Search Content

Displaying results 67751 - 67800 of 87947

When did Isaac Newton finally fail? (Synopsis)

"To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you." -Isaac Newton Perhaps the greatest, most successful scientific theory of the past century is Einstein's General Relativity, our theory of gravitation that has answered every challenge to it for the past 101 years with resounding success. Yet before that, Newton's gravity did the same thing for more than twice as long! The culprit that finally brought the universal theory of ground was incredible in its…

The limits of how far humanity can go in the Universe (Synopsis)

“Even if I stumble on to the absolute truth of any aspect of the universe, I will not realise my luck and instead will spend my life trying to find flaws in this understanding – such is the role of a scientist.” -Brian Schmidt Imagine you had arbitrarily great technology, limitless energy, and the ability to accelerate as close to the speed of light for as long as you wanted. Would you be able to reach the most distant galaxies, the leftover glow from the Big Bang or anything beyond the limit of what we can see today? Image credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI). The GOODS-North survey,…

Winning a Nobel Prize two kilometers under the Earth (Synopsis)

"It's ironic: in order to observe the Sun, you need to go kilometers underground." -Art McDonald Imagine you finally thought you understood how the Sun worked: how light elements fused into heavier ones, emitting energy in the process. And when you finally completed your calculations, you got nuclear physics results that matched what you observed exactly, energy outputs that fit, and a prediction for the emission of neutrinos. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Borb, created in Inkscape, of the proton-proton chain in the Sun. Note the production of neutrinos. Yet when you built the…

A nearby, infant star teaches us how planets begin to form (Synopsis)

"TW Hydrae is quite special. It is the nearest known protoplanetary disc to Earth and it may closely resemble the Solar System when it was only 10 million years old." -David Wilner For hundreds of years since the realization that Earth and the other planets orbited the Sun, humanity had only hypotheses about how planets formed around stars. The consensus was that gas clouds collapsed along one direction first, forming a disk, which then rotated and formed instabilities, leading to the development of planetary systems. Image credit: Mark McCughrean (Max-Planck–Inst. Astron.); C. Robert O’Dell…

Could right-handed neutrinos solve the dark matter puzzle? (Synopsis)

"Eight solid light-years of lead...is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos." -Michael Chabon When it comes to dark matter, the most commonly considered candidates are WIMPs, or Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles. But with the failure of the LHC to turn up anything compelling at the ~100 GeV scale, or any robust hints of a new particle, for that matter, it might be time to consider another possible solution at much higher energies: a heavy, right-handed neutrino. Image credit: public domain image,…

We won't have Dianne Mandernach to kick around anymore

Our Minnesota Health Commissioner, a Republican appointee who was supported by our Republican governor through a number of startlingly clueless incidents, has finally resigned. Here's a short summary of her career: This summer, Mandernach was criticized over her suppression of a state study about 35 cancer deaths related to taconite mining on Minnesota's Iron Range. In 2004, her credibility suffered when a website posting by the department suggested that abortion might have a role in breast cancer. Critics denounced those claims as junk science, and the wording was removed from the website.…

Here's a Group for You

My buddy Jeff emailed me a link to this group with the title, "Oh my god. I can't believe this is real." The Christian Boy Love Forum. I know, it sounds like something from South Park, but they're apparently serious. A sample: Many boylovers who have attempted to change their orientation say their ability to love others and their self-esteem have been severely damaged. The American Psychiatric Association claims that this attraction begins in adolescence, and efforts to eliminate it are usually ineffective. However, like ex-gays, some boylovers have found change possible. Many Christian…

Itadakimasu

At dinner with my parents last night, we were talking about the dinners at Sumiyoshi, the ryokan we stayed at in Takayama. I haven't gotten around to uploading those pictures yet, but I dug this one out: It's not the best picture of Kate, but she does provide a sense of scale... It was a great meal-- sashimi, tempura, beef cooked at the table, fish, pickles, miso soup, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. There was also this from the next morning: Which really just begs to be captioned "I Can Has Toaster," but discretion is the better part of valor. Breakfast was served in the…

Rejecting US News

There's a quick mention in Inside Higher Ed today of the latest news on the college presidents opposed to the US News rankings. They're up to 61 signatures on their letter committing college presidents to 1) refusing to provide information for the rankings, and 2) refusing to use the rankings in their publicity. 61 signatories is a good start, but I really doubt that they have the rankers quaking in their boots. I recognize a lot of the names on the list, but then, I'm in the liberal arts college business. Only two of the 61 (Kenyon and Denison) are in the top 50 of the infamous rankings, and…

Serious News from Outer Space

There have been a number of true and non-silly stories about astronomy and cosmology recently, which I'll collect here as penance for the earlier silly post: Some theorists at Penn State have constructed a Loop Quantum Gravity model that they claim allows for an oscillating universe with no singularities. In one of those psychology-of-the-press moments, the PSU press release accentuates the positive, with the headline "What happened before the Big Bang?" Meanwhile, the IOP Physics Web news item goes negative: "'Cosmic forgetfulness' shrouds time before the Big Bang" (referring to the model…

Tiny Robot Soccer

Via EurekAlert, next weekend will see a soccer demonstration by nanoscale robots at the RoboCup competition in Atlanta. This is "nano" in the usual sense of "hundreds if not thousands of nanowhatevers," of course, and they're not exactly playing soccer: The soccer nanobots (nanoscale robots) operate under an optical microscope, are controlled by remote electronics using visual feedback and are viewed on a monitor. While they are a few tens of micrometers to a few hundred micrometers long, the robots are considered "nanoscale" because their masses range from a few nanograms to a few hundred…

Extremely Dorky Poll: Coolest Word in Physics

The other day, while we were walking from my office back to the lab, one of my students asked me a question that's perfect for a Dorky Poll: What's the coolest single word you've encountered in physics? His vote was for "antineutrino," but I've got to go with "counterintuitive," as in "Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage uses a counterintuitive pulse sequence to excite atoms without populating the intermediate state," or "the idea of making atoms cold by shining laser light on them is somewhat counterintuitive." "Counterintuitive" captures a lot of what I enjoy most about physics. We work…

Semi-Dorky Poll: Best and Worst Required Reading

Sort of in the same spirit as yesterday's summer reading post, another book-related question: What's the best book you were ever forced to read for school? What's the worst? The best, for me, is probably The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a sort of metafictional Vietnam novel in stories. I had a loaner copy of this when I took a class on Vietnam in my junior year of college, and after I returned it to the lending library, I went out and bought myself a copy to keep, because it was that good. The worst book I was ever forced to read for a class has to be Beneath the Wheel by Herman Hesse…

Nobel Prize Betting Pool

Well, not really. That wouldn't be legal. But the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 is scheduled to be announced next Tuesday, and this clearly calls for some irresponsible speculation. Who do you think will win? How about a guess as to what field of physics will be honored this year? If you think it'll help, the last five prizes were: 2005: Quantum optics 2004: Asymptotic freedom 2003: Superconductivity theory 2002: Neutrino and X-ray astronomy 2001: Bose-Einstein Condensation in atomic vapors I wouldn't bet on anything from the AMO realm this year, as they've got two of the last five.…

Counting Leptons

Quantum Diaries survivor Tommaso Dorigo offers an inside look at experimental particle physics, describing new results from combing through CDF data to look for rare events producing two leptons with the same charge: Indeed, 44 events were found when 33.7 were expected, plus or minus 3.5. That corresponds to a roughly 2-sigma fluctuation of expected counts. The picture on the left shows the leading lepton spectrum for the 44 events in the signal region. What he leaves out is that this is 44 events out of a total number that's almost certainly in the millions. Particle physicists are sort of…

Pimp Me New Blogs

I've updated the sidebar links to reflect the fact that John Horgan has moved his blog, and to add Tales from the Learning Curve. I'm sure I'm missing something, though, so tell me what it is. What are the best blogs out there that I'm not linking to? (Bearing in mind that I'm not enthusiastic about political punditry at the moment...) If you think there's some blog I should be reading and linking to that you don't see represented here, leave a link in the comments, and I'll take a look. (It would probably be a good idea to leave a link to a specific post that you found worthwhile, or a short…

The Next String Theory

The current crop of String Theory Backlash books has a lot of people wondering about what will replace string theory as the top fad in theoretical physics. Other people (well, ok, me) are worried about a more important question: What will replace string theory as the most over-hyped area in theoretical physics? Dave Bacon selflessly offers up his own field of quantum information, noting that Lee Smolin praises quantum computing theorists as "young" and "smart." As Dave notes, this is the physics equivalent of "hip" or "hot" in more general pop culture. And Scott Aaronson offers further…

Air Travel Blues

Greetings from pitch-dark Northern California, where I'm just ecstatically happy to be awake at 5am. Jet lag sucks. Other things that suck? Weather delays. We were supposed to arrive at about 1:00 yesterday afternoon, but snow in Chicago screwed that up completely. We spent a good hour and a half sitting on the plane at the gate at O'Hare, where they were down to one working runway, and two working de-icing trucks. This, on top of delays getting into Chicago due to the weather (see "one working runway") meant that we didn't get in until 4:00, so rather than spending a leisurely afternoon…

Stuck in a (Shining) Moment You Can't Get Out Of

Via Dave Sez, a good Washington Post article about the post-Maryland career of Byron Mouton: Five years have passed since Mouton helped Maryland win the national title the last time it was held in Atlanta, but the significance of that weekend still casts a shadow over his daily life in the American Basketball Association. Since he started for Maryland during its 2002 title run, Mouton has played for 13 professional teams in nine leagues. Still, even in Wilmington, fans regularly ask Mouton to talk about his old college teammates and sign Terrapins memorabilia. In the consciousness of…

Wisconsin's turn!

Oh, no. Another one. Yet another kook is inspired by Ken Ham's example and plans to open a "museum" … in the Wisconsin Dells. The Dells, if you don't know it, is a family resort area, rather cheesy (ha! In Wisconsin! I made a funny), and crammed with waterparks and waterskiing shows and carnival rides and bowling alleys and little stage shows—a creationist "museum" will fit right in. The guy who has collected a hodge-podge of creationist exhibits, Bill Mielke, exhibits the typical rhetorical coherence of his breed. "What we're doing is those that say it's scientific, is to say it's not…

My Teams Stink Again

Karma is a bitch. I left work a little early yesterday, because I saw that both Maryland and Syracuse were playing at 2:00, on ESPN networks, and I was finished with my meeting in time to catch most of the second half. Not only did I get home to find that the Maryland game was only on pay-per-view, but both of them lost. Syracuse lost by six in a game where they shot 16-28 from the free-throw line (at one point, they were 9-20), while Maryland played a horrible game and lost to Miami. They did have a shot to tie, but really, there's no excuse for falling behind a 12-19 team by fifteen points…

Dorky Poll: Worst Job in Science

Another Thursday, another early lab section. Which means it's time for another audience participation entry... I think something like this went around ScienceBlogs once before, but if so, it was a while ago, and it's a fun question: What's the worst job in science? What's the nastiest, most unpleasant task facing anyone in science? Cleaning machine parts? Washing out animal cages? Justifying climate research to James Inhofe? If you are a scientist, leave a comment describing the worst task you've had to do as part of your training. If you're not a scientist, leave a comment describing the…

Week of Science

A couple of bloggers have issued a challenge: a week of blogging about Just Science. I like RPM's description better than what's on the official site: It boils down to this: One week of science blogging and only science blogging. At least one post a day of pure science content. No blogging about anti-science -- no creationism, no anti-vaccination, no global warming denialists. Just Science from February 5 through February 11. I have two problems with this: The first problem is that I don't know if I could go a whole week without blogging about academic issues, pop culture, or just general…

links for 2008-11-17

Information Processing: Central limit theorem and securitization: how to build a CDO "[T]he mathematical concepts related to the current financial crisis leave over 95 percent of our population completely baffled. If your Ivy League education didn't prepare you to understand the following, please ask for your money back." (tags: economics math statistics blogs) Pictures of Numbers: Fixing Excel's Charts It's really sad how many steps you need to go through to get halfway decent graphs out of Excel. (tags: science math computing data-analysis) slacktivist: How I beat the market "[I]n…

links for 2008-11-04

Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog. ""All we really need is some kind of simple technological solution," says Giblets, "like a garbage-powered weather machine or a synthetic source of God."" (tags: fafblog science environment silly blogs) McCain Refusing To Tell Voters What's In Box Unless Elected | The Onion - America's Finest News Source Don't fall for it-- it's just Joe the Plumber (tags: politics us silly onion) slacktivist: Shine a light "If we were to draw this relationship as a Venn diagram, bigotry would be a smaller circle entirely inside the larger circle of…

links for 2008-10-14

Q and A - What Happened to the Golf Ball the Astronaut Hit on the Moon? - Question - NYTimes.com "Alan Shepard actually hit two balls on the Apollo 14 mission of 1971, and they are still on the Moon, he said in a 1991 interview on the Academy of Achievement Web site for students." (tags: space science sports US history) Star Wars ABC - a set on Flickr The real question is, can we get this as a cross-stitch primer for the nursery? (tags: art SF silly movies culture nostalgia) The Quantum Pontiff : Information Age Transcripts A good idea, that would unfortunately require people to…

links for 2008-02-15

The Neon Season - Things I Have Learned From Reading Children's and YA Books of Yesteryear (and sometimes of Year Now) "1. The dog always dies." (tags: books literature culture silly) Talk Like A Physicist Because we're cooler than pirates. (tags: physics science silly) Cocktail Party Physics: a little light housekeeping I really like the KITP "Journal Club" idea... (tags: physics science writing society) The Quantum Pontiff : SquInT Live Blogging - Thursday Tutorials His Holiness reports on the latest in quantum information. (tags: quantum physics computing science) Scientists Find…

links for 2008-02-03

Things That Would Be Weirder Than "Green Porno" | The A.V. Club "Then you unexpectedly come across the news that Isabella Rossellini is dressing up like various bugs and making a series of comedic short films about the way that insects have sex." (tags: animals sex silly biology) Essay - Why Does It Still Take So Long to Publish a Book? - New York Times "Although publishers can turn an electronic file into a printed book in a matter of weeks -- as they often do for hot political titles, name-brand authors or embargoed celebrity biographies[...] -- they usually take a year before releasing…

Dorky Poll: Dubious Proofs

Over at Good Math, Bad Math, Mark explains "Proof by Contradiction," a common mathematical technique that doesn't translate all that well to politics. Whenever proof techniques come up, I always think about one of the very few things I remember from my graduate class on Math Methods. We were talking about some sort of complex analysis technique-- I don't remember what it was-- and the professor was drawing diagrams and doing contour integrals on the board to demonstrate whatever it was that he was talking about, and at one point he drifted into Proof by Invocation: "So we integrate along this…

links for 2007-10-31

Overheard in New York | The Giant Ones Who Live in the Sewers Are Especially Nasty A little something for the atheists. (tags: silly religion) Pure Pedantry : The Moral Problem of New Atheism vs. Religion -or- The Majesty of Creation ScienceBlogs' best writer on science and religion and politics. (tags: religion politics science) D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else "Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101" (tags: economics politics Iraq war) What is Statistically Significant? Bet you didn't think you could give a non-…

Cartoooooons!

I've been Netflix-ing and sloooowly watching the anime Last Exile over the last few months, and finished it over the weekend. It's all very pretty, but I really don't understand what the hell happened at the very end. Some fun stuff along the way, though. This means that I have once again run out of Japanese cartoons to watch, and the mystery anime I was recommended in Japan are not available from Netflix at present. Which means I need new stuff to watch on Friday nights after happy hour, when network tv sucks. So, oh all-knowing Internet types, what should be on my Netflix queue? Serial…

SteelyKid Dance Party

I have copy edits for an Anglicised edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog to review, lecture notes to write, and a faculty meeting to go to, so I'm going off-line for the rest of the day (with one possible exception). To keep you amused in my absence, here's some video of SteelyKid dancing to Bruce Springsteen: Ain't no party like a SteelyKid party, because a SteelyKid party don't stop. Except during the sax solo. Should you want to hold your own SteelyKid dance party, here's a list of songs that she has been directly observed dancing to: "I'm Going Down," Bruce Springsteen "The Lion…

Couldn't Happen to a Nicer Team

Lately, I've taken to putting ESPN's Mike and Mike show on the tv in the morning while I make breakfast and do my morning exercises. It's sort of interesting to watch people doing a radio show on tv, I enjoy their shtick, and now that the NFL season is nearly upon us, it actually sort of resembles interesting sports programming (in mid-July, even PTI is nearly unwatchable). The down side of the rapid approach of the NFL, though, is the wall-to-wall coverage of Terrell Owens-- Is he really injured? Did he practice? Did Bill Parcells make him practice? What did he have for breakfast? Did he…

Study: Researchers discover that they can't stand each other

One of the shocking revelations of the Swifthacking of CRU one year ago (aka Climategate) was the fact that scientists can be downright nasty. Contrary to all previous indications, scientists are not always shy, reserved and polite, prefering the inside of a lab to any possibility of confrontation. On the heels of the discovery of this new phenomenom comes a fresh bit of research from the icey confines of Antarctic research facilities. After three long months of studying ice core samples in the Antarctic, a multidisciplinary climate research team presented startling evidence showing that all…

And the winner of the first Molly Award is…

…annoyingly hard to pick. You people just named almost everyone, and some of you seemed to name everyone in a single comment. It's not like there was a runaway leader; it's more like there's this huge base of commenters that everyone likes. This is a good situation for the blog as a whole, but doesn't make it easy to single out anyone. So this time I've compromised and picked the top two, secure in the knowledge that there are many more from the Pharyngula pool who will be acknowledged in the future. They are: Kristine Harley, who is widely appreciated for general good humor, pithy comments…

What use is an appendix?

Here's an excellent and useful summary of the appendix from a surgeon's perspective. Creationists dislike the idea that we bear useless organs, remnants of past function that are non-functional or even hazardous to our health; they make up stories about the importance of these vestiges. Sid Schwab has cut out a lot of appendices, and backs up its non-utility with evidence. The study I cited most often to my patients when asked about adverse consequences of appendectomy is one done by the Mayo Clinic: they studied records of thousands of patients who'd had appendectomy, and compared them with…

Aftermath

Cafe Scientifique was great fun last night, although I admit that I'm feeling it this morning: I didn't get home until after 1am, and I still had to get up at 6. It was a huge crowd, we got lots of questions and discussion. There were a few criticisms, too: we got one comment that there wasn't enough evolution presented (these open discussions always get sucked into the culture wars issue), and there were a few criticisms that I was too harsh on religion. What? Moi? I think the people on the panel covered the full range of reasonable rational thought, from an atheist who was accepting of some…

Chronic Racial Discrimination Affects Health

The role of racial discrimination in mental health has been established in a number of studies, and a new study works out some of the details in how this works. The study found blacks may, in general, have poorer mental health as a result of two mechanisms: First, chronic exposure to racial discrimination leads to more experiences of daily discrimination and, second, it also results in an accumulation of daily negative events across various domains of life, from family and friends to health and finances. The combination of these mechanisms, reports Anthony Ong, assistant professor of human…

What I had for lunch today.

I am having lunch in an eatery, a cafeteria sort of place, where you get your food, pay at the cash register, and sit down somewhere. At one table is a woman reading. At another table there is a young man eating a muffin. At another table is a pair of women having a quiet conversation. At another table is a man looking over some papers. I'm off to the side with my laptop out writing this. And in the middle table is a woman with a fairly large voice standing at her table making a series of phone calls. She is discussing personnel related issues and contract related issues connected to…

LHC may run overtime this year. If and when they get it working.

Sometime this fall or early winter, they are going to turn the Large Hadron Collider back on. It may run for several minutes or hours and then break down again. In fact, expect that. This is a huge machine the like of which have never before been seen. Why would we expect it to work without several startups? Absurdly, the LHC press office and others have been conversing about what is going to happen next without much (or any) mention of the likelihood of a repeat performance of last year's breakdown (though presumably with a different technological problem). When it comes to physics, De…

Does Lithium in Drinking Water Reduce Suicide Rates?

Lithium has long been used as a psychotherapeutic drug, and treatment with lithium demonstrably reduces incidence of suicide. Lithium also occurs naturally in groundwater to varying degrees. This study explores the relative amount of Lithium in groundwater and suicide in 18 municipalities in Oita prefecture, Japan over a period running from 2002 to 2006. There are two principle findings: 1) There is a negative correlation between standardized (adjusted) suicide rates and the amount of lithium in the water; and 2) It does not take much lithium to produce this effect. The study reports…

South Africa Elections

South Africans are preparing to go to the polls in what is expected to be the most competitive general election since the end of apartheid in 1994. Some 20,000 polling stations are due to open at 0500 GMT for the more than 23 million registered voters. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) is expected to win, but its two-thirds majority is being challenged. ANC leader Jacob Zuma said the emergence of the opposition Congress of the People had "re-energised" the ANC. bbc I remember the first election. I was in Bloomington, Indiana at the conference for the Society of Africanist…

Did Conflicker Flop? Yes. Why? Nobody knows.

Contrary to what some have suggested, the worm did, in fact, do what it was expected to do -- it activated, giving the worm-masters full administrator-level control over some five million infected PCs, and making itself much more difficult to detect and fight. The worm generates URLs by which the master computer communicates with infected machines, constantly staying ahead of the efforts of security experts to shut them down. Beginning yesterday, the botnet began communicating over 50,000 domain names in 116 countries -- a dramatic increase over the 250 URLs used by previous versions of the…

The Humanism of the Star Trek Universe

The Humanism of the Star Trek Universe. Scott Lohman and Robert Price on Atheists Talk #0060, Sunday March 8, 2009 Gene Roddenberry convinced the executives at Paramount that a show about exploring space would appeal to a mass audience. They funded a weekly series for three beautiful years, and it turns out he was partially right. The show was not a ratings giant until it went into syndication and cartoons some five years after it had been canceled. From there it fostered a "Big Bang" of cultural infusion. Movies, fan fiction, spinoff series and "cons" exploded the concepts of Star Trek…

Thirty Years Ago Today ...

...over 900 people died in one event. One religious event. Happy Anniversary Jonestown Massacre. That event was when the word "cult" became absolutely, concretely reified to distinguish between 'mainstream' religion and non-socially accepted religion (though that distinction is often made post hoc) in newsrooms, and the association of death ... usually suicide ... with religious 'cults' was underscored in spades. (The term 'cult' has been used in a similar way, is of course, for over a century.) In my view, it is not entirely clear what the difference is between something like Jone's cult…

Listen and be disillusioned

You can now download the interview by Karl Mogel of Ken Miller and me. You'll want to listen to it first of all for 1) Ken Miller, 2) the music I suggested, and lastly and leastly, 3) me. Unfortunately, I wasn't impressed with Miller's explanation of his comments in Kansas against atheists—it would help if he could make a defense without relying on straw-man mischaracterizations of prominent atheists. The sound track is Roger Waters' music for "The Body", which has a nice biological theme, but also makes a sneaky dig at Intelligent Design creationism—it's got fart sounds in it. Now there is…

The Republicans are Pissing me Off Again

There is some nasty stuff happening in Minnesota. I'm thinking the Franken-Coleman election was rigged, and we may be able to prove this over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, in Winona county: Rocks thrown through Democratic Headquarters window: Local authorities are saying that this was revenge rocks being thrown through Obama posters. Regarding the Franken/Coleman race: Yes, the number dropped from four hundred plus (Coleman over Franken) to three hundred plus (Coleman over Franken) when a "1" in the hundreds place was discovered. Was this a mistake or on purpose? A mistake? Of 400…

Quentin Patrick: The Newest Poster Boy for Gun Control

Quentin Patrick thought his home was being robbed. So he fired 29 bullets from an automatic rifle out his front door of his house hitting 12 year old T.J. Darrisaw, T.J.'s 9-year-old brother, Ahmadre Darrisaw, and their father, Freddie Grinnell. T.J. was killed. All automatic assault rifles should be banned for ownership by private citizens in the United States. That is obvious and has always been obvious, and only the nuttiest of the gun nuts could possibly think otherwise. This particular incident does not change that, though I fully expect people to use this as an argument in favor of…

Lots of news

Wow. I step away from the intertubes for an hour and a news landslide happens. They found Fossett's plane in the mountains, crashed at 10K feet. They are now saying, following up on this, that 300 people remain missing after hurricane Ike. The guy driving that train WAS text messaging Palin is still a moron, but now we understand that she is an illiterate moron: In an interview broadcast Tuesday night, Katie Couric Palin which newspapers and magazines she had regularly read in the past to "stay informed and to understand the world?" Replied Palin: "I've read most of them again with a…

I knew I forgot something important

I forgot to set up a Friday Cephalopod post before I left, and I don't have my scanner with me! Don't panic. Deep breaths. We can cope with this, by being as flexible as a cephalopod. Here's what I've done. I've reposted an article on Gonatus onyx, which has lovely photos of a squid and its babies. If you saw that beautiful movie of a squid releasing larvae as it was suspended in the deep, you'll recognize it—this is one of those resonantly moving behaviors of certain species of squid: they produced huge numbers of eggs, and then just hover, completely alone and isolated in a deep layer of…