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gregladen | July 31, 2010Earlier this week, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman warned Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a letter that approving the Keystone XL pipeline would be "a step in the wrong direction" and criticized the State Department's limited environmental impact statement about the pipeline.
The proposed pipeline would transport 900,000 barrels of oil a day nearly 2,000 miles from Alberta, Canada to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. The project is currently undergoing the State Department's review process since all transnational pipelines must be approved by the State Department as…
gregladen | July 31, 2010Apropos this discussion, for your weekend entertainment:
From SBM Theater, hat tip daedalus2u
gregladen | July 30, 2010So far, my new experimental Skeptical Search Engine has been used hundreds of times, and the top searchers are:
deepak chopra
homeopath
ghost
high fructose corn syrup
god
evolution
zecharia sitchin
creationism
ghosts
global warming
ancient astronauts
ufo
pyramids egypt
love
vaccines
methane bubble
climate change
pyramids
fossil sirenia
carbohydrates
easter island
acupuncture
vaccine
Gmos
bigfoot
This is excellent. One suggestion: Use GMO rather than GMOs and ghost instead of ghosts in order to avoid limiting the search.
gregladen | July 30, 2010Desiree Schell of Skeptically Speaking diabolically matched The Culture of Fear author Barry Glassner for a live interview, and a fear-riddled edition of "Everything you know is sort of wrong" (on how poor people are breeding so fast they will take over the earth) by yours truly for TONIGHT's Skeptically Speaking show.
gregladen | July 30, 2010Can a fly's eye(s) be used for solar cells? Apparently so. Speaking of which, I have a gripe. Nuclear power supporters have always ignored the fact that Nuclear power (a.k.a. "unlimited safe free energy") is more expensive than other traditional forms of energy. In the mean time, anti "alternative" energy, often the same people, have touted that Solar is too expensive to be worth it. Well, guess what. A recent study seems to have shown that Solar power is cheaper than nuclear. So, there you go.
Berry Go Round # 30, the Plant Carnival, is up and running at Brainripples. This is your…
krandall | July 30, 2010By Dr. Franck Marchis
Planetary Astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute
I mentioned in my previous post that we observed several known multiple asteroid systems during our last observing run with the W.M. Keck Observatory and its Adaptive Optics Systems. If you have been following my personal blogs and/or the scientific articles of our group (you are courageous...) you know this is the scientific topic which is taking most of my time recently. Today, as you can see if you explore our VOBAD database, we know 192 companions of asteroids. What I…
krandall | July 30, 2010By Dr. Franck Marchis
Planetary Astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute
I'd like to share the first of two blogs on observations of Io that we did using the Keck telescope and its Adaptive Optics (AO) system.
Similar to last year, my summer is busy with the REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) students of the SETI Institute. I will write a specific post on two students who are working with me and their project in a few days.
I obtained telescope time at the end of June 2010 with the W.M. Keck II telescope and its Adaptive Optics system…
gregladen | July 30, 2010Wanted: A bash utility that sends the contents of a file to standard output. It would be named spew. It would be like cat but with the problems oft' complained about in cat fixed. There would be a few options. One option would be to chomp the final newline if there is one. Other options would change the character encoding. Another option would be to specify several commands to which the data could be sent simultaneously. But otherwise it would be pretty simple. Spew.
See the whole "WANTED" list here.
gregladen | July 29, 2010So, do you think there is any connection between this:
9 months, 23 days
Mark your calendars! The end of the world is nigh, and we've got a specific date: the Rapture will occur on 21 May, 2011, and the world ends on 21 October 2011. How do we know this? As near as I can tell, it's pure numerology...
and this:
That Killer Asteroid You Heard About Yesterday? We Knew About It Last Year
... there's a giant asteroid out there called 1999 RQ36, and there's a small chance it might hit us ...
Certainly not, but both are interesting reads.
gregladen | July 29, 2010For a new project to fund progressive candidates, with the intention of countering the 200 million or so that Republican-aligned special interests have raised for the 2010 election. Click here.
gregladen | July 29, 2010Tan Le's astonishing new computer interface reads its user's brainwaves, making it possible to control virtual objects, and even physical electronics, with mere thoughts (and a little concentration). She demos the headset, and talks about its far-reaching applications.
gregladen | July 28, 2010From Al Franken:
The Comcast-NBC merger is the first domino. If it falls, the rest will soon follow. If no one stops them, how long do you think it will take before 4 or 5 megacorporations effectively control the flow of information in America not only on television, but online? How long do you think it will take before the Fox News website loads 5 times faster than DailyKos?
It's almost too late to stop this from happening, but not quite. The government can stop them. . . but first the government has to be MADE to act.
Net Neutrality is THE First Amendment issue of our time. If you want to…
jgoldman | July 28, 2010BYU students made a spoof of the Old Spice ads, about studying. Did you know that eight out of five dentists say that studying in the library is six bajillion times more effective than studying in your shower?
(h/t The Education Standard)
gregladen | July 28, 2010Arthritis and injury grind down millions of joints, but few get the best remedy -- real biological tissue. Kevin Stone shows a treatment that could sidestep the high costs and donor shortfall of human-to-human transplants with a novel use of animal tissue.