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gregladen | October 30, 2017This is my last post at Scienceblogs.com.
In the future I will be blogging at Greg Laden's blog, located at its original home at gregladen.com.
I have a feeling that Scienceblogs will not last long without me. What do you think?
:)
But seriously, I'll be talking about the story of the current status and development of this blog and scienceblogs.com with Mike Haubrich on our podcast Ikonokast. We recorded the conversation today, and will post it in a day or two.
Please go HERE to continue this conversation.
That is all. Thank you very much.
tsmith | October 18, 2017As several others have already noted, after almost 12 years, Scienceblogs is shutting down at month's end. Though I've done most of my writing elsewhere over the last few years, I'd certainly like to keep the archives of this blog up somewhere, and maintain it as a place to post random musings that don't fit anywhere else. But admittedly, the primary thing that has kept me here has been inertia--moving is just so hard, y'all. So throwing this out there to anyone who would like to assist in a move. I have a domain and so can set up another Wordpress blog elsewhere and export/import the…
gregladen | October 10, 2017In every area of life, but especially in the overlapping realms of technology, science, and health, misunderstanding how things work can be widespread, and that misunderstanding can lead to problems.
In the area of voting, the main problem seems to be the expenditure of great amounts of outrage and concern over things that are not real. At the same time this happens, things that are real matter a great deal.
I'll give you one example. Remember the special election for the Congressional Representative for Georgia's 6th district, earlier this year? Several media outlets reported "voting…
gregladen | October 5, 2017... which I've posted on before ... there are new developments, summarized at Inside Climate News:
Invoking the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a federal conspiracy law devised to ensnare mobsters, the suit accuses the organizations, as well as several green campaigners individually and numerous unidentified "co-conspirators," of running what amounts to a giant racket.
"Maximizing donations, not saving the environment, is Greenpeace's true objective," the complaint says. "Its campaigns are consistently based on sensational misinformation untethered to facts or…
gregladen | October 5, 2017from a major non profit, click through the the X Blog to read the press release.
gregladen | October 5, 2017The Trump Administration, in the person of Interior Secretary Zinke, tried to eliminate Obama-era limitations on greenhouse gas emissions from the petroleum industry. The Administration tried to use the "Administrative Procedure Act to turn off provisions intended to reduce how much natural gas petroleum drillers could vent or burn on public or tribal lands. This would have been administered via the BLM. The federal government was sued by California, New Mexico, and various environmental groups, and yesterday, the court ruled in favor of the environment.
This is the second loss for Trump…
gregladen | October 4, 2017Two science books cheap (Kindle version, two bucks):
The Male Brain: A Breakthrough Understanding of How Men and Boys Think
Dr. Louann Brizendine, the founder of the first clinic in the country to study gender differences in brain, behavior, and hormones, turns her attention to the male brain, showing how, through every phase of life, the "male reality" is fundamentally different from the female one. Exploring the latest breakthroughs in male psychology and neurology with her trademark accessibility and candor, she reveals that the male brain:
-is a lean, mean, problem-solving machine. Faced…
gregladen | September 29, 2017The White House calls the disaster in Puerto Rico a "good news story," implying that the federal government is doing a great job there.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump put out a tweet today that seems to imply that the US needs to consider whether or not it wants to help Puerto Rico, which, by the way, is actually part of the United States.
Here is the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, responding to some of this:
Hat tip: Media Matters for America
gregladen | September 27, 2017There are special elections all the time, mostly at the state level. The news is full of the Moore vs. Strange race, which isn't just strange because Strange is in it. You all know about that. But what you may not know about is the interesting victory, also yesterday, of Kari Lerner in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire politics are above-average complex at the state level, so I won't dwell on context. But this is a New Hampshire state house race in a district normally held by Republicans. Lerner is a centrist Democrat. She won 39 votes, and a third party candidate, a Libertarian, won by 41. So…
hrynyshyn | September 20, 2017Much is being made of a new paper in Nature Geoscience in which the authors recalculate "Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C." Whether the authors are justified in their marginally optimistic conclusions — and there's plenty of debate about that — there really isn't much in the way of policy guidance here. Just look at this money quote in Nature:
“The Paris goal of 1.5 °C is not impossible — it’s just very, very difficult,” says lead author Richard Millar, a climate researcher at the University of Oxford, UK.
Or as Millar and his colleagues put in in their…
gregladen | September 12, 2017Some potentially interesting science related books cheap now in Kindle format:
The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution by Jonathan Eig
We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the…
gregladen | September 12, 2017Ya don't know, you just don't know.
Note: I'm pretty sure that at the time Trump made those remarks, the Coast Guard was still hunkered down.
jdupuis | September 11, 2017The last one of these was in mid-June, so we're picking up all the summer stories of scientific mayhem in the Trump era. The last couple of months have seemed especially apocalyptic, with Nazis marching in the streets and nuclear war suddenly not so distant a possibility. But along with those macro-level issues, Trump and his cronies are still hammering away at climate change denial, environmental protection, research funding and public health issues. As exhausting as it seems -- and this is part of the plan -- amongst all of us opposed to Trump, we need to keep track of a wide range of…
gregladen | September 11, 2017This is a preface to the preface to a piece I wrote in 2011. I have only this to add:
First as an aside, I suspected Trump could win the presidency, most people simply said it was impossible. But nonetheless, I was just as shocked as anyone else.
Here's the thing. American culture reacted to 9/11 in ways that are mostly harmful. Various aspects of culture tend to reside in specific, though often vaguely defined, entities, such as classes taught in schools, crap kids say to each other on playgrounds, religious ceremony, TV shows, etc. Sometimes parts of culture tend to hold, brew, evolve…
gregladen | September 11, 2017This is not my favorite book, because I think the subtitle should be "No, it doesn't Steve" ... but How the Mind Works is not without merit, and Steve Pinker is a great writer. Anyway, I thought you's like to know that it is now available on Kindle for two bucks.
gregladen | September 9, 2017I know a lot of you are interested in local elections. There are three special elections coming up Tuesday that you might want to know about, and possibly lend some support to, or at least, watch. The candidates are shown above. They are:
Charlie St. Clair
Kathryn Rehner
Jacob Rosekrants
gregladen | September 7, 2017I usually write my annual back to school post earlier than this, but I was distracted by various events. There are three themes here.
1) You are a science teacher and I have some stuff for you.
2) You have a student in a school and you want to support the school's science teacher.
3) You have a student-offspring or elsewise and are looking for a cool back to school gift.
First, for themes 1 and 2, a mixture of traditional back to school blog posts and some items that may be useful and happen to be on sale at the moment so now's your chance.
My For Teachers Page has posts providing some…
hrynyshyn | September 7, 2017The Conference Board of Canada, usually described as a business-friendly think tank, has come out with a report that is refreshingly honest, and even a bit subversive — especially if you pay extra attention to some sidebars, consider what the authors deliberately left out, and are at least a little familiar with the science of power consumption and generation.
The full report, which is behind a freewall — it is downloadable for the cost of supplying your contact information — concludes that converting Canada's economy to a carbon-free energy mix won't actually cost all that much. But what I…
gregladen | August 29, 2017No, this is not a religious reference to Houston or even Trump.
This is, however, a notice that the sci fi classic by Arthur Clarke, The Hammer of God , is suddenly, and I assume temporarily, available for two bucks in Kindle version. Just thought you'd want to know.