gregladen | May 10, 2017As you know, President Trump sacked FBI Director James Comey yesterday. The firing involved a letter written by Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general, complaining about Comey, to Jeff Sessons. (The three relevant letters by Rosenstein, Sessons, and Trump are here.)
Jeff Sessons had recused himself of matters related to the Russia-Trump Scandal, so it was necessary for the DOJ and White House to make up a reason Comey was being fired, apparently, and that letter from Rosenstein included the excuse.
In the letter, Rosenstein said, "The Director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General's…
gregladen | May 10, 2017Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual by Jeremy Brecher is a new and helpful book a the growing and essential literature.
Late in 2015, nearly two hundred countries signed the Paris Agreement acknowledging their individual and collective duty to protect the earth’s climate—and willfully refused to perform that duty. In response to this institutional failure and to growing climate destruction, we are witnessing the birth of a global nonviolent constitutional insurgency. Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual tells how to put strategy into action—and how it can succeed. It is a handbook…
gregladen | May 9, 2017Imma just put these here, and you can tell me what you think they mean.
Click here to get a PDF, and to see the entire Rosenstein letter.
gregladen | May 9, 2017The merging of Alexa and your Internet experience appears to be happening as we speak.
You know about the "Echo" by Amazon, similar to Google Home (which apparently you can buy at Target, which presumably does not have a similar device). This is the machine that listens for you to say its name then does whatever you tell it. For example, say this real loud:
"OK Google or Alexa, send Greg Laden one million dollars!"
OK, thanks. Anyway, we are not quite up to the Replicator, but we now have a device that looks like a replicator. It is the Amazon Echo Show, which is both an Alexa client and,…
gregladen | May 9, 2017You've heard of Homo naledi, the strange "human ancestor" (really, a cousin) found a while back in South Africa. There were many skeletal remains in a cave, in the kind of shape you'd expect if they had crawled into the cave and died there, not much disturbed. They look enough like other members of our genus, Homo, to be called Homo, but if we assume that increase in brain size is the hallmark of our species, they seem to be an early grade.
Over the last ten years, we have come to appreciate the fact that our genus may have differentiated into multiple species that did not have a large brain…
gregladen | May 9, 2017Evil Speaks: Warriors and Watchers Saga by S. Woffington is a new scifi/fantasy novel with an interesting twist.
If there is a Bechdel Test for ableism, it would pass.
This is an interesting story written for youthful readers (see publisher's summary below) that is well written and mostly devoid of the usual plot holes we find in this genre, but where the characters represent a range of non normative persona.
Benny, fifteen, is solitary by circumstance more than choice: he counts each move to a new town as “a life.” He’s on Life Number Seven. His last! He plans to run away from his…
gregladen | May 8, 2017We begin with the usual list of things you pretty much always do after installing every Linux OS. Why these things are not automatically done for you on installation is a bit mysterious, but down deep there are generally reasons (legal reasons) for some of these things. In fact, pretty much everything here, with some minor tweaking you can ignore, is the same as for Ubuntu 16. And 15, probably. If you've been upgrading to the latest Ubuntu on a regular basis, this might all be pretty automatic for you by now!
Anyway, after installing Ubuntu 17.04, consider these next moves:
Update and…
gregladen | May 8, 2017A Zapus is a kind of jumping mouse. A Zesty Zapus is the new Ubuntu Linux operating system, 17.04.
It has just been released and has some important features. But Zesty Zapus is not as interesting at the Artful Aardvark, which I'll discuss briefly below.
Support of 32 bit hardware is waning across the Linux world, and in this release the 32 pit PowerPC is not supported. The 64 bit PowerPC still is, but I would not be surprised if that support dropped in the not too distant future.
There are various other changes deep under the hood that the average desktop user may not care about, including…
gregladen | May 8, 2017A Photographic Field Guide to the Birds of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh is one of those next gen guides that uses photos but photos that are either enhanced or contextualized to serve the same role as drawings served in the old days, when drawings were better and photos were merely fun.
From the editors:
This is the only comprehensive photographic field guide to the birds of the entire Indian subcontinent. Every distinct species and subspecies--some 1,375 in all-
-is covered with photographs, text, and maps. The guide features more than 4,000 stunning photographs…
gregladen | May 8, 2017JFK: A Vision for America. As our political system slides off the seat and into the crapper, I am finding this book to be a worthy and informative distraction. From the publisher:
Published in commemoration of the centennial of President John F. Kennedy’s birth, here is the definitive compendium of JFK’s most important and brilliant speeches, accompanied by commentary and reflections by leading American and international figures—including Senator Elizabeth Warren, David McCullough, Kofi Annan, and the Dalai Lama—and edited by JFK’s nephew Stephen Kennedy Smith and renowned historian…
gregladen | May 4, 2017I've been enjoying Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar: A Guided Tour of the Solar System by Bonnie Buratti.
Burratti is a planetary astronomer at NASA's JPL, and is the head of the Comets, Asteroids and Satellites Group. She was a key player in the Voyager program, and in the research done with the Cassini-Huygens, and New Horizons space ships.
Worlds Fantastic, Worlds Familiar: A Guided Tour of the Solar System is a personal exploration of what it is like to personally (via robots) explore our solar system, and at the same time, a systematic accounting of the solar system. The story is…
gregladen | May 3, 2017Andrew Jackson was born in March, 1767.
Jackson was about 9 years old when the Revolutionary War started.
The Revolutionary War and the Civil War were two different wars. There was another war in between called the War of 1812. It was approximately in 1812.
Andrew Jackson was a lawyer, a judge, and a congressional representative, before he was President.
Andrew Jackson was an officer in the Tennessee Militia, and fought Native Americans, killing or ordering his men to kill, a bunch of them. He also sort of started one of the Indian wars he fought in. He also fought in the War of 1812…
gregladen | May 2, 2017A claim is being made, in a recent issue of Nature Magazine, that humans were active in the vicinity of San Diego well over 100,000 years before archaeologists think humans were even in the New World. Most commentary on this claim dismisses it out of hand, but out of hand rejections are no better than foundationless assertions. Let's take a closer look at the Cerutti Mastodon Site. But first, some important context.
The Near Consensus on North American Prehistory
The Clovis Culture is a Native American phenomenon that occurred between about 12 and 10 thousand years ago (most likely between…
gregladen | May 2, 2017Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by NdGT is now available.
What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and best-selling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.
But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in tasty chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.
While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or…
gregladen | May 1, 2017Honestly, it is hard to have an honest conversation about science with science obstructors or deniers. That is how you know you are conversing with a denier. You try to have the conversation, and it gets derailed by cherry picking, misdirection, faux misunderstanding, or lies.
I don't care how far a person is from understanding a scientific concept or finding. I don't care how complex and nuanced such a finding is. As long as the science is in an area that I comfortable with as a scientist, educator, and science communicator, I'll take up the challenge of transforming scientific mumbo…
gregladen | April 30, 2017Climate science deniers like to call we who are correct and rational (we the good guys) "alarmists." So be it.
This is a post that closely reflects my own feelings, by my friend and colleague, Lawrence Torcello. It begins:
Most of us have wondered about the human context of past crimes against humanity: why didn’t more people intervene? How could so many pretend not to know? To be sure, crimes against humanity are not always easy to identify while they unfold.
We need some time to reflect and to analyze, even when our reasoning suggests that large scale human suffering and death are likely…
gregladen | April 29, 2017https://twitter.com/Peoples_Climate/status/858366705105547265
https://twitter.com/PeterGleick/status/858380761786978304
https://twitter.com/USseriously/status/858380252749475840
https://twitter.com/HighTechAztec/status/858372516552822784
https://twitter.com/NRDC/status/858324745716215810
https://twitter.com/350/status/858314513845821440
https://twitter.com/tinselkorey/status/858380392214142977
https://twitter.com/WECAN_INTL/status/858307511551766532
https://twitter.com/fastlerner/status/858374486671994880
https://twitter.com/SierraClub/status/858382306737827840
gregladen | April 29, 2017A major Canadian logger appears to be using a pair of law suits to end the existence of Greenpeace and to stop or curtail pro-environmental activities by other organizations operating in North America, or perhaps, generally.
This activity is being carried out by Resolute Forest Products. This is a rapidly developing story. Aside from the usual sources of information, I had a long conversation with a representative of Greenpeace. I also refer you to this blog post.
Resolute Forest Products is one of North America’s largest converters of forest into pulp, ultimately to be used to make paper.…
gregladen | April 29, 2017From MMFA:
Broadcast networks are decreasing their climate coverage at a time when the case for reporting on the issue is become more and more compelling. By ignoring this serious matter, media are failing to inform audiences about pressing impacts on human migration patterns, women, and the economy.
In 2016, media had no shortage of compelling reasons to cover climate change -- from the revelation that it was the third consecutive hottest year on record to the United States’ election of a climate denier to its highest office. Yet broadcast news outlets’ coverage of climate change dropped a…
gregladen | April 29, 2017The EPA has removed climate science from its site in order that the site contents better reflect Donald Trump's perspective.
From Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin at the Washington Post:
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday evening that its website would be “undergoing changes” to better represent the new direction the agency is taking, triggering the removal of several agency websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information.
One of the websites that appeared to be gone had been cited to challenge statements made by the EPA’s new administrator, Scott Pruitt…