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gregladen | February 1, 2012There's some stuff I don't want you to miss.
Related to the Komen Maneno:
Stop Giving Money to Susah G. Komen for the Cure, and tell everyone else you know to do the same.
We Stand with Planned Parenthood
Poor Women Have Breasts Too, You Know!
Another fight about gun control:
Seven Year Old Jaymee Stewart Has Died...
Political Update:
Florida Primary Results: A Pattern Emerges
I'm guest blogging at Scientific American:
How Animals Prepare for an Alien Invasion
What Robot Fish Can Tell Us About Parallel Evolution
Boa Constrictors Get a Feel for Their Prey
gregladen | February 1, 2012State Legislator Ellen Anderson is an energy expert, who authored seven energy related bills one of which became a national model, all of which were signed into law by a Republican Governor. She was recently appointed by Governor Dayton to the Public Utilities Commission. Republicans, however, organized a vote against the apointment because her views on energy are too radical.
What are her radical views? Well, she she thinks coal is dirty, for one thing. She'd like to see more conservation and use of solar and wind. That sort of thing.
Here's the story on our local news station.
Who…
gregladen | January 31, 2012... can be found HERE.
What I'm talking about is the complete series of stories told at The Monti at ScienceOnline 2012. (I mentioned them here.)
You will laugh, you will cry, you will go "WTF?"
gregladen | January 31, 2012Jessica M. Budke has the Berry Go Round carnival up at her site. Have you heard about the plants that eat nematodes? Solar powered sea slugs? Have you considered covering your house instead of painting it?
Go here to find out all about these amazing topics and more.
gregladen | January 31, 2012"Parallel Evolution" is not really a kind of evolution, but rather, an observation we make about the pattern of evolution in particular cases. Many species have a "woodpecker adaptation" by which a hard sharp thing is used to get at grubs and other insect (or non insect) meat hidden beneath bark. Some of the sharp things are beaks, one bird uses a cactus spine, and there is a primate with a special elongated finger for doing this, and most or all "woodpeckers" (bird like or otherwise) have related adaptation allowing them to figure out where to poke through the bark to find their prey. This…
gregladen | January 31, 2012The following is a fictionalized version of a true story recently told to me by two of the people involved. All the names of those still living have been changed. Please do not let this happen to you.
[This is a timely repost]
~~~~~
No one is sure why Fred took the chance he took that day, but when Elmer saw him flailing in the icy water surrounded by black ice 300 yards out in Medicine Lake, he did not at that time think to divine his motivations for being there. Fred, an old man who had been ice fishing for dozens of generations of fish and two or three generations of more mortal men,…
gregladen | January 30, 2012I remember the first time I visited a penguin colony. It was not hard to find. Penguin colonies smell really really bad. Here's why:
Further details at Huffington Post.
Hat Tip Richard Wilson.
gregladen | January 30, 2012Organizers with the Lake Elmo Lions Club announced the cancellation of next Sunday's ice fishing contest...
Organizers measured the ice on the lake at about 12 inches, and said it needed to be 18 inches for everyone's safety, especially because most participants would be parking their vehicles along the lake's edge.
...this is the second time in recent years the event had to be canceled because of warm weather.
Not from the Wall Street Journal
stoat | January 30, 2012There is a remark somewhere in Popper - but of course I forget where, and since I'm only struggling to remember this as an intro or lead-in I may even have made it up - to the effect that deep inquiry into the meaning of words is largely fruitless. And this is in the context of his attack on Plato, so my forward-reference to Plato spending an entire book trying to define Justice is apt.
The kind of thing I mean is Plato's Concept Of Justice: An Analysis which just happened to be the top google hit, and now I've propelled it higher. Plato doesn't really mean Justice, to be fair. He means a…
gregladen | January 30, 2012If you are a snake. And, what causes some island dwelling boas to be smaller than the mainland variety?
If you want to know the answer to these two burning questions, click here and visit Smithsonian's Surprising Science where I'll be guest blogging for a couple of weeks. For the first question, there is some new and very cool research. For the second question, some older (but closely related) research.
choofnagle | January 29, 2012In case you missed it, here's a pointer to a recent Times story concerning baked reviews on Amazon and the like. In it, David Streitfeld describes how one company gave rebates to customers in exchange for five star reviews. They even seem to have a claque to address detractors--
Even a few grouches could not spoil the party. "This is an egregious violation of the ratings and review system used by Amazon," a customer named Robert S. Pollock wrote in a review he titled "scam."
He was promptly chastised by another customer. This fellow, himself a seller on Amazon, argued that he had both given…
choofnagle | January 29, 2012Evgeny Morozov argued in Slate last week that search engines could do more to warn readers about kooks online. Among other things, he cites to a recent article in Vaccine that details the tactics of anti-vaccine denialists. Morozov points to Google's special treatment of certain searches, such as "ways to die." Perhaps an alert can appear when one searches, "should I vaccinate..."
stoat | January 28, 2012
A problem from the British Go Journal issue 158. I don't play Go any more, but I still like it. This problem is particularly pleasant. It is symmetrical, so there are only 6 possibilities. Black to play and live.
SGF visualised with GoRilla.
gregladen | January 28, 2012Quiet possibly. Ocean acidification caused by the same CO2 that causes global warming is causing them to die.
You might think you can take solace in the idea that coral reefs have been with us forever even when ocean chemistry changes, that there must be some way in which coral reefs survive through changing conditions, and that they may look different for a while but they can't possibly entirely disappear. But the thing is, scientists have known for decades that coral reefs have in fact re-evolved numerous times from entirely different phylogenetic stock. This probably means that ocean…
gregladen | January 28, 2012This week, we're talking about what may be the most stigmatized facet of human reproduction. We're joined by Dr. Kate Clancy, anthropology professor and science blogger, to learn about the physiology and function of menstruation, and the history of how it's been considered in medicine and myth. And on the podcast, biologist P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula looks at menstruation from an evolutionary perspective.
Click here for details.
gregladen | January 27, 2012The Wall Street Journal has published one of the most offensive, untruthful, twisted reviews of what scientists think of climate change; the WSJ Lies about the facts and twists the story to accommodate the needs of head-in-the-sand industrialists and 1%ers; The most compelling part of their argument, according to them, is that the editorial has been signed by 16 scientists.
The scientists who signed to WSJ editorial are:
Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the…
gregladen | January 27, 2012I met Amy Shira Teitel at the Science Online 2012 conference, and we had an interesting conversation about the risks of spaceflight. Have a look at this extensive coverage by Amy of the Apollo 1 fire, which happened 45 years ago.
stoat | January 27, 2012 Well, this is an interesting take on SOPA (h/t Paul, and the atheist FAQ is worth reading too):
Hollywood appears to have peaked... [But] The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down... The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they're resorting to such tactics... SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies…