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gregladen | March 12, 2011Now that space shuttle Discovery has returned from its last mission, NASA workers will start getting it ready for its next voyage -- to a museum.
NASA is retiring its shuttle fleet this year, and 21 museums across the country are vying for the chance to become a retirement home for one of the iconic space shuttles.
I remember when John Glen's space capsule toured and was displayed briefly in the State Capitol in Albany, in the same place they displayed the bodies of various touring dead presidents and other similar memorabilia. It would be really cool to visit the Space Shuttle in some…
gregladen | March 11, 2011A planet is considered "Class M" if it can sustain human life1. We live on a Class M planet. However, the conditions that make a planet conducive to life may change over time, so it is important to have instrumentation and gauges and stuff that will keep track of important variables.
It is estimated that when about one trillion tonnes of fossil carbon is released into the atmosphere by human activities, we will have reached a critical point, at which time we may have to leave the planet2.
We're nearly half way there.
James Hrynyshyn at the blog Class: M has devised a sort of tricorder…
pharyngula | March 11, 2011It's a giant amoeboid horror!
Suddenly, I appreciate one benefit of living in Minnesota.
cwilcox | March 11, 2011I was over at my friend Kira's house last night, having some wine and pizza and helping her relax before her PhD defense this afternoon. There was nothing abnormal about the evening at that point, though soon enough, that would change. Within the hour, we would first hear reports of a tsunami warning, the results of the fifth largest quake in recorded history off the coast of Japan. We would turn on the news and watch as the 13 foot waves rushed across Japanese crop fields. We'd watch in horror as cars were thrown about in raging floods and fires broke out in the water's wake. We'd look at…
mspringer | March 11, 2011In the last post I talked about a measurement we did in our lab to characterize some properties of two parallel laser beams. The theory, if you want to dignify that equation with such a title, gave the power of the two beams as a function of mow much of the beams we cut off with a moving opaque block at position x.
The equation had 6 constants - the power of each beam, the width of each beam, the separation of the beams, and background power with no beams. Compare this to Newton's law of gravitation:
For two masses m1 and m2 separated by a distance r, this equation gives you the force. If…
pharyngula | March 11, 2011This isn't a news service: go to the BBC or CNN now and read up on the 8.9 earthquake that just hit Japan. There is a tsunami rippling across the Pacific right now, too.
gregladen | March 10, 2011Unions and Democracy are no longer major factors in the Badger State:
Wisconsin lawmakers voted Thursday to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from the state's public workers in one of the strongest blows to the power of unions in years.
The state's Assembly passed Republican Gov. Scott Walker's explosive proposal 53-42 Thursday. The state's Senate approved it the night before after using a procedural move to bypass its AWOL Democrats.
Details
gregladen | March 10, 2011Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is upset that the federal government has squelched his right to own a super-toilet, leaving him with less freedom than women, who are still allowed to have abortions. It's an unusual comparison, but it's meant to underline his opposition to the executive branch's involvement in encouraging energy efficiency.
In a Senate hearing, Paul laid in to Kathleen Hogan, deputy assistant energy secretary for efficiency, for imposing restrictions and fines meant to encourage people to use environmentally friendly appliances.
Read the rest of this incredible story here.
And the…
gregladen | March 10, 2011What happened in #Wisconsin, and what happens next by Laura Conway:
Last night, Wisconsin State Senate Republicans stripped most public employees unions of most collective bargaining rights. After insisting for weeks that busting the unions was essential to balancing the state's budget, they broke Governor Scott Walker's "budget-repair bill" into two parts. One part contained the anti-union provisions, the other the items that Republicans now deemed fiscal.
Read the rest
The Uptake on Wisconsin Senate
Koch Industries Employs PR Firm To Airbush Wikipedia, Gets Banned For Unethical 'Sock…
gregladen | March 10, 2011Senate Bill 1854, introduced in the Florida Senate on March 5, 2011, would, if enacted, amend a section of Florida law to require "[a] thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution" in the state's public schools. The bill is sponsored by Stephen R. Wise (R-District 5), who in February 2009 introduced SB 2396 (PDF), which would have amended the same section of Florida law in the same way. Before Wise introduced SB 2396, he announced his intention to introduce a bill requiring "intelligent design" to be taught in Florida's public schools. "If you're going to…
gregladen | March 9, 2011"Disingenuous efforts by creationists to portray themselves as persecuted in mainstream academia for their anti-evolution beliefs are getting a boost from a Texas lawmaker," reported the Texas Freedom Network in a March 9, 2011, post on its blog. House Bill 2454, introduced in the Texas House of Representatives on March 8, 2011, would, if enacted, provide, "An institution of higher education may not discriminate against or penalize in any manner, especially with regard to employment or academic support, a faculty member or student based on the faculty member's or student's conduct of research…
gregladen | March 9, 2011Apparently, they voted without the Dems present. Oh hell, who needs teachers and stuff anyway.
gregladen | March 9, 2011You may have noticed that Scienceblogs.com has been loading slowly lately. Also, in the "back end" .... where we write the blogs and stuff ... the servers have been slow, and eventually, useless. Well, the crack technical team that takes care of these things have determined that we were experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoSA). I have no idea from or for what reason. Anybody out there know?
Meanwhile, the Overlords have asked us to pass on a request for help to you. The IP addresses whence the attacks originate have been blocked. But this means that you may be…
heathero | March 9, 2011... because I love science and I love beer, obviously.
I had a great time moderating Science by The Pint last night! It is always awesome to be reminded how enthusiastic non-scientists often are about science. I find events like this incredibly refreshing when I have been stuck in a science rut or simply less enthusiastic about my work than usual.
I had participated in one of these events last year, when an upper level grad student was speaking. I wandered from table to table talking about how cool hydrothermal vents are, and why we think its important to study them. People asked…
gregladen | March 8, 2011The video comes from Project Veritas, and is another in political activist James O'Keefe's undercover exposes (he most prominently took on ACORN -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). In the video, Schiller and NPR institutional giving director Betsy Liley are at lunch in Washington with two Project Veritas "investigative reporters" identified as Shaughn Adeleye and Simon Templar, who posed as "Ibrahim Kasaam and Amir Malik." They were allegedly interested in having their organization donate $5 million to NPR. O'Keefe's organization says the recording was made on Feb.…
gregladen | March 8, 2011From the IWD web site:
International Women's Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, International Women's Day is a national holiday.
I remember in the 1980s passing through Nairobi on or about IWD during the Year of the Woman (a UN thing) and seeing slogans on all the busses noting that "A crime against a woman is a crime.
Kenya has lots of misogyny and many women there are treated very badly. On the other hand, there are piles of women in elected…