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gregladen | January 12, 2010News:
Current news from the BBC
Arikia Millikan's twitter feed. Arikia has relatives in the area, and is tweeting current news.
Help:
US citizens seeking information on your relatives in Haiti, call this number: 888 407 4747
UNICEF page for Haiti: Information and link to donate.
Direct Relief International: Web page and link for donations
American Red Cross International Response Fund
Oxfam now has its Haiti page up, here.
Science and other info:
Tectonics of the Haitian earthquake
Global Seismic Monitor
grrlscientist | January 12, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Have you read an especially good essay about science, nature or medicine lately? If so, why not share it with the world by submitting the URL for this essay to a blog carnival designed to share excellent writing with others? You don't need to be the author of an essay to submit it for consideration, and this is one way that blog carnivals grow in size and influence: by sharing with others.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a traveling blog carnival…
gregladen | January 12, 2010At the moment, the only secular relief organization that indicates that they are on top of Haiti, and is a respected and effective organization, and so on and so forth, is Direct Relief International. Here is their web site.
UPDATE: If you are a US citizen and seek information on your relatives in Haiti, call this number: 888 407 4747
You'll probably get a busy signal but keep trying.
If you know of any other secular organizations that are providing the opportunity to donate to help people in Haiti, please post them below.
Drs. without borders and the various UN groups are obvious cases…
gregladen | January 12, 2010Before I took the snap, I had a funny feeling that Alec was trying to tell me something. Not verbal communication or any facial expression or signal; whatever it was, I knew that he wanted the deep ball. So I called hike and the ball was snapped to me and I threw the ball as far as I could. The defense looked back, only to see that my brother Alec caught the ball with nobody contesting him. He leaped into the end zone and we celebrated our touchdown. "Wow!" said Victor. "You guys are an amazing team, it's like you guys used some kind of twin telepathy on that play.
Find out what's going on…
gregladen | January 12, 2010The earthquake was 7.0 or more (see Eruptions for info and discussion) and was not far from Port-au-Prince. Apparently damage is widespread and intense, and casualties high, but accurate information is limited because the information infrastructure was destroyed (see this for news details).
gregladen | January 12, 2010She was born as Hermine Santrouschitz in Vienna in 1909.
....Miep Gies, along with Johannes Kleiman, Victor Kugler, Bep Voskuijl, Jan Gies and Johan Voskuijl, made up a team of helpers for the eight Jewish people hiding in the Secret Annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam. The office of Otto Frank, where Miep worked as secretary, was located at the front side of the same building.
Following the betrayal and the deportation of the hiders, Miep and her colleague Bep made sure that the diary of the youngest of the group, Anne Frank, did not fall into the hands of the German occupier. ...
Here's…
sb admin | January 12, 2010Last year, it started out cold, then got warmer, but then it also got rainy. Therefore, I assume the same exact thing will happen this year.
And, the forecast is ...
Fri: Low 31F, High 57F -- Partly Cloudy
Sat: Low 42F, High 52F -- Cloudy
Sun: Low 42F, Hight 44F -- Chance of showers
(From The Weather Channel and the Weather Underground)
Holy crap, almost the same as last year! Who would have thought?
gregladen | January 12, 2010The National Academy of Sciences is to honor NCSE's executive director Eugenie C. Scott with its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal. ... "the medal is presented annually to honor extraordinary use of science for the public good"; Scott was chosen "for championing the teaching of evolution in the United States and for providing leadership to the National Center for Science Education." She will receive the award on April 25, 2010, during the Academy's 147th annual meeting.
The president of the National Academy of Sciences, Ralph J. Cicerone, commented, "Eugenie Scott has worked…
gregladen | January 12, 2010This blog and a few others were down for a while this morning. We apologise and promise it will never happen again.
If you see any pages that are still blank, please let me know. You can paste a comment below and point to that page by entering it in the URL of your comment (that's probably the most efficient way).
When I first saw that the blog was a blank page, and noticed that other Sb blogs were operating (by chance I sampled only blogs that happen to be running) I thought that something that had been going on in the background had somehow come to fruition. A commenter on this site…
sastyk | January 12, 2010Ok, as you all know from my "Pyr-Buck-Bees-Sheep" post, I need inspiration to get this book cooking again. So I know you've told me before, some of you, but I want to hear about how you are making a lower-energy life where you are, or how you've found a new place to do it. I'm also looking for a couple new people to profile for my book - I've had some dropouts, and would love to add a couple of new participants. I'm particularly looking for people who are trying to AIP in very dry climates and deal with water issues, those adapting in rental housing, anyone adapting as part of a religious…
cortex | January 12, 2010In a recent New Yorker, John Cassidy spends time with a number of influential economists at the University of Chicago, home to the Chicago School and its emphasis on the productive efficiency of free markets. Obviously, the financial maelstrom of the last few years has led many to question this premise, at least in its strongest form. How have these economists reacted? If you read my recent article in Wired on the psychology of failure, you probably aren't too surprised to learn that Cassidy finds several eminent Chicago economists who insist that the market failure wasn't actually a failure…
mspringer | January 12, 2010Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, a quick look at a funny exchange in the oral arguments of Briscoe v. Virginia:
MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging -
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I'm sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented…
sb admin | January 11, 2010At Science Online 2010 (or, as I like to call it, Esss Oh Ten Oh) I'll be participating in a session organized by Stephanie Zvan called Trust and Critical Thinking, with herself, PZ Myers, my favorite Radio Talk Show Host Desiree Schell, and Kirsten "Dr. Kiki" Sanford. Oh, and me.
Pursuant to this session, we've put up a few posts discussing the topic. They are:
Are you a real skeptic? I doubt it.
...Fine. So I could say that people have different opinions about the meaning of the word "skeptic," or more dogmatically, that some people don't understand the meaning of the term. And I will…
gregladen | January 11, 2010I don't know what I want for christmas
... Or what I want to be when I grow up, or what to major in in college.
But I can write a poem with Google Search Box:
I am going crazy
I am going to die.
I am going in
I am going to be a big sister.
I am going in Spanish
I am going to die alone.
Hat Tip Science Punk
gregladen | January 11, 2010First, following Ethan's Fitness Challenge (to which I responded here) there is another new entry by Dunford here.
Discovering Biology in a Digital World gears up for Science Online 2010: Citizen Science: all fun and no data? ScienceOnline 2010
Isis is branching out from the realm of incivility to the world of diversity, also at Science Online 10: Dr. Isis Continues to Ponder Diversity for #scio10. She's asking for your ideas as to how to respond to certain question about diversity.
EM Johnson has the third (and I think final) installment of his Social Darwinism posts.
gregladen | January 11, 2010If you follow the race-IQ discussion, you'll note that the entire edifice is calibrated to questions of work and class. As long as classism stands, the arguments of inherent ability will be plausible to far too many people, and the problem of blacks in poverty will be used to justify itself. Just as racism has always been used to justify poverty.
Read: At the Corner of Race and Class at Quiche Moraine by Stephanie Zvan.
gregladen | January 11, 2010Science Online 2010 is coming up in a few days. There is a post at A Blog Around the Clock that is a veritable clearing house for all of the blogospheric information on this conference, including ways for you to participate in the conference even if you do not attend in physical form. I'm sure I'll be blogging from the conference. For now, I just want to talk about conferences in general, as part of my mental preparation for the impending event.
There was a time, for several years, that I went to three or more full blown conferences a year, plus a couple more smaller less formal…
mspringer | January 11, 2010Rhett over at Dot Physics is not quite happy about the way magnets are being taught to his young niece:
The other question came from my niece - who is an extremely bright girl (not sure exactly what grade - maybe 5th). She was at home and didn't have her science textbook, so she asked me the following:
"What happens to the electrons in a metal when it becomes a magnet"
I always worry about magnet questions because magnets are not that simple to understand at a fundamental level. Sure, there are some things you can do with magnets - especially if you want to do some experiments. However,…