gregladen | September 7, 2014This is a big thing. Starting just now, 97 different top experts on climate change, starting with Michael Mann (author of this book), one per hour, will have a say about the consensus. This is being run by Skeptical Science.
From Dana Nuccitelli's post at The Guardian,
Research has shown that when people are aware of the expert consensus, they’re more likely to accept the fact that humans are causing global warming, and also more likely to support taking action to address the problem. Hence the consensus gap is a significant roadblock preventing us from tackling global warming.
To help…
gregladen | September 6, 2014Nine months after the Polar Vortex covered a good part of American with freezing cold, there appears to be a baby boom, according to one unverified news story:
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – It’s been nine months since our bitter cold winter ended.
Now, delivery rooms are bracing themselves for a Polar Vortex baby boom.
All 39 maternity rooms and the NICU are full this weekend at a Des Moines hospital.
Doctors believe the baby bonanza is a result of the polar vortex last December and January.
In case you forgot, it was one of the snowiest and coldest winters on record.
August and September are usually…
gregladen | September 6, 2014This is Andy Robinson of the Sea Ice Graphics
Put up or ... dump water on your head!
gregladen | September 6, 2014You can now see what happens when you tweet something. Twitter has a web page that tells you how many "impressions" a tweet has, how many "Engagements" (any kind of click on your tweet) and, for convenience, the percentage of tweets with which your tweeps engaged. There are also summary graphs for engagement rate, link clicks, and retweets. There is also a graph that shows your daily frequency of impressions from your entire twitter feed and a few helpful summary statements such as your current day's impressions in relation to your 28 day average.
If you click on a tweet, you get a graph…
gregladen | September 5, 2014But you knew that already.
The Coffea canephora Genome has been sequenced. This is probably more important than the Human Genome project because humans are completely useless first thing in the morning, but coffee is very important first thing in the morning.
Some important plant evolution involves wholesale duplication of large parts of the genome. This does not appear to be the case with coffee. Rather, diversification of single genes characterizes the genome, so, according to the paper reporting these results in Science, "...the genome includes several species-specific gene family…
gregladen | September 5, 2014I'm sure you've heard. The most complete skeleton of a titanosaur, a newly named species, Dreadnoughtus schrani, is being reported from Argentina.
It is not a bird. I mention that because we've been talking about how birds are dinosaurs lately (see:"Honey, I shrunk the dinosaurs" and "Flying Dinosaurs: A new book on the dinosaur bird link.").
Dreadnoughtus schrani is a sauropod. Brontosaurus, if it existed, would be a sauropod. These are the dinosaurs with the little heads, long necks, and long tails. In cartoons they are sometimes called "long-necks." Dreadnoughtus schrani is, as…
gregladen | September 5, 2014Phil Plait says "Don't Panic!" and he should know because he is the Death from the Skies!: The Science Behind the End of the World which is about things hitting the earth. The object is called 2014 RC and it was discovered on September 2nd. It will arrive on Sunday.
The object is about 20 meter across, and Phil told me on twitter yesterday that this is roughly the same size as the Chelyabinsk asteroid that made a pass over Russia last year.
Remember. Random events occur in clusters. Otherwise they would be called "regular events." So there is probably no meaning to two similar objects…
gregladen | September 5, 2014This is not a peer reviewed meta-study, but a meta-study nonetheless. Reuters has engaged in a major journalistic effort to examine sea level rise and has released the first part (two parts, actually). It is pretty good; I only found one paragraph to object to, and I'll ignore that right now.
There are two reasons this report is important. First, it documents something about sea level rise that I've been trying to impress on people all along. The effects of sea level rise do not end at one's perceived position of a new shoreline. Here's what I mean.
Suppose you are standing on a barrier…
gregladen | September 4, 2014I was going to put this on my facebook page, but it seemed worthy of a higher status. As it were.
We live in a police state, here in America, in the same way one gives oneself a particular religion or non-religious label. Unless you are a priest, a habitually repentant sinner, or like me, a habitually annoyed atheist, you usually aren't anything. Someone can't look at you and pick out your belief system. It is in the background lurking around doing nothing, ignored and all but forgotten most of the time. But when needed out comes the book (The Bible, The Origin, whatever). Our police…
gregladen | September 4, 2014I'm just posting the graph and very little info right now. The per day rate of new cases is currently about 123 cases per day, the total number of suspected, confirmed, etc. cases is 3,685 with 1841 fatalities. These numbers no longer include Nigeria (and the one case in Senegal is not included either).
gregladen | September 4, 2014Twitter is about to ruin itself.
I'm convinced that the people who made and run both Facebook and Twitter don't have a clue as to what Facebook and Twitter are for. And by "for" I mean how the users use them. I know, I know, if you are not paying for the product than you are the product. I get it. But it is also true that for a service to be successful it should meet a need or two, and knowing what those needs are is ultimately linked to success or failure. It seems like on line services like Facebook and Twitter are too big to go away or fail. And that is exactly how we humans tend to…
gregladen | September 3, 2014Flying Dinosaurs: How Fearsome Reptiles Became Birds by science writer John Pickrell is coming out in December. As you know I've written a lot about the bird-dinosaur thing (most recently, this: "Honey I Shrunk the Dinosaurs") so of course this sounded very interesting to me. In a way, Pickrell's book is a missing link, in that he writes a lot about the history of paleontology associated with the discovery, undiscovery, and rediscovery of the early bird record and the dinosaur link.
Birds have rewritten dinosaurs. Not all dinosaurs are directly related to birds, but a large number of them…
gregladen | September 2, 2014WHO has put out very few updates in the last several days. The most current update is August 28th, and it pertains to information from August 26th and before. Based on that update, the total number of cases (confirmed, suspected, etc.) is ow 3069 with 1552 deaths. The number of new cases per day may be increasing, may be decreasing; hard to say at this point. Here's the new cases per day since the second week of July:
Senegal now has one case, a person who traveled there from Guinea. He had contact with a lot of people including health workers and family before it was figured he may have…
gregladen | September 2, 2014In order to install a new operating system on a computer, you can make a bootable DVD that includes the software to install the new system, put it in the DVD/CD reader, and reboot your computer. If all goes well your computer will boot off the DVD/CD reader and then you follow the install process and there you go.
But sometimes this doesn't work. The most common reason is that your computer is not configured to boot from the DVD/CD reader first (if it has a bootable disk in it). You have to go into bios and change the "boot order" so "boot from DVD" is on top of the list, above "hard drive…
gregladen | August 29, 2014UPDATE (January 2, 2016): The makers of Scrivener have decided to abandon their Linux project. Kudos for them for giving it a try. The Scrivener on Linux users were not many, and almost nobody donated to the project, and as far as I can tell, the project was not OpenSource and thus could not have attracted much of an interest among a community of mostly OpenSourceHeads.
So, I'm no longer recommending that you mess around with Scrivener on Linux, as it is no longer maintained. Back to emacs, everybody!
Scrivener is a program used by authors to write and manage complex documents, with…
gregladen | August 27, 2014I've designed an outline, which can be used as a table of contents, for a computer book about anything. In this case, about foo bar.
Preface
Forward
Introduction
Overview
What is foo bar?
Before you start
A brief history of foo bar
A longer history of foo bar
Why you want to use foo bar
Why you might not want to use foo bar
Alternatives to foo bar
Obtaining foo bar
Installing foo bar
Getting help on foo bar
Getting help on reading this book about foo bar
Alliterative methods of installing foo bar
Installing foo bar from source code
Installing foo bar from alternate binaries
Installing foo…
gregladen | August 27, 2014We can now be pretty sure that the Ebola outbreak in the DR Congo is not an extension of the West African outbreak. The index case seems to have gotten the disease from a mammal she butchered, and the numerous other cases seem to stem from contact with her primary as health care workers and family members. I don't think we have enough information yet to assess this outbreak vis-a-vis the genetics of the Ebola itself.
From WHO:
On 26 August 2014, the Ministry of Health, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) notified the World Health Organization (WHO) of an outbreak of Ebola virus disease (…
gregladen | August 26, 2014The Keeling Curve is the measurement of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. As we burn fossil fuel or damage "Carbon sinks" we increase that number. The Keeling curve is at the root of much of the science of global warming. It goes up over time because of the release of fossil Carbon, and it wiggles up and down at shorter time scales for other reasons. For example, the curve drops during the Northern Hemisphere summer because the plants on the north side of the globe take in some of the CO2 and make it temporarily into plant tissue. During the northern winter the reverse happens. (There is a…
gregladen | August 25, 2014The number of people known or suspected to be infected with Ebola in the West African outbreak is increasing, and the rate at which it is increasing is increasing. About 40 new cases are being reported per day on average, but the number of new cases has been going up by a few a day.
However, it is still unclear that these numbers represent what is actually happening on the ground. There is little confidence that the WHO has a good idea of who is currently stricken with the disease, and efforts to contain those who are have had mixed results.
A second outbreak is now occurring in the DR…
gregladen | August 21, 2014Do the math:
There are actually two answers to this question.
First, "maths" looks plural and is preferred by some because "mathematics" is plural. The problem with that is "mathematics" is no more plural than "physics" or any other compound noun. It is a rational sounding utterly incorrect argument. If we said "mathematics are cool" then there might be a case. But we say "mathematics is cool."
Second, some people say maths and some people say math, and that's how language works. That is a valid argument, but if you are walking around in the US saying "maths" instead of "math" be aware…