jlynch | January 27, 2008Events
1986 - Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart 73 seconds after liftoff killing all seven astronauts onboard
Births
1608 - Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Italian physiologist and physicist
1611 - Johannes Hevelius, astronomer
1622 - Adrien Auzout, French astronomer
1755 - Samuel Thomas von Sömmering, German physician
1884 - Auguste Piccard, Swiss physicist
1922 - Robert W. Holley, American biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1687 - Johannes Hevelius, Polish astronomer
1864 - Ãmile Clapeyron, French engineer and physicist
1915 - Nikolay Umov, Russian physicist
1988 - Klaus Fuchs,…
jlynch | January 26, 2008
Meet William Torres and his slippers. William was arrested while driving in Allentown (Pa) on two counts of homicide and was known to be dealing coke and heroin from his home. More interestingly, William was pulled over while wearing "a hooded sweartshirt [sic] with a skull-head pattern on it, pajama bottoms and fuzzy lion-faced slippers". Prison is going to be rough on this guy, me thinks. Either that or he's getting a head start on the insanity defense.
(HT to Fark for making my evening).
jlynch | January 26, 2008
Births
1621 - Thomas Willis, English physician
1903 - John Carew Eccles, Australian neuropsychologist and Nobel Prize laureate
1936 - Samuel C. C. Ting, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1851 - John James Audubon, French-American naturalist, ornithologist, and painter
1967 - Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee (above) were killed in a fire during a test of the spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center.
jlynch | January 25, 2008Anyone who knows Arizona politics won’t be surprised by another dumb proposal being put forward by Thayer Verschoor and Karen Johnson. Both are Republicans. Both have problems with evolution - Verschoor turned up at an Answers in Genesis fundraiser a few years back. Both supported a measure that would have forced instructors to provide alternative material when the material being taught went against the worldview of students. In short, both are culture warriors idiots, pure and simple.
And if only to prove their idiocy, they are now proposing a bill (SB 1214) that would exempt concealed-…
jlynch | January 25, 2008Births
1891 - Wilder Penfield, American-born Canadian neurosurgeon
1904 - Ancel Keys, American scientist
1911 - Polykarp Kusch, German-born physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1823 - Edward Jenner, English physician
1943 - Harry H. Laughlin, American eugenicist
1946 - Adriaan van Maanen, Dutch-American astronomer
jlynch | January 25, 2008I’ve seen the light, had an epiphany even. Tom Cruise tells us:
Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, its not like anyone else. As you drive past you know you have to do something about because you know you’re the only one that can really help.
and later
We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. We are the authorities on improving conditions. Criminal, we can rehabilitate criminals, way to happiness, we can bring peace, unite cultures.
Is there anything Scientology can’t do? Probably not, according to Cruise.
So I’ve had an…
jlynch | January 25, 2008
This is what Pluto and Charon look like from 3,600,000,000 kilometers. The picture was snapped by NASA’s New Horizons probe which expects to flyby the planet in 2015. Expected future highpoints for the mission are:
June 9, 2008 -- Pass Saturn’s orbit.
March 5, 2011 -- Pass Uranus’ orbit.
August 1, 2014 -- Pass Neptune’s orbit.
July 14, 2015 -- Flyby of Pluto around 11:59 UTC at 11096 km, 13.780 km/s
July 14, 2015 -- Flyby of Charon around 12:13 UTC at 26927 km, 13.875 km/s
2016-2020 -- possible flyby of one or more Kuiper Belt objects.
Set your alarms accordingly.
jlynch | January 25, 2008
How in the name of all that is rational can a NBC/WSJ poll (taken 1/20 to 1/22) give Bush a 31% approval rating? The economy is circling the drain and Bush has achieved absolutely nothing over the past year. Seriously, name one thing of any worth he has achieved over the past year. Just one .... I’m waiting.
I’m willing to predict that his one achievement for 2008 in the next year will be to leave office, and then only if someone helps him open the door.
jlynch | January 25, 2008As regular readers probably know, I have been a (sporadic) contributor to The Panda’s Thumb since its founding in March 2004. Usually if I post there, the post ends up here, with comments often ending up at both sites. To make it easier to keep track of these (and to make it easier to keep up with comments), I have created a category The Panda’s Thumb (cross posts) which will list all such cross-posts since January 1st of this year. Cross-posts will also be indicated by the spiffy icon you see here.
jlynch | January 25, 2008By way of GrrlScientist, I notice that Fieldiana (the journal of the Field Museum is now freely available online. This means that DD Davis’ classic study "The giant panda: a morphological study of evolutionary mechanisms" of 1964 can now be enjoyed by one and all. Over three hundred pages, detailing everything you’d want to know about giant panda morphology.
jlynch | January 25, 2008>
Kindred
Musing, between the sunset and the dark,
As Twilight in unhesitating hands
Bore from the faint horizon’s underlands,
Silvern and chill, the moon’s phantasmal ark,
I heard the sea, and far away could mark
Where that unalterable waste expands
In sevenfold sapphire from the mournful sands,
And saw beyond the deep a vibrant spark.
There sank the sun Arcturus, and I thought:
Star, by an ocean on a world of thine,
May not a being, born like me to die,
Confront a little the eternal Naught
And watch our isolated sun decline--
Sad for his evanescence, even as I?
George Sterling
jlynch | January 25, 2008Events
2004 - Opportunity Rover (MER-B) lands on surface of Mars.
2006 - Three independent observing campaigns announce the discovery of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb through gravitational microlensing, the first cool rocky/icy extrasolar planet around a main-sequence star.
Births
1627 - Robert Boyle, Irish chemist
1794 - François-Vincent Raspail, French chemist
1796 - William MacGillivray, Scottish naturalist and ornithologist
1917 - Ilya Prigogine, Russian scientist and Nobel Prize laureate
1949 - Paul Nurse, English biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1957 - Kiyoshi Shiga, Japanese…
jlynch | January 24, 2008Births
1928 - Desmond Morris, British zoologist
Deaths
1877 - Johann Christian Poggendorff, German physicist
1966 - Homi J. Bhabha, Indian physicist
jlynch | January 23, 2008Over at The Questionable Authority, Mike re-iterates something I've been saying for years about the DI's "Dissent from Darwinism" signatories, 700 individuals who the DI's flacks claim "have signed the list because it is their professional opinion that the evidence is lacking for the claims for the ability of random mutations and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.":
What basis does Douglas Keil, who is listed as having a PhD in "Plasma Physics" have for forming a professional opinion on evolutionary biology? How about Jeanne Drisko, "Clinical Assistant Professor of…
jlynch | January 23, 2008I've written before about efforts to study and support jaguar populations here in the desert southwest and Mexico. So the following is saddening. Nature is reporting that:
The US government will not attempt to save jaguars from extinction within the formal system of the Endangered Species Act... [Cats seen in the US in recent years] do not justify a formal "recovery plan". The agency says that it will instead work on behalf of the endangered cat with other countries south of the border that comprise the rest of the animal's range.
jlynch | January 23, 2008Births
1840 - Ernst Abbe, German physicist
1857 - Andrija MohoroviÄiÄ, Croatian seismologist
1872 - Paul Langevin, French physicist
1876 - Otto Diels, German chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1907 - Hideki Yukawa, Japanese physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1918 - Gertrude B. Elion, American scientist and Nobel Prize laureate
1919 - Hans Hass, Austrian zoologist
1929 - John Charles Polanyi, Canadian chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1937 - Orso Mario Corbino, Italian physicist
1971 - Fritz Feigl, Austria-born chemist
1988 - Charles Glen King, American biochemist
jlynch | January 22, 2008
The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism have released a report finding that the administration issued at least 935 false statements in the two years leading up to the invasion of Iraq as "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses." Administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had WMDs or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both. Neither of those claims have turned out to be true.…
jlynch | January 22, 2008By way of Sage Ross, a graduate student in history of science at Yale:
Spontaneous Generations is a new online academic journal published by graduate students at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. The journal aims to establish a platform for interdisciplinary discussion and debate about issues that concern the community of scholars in HPS and related fields.
Apart from selecting peer reviewed articles, the journal encourages a direct dialogue among academics by means of short editorials and focused discussion papers which highlight…
jlynch | January 22, 2008
And so it started, four years ago today.
The "more focussed" thing didn’t really work out though ...