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gregladen | February 23, 2012TED Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz asks: How often do you see the true beauty of the night sky? At TEDxPhoenix, she shows how light pollution is ruining the extraordinary -- and often ignored -- experience of seeing directly into space.
gregladen | February 22, 2012The Heartland Institute, a smallish Libertarian "Think" Tank recently made famous by the leak of a rather embarrassing set of incriminating documents, is now slated for investigation by the Congress of the United States.
The chair and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijavla, has initiated an investigation of Indur Goklany, an administrator at the Science and Technology Policy of the US Department of the Interior. It appears that Goklany was being paid by Heartland which raises a significant potential for conflict of interest.
The story broke at Think Progress.
gregladen | February 21, 2012Featuring my brother-in-law, Damion:
(The Town Hall is also mentioned.)
sastyk | February 21, 2012Did something unpleasant to my elbow the other day and I'm taking a few days off from typing - promise I'll be back soon!
Sharon
gregladen | February 21, 2012The best available evidence now suggests that the most damning of the "Heartland Documents" -- the strategy memo which explicitly states that Heartland's strategy is to interfere with good science education in order to advance their political agenda -- is legitimate. The legitimacy of the document was being questioned because it was physically and stylistically different from the other documents with which it was released. We now know that the strategy memo was sent to climate scientist Peter Gleick and that Peter then took steps to acquire corraborating documents from Heartland (see "The…
gregladen | February 20, 2012While I recover from several days of intense activities that have made it hard to blog much, and as I prepare some good stuff for you, we can amuse ourselves with the following animations from the usual source of not-so-amusing events:
Three killed, one survivor in Washington avalanche
British couple cheat death in cliff collapse
Swedish man trapped for two months in snow-covered car
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVkFc7Kbnj8
Discuss
gregladen | February 19, 2012I just got this email. I have no way of telling if it is authentic:
February 18, 2012
By e-mail to: greg@gregladen.com
By Federal Express to:
Mr. Greg T. Laden
Greg Laden's Blog
44788 265th Lane
Aitkin, MN 56431-4807
Re: Stolen and Faked Heartland Documents
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2012/02/heartlandgate_anti-science_in…
Dear Mr. Laden:
On or about February 14, 2012, your web site posted a document entitled "Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy" (the "Fake Memo"), which is fabricated and false.
On or about the same date, your web site posted certain other…
gregladen | February 19, 2012Kentucky's Creation Museum is in contention for listing as one of the "top ten" places to bring your child under 15 years of age on this travel and tourism site.
Feel free to go and vote your preference! Also, I
I think you can't vote something down, but you can vote something up. You know what to do.
The flying spaghetti monster museum does appear to be a choice. If it does not really exist, however, I don't recommend voting for it, as that would be stupid. Maybe pick a nice natural history museum.
gregladen | February 17, 2012If you know only a little bit about Charles Darwin, you know that he figured out Evolution via his study of the finches (and other birds) of the Galapagos. If you know a bit more than that about Darwin, you know that he totally messed up his collection of birds from the Galapagos Islands, and didn't really think up Evolution until much later in time. If you know more than that about Darwin, then you know that neither of these characterizations of the great man's work is accurate.
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gregladen | February 17, 2012We're taking a break from live recording this week. On the podcast, we're talking science and storytelling. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan speaks to science journalist and author Deborah Blum about her national bestseller The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. The book tells the fascinating story of the way that chemical detectives started a revolution in the investigation of crime. And Desiree Schell talks to Bora Zivkovic, blog editor at Scientific American, about a new event that teaches science through personal stories.
The podcast will…
choofnagle | February 16, 2012
How's this for a tinfoil hat conspiracy, brought to you by the American Life League--
Planned Parenthood's strategy in this great world is to:
Phase one: Get kids addicted to sex.
Phase two: profit! Through selling birth control, STD testing, and abortion.
gregladen | February 15, 2012Mice with a certain laboratory variant of Alzheimer's disease have been shown to get much better with the use of an existing pharmaceutical. This is only in mice, only with a certain model of the disease, and is only one study, so we must be very cautious, but the results are on the face rather dramatic.
Here's the rundown.
gregladen | February 15, 2012Anti-science and creationist rhetoric, coming from organizations like the Discovery Institute, often paints Darwin as handmaiden to the Nazis and founder of racist biology. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century is uncritically melded with Darwin's writings that touched on race, and the genetic determinism of certain aspects of modern biology is uncritically melded with Darwinian theories.
I'm giving a talk this weekend for the Minnesota Atheists that will address Darwin's racism (or lack thereof) and explore the relationship between concepts of race and racism and evolutionary…
gregladen | February 15, 2012Years ago, my friend Rick Bribiescas and I got into a friendly debate about the cause of muscle atrophy and bone loss during space flight. We both felt that a homeostatic mechanism was thrown out of whack by the circumstances of weightlessness. One of us suggested that zero gravity caused to lose their ability to regulate tissue mass because gravity would be part of the mechanism for measuring this variable. The other of us thought the body was reacting as though it was falling, and transforming ingested material into bodily tissue would be forestalled until some time after hitting the…
gregladen | February 15, 2012You could read hundreds of pages of Darwin's work and easily come to the conclusion that he was a geologist. But a different selection of readings would convince you he was a biologist. In truth, he was neither and both. I'm giving a talk this weekend for the Humanists of Minnesota that will explore what Darwin really was: An experimentalist, a part time anthropologist, a natural historian and most impressively, an integrative thinker of the likes rarely to be seen again for a century after he lived. My talk will draw heavily on Darwin's own work and provide a sampling of some of his more…
denialism | February 15, 2012WSJ has an article about the increasing number of pediatricians who fire their patients who refuse to vaccinate:
Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are "firing" such families from their practices, raising questions about a doctor's responsibility to these patients.
Medical associations don't recommend such patient bans, but the practice appears to be growing, according to vaccine researchers.
In a study of Connecticut pediatricians published last year, some 30% of 133 doctors said they had…
gregladen | February 15, 2012It will take some time before the meaning of HeartlandGate is realized. The released confidential documents are not extensive, but they are current, mainly related to a meeting that happened less than a month before their release. They don't tell us anything that we didn't suspect, but they give details that people outside this science denialist "think" tank did not know. The most important thing about these documents is probably this: We can now say without equivocation that global warming denialism and other science denialism is, at the institutional level, funded by wealthy individuals…