jlynch | February 26, 2007WaPo reports:
Five Western governors [California, Arizona, Oregon, New Mexico and Washington] agreed yesterday on a plan to cut their states' emissions of gases linked to global warming and to establish a regional carbon-trading system, though they stopped short of saying how drastically they will seek to reduce greenhouse gases ...
"In the absence of meaningful federal action, it is up to the states to take action to address climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the country," said Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano. "Western states are being particularly hard hit by the effects of…
jlynch | February 26, 2007February 26th
1638 - Death of Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac, French mathematician
1786 - Birth of François Arago, French mathematician
1799 - Birth of Émile Clapeyron, French engineer and physicist
1814 - Birth of Charles Joseph Sainte-Claire Deville, French geologist
1935 - Robert Watson-Watt carried out a demonstration near Daventry which led directly to the development of RADAR in the United Kingdom.
1852 - Birth of John Harvey Kellogg,American surgeon, advocate of dietary reform
1857 - Birth of Émile Coué, French psychologist
1903 - Birth of Giulio Natta, Italian chemist, Nobel…
jlynch | February 25, 2007Internet users with a home wireless connection check news and e-mail more than users with just a wired broadband connection, according to new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. (source)
jlynch | February 25, 2007February 25th
1682 - Birth of Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist
1919 - Birth of Karl H. Pribram, Austrian neuroscientist
1950 - Death of George Minot, American physician, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1953 - Death of Sergei Winogradsky, Russian scientist
1971 - Death of Theodor Svedberg, Swedish chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1999 - Death of Glenn T. Seaborg, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
2006 - The world's estimated population reaches 6.5 billion.
jlynch | February 24, 2007After being defeated by the French two weeks ago, the Irish hammered the luckless English 43-13 to keep their Triple Crown hopes alive. Victory over Scotland at Edinburgh on March 10th will mean the title is theirs.
jlynch | February 24, 2007
According to this paper, a hidden Markov model of the divergence between humans and chimps finds "a very recent speciation time of human-chimp (4.1 ± 0.4 million years)". This would put the last common ancestor with Pan after a previously
reported date of between 4.98 and 7.02 million years. (TimeTree reports the weighted average for the time of nuclear divergence to be 5.56 million years). The age of 4.1 million years would apparently put the split during the time of such taxa as Australopithecus anamensis, A. afarensis and Kenyanthropus platyops. It will be interesting to see how this…
jlynch | February 23, 2007February 24th
1799 - Death of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German physicist
1810 - Death of Henry Cavendish, English scientist
1812 - Death of Etienne-Louis Malus, French physicist and mathematician
1856 - Death of Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Russian mathematician
A relatively quiet day. But in related news Abe Vigoda ,who was born today in 1921, is still alive.
jlynch | February 23, 2007Over at Retrospectacle, Shelley briefly mentions a quote that William F. Buckley has been mumbling for aeons now.
"I'm taken with the reply of an elderly scientific scholar to an exuberant young skeptic. 'I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.'"
When I first heard it in the 1997 Firing Line Debate, I wondered who the "elderly scientific scholar" and "exuberant young skeptic" were. According to this Time article from 1960, they were Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall. If you know anything about this two,…
jlynch | February 23, 2007February 23rd
1583 - Birth of Jean-Baptiste Morin, French scientist
1603 - Death of Andrea Cesalpino, Italian philosopher, physician, and botanist
1855 - Death of Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician, astronomer, and physicist
1922 - Death of Albert Victor Bäcklund, Swedish physicist
1924 - Birth of Allan McLeod Cormack, South-African born physicist, Nobel laureate
1941 - Plutonium was first produced and isolated by Glenn T. Seaborg.
1954 - The first mass vaccination of children against polio begins.
1973 - Death of Dickinson W. Richards, American physician, recipient of the Nobel…
jlynch | February 22, 2007A few days ago I mentioned the Conservapedia entry on evolution as being notably bad. Well, it has changed over the past few days (but not for the better).
Witness:
The Theory of Evolution, introduced by Charles Darwin in his book On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, published in 1859, is a scientific theory that explains the process of evolution via natural selection. The basic principle behind natural selection, states that in the struggle for life, some organisms in a given population will be better suited to…
jlynch | February 22, 2007February 22nd
1632 - Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is published.
1705 - Birth of Peter Artedi, Swedish naturalist
1731 - Death of Frederik Ruysch, Dutch physician and anatomist
1796 - Birth of Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, Belgian mathematician
1817 - Birth of Carl Wilhelm Borchardt, German mathematician
1849 - Birth of Nikolay Yakovlevich Sonin, Russian mathematician
1857 - Birth of Heinrich Hertz, German physicist
1875 - Death of Sir Charles Lyell, Scottish geologist
1878 - Birth of Walter Ritz, Swiss physicist
1879 - Birth of Johannes Nicolaus…
jlynch | February 21, 2007A couple of quick comments on this article:
Arizona State University is among the nation's top offenders when it comes to students illegally downloading music, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
The organization has sent ASU more than 300 notices identifying students involved with the illegal activity...
ASU ranks among the country's 25 top university offenders regarding piracy.
This is not really surprising. ASU has an enrollment in the region on 60,000 students making it currently the second largest university in the country. 300 is probably a relatively small…
jlynch | February 21, 2007February 21st
1554 - Death of Hieronymus Bock, German botanist
1721 - Birth of John McKinly, American physician
1895 - Birth of Carl Peter Henrik Dam Danish biochemist, Nobel laureate
1901 - Death of George Francis FitzGerald, Irish mathematician
1918 - The last Carolina parakeet dies in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo.
1926 - Death of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Dutch physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1938 - Death of George Ellery Hale, American astronomer
1953 - Francis Crick and James D. Watson discover the structure of DNA.
1968 - Death of Howard Walter Florey, Australian-born pharmocologist…
jlynch | February 20, 2007Ed Brayton has introduced us to Conservapedia - a Conservative alternative to Wikipedia which is "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American" according to Conservapedia's founder Andrew Schlafly. The quality of work is best evidenced by the entry on evolution:
The Theory of Evolution, introduced by Charles Darwin in his book On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, published in 1859, is the scientific theory that explains the process of evolution. The basic principle behind evolution, called natural selection,…
jlynch | February 20, 2007February 20th
1762 - Death of Tobias Mayer, German astronomer
1771 - Death of Jean Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan, French geophysicist
1844 - Birth of Ludwig Boltzmann, Austrian physicist
1907 - Death of Henri Moissan, French chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1937 - Birth of Robert Huber, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1962 - While aboard Friendship 7, John Glenn orbits the earth three times in 4 hours, 55 minutes, becoming the first American to orbit the earth.
1972 - Death of Maria Goeppert-Mayer, German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1983 - Death of Fritz Köberle, Austrian-Brazilian…
jlynch | February 19, 2007Yet another reason why John McCain is increasingly less deserving of any respect. from anyone who once thought he was a moderate Republican:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain, looking to improve his standing with the party's conservative voters, said Sunday that the court decision legalizing abortion should be overturned.
"I do not support Roe vs. Wade. It should be overturned," the Arizona senator told about 800 people in South Carolina, one of the early voting states.
McCain also vowed that if elected, he would appoint judges who "strictly interpret the Constitution of the…
jlynch | February 19, 2007I had meant to pimp this earlier but neglected to (bad me!). Flyers at the AAAS reminded me that Evil Monkey recently announced an essay contest sponsored by the Alliance for Science:
2007 National High School Essay Contest
Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? If you are a high school student in the United States, we want to hear your answer to that question. Send us an essay of not more than 1,000 words by March 31st.
There are all sorts of prizes for winners and the details can be found here.
jlynch | February 19, 2007The numbnut Republicans over at the Arizona State Legislature are at it again. Senate Bill 1542 passed the Senate Government Committee 4-3 along party lines and is headed for the Senate floor. Put simply, the bill would:
Forbid public K-12 and college instructors from giving their partisan political opinions while teaching.
Forbid specific endorsement or opposition of candidates, legislation or court action as well as any social, political or cultural issues of a partisan nature.
Mandate three hours of instruction annually to tell teachers what is expected under the law.
Forbid…
jlynch | February 19, 2007February 19th
1473 - Birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, mathematician and astronomer
1526 - Birth of Charles de L'Ecluse, Flemish botanist
1553 - Death of Erasmus Reinhold, German astronomer and mathematician
1660 - Birth of Friedrich Hoffmann, German physician and chemist
1799 - Death of Jean-Charles de Borda, French mathematician, physicist, political scientist, and sailor
1804 - Birth of Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky, German physician
1859 - Birth of Svante Arrhenius, Swedish chemist, Nobel laureate
1897 - Death of Karl Weierstraß, German mathematician
1916 - Death of Ernst Mach, Austrian-…