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gregladen | March 19, 2011Reverend Mike gives it a try.
Also, don't forget that March 16th is St. Urho's Day!
What? We missed it? I guess I'll have to save my purple beer for next year.
gregladen | March 19, 2011I will be over by the holy water waiting for an apology on behalf of most of humanity from the nearest religious person ...
gregladen | March 19, 2011Today is DuWayne Brayton's birthday. His web site is here, but his best writing is in comments on my blog!
Happy Birthday DuWayne. Many happy returns. Though I actually have no idea what that means, and assume it has to do with gift receipts.
gregladen | March 19, 2011"Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand" by Chris Hedges was brought by Mike the Mad Biologist to the attention of Stephanie Zvan who wrote: Rights Must Be Protected *and* Shared
Nature Blog Network turns us on to a blog of photos and video about about wildlife conservation, and a blog by a forest conservation officer. I always wanted to be a forest conservation officer.
gregladen | March 19, 2011James at Class:M has an important post on the perception and cost of Nuclear Energy: What Fukushima doesn't change
PalMD at The White Coat Underground has an important rant about iodine, which is much in the news these days for obvious reasons: Saturday Evening Rant, Iodine Edition
gregladen | March 19, 2011Skepchick Evelyn (who also comments here now and then) is writing an interesting series of posts that consist of interviews by her of her dad, an Nuclear Engineer, regarding what is going on in Japan. I think this link is probably the best way to get to them.
Speaking of Skepchicks, you should check out this post. It's amazing. Yet mundane. You will, like, totally LOL. Hebbo.
gregladen | March 19, 2011The amount of water available to produce floods is at a much higher than average level for Minnesota, including the Minnesota, Red, Mississippi and Saint Croix river drainages, not to mention smaller rivers and streams. As I write this personnel at the National Weather Service are dotting the i's and crossing the t's on watches and warnings for this area.
The snow pack has been melting for a few days and continues to do so, and is actually doing it at a nice pace. The melting stops over night as it gets cold, and only slowly resumes until the warmest part of the day, then slows down again…
j7uy5 | March 19, 2011A little less than one year ago, the major environmental news pertained
to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. From Wikipedia:
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the BP
oil spill, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the BP oil disaster or the
Macondo blowout)[4][5][6] is an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which
flowed for three months in 2010. The impact of the spill continues even
after the well has been capped. It is the largest accidental marine oil
spill in the history of the petroleum industry.[7][8][9] The spill
stemmed from a sea-floor oil gusher that resulted from the April…
gregladen | March 18, 2011Join artist Lynn Fellman and Professor Perry Hackett for a science and art presentation at Hennes Art Gallery in Minneapolis. It's an evolutionary tale about an ancient fossil gene discovered by Hackett's Lab at the University of Minnesota. The lab awakened the gene from an evolutionary sleep and named it "Sleeping Beauty". Intrigued by the science and the metaphor behind a 14 million year old gene, Lynn created a dimensional art titled "Waking Sleeping Beauty"
In a lively exchange, the artist and scientist tell the bench-to-bedside story how the gene was developed as a valuable biomedical…
gregladen | March 18, 2011There will not be a Mark Zuckerberg action figure.
After being told it can no longer sell its Apple CEO Steve Jobs action figure, M.I.C. Gadget has been ordered to kill off its Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg action figure as well. The lifelike Zuckerberg doll was available for $70 online, but now Facebook has had it banned, just like Apple did for the Jobs doll.
This time around, M.I.C. Gadget made a point to call the action figure the "Poking Inventor" and not "Mark Zuckerberg." It wanted to avoid Facebook getting involved, since Apple threatened it with legal action if it didn't stop selling…
tfk | March 18, 2011Kevin Drum reports on an essay by James Heckman that would be depressing if it weren't predictable. The basic idea is expressed in this graph:
Drum summarizes:
The chart shows achievement test scores for children of mothers with different levels of education. Children of college graduates score about one standard deviation above the mean by the time they're three, and that never changes. Children of mothers with less than a high school education score about half a standard deviation below the mean by the time they're three, and that never changes either. Roughly speaking, nothing we do…
gregladen | March 17, 2011Tennessee's House Bill 368 was passed on a 9-4 vote, with no testimony or discussion, at the House General Subcommittee of Education meeting on March 16, 2011. A version of the "academic freedom" antievolution bill, HB 368 would, if enacted, require state and local educational authorities to "assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies" and permit teachers to "help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories…
gregladen | March 17, 2011As we speak, several children lie gravely ill in Minneapolis, struck down by a preventable but sometimes fatal childhood disease.
One of the children is an infant who was too young to have been vaccinated, but caught the disease, apparently, from someone old enough to be vaccinated but who was not.
Get your children vaccinated.
Learn about measles here. Read about vaccination here.
gregladen | March 17, 2011When the Kentucky legislature adjourned sine die on March 9, 2011, House Bill 169 died in committee. A special session of the legislature will convene starting on March 14, 2011, but only to consider two unrelated items, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader (March 10, 2011). HB 169, if enacted, would have allowed teachers to "use, as permitted by the local school board, other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner." No particular scientific theories were cited in HB 169, but the similar HB 397…
gregladen | March 17, 2011I am (half) ethnic Irish and I grew up in a city that was as Irish as the Blarney Stone itself. When I was a teen armed with a false ID and a strong sense of purpose (that being to get drunk with my friends) we'd cruise the bars, starting on or near Madison, Lark and State (where I generally lived) in our regular hangouts, but quickly working our way up to the nominal Irish Bars (they were all Irish bars, but only some had Irish names). Somewhere between GJ's and O'Heaney's we would find the bar where Charlie Tapps was hoofing his Irish Tap Dancing act and ... well, join in. If I recall…
gregladen | March 17, 2011Daemonic underground gasses exploded to the surface in a fiery fireball in South Minneapolis today, blasting a huge hole in a parking lot, causing several cars to meltdown, and potentially damaging a newly rebuilt section of God's Highway (I35 W).1 The news agencies noticed it when checking the traffic cameras for their local traffic report.
Local Minneapolitonians: This was on 60thE and Nicollet, near the Crosstown Junction. Route 62, closed for a time, is reopened, but as of this writing, 35 W is closed both North and South as they are checking for damage. Of the just moments ago…