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stoat | August 7, 2011
BTW, if you want a laugh, go to http://judithcurry.com/2011/08/04/carbon-cycle-questions/. When you've stopped laughing (or despairing, if you thought her saveable) at her puffing twaddle, scroll down a fraction and read "Moderation note: this is a technical thread, comments will be moderated for relevance." Then read the first comment: "Thank you, thank you, Professor Curry, for another moment of truth. Propaganda artists have manipulated and used good citizens of the once "Free West" by the same bag of "political correct" consensus opinions that once openly controlled the other half of…
gregladen | August 6, 2011We dropped the atomic bomb on japan today (in 1945) and that caused a lot of changes in the world. The idea of a bomb like this was so outrageous that it was actually possible to keep the project secret even though thousands of people worked for months on it, at many different locations. In one plant where nuclear material was being enriched people were told to make up whatever they wanted when asked what they were doing, as long as they avoided saying what they were doing. This was a bit risky because they didn't actually know, as mere cogs in a larger and incomprehensible machine, what…
gregladen | August 5, 2011Not wearing a life vest when you are on a recreational boat is about the same as not wearing your seat belt when driving on the highway: Perhaps 8 out of 10 water-recreation related deaths in the US in recent years would not have happened were the person wearing a life vest (as in wearing, not just having one near by). In 2008, about 700 people died in boating accidents in the US. Over 500 of those deaths were by drowning. Of those, abut 50 were wearing their life vest.
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mikethemadbiologist | August 4, 2011Enough depressing current events. Let's look at duckies...with SWAN-INDUCED TERROR!!!
Last year, I described how the pair of swans, Juliet I and Juliet II*, living on the lagoon** in the Boston Public Garden would mercilessly pursue baby ducklings. Well, now I have video proof (it starts getting nasty at around 3:50):
Definitely not making way for ducklings. I still have no idea why they go after the ducklings so relentlessly--they really aren't bothered by grown ducks, even when they sleep next to the swans' nest.
*Yes, Boston has lesbian swans. Our 'mating' pair consists of two females…
gregladen | August 3, 2011I have a childhood memory of a troop of baboons, waiting among nearby rocks on a sun baked kopje, taking notice of nearby humans and watching and waiting until they saw a weakness and finally moving in for the kill, barking, grabbing, ripping livid flesh with long sharp canines, howling like wolves. And for the longest time I thought that memory was a scene from a movie called Flight of the Phoenix. But it turns out it was a scene from a movie that showed up on my doorstep this morning. And some time between that childhood memory forming and the DVD's delivery I actually went to the…
gregladen | August 3, 2011I'll bet you can't explain dark matter in less than one minute.
Whoa. Pretty good
Visit the Minute Physics channel for more.
gregladen | August 3, 2011In case you've been living in a well insulated cave, you need to know about Freethought Blogs Dot Com at http://freethoughtblogs.com/, which is where PZ Myers, Ed Brayton Digital Cuttlefish and some others are blogging.
Also, Sheril Kirshenbaum has departed from Wired and has started her own blog, A Culture of Science.
Check them out!
lborkowski | August 1, 2011A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Brad Plumer at Ezra Klein's blog: Will the new fuel economy rules actually work?
Maryn McKenna at Superbug: Is Polio Eradication Slipping Out of Reach?
David Bornstein at the New York Times' Opinionator: Treating the Cause, Not the Illness
John Culhane at Slate: Concussions and Cigarettes ("A new lawsuit claims the NFL is like Big Tobacco. Does the case have merit?")
Zuska at Thus Spake Zuska: Hunger Relief vs. Poverty Relief: I Vote for More of Both
gregladen | August 1, 2011I have thought about writing a post on this topic, and I may well still do that, but so many have covered it so well already that I probably needn't bother. And needn't is not a word I use lightly. Anyway, this is an urgent issue and you can help resolve it but adding to some of the pressure to make Google do the right thing and follow their own motto of "not being evil." Because right now, they are.
Sign the petition!
gregladen | July 31, 2011I've updated the Skeptical Search Engine (on the left side bar of this site, as well as below in this blog post) to include more sites dealing with climate change.
Enjoy!
gregladen | July 29, 2011...Louis Agassiz, the most famous scientist of his time, eclipsing Darwin in his stature and influence (up to a point) addressed this diversity across the landscape in one way. Darwin addressed it in another way. Today, most people don't even know what Agassiz said, even though it is a perfectly rational model if you are a creationist, and something like half of all Americans are. But, his ideas would be considered absurd even by modern Young Earth Creationists (YECs). Darwin's view, in contrast, is not absurd, but it is complicated....
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mspringer | July 29, 2011Our department here at Texas A&M has a student chapter of the Optical Society of America, and each week a student or professor gives a talk about something interesting while the rest of us eat pizza. I've been working on and off on a talk I'm going to give, tentatively titled "Just what the @#$% is a photon anyway?". The more I dig into the subject, the more I start to think that (like the rubber-sheet analogy in GR) the "particles of light" view that tends to be the common impression tends to cause more confusion than enlightenment. I have some good company here - E.T. Jaynes wrote a…
gregladen | July 29, 2011Relying heavily on the excellent resource known as Dr. Jeff Master's Wunderblog and a few other sources, I've compiled a quick list of a few of the highlights of weather events related to global warming in the news these days, in preparation for this weekend's radio show "The Science of Global Warming: Science V Denialsim" on Atheists Talk #126, with Kevin Zelnio and John Abraham.
Here goes:
In recent months we have experienced the largest fire on record in Arizona, the largest fire in the history of New Mexico, the most extreme precipitation in the US ever, the hottest day in hell aka the…
gregladen | July 28, 2011I know, I know, PZ Myers at Pharyngula does a Friday Cephalopod thing, and I'm totally ripping him off here and it's not even friday yet, but still ..
(Below the fold. Not work safe if you work, say, in a Japanese resturant.)
Click here if you want to know the science behind this neat trick. Hint: The creature is NOT alive. And there are no strings attached.
Am I a bad person because this makes me hungry?
gregladen | July 28, 2011Have you been keeping up with my posts at Birdingblogs.com?
If Darwin was alive today he would be a bird watcher. But he would do his bird watching differently, using a nice set of binoculars rather than a shotgun. In his autobiography, Darwin reminisces ...
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