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gregladen | November 18, 2010From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.
gregladen | November 18, 2010The distinguished evolutionary biologist Morris Goodman died on November 14, 2010, at the age of 85, according to the Wayne State University School of Medicine. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 12, 1925, Goodman attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before enlisting in the United States Air Force in 1943. Returning to Wisconsin, he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in zoology. After a series of postdoctoral appointments, in 1958 he took a position at Wayne State University, where he remained for fifty-two years. In the late 1950s, he became interested in…
gregladen | November 18, 2010Paul was a real live scientific meteorologist who accidentally ended up a TV weatherman. (The regular one was sick, the substitute was sick, so they threw him in front of the camera.) He then became so popular that they fired him during a budget crunch. He was one of the first weather reporters anywhere, and certainly the first in Minnesota, to tell people that AGW is real.
Don't worry he didn't die or anything. (Don Shelby is retiring thus this conversation):
gregladen | November 17, 2010Let's have a look and see if we can decide.
Sciencedaily.com has this piece on a paper published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in which the claim is made that "US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research." The problem is that the statistics given don't show that.
The study is said to look at papers withdrawn according to PubMed between 2000 and 2010. Which means 2001 through 2009 inclusively (though I'm guessing that is not what was meant). Here's the data:
Papers retracted: 788
... because of error: 545
... "attributed" to fraud (no indication in the write up what…
gregladen | November 17, 2010Denis Dutton is a philosophy professor and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In his book The Art Instinct, he suggests that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty.
stoat | November 16, 2010I haven't ranted about climate for a bit, so I think I will. Misc stuff follows, mostly commentary.
APS has a nice post on "The nothing that was Climategate" (though he really needs to upgrade his colour scheme; links are hard to see). [Update: or ClimateSight perhaps; or Bart]. APS has some nice referee's quotes of his own, and links to Joe Romm. I'll get on to JR in a moment, but first I need to comment on JR's link to...
[We interrupt this link to bring a minor update; Nature has a completely rubbish editorial on the subject.
But RC has the correct answer. Now to return...]
Robin McKie in…
pharyngula | November 15, 2010I must catch a plane, but here are a few short notices I didn't want to neglect.
Godless folk are trying to establish an atheist discussion site, and they need votes for approval. Help 'em out if you'd like.
Phylointelligence is a new site organizing essays to summarize and explain the evidence for evolution. Take a look!
Jeff Randall is an activist for secular humanism and skepticism who has fallen on hard times — his friends are fundraising to help him through a current crisis. Help if you can.
gregladen | November 15, 2010It has been with us all along. In movies, on TV, documentaries. We wuz lookin' 'em right in the face and never done nowd it.
I recommend that you stop watching around six minutes. You have been warned.
gregladen | November 15, 2010In a recent blog post, Krazy Kristian Guy Ray Comfort (the "Banana man") notes that atheists are planning a billboard campaign that will point out the barbaric nature of passages from the Christian and Muslim texts. He goes on to note that anyone who offends Islam is likely to get their heads cut off, and he tastelessly uses a photograph of a living, smiling Daniel Pearl (who was beheaded by his terrorist captives in 2002) to make his point.
Comfort goes on to say that Atheists may be captured by people of Islamic faith and beheaded, and that would be bad for the Atheists. Therefore, he…
gregladen | November 14, 2010Yesterday in Minnesota, 546 vehicles drove off the road and 461 vehicles crashed into something (often, another vehicle) due to storm conditions. In one of those incidents, a person died. In neighboring Wisconsin, there were over 400 crashes and two dead.
If this was a disease epidemic over the same time period, it would be way worse than the H1N1 flu or the cholera epidemic currently hitting Haiti. Yes, yes, I get that this is a temporary short term phenomenon, but if we put all the stormy weather end to end in time it would be an event of a week or two duration (depending on the year).…
mikethemadbiologist | November 13, 2010A warm fall day. If you're stuck inside, here are some links for you. Science:
Dire Consequences of NIH Cuts
Rare Hits and Heaps of Misses to Pay For
NDM-1, the supergene: Further (community?) spread
Other:
Making religion of economics: The arguments of market fundamentalists don't fit the facts of our economy. So they ignore the facts
Phantom Jobs
Deregulation and Your Front Lawn
Our unemployment crisis is not structural
Maybe We Can All . . .
The Obama Movement
mspringer | November 13, 2010Shortly after the invention of the laser, a torrent of discoveries began pouring in thanks to the previously unreachable intensities that became available. Many of these discoveries fall under the general category of "nonlinear optics", which you could more or less say is the study of the behavior of light in a medium whose optical properties are themselves a function of the light intensity. Pretty much all material exhibit nonlinear optical effects if the light is intense enough, but "intense enough" is frequently in the neighborhood of 10^20 watts per square meter.
Once lasers were invented…
gregladen | November 12, 2010Over eleven thousand Haitians have been infected with cholera, and over 700 have died. The epidemic is worsening very quickly. Over 80 of the dead have died within the last 24 hours as of this writing. The resources needed to deal with this are not available, apparently because cholera in Haiti is not as interesting or sympathy garnering as an earthquake in Haiti.
From Medecines Sans Frontiers:
Over the past three days, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical teams supporting Haitian Ministry of Public Health facilities and working in their own independent medical structures in Haiti's…
gregladen | November 12, 2010Overall, my opinion of New Yorkers just went down three notches.
At 3 minutes: Why we feel good hating Bush, but bad hating Obama.
mikethemadbiologist | November 11, 2010By way of Oliver Willis, we discover that the Corporate Democrat Third Way propaganda tank has decided that doubling down on failed Blue Dog policies is exactly what it will take to kill off the Democratic Party will resuscitate the Democratic Party's fortunes:
The party is about to come to a major fork in the road," said Jonathan Cowan, Third Way's president. "A left turn at this juncture is a turn toward permanent minority status."
The group's efforts reflect the underlying tension President Barack Obama faces as he heads into the last two years of his first term. Liberals say there's an…
gregladen | November 11, 2010
Wow. Just wow. It just keeps going and going. And going.
Hat tip: wfr
RT America broadcasts from studios in Washington, DC. We report on the other side of the story, not making any conclusions, but raising the unanswered questions.
Tune in to watch news reports, features and talk shows with a totally different perspective from mainstream American television.
Like I said. Irresponsible.
The woman speaking is a scientoligist. So are these people, according to one source on the internet (which may or may not be accurate*):
John Travolta - actor
Chick Corea - influential American…