jlynch | August 20, 2007Average number of 110+ degree days at Phoenix Sky Harbor per year by decade:
1950s: 6.7
1960s: 10.3
1970s: 17.0
1980s: 19.0
1990s: 13.6
2000s: 21.6
Notice a trend? No comment necessary. The record for the number of days in a year to reach at least 110 degrees is 28. Today was number 26 for this year. (source)
jlynch | August 19, 2007Events
1975 - Viking 1 planetary probe launched toward Mars.
1977 - Voyager 2 probe launched.
Births
1719 - Christian Mayer, Czech astronomer
1779 - Jöns Jakob Berzelius, Swedish chemist
1913 - Roger Wolcott Sperry, American neurobiologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1936 - Hideki Shirakawa, Japanese chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1915 - Paul Ehrlich, German scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1917 - Adolf von Baeyer, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1961 - Percy Williams Bridgman, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate…
jlynch | August 19, 2007Tomorrow is the first day of classes here at ASU and promises to begin a rather hectic week as everything slowly comes together. I’m down to teach two courses - one section of my Darwinian Revolution course (100 student lecture course), and two of the Human Event (Science Focus), a Socratic seminar. Follow the links if you want to know more.
jlynch | August 18, 2007Events
1839 - Presentation of Jacque Daguerre’s new photographic process to the French Academy of Sciences.
1960 - Sputnik 5 launches with a cargo of the dogs Belka and Strelka, 40 mice, 2 rats and a variety of plants.
Births
1646 - John Flamsteed, English astronomer
1871 - Orville Wright, American aviation pioneer
Deaths
1662 - Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher
1950 - Giovanni Giorgi, Italian physicist
1957 - Carl-Gustaf Rossby, Swedish meteorologist
1968 - George Gamow, Ukrainian-born physicist
1994 - Linus Pauling, American chemist, recipient of the Nobel…
jlynch | August 18, 2007
Can any one out there identify this little guy for me? Spotted this afternoon fluttering around my yard (suburban Phoenix, AZ) in some distress. If it helps, the grey stripe is approximately a half an inch wide.
Update: Looks like it is a White-lined sphinx (Hyles lineata Fabricius, 1775). More information here. Thanks to Gene Goldring for making the id.
jlynch | August 18, 2007Events
1868 - Pierre Jules César Janssen discovers helium.
1877 - Asaph Hall discovers Phobos.
Deaths
2001 - David Peakall, British toxicologist.
jlynch | August 17, 2007Jerry Bergman is well know to those of us who follow creationism - in the past he has blamed Darwin(ism) for practically every ill that afflicts the modern world and regularly publishes "historical" work in the journals of the Answers in Genesis and teh Creation Research Society. Bergman's history is deeply flawed and he twists facts to suit his pre-ordained position (like many YEC commentators).
Bergman has recently written a piece for ICR Impact discussing the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, author of L'Evolution créatrice (1907, not 1944 as Bergman indicates). The articles begins:
An…
jlynch | August 17, 2007Events
1970 - Venera 7 launched towards Venus. It became the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from the surface of another planet.
Births
1828 - Jules Bernard Luys, French neurologist
1873 - John A. Sampson, American gynecologist
Deaths
1673 - Regnier de Graaf, Dutch physician and anatomist
2005 - John Bahcall, astrophysicist
jlynch | August 16, 2007
Last time I took the Political Compass I scored Economic Left/Right: -9.5 / Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.31. That puts me fairly clearly in the far Progressive Left. The above thus is interesting: putative scores for the Presidential candidates - clearly there isn’t a candidate like me out there! More importantly, it is clear that the Democratic front runners (Obama, Edwards and Clinton) are clearly not really on the Left at all, either economically or socially.
(From Blast Off! via Crooks and Liars)
jlynch | August 16, 2007Readers of other Scienceblogs will have noticed that many of my sciblings are heading off to New York for a grand meetup. Unfortunately, due to our semester starting on Monday (and thus a start-of-semester event on Saturday that will literally involve approximately 5 seconds of my time - walk on stage, smile, wave, walk off, repeat twice 90 minutes apart), I’m unable to be there. That and the cost of flying to, and staying in, NYC.
We need a West coast meetup.
*Big sigh*
jlynch | August 16, 2007
Last October I blogged about the reappearance of jaguars in southern Arizona and the possible effect of Bush’s border fence on the species recovery. While jaguars have been seen in Arizona, the closest breeding population is 125 miles south of the border and is being studied by the Northern Jaguar Project. The population is estimated to number between 80 and 120 individuals and illegal hunting has removed at least 25 adults and cubs in recent years. If jaguars are to return to the United States, this population is surely vital.
Kevin McHugh of the Project has kindly let me know that they…
jlynch | August 16, 2007
Today in 1960, Joseph Kittinger made a jump from the balloon Excelsior III. Nothing special, I hear you say. Well, the balloon was at an altitude of 31,330 meters, and Kittinger free-fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds, achieving a maximum speed of 1,149 kph (that’s over 700 mph). He set records for highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, and fastest speed by a man through the atmosphere. This article notes that a French jumper aims to beat the record by leaping from 38 kilometers and reaching 1,790 kph.
Some video of Kittinger's jump below the fold.
jlynch | August 16, 2007Births
1832 - Wilhelm Wundt, German psychologist
1845 - Gabriel Lippmann, French physicist, Nobel laureate
1904 - Wendell Meredith Stanley, American chemist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1705 - Jakob Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician and scientist
1893 - Jean-Martin Charcot, French neurologist
1899 - Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, German chemist
1907 - James Hector, Scottish geologist
1957 - Irving Langmuir, American chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1973 - Selman Waksman, Ukrainian-born biochemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
jlynch | August 14, 2007Births
1892 - Louis, 7th duc de Broglie, French physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1893 - Leslie Comrie, New Zealand astronomer and computing pioneer
1896 - Gerty Cori, Austrian-born biochemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
Deaths
1953 - Ludwig Prandtl, German physicist
1982 - Hugo Theorell, Swedish scientist, Nobel Prize Laureate
2004 - Sune Bergström, Swedish biochemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
jlynch | August 13, 2007Births
1777 - Hans Christian Ãrsted, Danish physicist
1840 - Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German psychologist
1933 - Richard R. Ernst, Nobel Prize Laureate
Deaths
1774 - Johann Jakob Reiske, German physician
1856 - Constant Prévost, French geologist
1860 - André Marie Constant Duméril, French zoologist
1941 - Paul Sabatier, French chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1958 - Frédéric Joliot, French physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate
jlynch | August 13, 2007One of the reasons that I canceled my subscription to Skeptic was that it was giving a mouthpiece to Frank Miele and his odious defences of Arthur Jensen and putative links between race, intelligence and IQ. Miele as an undergraduate contributed to the racist journal Mankind Quarterly, has collaborated with eugenicist Richard Lynn, and has received funding from the eugenicist Pioneer Fund. Which makes the following all the more ludicrous.
Over at Uncommon Descent, Dave Springer (a.k.a. "DaveScot") has approvingly linked to an overwrought article by Miele which decrys Newsweek for its coverage…
jlynch | August 12, 2007Births
1625 - Rasmus Bartholin, Danish physician, mathematician, and physicist
1814 - Anders Jonas Ãngström, Swedish physicist
1819 - George Gabriel Stokes, French physicist
1872 - Richard Willstätter, German chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1912 - Salvador Luria, Italian-born biologist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1918 - Frederick Sanger, English chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
Deaths
1826 - René Laënnec, French physician
1865 - Ignaz Semmelweis, Austro-Hungarian physician
1910 - Florence Nightingale, English nurse
1917 - Eduard Buchner, German chemist, Nobel Prize Laureate
jlynch | August 12, 2007
Cheney in 1994: "And the question for the President in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans was Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got that right."
Full transcript below the fold
"Because if we’d gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us - it would have been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you got to…
jlynch | August 12, 2007Jim Lippard has highlighted an article in the latest Skeptic which provides a taxonomy (below) of answers to why this universe is the way it is. Jim neglected to mention that the article is freely available online as a PDF.
1. One Universe Models1.1 Meaningless Question1.2 Brute Fact1.3 Necessary/Only Way1.4 Almost Necessary/Limited Ways1.5 Temporal Selection1.6 Self Explaining
2. Multiple Universes2.1 Multiverse by Disconnected Regions (Spatial)2.2 Multiverse by Cycles (Temporal)2.3 Multiverse by Sequential Selection (Temporal)2.4 Multiverse by String Theory (with Minuscule Extra Dimensions…
jlynch | August 11, 2007
Events
1877 - Asaph Hall discovers Deimos.
1883 - The last quagga (above) dies at the Artis Magistra zoo
1960 - Echo I, the first communications satellite, launched
1977 - The first free flight of the Space Shuttle Enterprise.
1981 - Release of the IBM PC
1990 - Sue, the most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex, is discovered near Faith, South Dakota.
Births
1885 - Jean Cabannes, French physicist
1887 - Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist, Nobel Prize Laureate
1919 - Vikram Sarabhai, Indian physicist
Deaths
1810 - Etienne Louis Geoffroy, French pharmacist and entomologist
1865 -…