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gregladen | May 28, 2011It is Memorial Day Weekend, which can only mean one thing. It's time for this year's Summer Reading Recommendations List! Unlike the Summer Readings Suggestions: Science list, these books are primarily (but not entirely) fiction. Since I've not read very much fiction over the last year, I polled my facebook friends and assembled their advice here. You may be thinking "Who cares about Laden's facebook friends, what do they know?" and you'd probably be right about that for a lot of topics, but not reading. These people can read! In fact, two or three of them are published authors.…
gregladen | May 28, 2011Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. He spent his early years in Jackson, Tenn., attended high school in The Bronx, and spent time at Pennsylvania's Lincoln University before settling in Manhattan. His recording career began in 1970 with the album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, which featured the first version of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." The track has since been referenced and parodied extensively in pop culture.
More at NPR
catdynamics | May 27, 2011bloomin' proposal week...
Ok, them's the vagaries, but it is friday and it is the end of another and much fraught bloomin' proposal week,
so we ask the Mighty iPod: how about them proposals?
Woosh goes the randomizer.
Woosh.
The Covering: Friday Mourning - Morrissey
The Crossing: Run Like Hell - Pink Floyd
The Crown: Spanish Bombs
The Root: Estampe - Jardins sus la pluie - Claudio Arrau
The Past: Scenes from Childhood: Foreign Lands and Peoples
The Future: Í Hlíðarendakoti - Fyrr var oft í koti kátt
The Questioner: Mouse II - Spilverk Þjóðanna
The House: Sealclubbing - Half Man Half…
pharyngula | May 27, 2011It's true, and it has been empirically evaluated: Guinness really does taste better in Ireland.
The results of the Guinness-tasting t-test were clear. Pints consumed in Ireland had a mean GOES score of 74, compared with a score of 57 in pubs outside Ireland. While Ireland may not necessarily keep the best stuff to itself, the science is clear: Guinness tastes better over here.
Being a Man of Science myself, of course, I'm not going to simply accept this claim, but will have to engage in some spot-testing and verification next week in Dublin.
stoat | May 25, 2011Says the FT:
Libya lost billions of dollars on sophisticated financial products sold to Muammer Gaddafi's sovereign wealth fund by some of the world's leading financial institutions, according to a confidential Libyan government document... One of the most striking losses, outlined in an internal report for the Libyan Investment Authority, was a 98.5 per cent fall in the value of the sovereign wealth fund's $1.2bn equity and currency derivatives portfolio. The disclosures - in a document obtained by the campaign group Global Witness - raise more questions about the west's enthusiastic…
gregladen | May 25, 2011Congratulations for Almost Diamonds and Quiche Moraine blogger Stephanie Zvan for her brand new Guest Post at Scientific American.
The Politics of the Null Hypothesis
... Nothing about the field of IQ studies is free of political influence. It's naive to believe that any kind of research on a purported measure of individual merit could be politics-free in a self-proclaimed meritocracy with wide inequalities. ...
Read it HERE
catdynamics | May 24, 2011and it looks like it might be about over:
plume is about a tenth of its original size;
earthquake activity has tapered off to low levels;
no flash flood - between normal flood last year, and ice vapourized it doesn't look like there is any lake left to flash out the drainage channels under the ice;
no sign of lava flow
the initial eruption was an order of magnitude larger than Eyjafjallajökull was, with correspondingly larger ash volume;
the ash was coarser and didn't travel as much as last year, which means more of it dumped on local regions, natch;
still about 500 flight cancellations and…
gregladen | May 24, 2011Polio is almost completely eradicated. But as Bruce Aylward says: Almost isn't good enough with a disease this terrifying. Aylward lays out the plan to continue the scientific miracle that ended polio in most of the world -- and to snuff it out everywhere, forever.
cwilcox | May 23, 20113 Quarks Daily has announced their third annual science blogging prize! This year, the final results will be judged by none other than Lisa Randall, theoretical physicist extraordinaire from Harvard University.
Nominations are open now, and are for any post published between May 22nd, 2010 and today. Posts can be nominated by placing a comment with a link to the post in the comments section of this post. Nominations close May 31st, so you've got about a week to nominate your favorites!
...and yes, in a moment of shameless self promotion: if you want to nominate one of mine, here are some of…
gregladen | May 22, 2011Well, that was interesting. We are having turbulent weather here in Minnesota. The current low pressure system passing across the US is sitting on us like a bullet on a bull's eye. Almost every line of storm activity is breaking into small blobs which in turn are spinning up wall clouds and twisters, mostly small, mostly only on radar, mostly not touching down.
Except the one that is currently bearing down on Coon Lake Beach and Forest Lake. It was spotted on a traffic cam earlier, seen by some spotters, damaged a shopping mall, and hit the small airport we have down the road from here.…
pharyngula | May 21, 2011…the fear he fosters spreads around the world.
This woman, fearful of the end of the world, took a boxcutter to the throats of her two daughters, and then sliced her own throat. This is what religion encourages: fear based on imaginary terrors.
Here's a man who committed suicide in Nairobi. Here's a family torn by parents who gave away everything to Camping; the mother said a daughter would be left behind…at least she didn't try to cut her throat.
I want to see Harold Camping prosecuted for bilking people out of their money, for destroying lives and families. I want to see his radio empire…
pharyngula | May 21, 2011I'm busy in DC this weekend, so I thought I might just dick with you all by letting Pharyngula go dead for the whole weekend, as if I'd been raptured. But I decided to be nice and at least mention that I'm still earthbound. (Although there was a scary moment on the plane last night, when something went bump-bump-crunch-thumpety-thump over by the right engine at 30,000 feet, and the pilot came on to announce, "Nothing to worry about, folks, we just mumbley-mumbley throttles mumble flanges something or other Jeffries tubes, but don't fret, we have "procedures" — just fasten your seat belts,…
gregladen | May 21, 2011Happy Rapture Day!
It's a bummer that it's raining here, because the rapture BBQ at Kammy's might be rained out. In the meantime I've got lots of stuff to get done ... finish cleaning the garage, get the wood for a new book shelf, write a few more posts for Migration Week, update the Fukushima project, and if I have a chance finally get around to watching the new Dr. Wh......
pharyngula | May 20, 2011It's a great lead: Atheists have better sex. Sign me up already.
Put it on billboards, too.
pharyngula | May 20, 2011It's embarrassing. Not only do we have Michele Bachmann, but the last election swept in a gang of know-nothing Rethuglican scum who've been trying to turn our state into Texas. Now they've invited the notorious evangelical crank Bradlee Dean to give an opening prayer. Dean, for those who don't know of him, is a kind of Vox Day impersonator—he's a raving homophobe with a parasitic ministry that targets public school. He puts on school assemblies that are nominally about fighting drugs and promiscuity, but are actually come-to-Jesus sessions. We see his vans tooling about on the highways now…
pharyngula | May 20, 2011The CDC has issued a preparedness warning for the Zombie Apocalypse. I'm stockpiling water and shotgun shells now. Remember, AIM FOR THE HEAD.
gregladen | May 19, 2011Bird migration is a huge topic. Super-Big. Vast. Overwhelming.
So, starting today, it is Bird Migration Week (running from Thursday to Thursday) on this blog. I'll be posting a number of quick reviews of bird-migration related books and a few other items, but for starters, I'll send you over to 10,000 Birds for a post on bird migration.
To a birder, migration means that you can live in Minnesota, New York, Paris or Moscow and see exotic tropical birds such as Piranga olivacea and Icterus galbula on a regular basis without buying a plane ticket. The birds do the flying for you. Even if…
gregladen | May 19, 2011Everything is connected to everything else. Sometimes, the connections are non-trivial. Often they are fundamental, sometimes exploitable, and now and then very potent sources of debate and discussion. I've come to think that a measure of sanity is the degree to which one limits a sense of connection when taking in new information. For instance, I was lambasted by a fellow blogger a few months ago when he insisted that there were connections ... of influence, of a pecuniary nature, at least ... between me and a major Big Science institution which caused me to say things that he thought I…