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cwilcox | June 7, 2011Today's post is by the fantastic and phenomenal Zen Faulkes. Be sure to check out his blog after you read it!
Note; I'm writing this guest post because this week, I'll be a visitor in Christie's current stomping grounds, Hawaii, attending the summer meeting of The Crustacean Society. Christie, meanwhile, is on the mainland. Since we are sort of switching places, we thought it might be fun to switch blogs. So here I am at Observations, and she's promised me a guest post for my blog, NeuroDojo.
Hawaii is famous for its beaches. When most people see a beach, they think of relaxation. Tanning,…
gregladen | June 7, 2011
Context, details and discussion are here: PZ MYERS VS ISLAMISTS ON EMBRYOLOGY
cwilcox | June 7, 2011There are still two days of voting left - so go forth and vote! Even a few votes might make the difference between a post making the cut and falling behind.
Here's the full list of entires. There are a ton of great ones - you should read them all! But, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want you to vote for one of the three from this blog (see below). The last one - Why Do Women Cry - is my personal favorite, but of course vote how you wish! The voting closes Wednesday at 11:59pm eastern time, so whether you vote for me or vote for another post, vote soon!
How Do You ID a Dead Osama Anyway?…
catdynamics | June 6, 2011There has been a lot of effort to try to figure out how to teach physics better, at the university level, in the US.
Of course, we know perfectly well how to do that.
To teach physics well, you provide an intensive, mathematically rigorous in-sequence series of classes.
You need at least two different parallel classes per term, each class a prerequisite for the succeeding class and coordinated syllabii for parallel and successive classes, providing an initial short review of the previous material.
You also need a parallel sequence of coordinated mathematics classes, such that the…
gregladen | June 6, 2011I'm not sure why colonial Americans thought they could succeed at blowing off the British to make their own country or countries, but that they needed to do something was obvious to a lot of people during the middle of the 18th century. In the end, it would turn out that the American Revolution was a little like a lot of other things that have happened in history (and prehistory): Very unlikely to have come out the way it did, because at so many junctures something quirky or unlikely happened, and shaped the course of events significantly. It might have been inevitable that the British…
catdynamics | June 5, 2011So LISA is moving ahead with a possible all European mission to look for low frequency gravitational radiation
Next Steps for LISA
..."As announced by ESA in March 2011, due to a modified international cooperation scenario, it is now necessary to study a European-only mission that offers a significant reduction of the cost while maintaining its core science objectives.
...
The goal of this phase is to identify a few mission profiles that can achieve a substantial cost reduction whilst minimizing the impact on the science return
...
The selected mission architecture will maximize the use…
gregladen | June 5, 2011Life History, Genetic Relatedness, and the Evolution of Menopause
Imagine you're on the Serengeti Plateau and your children are hungry. For miles in every direction there's nothing but dry scrub grass with the occasional flat-topped acacia tree marking the landscape. Your oldest has found a spot to dig for tubers but he and your daughter aren't strong enough to scrape away the hard, baked earth by themselves. Your husband is tracking a wounded gazelle and could be gone for days. Meanwhile, the infant slung to your hip has started screaming and the distinctive sound triggers a release of…
pharyngula | June 5, 2011There were Muslims lurking about here at the Dublin conference, and I spent a few minutes talking to them and grabbing some of their literature. I can tell you this: don't bother. They were boring and utterly unoriginal — everything they said was the same old crap, patently cribbed from the Christian creationists, with the new stuff (what little there was) being incoherent and inane.
Here's an example. I picked up a pamphlet titled "The Man in the Red Underpants", and the only novelty in it was the title annd the weird metaphor that was briefly mentioned and then dropped. The titular man is…
pharyngula | June 4, 2011I've been hanging out with AronRa and DPR Jones, and it looks like I might be drafted to appear on The Magic Sandwich Show on Sunday, at 8pm GMT. Tune in!
That's the conference venue here in Dublin, appearing briefly in the video.
sb admin | June 4, 2011I've been hanging out with AronRa and DPR Jones, and it looks like I might be drafted to appear on The Magic Sandwich Show on Sunday, at 8pm GMT. Tune in!
That's the conference venue here in Dublin, appearing briefly in the video.
gregladen | June 4, 2011Don't forget to tune in to Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio on Sunday AM (click the link for details) to hear Desiree Schell and I settle whatever differences we may have on how to BE A SKEPTIC!!! I warn you, this could be gruesome. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Office of Homeland Security have set up checkpoints on the border. Listen in, call in, email in.
cwilcox | June 3, 2011I've been so busy in NYC for the World Science Festival and seeing friends and family that I completely missed that the voting is open for the 3 Quarks Daily Science Blogging Contest!
There are 87 entries duking it out for a place among the top 20 semi-finalists - see the full list here. To get in the top 20 you need one thing and one thing only: votes. So go vote for your favorite post!
Of course, I'd appreciate if that favorite is one of mine :). Observations of a Nerd has three posts in contention (#49-51):
How Do You ID a Dead Osama Anyway?
Reflections on the Gulf Oil Spill:…
gregladen | June 3, 2011As you know, the NCSE brokers free chapters and sometimes entire books for people to download and read, in order to disseminate knowledge about Important Stuff. They just released a chapter of Darwin's Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life by Martin Brasier.
Click here to download the PDF file.
catdynamics | June 3, 2011In the infrared of course...
It is friday!
Proposal season coming to a very temporary end.
So...
what is with the flap over building, like, actual new ginormous telescopes?
What say thee Oh Mighty iPod?
Can we learn to Build Them, and Operate Them at the same time,
while still having the $$$ to pay for like actual science and shit.
Woosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Walk This Way - Run DMC
The Crossing: Sexuality (London Remix) - Billy Bragg
The Crown: Search & Destroy -The Stooges
The Root: I Don't Want to Walk Around With You - Ramones
The Past: O Soave Fanciulla -…
pharyngula | June 3, 2011The first panel (DPR Jones, Lone Frank, Richard Dawkins) at the Wotld Atheist Convention has got us off to a roaring good start. Lots of interesting discussion and disagreement within the panel and the audience, good questions, not too many audience manifestos.
There is a delegation of Muslims here, one of whom stood up to ask a question that instantly marked him as a moron: he asserted the common inanity that Dawkins believes in a universe of nothing but chance. There were boos, Dawkins ripped him a new one, but of course he was undeterred. Now the Muslims are hitting the twitter hashtag #…
pharyngula | June 3, 2011They have an official wish list. it's mostly "drill, baby, drill" and other heedless, short-term indulgences and catastrophes, but it also openly advocates ignoring science.
In California's dry central valley, ensure that no federal scientific report ... requiring water for endangered fish be allowed to interfere with farmers' rights to their historical maximum allocations.
That bodes well. Bugger evidence, let's do whatever maximizes profit now!
gregladen | June 3, 2011A hip-hop exploration of modern evolutionary biology, with songs about Sexual Selection, Artificial Selection, Altruism, Morality, and Unity of Common Descent.
The Rap Guide to Evolution by Baba Brinkman
More here.
pharyngula | June 2, 2011I write in my sleep. You see, the way it works is that if I have something on my mind when I go to bed, my brain will churn over it all night long, and because of the way my head works, it will spontaneously generate a narrative. I do that in all of my dreams — I float aloof from the events, mentally transcribing what's going on. My consciousness is a kind of disembodied reporter, I guess.
This quirk can work out well. Lots of my longer posts are composed while I'm sleeping — I wake up in the morning and the structure of the story is all laid out in my head, with a jumble of words stacked…
pharyngula | June 2, 2011It's nicely done. The difference is that this one is a parable about sausages.
catdynamics | June 1, 2011some interesting astro happening over the last few days
The Next 40 Years of Exoplanets workshop took place at MIT. Website has archive of meeting.
Some fireworks there, Nature blogs has a take on it
NASAwatch discusses contradictory rumours of layoffs at JWST contractor
Two things to take away from that: yes, the aerospace contractors must be doing contingency planning for RIFs because of the impending budget doom in the 2012 budget; and the NASA comments talk in terms of 2013...
JWST launch date is clearly slipping, main question is whether the rate can be less than a year-per-year or not…