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gregladen | April 27, 2011Huxley loves to go to bed at night. You say "Huxley, time for bed" and he runs for the bedroom giggling.
Sometimes he stops on the way to read a book, or more exactly, get a book read to him because he can't read yet. Sometimes the book is Goodnight Moon.
But some kids are not as sanguine with the idea of gong to bed at night and can give their parents a hard time. For those kids, we have this:
Go the F**k to Sleep is ...
...a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don't always send a toddler sailing off to dreamland.…
gregladen | April 27, 2011Yes, apparently.
PROPOSED INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS PUT SCIENCE EDUCATION, PUBLIC SCHOOLS AT RISK IN TEXAS
Vendor's creationist materials could be used in public school science classes around the state
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 25, 2011
CONTACTS:
Dan Quinn (TFN), 512.322.0545, 512.799.3379 (mobile); Robert Luhn (NCSE), 510.601.7203 x314, luhn@ncse.com
Science in Texas public schools would take a shocking leap backward if the State Board of Education approves newly proposed instructional materials that promote creationism and reject established, mainstream science on evolution, said the Texas…
gregladen | April 27, 2011All over the planet, giant telescopes and detectors are looking (and listening) for clues to the workings of the universe. At the INK Conference, science writer Anil Ananthaswamy tours us around these amazing installations, taking us to some of the most remote and silent places on Earth.
gregladen | April 27, 2011When Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters came out, I got myself an electronic copy of it and searched for the words "God", "Jesus", "Miracle" etc. Amanda and I had watched Capt'n Sully be interviewed a few times and we guessed that he was a straight up guy who knew how to land an airplane on a river. And did. We were happy to find an example of something extreme and unlikely happening and the key person involved not invoking supernatural powers as causing or stopping something from happening.
At an entirely different time in the past, well, a few times, I was almost eaten by a…
gregladen | April 27, 2011Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).
hrynyshyn | April 27, 2011Floods, droughts, heatwaves, rising sea levels. Massive debts and deficits. Multiple wars. Peak oil. But what's really important is providing yet more evidence that the president was born on U.S. soil. So the White House flies a staffer 9,600 miles (15,450 km) from Washington, D.C., to Hawaii and back to collect the certificate of live birth.
Un frakking believable.
Of course, the emissions generated by the staffer's share of the flight is hardly among the most objectionable consequences of the insanity that is the birther movement. But I just thought I'd point it out.
gregladen | April 27, 2011Donald Trump, Orly Tate, others are "side show carnival barkers" and questions by birthers, others "silliness" according to Obama, in a press conference moments ago.
Following a down-and-dirty live statement to the press asking everyone to just shut. up. and get down to business on the important issues facing the nation, the press vowed to provide intensive, irrelevant and annoying coverage of the birth certificate issue all day and for the rest of the week. Presumably the story will be interleaved with coverage of some wedding going on in England.
Here's a statement from the White House:…
mspringer | April 27, 2011Last time we took a pulse of light and shot it through a medium with a frequency-dependent refractive index. The particular form of the refractive index was sort of interesting - for some frequencies, it was less than 1. That implied that the phase velocity of a sine wave would be faster than the speed of light. But pulses of light contain a band of frequencies so normally we'd invoke the group velocity to show that the pulse as a whole propagates with a speed less than c. For reference, here's the refractive index curve we postulated:
We can't do that group velocity jazz here. Take a look.…
cwilcox | April 26, 2011Who would have thought I'd return home from my Tuesday night exercise class to see this:
That's right. I now have 2000 twitter followers - a full four days ahead of the deadline, too! That means the Twitterverse has spoken, and it has commanded a science remake of Friday.
I must now consult with my Chief Artistic Consultant, Scicurious. Since this will be a full YouTube production remake, it will take me a little time. But I vow that before I turn 26 - that is, July 1st of this year - you shall have your Sci-Friday.
cwilcox | April 26, 2011So, as you might have seen from the picture, I crashed PZ Myers' recent talk at the Society for Developmental Biology. He said a lot of good things - about science communication and the need to make a more direct connection between scientists and the general public, among other things. But the one thing really stuck with me was his direct call out for scientists to blog and tweet.
I feel the exact same way, but moreover, I think graduate students need to take on the challenge. Why grad students? Well, a number of reasons. For one, let's be honest: our generation is just more tech savvy than…
pharyngula | April 26, 2011That open letter to the NCSE by Jerry Coyne really seems to have set the cat among the pigeons — it's an amazing flurry of ruffled feathers. I don't see how there's any hope of reconciliation, either, as long as the apologists for religion continue to be as obtuse as they have been. Roger Stanyard of the BCSE is unloading furiously on Richard Dawkins right now:
We don't entirely know Peter but this is very definetly an attack on both the BCSE and the NCSE by the "New Atheists" including Richard Dawkins. It's very personal and nasty as well. Basically they want the NCSE and the BCSE to back "…
gregladen | April 26, 2011Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity. Is that because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily. New research concludes that IQ scores are partly a measure of how motivated a child is to do well on the test. And harnessing that motivation might be as important to later success as so-called native intelligence.
Read the rest here.
gregladen | April 26, 2011I've hardly ever played video games, and Julia, growing up, never did either. Then a couple of years ago we got a Wii and now we play it regularly but responsibly. Amanda joins us now and then.
After the filing of our 1040s, we realized we could afford to buy a new TV to replace our old energy-hogging tube model, so we did. Now we will be able to see what we are doing when using the Wii. As an indicator of how much we are NOT addicted to game play, I'll note that other than testing that the connection works, We've not used it since installing the TV on Friday.
The Wii is great, but it…
gregladen | April 25, 2011The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR (now Ukraine). It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, and it is the only one classified as a level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale.
source
But it's OK, because all that really happened is a few dozen people died in the explosion and fire, several thousand children had their thyroids cut out, and farmers across much of eastern Europe got an extended vacation.
gregladen | April 25, 2011Pioneering surgeon Susan Lim performed the first liver transplant in Asia. But a moral concern with transplants (where do donor livers come from ...) led her to look further, and to ask: Could we be transplanting cells, not whole organs? At the INK Conference, she talks through her new research, discovering healing cells in some surprising places.
j7uy5 | April 24, 2011The good folks at Shrink Rap are conducting a survey about attitudes toward psychiatry. I would appreciate it is some of you would participate.
pharyngula | April 24, 2011Where's my rusty porcupine? If you want to understand why I despise the Templeton Foundation, just read the BS from their latest hero, Martin Rees, who advocates silence in the face of absurdity.
"Campaigning against religion can be socially counter-productive. If teachers take the uncompromising line that God and Darwinism are irreconcilable, many young people raised in a faith-based culture will stick with their religion and be lost to science. Moreover, we need all the allies we can muster against fundamentalism - a palpable, perhaps growing concern," he wrote.
So…when someone says their…
j7uy5 | April 24, 2011Agave
lechuguilla,
commonly called lechuguilla or shin dagger, is a type of agave that
grows in northern Mexico and southwestern USA. It is highly
tolerant of drought and alkaline soil; it is somewhat tolerant of
cold. Each plant blossoms exactly once, then the entire plant
dies. I have read that if you cut off the stalk when the plant
starts to blossom, it won't die. Instead, it will form little
pups (offsets) from the roots.
We had a hard freeze in February that killed most of the century
plants, all of the oleander, and severely damaged many other
plants. The temperature got a bit…
gregladen | April 24, 2011Placed in orbit by the Shuttle Discovery, launched with this payload in 1990. Stop by and say hey.
gregladen | April 23, 2011By leading the Americans in his audience at TEDxPSU step by step through the thought process, sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge: can they understand -- not approve of, but understand -- the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent? And by extension, can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?