Uncategorized
gregladen | April 23, 2011Archaeologist Lew Binford has died at the age of 79 at his home in Kirksville, Mo. He died of a a heart attack.
I knew Lew a little, having spent some time with him while I was in graduate school, and having met him at the occassional conference (he was famous for NOT going to conferences very often by the time the 1980s rolled around).
Lew was a dick, a very smart guy, and probably had as much influence on archaeology as any other individual. Those who have taken classes from me know that I've got a few stories to tell about him. But not now.
RIP Lew Binford. May your bones be dug up…
gregladen | April 22, 2011I'm not sure what I think of Gnome 3's Shell Interface. Imma try it out but I think they may have fallen into the trap of making the desktop the point rather than, well, emacs and a web browser the point (the only two pieces of software I use every day and both days). Either way, Fedora 15 looks interesting, and it does use Gnome 3 Shell.
Linux in Exile has a review. The LIE author is really into Fedora, and seems to know a lot about it, so this is rather useful. Here.
pharyngula | April 22, 2011Christopher Hitchens was scheduled to appear at the American Atheist convention, but had to cancel because of his illness. He sent this letter instead.
Dear fellow-unbelievers,
  Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and…
pharyngula | April 22, 2011I have noticed a curious phenomenon. We have large numbers of fervent theists who relentlessly push this idea associating atheists with Nazis and mass-murdering communists — I understand there was a movie with that premise, I've seen Kennedy's 'documentary' that reveled in that claim, and of course the frauds at the Discovery Institute have a pseudo-history book that accuses Darwinists of being genocidal maniacs — but there's also an odd bias in the apologists for religion. If an atheist should point out that these evil behaviors are not unique to atheists, that religions have also supported…
stoat | April 22, 2011To the lakes with the children for a little relaxation out of the flow of normal time, or so it seems from up there. My aunt lives in Torpenhow, a village so small it only just about has a wikipedia article. Its to the north west of the park, beyond Bassenthwaite and Skiddaw, looking out towards the Solway Firth and Scotland. Anyway, the only minor item of interest to the outside world is that I finally climbed Helvellyn via Striding Edge.
And very pleasant it was too, though it can't begin to compare with the Stubai.
Also there was Allonby beach (or whatever it is really called; the bay…
gregladen | April 21, 2011In this interview with Karen Stollznow, Josh presents the "Three Pillars of Creationism", the beliefs and claims of creationists. He describes their rhetoric and propaganda, and the setbacks they cause for science, from legal cases to creationist theme parks.
Get it here!
gregladen | April 21, 2011Well, this applies more generally than just the Internet. What do you think, is she wrong???
pharyngula | April 21, 2011Whoa, brace yourselves: Chris Mooney has broken away from the malign influence of Matt Nisbet. It's like seeing Gollum turning into Smeagol.
I have no illusions that he's now on my side, but at least it's a faint glimmer of hope.
gregladen | April 21, 2011Tennessee's Senate Bill 893 -- nicknamed, along with its counterpart House Bill 368, the "monkey bill" -- is on hold, "almost certainly postponing any action until next year," according to the Knoxville News Sentinel's Humphrey on the Hill blog (April 21, 2011). Its sponsor, Bo Watson (R-District 11), assigned the bill to the general subcommittee of the Senate Education Committee on April 20, 2011, which was the last scheduled meeting of the committee; he told the blog, "Practically speaking, I probably am not going to be able to run the bill this year," although it is still possible that the…
gregladen | April 21, 2011BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- More than 40 Nobel Prize-winning scientists are urging Gov. Bobby Jindal and Louisiana lawmakers to repeal a law that allows public school science teachers to use supplemental materials in their classrooms beyond state-approved textbooks.
In a letter released Thursday, the Nobel laureates say the "Louisiana Science Education Act" of 2008 creates a pathway for creationism and other non-scientific instruction to be taught in science classes.
"Louisiana's students deserve to be taught proper science rather than religion presented as science," says the letter representing…
gregladen | April 21, 2011Rally at the Capitol to Repeal Louisiana's Creationism Law
Mark April 28th on your calendars!
We will be holding a rally at the Louisiana State Capitol in support of repealing the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act.
The rally will take place at 11 am and the repeal will hold a table in the atrium of the capitol from 9 am to 4 pm.
Please contact repealcreationism@gmail.com if you're interested in meeting with legislators or in volunteering.
I hope to see you there, and please bring friends. We will show the legislature that Louisiana wants this law repealed!
Facebook group…
gregladen | April 21, 2011
"They charm the females by instrumental music of the most varied kinds"
And thus, Charles Darwin adapted the phrase "Instrumental Music," previously used to mean humans with instruments making music, to name one of the most important "secondary sexual characters ... diversified and conspicuous in birds" which, added to "all sorts of combs, wattles, protuberances, horns, air-distended sacs, topknots, naked shafts, plumes and lengthened feathers gracefully springing from all parts of the body" mediate avian sexual selection..
Read my first post at 10,000 Birds ...
For reviews of bird guides…
mspringer | April 20, 2011Last time, we did some slightly boring groundwork. This time, we're going to look at something more interesting: the way a pulse of light propagates in something (like a piece of glass) with a frequency-dependent refractive index. As we discussed, the refractive index is just a way to express the phase velocity of a monochromatic continuous wave. If a medium has a refractive index of 1.5, then the speed at which the crests and troughs of a continuous wave travel is c/1.5, where c is the speed of light.
But here's the interesting part - there's really no such thing as a purely continuous…
krandall | April 19, 2011By Dr. Lori Fenton; Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs
Planetary scientist Dr. Lori Fenton joined the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center as a Principal Investigator in 2006, and was awarded NASA's Carl Sagan Fellowship for Early Career Researchers that same year. Lori's primary research interests include aeolian geomorphology - how wind shapes a planetary surface - for both Mars and the Earth, recent and ongoing climate changes, and the mobility of wind-blown sand and dust. Her research makes use of many different types of information,…
gregladen | April 19, 2011... well, at least for me.
Starting this week, I will become a "Beat Blogger" at 10,000 Birds. I am not sure what a Beat Blogger is, but I think it's a real happening with bongo drums and highly esoteric poetry. I'll be scribing one bird-related post every four weeks, on a Thursday. Go have a look at 10,000 Birds. It's, like, totally loaded with blog posts written by the other hip Beat Bloggers, and they all seem to be about ... really hip birds.
10,000 Birds is run by Mike Bergin (who started it all) and Corey Finger. They operate their groovy birdwatching syndicate from New York,…
gregladen | April 19, 2011... is now on line.
Plus Mike Klymkowsky reviews Matt Young and Paul K. Strode's Why Evolution Works (and Creationism Fails); Joel W. Martin reviews Francisco Ayala's Am I a Monkey?; David A. Reid reviews Randy Moore, Mark Decker, and Sehoya Cotner's Chronology of the Evolution-Creationism Controversy; Robert H. Rothman reviews Allene S. Phy-Olsen's Evolution, Creationism, and Intelligent Design; Stephen P. Weldon reviews Mano Singham's God vs. Darwin; and Matt Young reviews Joel W. Martin's The Prism and the Rainbow.
Check it out.
gregladen | April 19, 2011Senate Bill 70 (PDF), prefiled in the Louisiana Senate on April 15, 2011, and provisionally referred to the Senate Committee on Education, would, if enacted, repeal Louisiana Revised Statutes 17:285.1, which implemented the so-called Louisiana Science Education Act, passed and enacted in 2008. SB 70 was introduced by Karen Carter Peterson (D-District 5), but the driving force behind the repeal effort is Baton Rouge high school senior Zack Kopplin, working with the Louisiana Coalition for Science. The repeal effort is endorsed by the National Association of Biology Teachers and the Louisiana…
cwilcox | April 18, 2011So I have this bad habit of ending up in twitter conversations with Scicurious. Last time, I ended up looking at the taste of dolphin semen. This time I have somehow agreed to a challenge: if I get to 2000 twitter followers by the end of April, I'll do a remake of Rebecca Black's Friday.
For those who don't know what I'm referring to, let me show you:
Yeah. I'll have to do a science-related remake of that. Video and everything.
I'll leave it to the masses to decide if such a thing should be made, or if it would be too blasphemous to the good name of science. Past remakes of mine have…
dr. dolittle | April 18, 2011You may recall the previous post on the seminar that I attended on Comparative Physiology of Brown Adipose Tissue at the Experimental Biology meeting last week.
Here are some of the comparative physiology abstracts that were presented at the meeting on this topic:
-Dr. Michael Symonds and colleagues from the The University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, presented "The Use of Thermal Imaging of Brown Adipose Tissue in the Supraclavicular Region as a Repeatable Technique to Quantify its Function in Humans." Dr. Symonds presented data showing that the temperature of the brown adipose tissue in…