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sb admin | December 15, 2010Late last week I stumbled across a press release with an attention-grabbing headline ("The Causes of Common Diseases are Not Genetic Concludes a New Analysis") linking to a lengthy blog post at the Bioscience Resource Project, a website devoted to food and agriculture. The post, written by two plant geneticists, plays a tune that will be familiar to anyone who has encountered the rhetoric of GeneWatch UK: basically, modern genomics is pure hype perpetuated by scientists seeking grant money and corporations seeking to absolve themselves of responsibility for environmental disasters.
The…
gregladen | December 14, 2010That would be an interesting headline to see. Even more interesting is the fact, as far as I know, that we haven't seen it. For that, there should be consequences. Rant below the fold. Not work safe. Grrrrrrrr.
Julian Assange and his Hactivists can kiss my ass. Did you hear that? KISS MY FUCKING ASS!!!! I've gotten more "your password was compromised" emails in the last day or so than I've ever seen since the beginning of the Internet. Why? Because you have the maturity and perspective of an overtired baby with diaper rash.
Item: According to their own Rhetoric, Julian Assange is…
mspringer | December 13, 2010Right now I'm on the 4th floor of the physics building. If I walk down the hall to the balcony overlooking the atrium, I could drop a bouncy ball and watch its trajectory. It'll fall to the ground, bounce up to some fraction of its initial height, and repeat the process with a loss of energy each time until it finally comes to rest. In a perfect world with no dissipation of energy, the ball would always bounce exactly up to its initial height and repeat its trajectory forever.
In principle, I can drop the magic ball at a given time on the stopwatch and thenceforth predict exactly where it…
gregladen | December 12, 201011-year-old Birke Baehr presents his take on a major source of our food -- far-away and less-than-picturesque industrial farms. Keeping farms out of sight promotes a rosy, unreal picture of big-box agriculture, he argues, as he outlines the case to green and localize food production.
gregladen | December 12, 2010William Ury, author of "Getting to Yes," offers an elegant, simple (but not easy) way to create agreement in even the most difficult situations -- from family conflict to, perhaps, the Middle East.
gregladen | December 12, 2010Before:
After:
Video of the collapse!!!:
This happened about 5 AM. Too much snow, and the Metrodome is basically a big balloon. There is a live snowcam here but the signal is poor. This is why the Vikings game had been moved to Monday, for fear of there being too much snow.
If you work in one of the skyscrapers downtown, this is your chance to get one of those once in a lifetime photos!
This has happened before but no one can remember how long it takes to get it back up again. Or, at least, Amanda, Huxley and I can't remember.
pharyngula | December 11, 2010His father, John Dawkins, has died at the age of 95. He led an interesting life!
There's a better link here, with pictures.
gregladen | December 11, 2010If you've been in a restaurant kitchen, you've seen how much food, water and energy can be wasted there. Chef Arthur Potts-Dawson shares his very personal vision for drastically reducing restaurant, and supermarket, waste -- creating recycling, composting, sustainable engines for good (and good food).
esiegel | December 10, 2010"I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it." -Harry Truman
It's the end of the term here at my college, as well as most colleges across the nation. And while the students are freaking out about finals, grades, and other things associated with the end of the semester, there's a new one that's coming up more and more frequently all across the nation.
I'm looking squarely at you, helicopter parents. While college students, perhaps, should be going through and learning to cope with the stresses of higher education, many…
gregladen | December 9, 2010At its December 9, 2010, meeting, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted 8-2 to approve high school biology textbooks, despite the ongoing complaints of creationists objecting to their treatment of evolution. As NCSE previously reported, a decision on the textbooks, expected initially in October 2010, was deferred by the board, which sought a recommendation from its Textbook/Media/Library Advisory Council. On November 12, 2010, the council voted 8-4 to recommend the textbooks. Then, on December 7, 2010, a committee of the board voted 6-1 to move forward with the…
gregladen | December 9, 2010Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | December 9, 2010Now that Mythbusters is on Roku and Netflix via various venues, I've been watching it. Previously I've only seen a few. They're pretty good. And now, President Obama will be on Mythbusters: "The Discovery Channel has announced that the Commander-in-Chief will be doing a cameo on "Mythbusters" tonight. He'll be asking hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to redo one of their projects." *
Meanwhile, with the holidays fast approaching, you may need to find a good therapist. Lemondrop has a post on that.
gregladen | December 9, 2010Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
gregladen | December 9, 2010It's a great idea that I found on a new blog called Notes from the Pondonome, (which from the photograph in the blog's banner must be some kind of remote church and graveyard near a river in South Dakota): It involves bacteria.
gregladen | December 9, 2010This is interesting. Well, the whole conversation is interesting, but it gets especially interesting around 6 minutes ...
Question: ... there's this US Intelligence Analyst Bradley Manning arrested and it's alleged that he confessed in in a chatroom to have leaked .... 280 thousand classified us embassy cables. Did he?
Answer: Well, we have denied receiving those cables. He has been charged, five days ago, with obtaining 150k cables and releasing 50. We have released early in the year a cable from the Reykjavik us embassy but not necessarily connected...
What is really interesting…
gregladen | December 9, 2010
"Carbon dioxide is natural, it is not harmful, it is a part of Earth's lifecycle. And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance, reduce the American standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occuring in Earth."
cwilcox | December 9, 2010Most animals reproduce sexually. This means that every individual has to find another individual to mate with - and they have to convince that other that they're worthy of the privilege. More often than not when it comes to picking that special someone, it's the girls that get to be choosy. Females spend a lot more energy per offspring than males from the get-go due to the size of our eggs (let alone most child rearing responsibilities), so as a gender, females want to make sure they don't waste their efforts. To ensure top notch kids, females choose the best male they can find. It's no…