gregladen | November 13, 2013If I want to measure how much business a shopping mall gets, I can stand by an entrance way and count the number of people who go into the mall. If I stop every tenth person on the way out and frisk them for their receipts, I can estimate the per-person amount of money spent, and multiply that by ten to get an idea of how much business is represented by the particular entrance way I am sampling. This would work. I wouldn't know how much money was spent in the mall because I have no information about other entrance ways, but I could track changes over time in business, and I'd probably be…
gregladen | November 11, 2013I’m sure the measurements are still being checked and adjusted but it is clear that Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda was one of the most powerful tropical cyclones (termed “Typhoon” in the western Pacific) ever recorded. There are several ways to measure how big and bad a tropical cyclone is including it’s overall size from end to end, how low the barometric pressure gets, how high the sustained wind speed is, and how wide that wind field is. In addition, when a typhoon hits land details matter. The front right quadrant of a counter-clockwise spinning typhoon packs the maximum punch and if that part of…
gregladen | November 11, 2013Trigger warning: Truth and pain.
Published on Nov 11, 2013
Philippines delegate Naderev (Yeb) Saño, announces his decision to go on hunger strike on the first day of the COP19 Climate Change Summit in Poland, 11 November 2013.
Making an impassioned plea for action by the conference, he said that he would be fasting in solidarity with his country-folk until action to prevent climate change is forthcoming.
Saño received a standing ovation after describing the hardship suffered by Filipino's, including members of his own family, due to the "colossal" typhoon Haiyan which recently hit his…
gregladen | November 10, 2013Should there be a Category 6, or even a Category 7, to classify extra bit tropical cyclones like Haiyan?
Some tropical cyclones labeled Category 5 are much stronger than others. It has been suggested that we would be smart to extend the system to have a Category 6 and maybe even a Category 7 to allow the additional severity of these storms to be indicated when they are being spoken of in the news or by officials in charge of scaring people into doing the right thing, like running away or staying indoors.
There is resistance to this proposal that comes from two mostly distinct places. One is…
gregladen | November 10, 2013He who lives by gravity shall die by gravity. That's what they say in the gravity biz, anyway. GROCE is the European "Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer" Satellite which is a flying spacxe robot that has done some amazing research:
GOCE has a gradiometer with three accelerometers to measure gravity very accurately, to the level of 1 in 10^12th of Earth's gravity. In other words, if an X went to within Y meters of the detector, the detector could tell based on X's gravity. I'm not sure what X and Y are (I'm hoping someone who knows will fill in the blanks for us) but…
gregladen | November 10, 2013I've got a tip for the Minnesota Vikings, who could use a tip. Try this!
gregladen | November 9, 2013At this moment, there is a guest post over at WUWT blog downplaying the size, strength, wind speeds, overall effects, and even the death toll of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Even as the monster storm steams across the sea to it's next landfall (probably as a huge wet tropical storm, in northern Vietnam and southern China), Anthony Watts and his crew are trying to pretend this monster storm didn't happen, and instead, that it was a run of the mill typhoon.
At the moment, nobody is really saying that Haiyan's strength, size, power, or even existence is specifically the direct result of global warming…
gregladen | November 8, 2013First, watch this ad:
Steven Colbert talks about the ad here in his Tip of the Hat; Wag of the Finger segment.
Peter Gleick goes after the ad here: Is This the Most Anti-Science, Anti-Environmental TV Ad Ever?
Besides nature sucking, pink is for girls and gunnish things are for boys.
Feel free to rant below.
gregladen | November 7, 2013Paul Douglas on the weather in eight days hence and Thanksgivings anon. Interesting to note that Thanksgiving this year will be on the latest possible date it ever occurs on.
gregladen | November 6, 2013You probably already know about Michael Mann's book, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines."
The ongoing assault on climate science in the United States has never been more aggressive, more blatant, or more widely publicized than in the case of the Hockey Stick graph -- a clear and compelling visual presentation of scientific data, put together by MichaelE. Mann and his colleagues, demonstrating that global temperatures have risen in conjunction with the increase in industrialization and the use of fossil fuels. Here was an easy-to-understand graph that, in…
gregladen | November 2, 2013I think it was Johan Huizinga, who noted so many things about the Middle Ages, who noted that more than one Christian architect, captured by muslims during the crusades, was put to death for insolence after put to service to design a mosque and making it appear as a holy cross from the sky. If I recall correctly (and this was all before the Internet so nobody is going to check) the idea was this: If you build a church the way your daddy, the architect before you in your lineage of architects, built it, you don't necessarily think of why you are doing what you are doing. Way back in the…
gregladen | October 30, 2013My friend and colleague Emily Cassidy gave this TED talk! Her research is some of the most important work being done. Have a look:
gregladen | October 29, 2013This from The Big E at MPP:
The LA Times recently instituted a policy change: they no longer print letters to the editor from climate change deniers. The LA Times believes that peer-reviewed work by established scientists have overwhelmingly proven that our planet is warming and this is leading to significant climate change.
And those scientists have provided ample evidence that human activity is indeed linked to climate change. Just last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a body made up of the world’s top climate scientists — said it was 95% certain that we fossil-fuel-…
gregladen | October 29, 2013Can we replace Classroom Chaos with Learning-Centered Education?
K–12 education can be better. One of the most effective changes that could be made is to reduce the amount of chaos in the classroom and replace it with learning.
I spend several hours a year in various schools giving presentations on Anthropology, Evolution, Brainzz, and other topics. Plus, I know some teachers and have taught seminars specifically for teachers. For these reasons I have a sense of what happens in high school (and to a lesser extent middle school and elementary school) classrooms. What I am about to describe…
gregladen | October 26, 2013...
As instructed, I arrived at the New Stanley Hotel, in downtown Nairobi, at just before 11:00 AM, to meet Pat Soffer, primatologist. Willoughby didn't have to tell me about the fish and chips at the hotel's cafe; I'd eaten here many times. The Thorn Tree was a pretty standard meeting place in Nairobi. A block or so from the Hilton, at the end of the main downtown street, a short walk from the central government buildings, across from a central bus station, it was a slightly pricey but reasonable hotel with an inexpensive, leisurely outdoor restaurant open early in the morning for…
gregladen | October 21, 2013This story is not getting the attention it probably deserves in national press. Which would be more than zero (I've not seen any coverage at all).
Rather than rehashing what has already been summarized elsewhere I'll just point you to some sources:
The North Dakota Neo-Nazi Take-Over HAS ALREADY HAPPENED
The small town of Leith, North Dakota recently took center stage on social networking sites, even while most media outlets barely reported on the story getting all the buzz. A network of white supremacist groups had come together to purchase properties in the small town, so as to create a…
gregladen | October 17, 2013...When we look at living species (A and B) that we know shared a common ancestor resembling one of them (A), we can guess that the features seen in A evolved in steps more or less linearly to eventually resemble the corresponding features seen in B. For example, we think that chimpanzees and humans shared a common ancestor that resembled chimps a lot more than humans, and in fact, we consider living chimps to be a pretty close analog to this common ancestor. Chimp teeth are somewhat larger in relation to body size than human teeth, and human teeth have somewhat thicker enamel than chimp…
gregladen | October 17, 2013Laura Helmuth has written what I think is one of the most important posts so far to emerge from the fray that is Bora Zivkovic's: Don’t Be a Creep: Lessons from the latest terrible, sad, fascinating scandal in the science blogging world. Before getting to what I think is the most important part of her post, I want to first say what the most important overall lessons are, clearly, from this whole maneno, because they are different than the lesson Laura writes about:
1) Men behaving poorly in relation to women, in the context of power imbalances (but also without the power imbalance) is…
gregladen | October 16, 2013It is not helpful to elaborate the important stories of women talking about harassment to generate lies. Nor is it respectful to those women. So don't do that.
This:
Bora and I were walking in the same direction and chatting, a bit tipsy, when he asked me if I would walk him back to his hotel. I lost my breath for a second. I froze and stuttered, “No, I have to go.”
does not equal this:
Friends of @boraz, how do we justify a request to go to his hotel room? Innocent hugging? https://t.co/jGWffWMGQQ
— Dr. Isis (@drisis) October 16, 2013
So we start by getting the facts straight. The…