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pharyngula | April 13, 2011I have learned that today is Christopher Hitchens' birthday. I hope he gets many more.
What is it with all these New Atheist birthdays in the springtime, though?
mspringer | April 13, 2011So we left off with the most basic mathematical description of a wave. It's a function of the form f(x - vt), or in words a disturbance that moves from one place to another at a constant speed without changing shape.
This is a nice start, but it's both too general and not general enough to be useful. To general because f can be any function at all, and few mathematical techniques can conveniently handle anything you throw at it. Not general enough because waves can and do change shape, move at varying velocities, and so forth. We need to do better.
"Better", to a physicist looking at waves,…
cwilcox | April 12, 2011In case you missed it, I delve into the concept of animal happiness and whether wild animals are happier than others in a new post on SciAm's Guest Blog. So hop on over and check it out!
stoat | April 11, 2011 [Another in a series of posts designed to disguise my failure to come up with a daily sea ice bet. But I'll get there.]
The backstory: a while ago, last September, some friends mentioned that they were training for the Brighton Marathon and would I like to run the Grunty Fen half marathon in two weeks time? At that point I'd been running for about half a year (starting from "rowing and running, but I should add that I'd been fairly fit before then) so I said yes. Since then I've pulled my half marathon score down from 1:51 to 1:41, and done some training runs out to 32k, which is 3/4 of the…
gregladen | April 11, 2011A lot of things are broken because we fixed them. Somewhere out there is a web site that specializes in listing these things; Please let me know if you have a link, I can't find it at the moment. There is a web site that specializes in these things called "This is Broken" run by Set Godin (see video below). Anyway, it is annoying when some advancement causes something to not work. And it is especially annoying when the advancement is something that specifically should cause something to be improved in a certain direction and instead it gets unproved, er, messed up in that direction.…
gregladen | April 10, 2011Aardvarchaeology blogger and renowned skeptic Martin Rundkvist and Swedish journalist Yusie Chou discuss their impressions of the Twin Cities, Swedish atheism, journalism, Chinese history, culture conflict and change, skepticism, humanism, Politics, archaeology, Vikings, and so on. Here. Enjoy!
cwilcox | April 8, 2011Remember how I sang that awesome evolution rewrite of that song for open mic night at Science Online 2011?
No?
Oh, I see. You weren't at Science Online 2011. Or, worse, you were, but you missed my stellar performance. No worries - I've been strong-armed into turning it into a recording. Without further ado...
**UPDATE** Like it so much? Ok, fine. Go download it and add it to your iPod.
tlambert | April 7, 2011Via Deep Climate, John Mashey's seminar on "The Machinery of Climate Anti-Science" is being streamed live here. It starts two hours from now, 7:30 PDT.
The battle of truth versus disinformation is nowhere better demonstrated than in the distortion of climate science. More than 97 percent of practicing climate scientists support the fact that global warming is happening and caused by humans, yet the public often thinks that scientists are seriously divided on this issue.
In this special public lecture, Silicon Valley computer scientist and technology expert Dr. John Mashey will expose the…
mspringer | April 7, 2011So, what's a wave? In his deservedly ubiquitous undergrad electrodynamics textbook, David Griffiths emphasizes the fact that the whole idea is pretty nebulous. Any rigid definition is likely to exclude things that are usually thought of as waves or to include things that aren't. He suggests that one possible vague definition is "a disturbance of a continuous medium that propagates with a fixed shape at a constant velocity". He goes on:
Immediate I must add qualifiers: In the presence of absorption, the wave will diminish in size as it moves; if the medium is dispersive different frequencies…
gregladen | April 6, 2011Don't forget, this Sunday, April 10th, Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio will host Science Blogger and Atheist Dr. Martin Rundvist and journalist and broadcaster Yusie Chou, both from Sweden. Details here. After the show, there will be a meetup! Details of the meetup are here: Blasphemers' Brunch w/Special Radio Guests, Sunday, April 10, 10:30 am, Edina. See you there!
pharyngula | April 6, 2011I have a request to all of you. Some of you hate me, so you'd enjoy this, but it's more important that those of you who have a mild and distant affection for me take a stand, too. If, sometime in the future, when the billions of dollars role in, if you learn that I'm flying in children for sex, I don't want you to defend me. Don't use friendship as an excuse, just come out loud and clear and denounce my behavior, with no qualifiers. Please. There aren't any justifications or rationalizations possible.
I am not planning to turn into a leering old degenerate, but you never know…I could suffer…
pharyngula | April 5, 2011Lawrence Krauss has sent me a guest post discussing his debate with William Lane Craig. As he notes, these debates with cranks are always a mistake; debates in general are a format tailored to give the weak side, even the side that has no credibility at all, an equal standing with the stronger side at the beginning, and then the conclusion is resolved by the rhetorical ability of the two opponents, not the evidence. William Lane Craig is an expert debater, but he is otherwise a vacuous moron, but because he has a series of familiar syllogism that he always trots out in these debates, and…
pharyngula | April 4, 2011@JoeCienkowski is a motor-mouthed creationist who hangs out on Twitter. His wife, Brandy Evans Cienkowski, is much less vocal and considers herself one of those 'liberal Christians', and she apparently got fed up with Joe (he has also been arrested at least once for battery in January, which is not a good sign) and left him…and then was, presumably, reconciled and rejoined him, at least by Joe Cienkowski's account. Strangely, Brandy has gone completely silent since this reconciliation, and Joe has has also spluttered to a trickle of tweets, all unresponsive to questions about his wife's…
pharyngula | April 2, 2011The beans have been spilled. I lied. I am not the Digital Cuttlefish, I am not leaving Scienceblogs, I have no talent for poetry, and I am not a nice person.
I am highly untrustworthy, though. I had people asking all day if I was really in Elmhurst and if I was really going to the local pub last night. I'm a little worried that I'll get home to find the wife has changed the locks on me.
gregladen | April 1, 2011There's been about 90 or so significant nuke accidents. That's a lot considering that there are only some 400-500 or so facilities involved. But it's OK. Nuclear power is totally safe. We have backups on backups on backups. Nothing can go wrong. ... go wrong ... go wrong..
Oh, and Happy Birthday Rachel Maddow! Here's Rachel now ...
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | April 1, 2011The first step required to recall Wisconsin Republican Senator D. Kapanke has been completed; A petition with sufficient signatures to require a recall election has been filed. Challenges mus be filed over the next 10 days. If there remain enough valid signatures, the recall election is required.
I don't really have a link for this but you can try this.
tlambert | April 1, 2011There are two climate related rallies in Sydney tomorrow. The rally for climate inaction (What do we want? Inaction! When do want it? Now!) has been heavily promoted on talkback radio and the facebook page has 709 people saying they are attending, while the rally for climate action has relied on new media and the facebook page has 2,765 saying they are attending.
I can't attend either one, I'm helping run a round in the Australia and New Zealand Algorithmics & Computing League.