
Dec 21
Women gain the right to hold political office in South Australia, 1894
Dec 21
Frank Zappa is born in Baltimore, 1940
Dec 21
Yule (Norse for "wheel") - Germanic 12-day feast
Dec 21*
Winteranfang
Dec 21*
Winter Solstice
Dec 22
Giacomo Puccini born, 1858
gregladen | December 21, 2007Please go check this out and come back and tell me what you think.....
Top Evangelical Scientist Joins Science Debate 2008 Push
I honestly hope it is a good thing...
gregladen | December 21, 2007One of these pols is not like the other. One of these pols is not the same.
gregladen | December 21, 2007I have great respect for public school teachers. Hey, I married one! Mainly, of course, because I respect her. But they are not all good. Some of them are bad...
From the Internet Infidels Discussion Board:
My son just told me that his seventh grade teacher showed his public school class...the movie "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever." It is blatantly pro-Christian
...
My son just told me that in the movie the bad kids had NEVER read the bible and had never heard the Christmas story,... Those horrible non-believers turned completely straight and moral once they were told about Jesus. My…
gregladen | December 21, 2007
Roland S. Martin is a CNN commentator who is coming late to the War on Christmas.
The name Roland Martin reminds me of Rowan and Martin. I'm pretty sure that is why Rowan S. Martin uses the "S." .. so people don't think of Rowan and Martin when they hear his name.
Rowan and Martin were funny in their day. Roland S. Martin is not funny. Yet it is hard to not laugh at the guy.
In a recent commentary, Martin whines ...
Because of all the politically correct idiots, we are being encouraged to stop saying "Merry Christmas" for the more palatable "Happy Holidays." What the heck are "…
gregladen | December 21, 2007A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist, controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature. Magical enhancers regulating gene expressionmay be involved, combined with mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2 and MCR1.
The most important thing about this study is not its conclusion, but what we will do with it.
The study, in the current issue of the British Medical Journal (here), is surely to be picked up by some of the major news agencies. Another recent study, linking testosterone to humor, was, ans passed…
gregladen | December 21, 2007Humour appears to develop from aggression caused by male hormones, according to a study published in this week's Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.... Makes total sense to me. And if you think I'm kidding, you can stuff it.
This is the finding of a newly published study by Sam Shuster, emeritus professor of dermatology from the Department of Dermatology, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, in the U.K.
This study involved measuring responses of subjects categorized by age and sex (and other variables) and showed that individuals with higher levels of testosterone (adult men…
gregladen | December 21, 2007Plant and animal fossils recently discovered from an island in the Bahamas tell a story of habitat change and human involvement in local extinction.
These finds are reported in a paper by Steadman et al. in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Most people with an interest in natural history know about one or more regions that were at one time covered by "a great inland sea." For instance, if you live in the American Midwest, you probably know that much of this region was covered by such a sea, evidenced by extensive limestone beds and other geological manifestations. As…
gregladen | December 21, 2007Firefox 3 Beta is released...
From Mozilla:
Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download.
New features and changes ... include:
Improved security features such as: protection from cross-site JSON data leaks, tighter restrictions on site-specific content using effective TLD service, better presentation of website identity and security, malware protection, stricter SSL error pages, anti-virus integration in the download manager, version checking for insecure plugins.
Improved ease of use through: better password management, easier add-on installation, new download manager with resumable…
gregladen | December 21, 2007No, no, she didn't die. My past-tensing of the verb "to live" (sorry about the verbing of the noun "tense") is a clever trick. But today is a big day in British History.
You see, today is the very first day that Queen Elizabeth of England becomes the oldest person to ever sit on the throne of England. Today, the Queen is 81 yars and 244 days old, one day more than Queen Victoria on her last day on the big ugly chair. She is expected to live many more years.
The Throne:
[source]
gregladen | December 21, 2007The Catholic Church has repressed positive reviews of the movie The Golden Compass, and has encouraged people to not see the movie. Representatives of Catholic groups have spoken out forcefully, on the verge of Holy War Level Talk, against the movie and the book. Now we year news of an event that started to play out a few weeks ago and that is now coming to a head: One school district has banned the book. The Halton Catholic District board has removed the His Dark Materials trilogy from the library shelves in that district.
The trio of books was removed from library shelves last November…
gregladen | December 21, 2007A lectin is a funny little protein that seems to be used in a lot of biological systems. They bind to sugars, and one of the roles they play is inhibition of "agglutination" ... clumping, or gluing together ... of other molecules.
A sea cucumber is an echinoderm that lives in the ocean. It looks kind of like a cucumber, but if you saw a cucumber that looked and acted like an echinoderm you would probably not put it in your salad.
Malaria is a type of protozoan, a single celled organism that is not a bacteria. There are many kinds, and they complex life cycle with many different stages…