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gregladen | February 2, 2010Let's go visit the Twin Cities Creation Science Science Fair at Har Mar Mall on Feb 13.
We'd meet up at the local bookstore cafe in the mall around 10:30 to 11 or so, visit the science fair exhibits and look around, then around 12:30 to 1:00 we'll have lunch.
There is a facebook event. (Check my facebook wall. If you are not my facebook friend, why not? If you are not a member of facebook, HELP GET ME OUT OF HERE.... but you can come anyway. Har Mar Mall. If you don't know what or where that is then you are probably not from the Twin Cities. But if you are from the twin cities and want…
grrlscientist | February 2, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) was published late last night and can be read here: Scientia Pro Publica -- 20th edition. This is the first blog carnival that John has ever hosted, so be sure to go there and leave encouraging comments and other forms of praise.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been…
mspringer | February 2, 2010Every year there's a Super Bowl, and every year the whole shebang gets started by a famous person tossing a coin into the air. The team winning the toss gets to decide whether they want to begin the game on offense or defense. Theoretically this choice might produce an advantage. If so, would be interesting to know how much. The same thing happens in physics - just how much signal is hidden in the random noise of an experimental apparatus?
Let's take a look at the numbers and try to see what kind of advantage the toss-winning team has. The data is pretty straightforward - in 43 coin…
cortex | February 2, 2010Ross Douthat reflects on the recent news that teenage birthrates inched upward during the Bush era, after more than a decade of decline:
The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it "crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work."
In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton's presidency. If you blame abstinence programs for a year's worth of bad news, you'd also have to give them credit…
sciencepunk | February 1, 2010I discovered these symbols hidden underneath my TV. Does anyone know what they mean?
gregladen | February 1, 2010The following is a subset of the ideas for science fair projects found on this science fair site.
For each project, your assignment is to come up with an experiment that would test the idea.
Make a computer model of the Flood currents.
Statistical occurrence of giants, and midgets and dwarfs and giantism. Use Princess Flo, Goliath, and brothers.
Does Tanning leather affect C14 content and date?
How much voltage or current can a human take before he is killed? ...
How much electricity does an eel put out?
What was life like before the Flood?
Trilobites prove Noah's flood because they are…
dblum | February 1, 2010On Friday, a 41-year-old Missouri woman was charged with poisoning her granddaughter with an anti-clotting medication. The reason: she wanted to scare the one-year-old's parents into uniting over the child's illness and giving up their divorce plans.
The poisoning was discovered when the little girl began bleeding uncontrollably from her mouth and nose. Although doctors treated her successfully, they expressed concern about long-term damage. High exposure to anti-coagulents, usually members of the Warfarin family of drugs, such as Coumadin, has been linked to heart and bone damage.
Bizarre as…
jwilbanks | February 1, 2010I'm going to get re-starting blogging here this week, after a crazy few weeks of work at the day job.
In the meantime, here's a few links to stuff I'm doing, reading, and writing.
The team has been busy working on governance and systems for the Sage Commons (the first globally coherent dataset is available - you have to register, but it's open data...).
We've also been busy pushing on the first beta version of the Creative Commons patent tools for the GreenXchange launch in Davos. There is more documentation on GreenXchange in the reading room over at SC.
I contributed an essay to the…
gregladen | February 1, 2010PLoS Blog Post Pick of the Month for January 2010 is as the NN blog Endless Forms, written by Anne-Marie Hodge.
Click here to read this post.
THERE IS A PIK-CHER OF A KITTEH!!!!
cortex | February 1, 2010In response to my recent post on the neuroscience of musical predictions, Alex Rehding, the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard, wrote in to offer a musical theorist perspective. He makes several excellent points, and complicates the neuroscience in useful ways, so I thought I'd reproduce the relevant parts of his email below:
The point you raise in your latest posting -- about expectation and prediction -- is one that has fascinated music theorists pretty much for the last 200 years. I realize that yours is a science blog, and I'll try my best to resist the urge to add too many…
gregladen | February 1, 2010Ideas that were once championed by evolutionists are no longer valid, much like the false science behind man-made global warming. Students deserve the truth.
That's from a guy running for school board in Wisconsin. Pharyngula has the details.
gregladen | February 1, 2010From the amazon web site:
....ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it's reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book.....
(Source. Hat tip)
For some back ground and discussion, see this earlier post and links among the comments that describe the situation.
I gave the specific quote because I love how Amazon notes that…
gregladen | January 31, 2010Does
Chris Matthews "forgetting that Obama is black" falls into that same range of racism as "Pretty for a black girl" and the "You're not like those other black people" claptrap often espoused by the "I'm not racist, but..." crowd. They're coded as compliments, but the subtext is still an ugly one that frames racism as being the fault of the oppressed...
see: Transcending Race...A History Lesson
pharyngula | January 31, 2010And what have I accomplished? Thanks to Steve and Dierdre Metzler, who gave me a tour of the local pubs and restaurants, I have learned something important. Guinness in Ireland is a completely different beast from Guinness anywhere else; here, it's a silky smooth ambrosia with not a hint of bitterness. It went down so easy I could have easily slid 3 or 4 of them down my throat, but given my current sleep-derived state, I restrained myself to one.
Of course, then we had to follow up with Irish coffee, and yeah, in a few minutes my head will touch the pillow and I will be spending an evening…
grrlscientist | January 31, 2010tags: birdday, birthday
So I have eaten some chocolate-glazed marzipan cake, a few slices of home-made sourdough-rye bread (hot out of the oven, squeeee!) and now I am drinking some hot Glühwein while watching HP4 (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), and thinking about how magical the past few months have been for me.
In the previous few months, my life has changed in just about every way you can think of;
I went from being sued on a fairly regular basis for half a dozen unpaid medical bills to having all those bills finally paid off
I went from being broke, unemployable and…
ddobbs | January 31, 2010
The Rise Of Marketing-Based Medicine
64 Comments
By Ed Silverman // January 28th, 2010 // 7:57 am
You've heard of evidence-based medicine. Well, a new paper summarizes a panoply of practices employed over the past two decades or so - ghostwriting, suppressing or spinning data, disease mongering and managing side effect perceptions among docs - that the authors call marketing-based medicine. And they rely on internal documents from litigation - such as the much-publicized lawsuits over antipsychotics and antidepressants - to illustrate their point.
A stunning must-read from Ed…
gregladen | January 31, 2010The iPad ... what is it like?
NZ school ditches Microsoft and goes totally open source (hat tip: LIX
The Amazon Kerfuffle
clock | January 31, 2010
I am collecting all the blog and media coverage on this wiki page, but redundancy is always a good idea in the digital realm, so the links are also now posted here, under the fold:
Update: the wiki page has reached its limit of number of links per page, so I am only updating this post from now on, adding freshest posts I can find on top. Please let me know if I missed yours.
Also, read the interviews with ScienceOnline2010 participants
Circle of Complexity: Importance of meatspace - session at Science Online 2010
Adventures in Ethics and Science: #scio10 aftermath: Continuing thoughts on…