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gregladen | August 7, 2010Conversion is the process through which a person's orientation on reliigion changes. How do people turn from and to new religious groups, ways of life, systems of belief and modes of relating to a deity or a the nature of reality. Dr. Grant Steves will be with me in the studio to discuss faith, conversion and deconversion with a dollop of religious indoctrination.
Dr. Grant Steves is a member of the Minnesota Atheists. He has a doctorate in Theology, and is an atheist. Mike Haubrich is a director on the board of the Minnesota Atheists, a former Catholic and deconverted evangelical…
gregladen | August 5, 2010Wanted: A bash command that undoes the previous bash command. The name of the command shall be "oops." It will be written in an object oriented programming language.
See the whole "WANTED" list here.
dr. dolittle | August 5, 2010
This is a nice area and I have taken the liberty of ducking out on one or two sessions to do some of my own comparative physiology sleuthing. Like most comparative physiologists, some of my best work is done outside the lab.
I think I could live here. This suburban Denver city is the eighth most populous in the state. In 2006, it was ranked 24th in Money magazine's Top 100 Best Places to Live. That was a notch above Ann Arbor, MI.
However, deciding where to live rarely is left up to just one person. Isn't there always a SO (significant other), spouse, offspring in the picture with their…
gregladen | August 5, 2010The Carnival of Evolution #26 is Here on The Thoughtful Animal.
Submit your posts for the next carnival here.
gregladen | August 5, 2010After he swam the North Pole, Lewis Pugh vowed never to take another cold-water dip. Then he heard of Lake Imja in the Himalayas, created by recent glacial melting, and Lake Pumori, a body of water at an altitude of 5300 m on Everest -- and so began a journey that would teach him a radical new way to approach swimming and think about climate change.
gregladen | August 5, 2010Check out the Sierra Club's "Beyond Coal" web site.
Get rid of the senate method of fillibuster.
If you are in CA, work against Prop 23.
dr. dolittle | August 4, 2010Greetings from Westminster, CO, site of the 2010 APS Intersociety Meeting: Global Change and Global Science: Comparative Physiology in a Changing World http://the-aps.org/meetings/aps/comparative/index.htm. The meeting is an intersociety meeting, hosted by the American Physiological Society (APS), and co-sponsored by the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) and the Society for Experimental Biology (SEB).
Looked at most of the 221 abstracts for the conference on the plane. Folks from the East coast, West coast, the Southwest, Canada, Norway, France, South Africa and…
illconsidered | August 4, 2010I think this YouTube video gets an A+ for content as it presents a great lineup of the compelling reasons we can be very confident that the case for anthropogenic global warming is solid.
But on style it does lack a little, oh well. If you want style, Lord Monckton is your man!
This video might be good to pass along as an intorduction/overview to any friends you might have who are not already well versed in the science of this issue.
gregladen | August 4, 2010Do you remember when, in an act of slap-in-the-face cynicism (that American Environmentalists accepted with little protest) Ronald Regan took the previously deployed (and largely symbolic) solar panels off of the roof of the white house?
Bill Clinton did not restore them. Bush ... well, whatever. And Obama has not restored them either.
Time to put them back. Here's a petition you can sign.
gregladen | August 4, 2010... emerged Huxley:
No, no, not THAT Huxley, THIS Huxley:
Please visit Cocktail Party Physics for an amazing essay on Thomas Henry Huxley (who is indeed the namesake of the other Huxley). Read: How East London defined "Darwin's Bulldog" and brought him into conflict with the world's most dangerous anarchist.
krandall | August 4, 2010By Dr. Adrian Brown
Planetary Research Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute
The last two months have witnessed several extremely important events with respect to future Mars Exploration. The first two revolved around the rover "Spirit." The other two are a new mission to Mars and a possible road for humans to Mars.
"Spirit"
On June 3rd, the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) team published a stunning paper describing how the rover "Spirit," now immobile in the shifting sands of Gusev Crater, detected carbonate minerals in a rock called "Comanche…
cwilcox | August 4, 2010For the past five days, I have been snorkeling and diving at Pearl & Hermes Atoll. P & H is one of the prettiest places I have ever been - stunning, vibrant reefs, calm, blue waters - the works. It's stupid pretty. The atoll has the highest standing stock of fish and the highest number of fish species in the entire Northwest Hawaiian Islands - and you can tell the minute you're in the water.
It's an atoll in the truest sense, in that most of it is underwater, with only a handful of small, sandy islands fringing its edges. While the reef covers over 194,000 acres, only 80 of that is…
gregladen | August 4, 2010In Iran, there was NOT an assassination attempt on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Here is a picture of him not being assassinated as his bodyguards don't react to anything as startled onlookers glance at the cite where there was not an explosion behind them.
(Photograph from Reuters, in The Guardian, which is NOT reporting anything.)
The BBC also reports that nothing happened in Iran today. Aljazeera.net, on the other hand, reports: Iran denies attack on Ahmadinejad.
gregladen | August 4, 2010 Barack Obama
Born on or near August 4th 1961, in Honolulu Hawaii. Or somewhere.
gregladen | August 4, 2010Overturning more than 40 years of accepted practice, new research proves that the tools used to check tests of "general mental ability" for bias are themselves flawed. This key finding from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business challenges reliance on such exams to make objective decisions for employment or academic admissions even in the face of well-documented gaps between mean scores of white and minority populations.
Here's the link.
dgmacarthur | August 4, 2010
Update 14:35 EDT 04/08/10: I just received a phone call from a 23andMe representative indicating that these rumours are not true; more details to follow once I have a written statement.
Update 17:26 EDT 04/08/10: Here is the written statement from 23andMe's PR firm:
We will continue to work with Illumina as our discussion with the FDA continues.
I've requested further clarification.
Update 17:59 EDT 04/08/10: I've received a (slightly) longer written statement from 23andMe clarifying that they have "no reason to believe there will be an interruption in the supply of Illumina chips at…
gregladen | August 3, 2010John McKay at Archy has written an in-dept analysis of Minnesota Congressperson Michele Bachmann. Read it here.
Surly Amy address Religion vs. Faith.
And, of course, the Ultimate Death Match: Fungus vs Worm