Uncategorized
gregladen | October 24, 2009Fifty People, One Question: London from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.
gregladen | October 23, 2009Today is Genie Scott's birthday. Genie is loved by all in the community of biological scientists because of her central role, as director of the National Center for Science Education, in fighting the good fight against irrational efforts to teach creationism in our public schools and elsewhere. Genie is the author of several books, articles, and book chapters, including Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction and Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.
pronald | October 23, 2009Hello all,
Biofortified is in the running to win the Ashoka Changemakers contest, GMO Risk or Rescue. But Karl Haro von Mogel needs your help, dear readers. The contest entries close on October 21, and the voting will continue to the 28th. The grand prize is a $1500 grant and a conversation with Michael Pollan. I look forward to hearing Karl and Michael discuss GE and the future of food.
If you read Biofortified and have enjoyed some of the stuff written there and want to see bigger and better things, please take a couple minutes to register for changemakers and enter your vote.
This is how…
gregladen | October 23, 2009This remedy makes you silly and giggly. It makes you get "high" and you tell silly stories. It also makes you really thirsty and causes some food yearnings. It also causes erotic talk and behavior.
Here's how you make it:
1) Get a really really strong telescope.
2) Point the telescope at Saturn, the planet.
3) Aim the rays coming from Saturn at some powdered milk.
4) Scrape the milk powder on the person you wish to treat.
More info here.
Hat Tip: Claudia Sawyer.
gregladen | October 23, 2009Bison having fun:
Bison on a farm:
It is said that only moose kill more tourists.
gregladen | October 23, 2009Keith Schon of Cataphora discusses how computers can track behavior, and find out all your dirty little secrets.
What are the limits on what your company is allowed to find out about you, and how are they doing it? How do we figure out, after the fact, whether "Yeah, go do that" means "Yes, grab me some lunch" or "Yes, perpetrate that multi-million dollar fraud scheme." And what do your online behavior patterns say about you?
details
gregladen | October 23, 2009The much anticipated Part Three of Jim Hall's exploration of OpenSource ... This is getting really interesting. This collection of posts will be the go-to source for anyone wanting to start an OpenSource project.
Here, on Collective Imagination.
gregladen | October 23, 2009It's mole day. The mole day site is down (try it later), but you can find out about it on Wikipedia.
Mole Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated among chemists in North America on October 23, between 6:02 AM and 6:02 PM[1], making the date 6:02 10/23 in the American style of writing dates. The time and date are derived from the Avogadro constant, which is approximately 6.02Ã1023, defining the number of particles (atoms or molecules) in a mole, one of the seven base SI units.
Mole Day originated in an article in The Science Teacher in the early 1980s.[2] Inspired by this article, Maurice…
gregladen | October 23, 2009It is an old story that a vegetarian diet is linked to a more efficient use of resources than a meat-rich diet. One of the reasons cited for this is that meat is taken from a higher level on the food chain, and thus about one tenth of the energy that enters the system is used per culinary unit (calorie, meal, whatever) than for vegetables. However, this argument, while partly true, overlooks a lot of other factors. For instance, the meat is a more efficiently used package for some purposes than the veggies. Think about it this way: A certain percentage of the food you eat is used to…
mspringer | October 23, 2009The deserts of New Mexico can get blazingly hot and bone-chillingly cold, extremes of temperature familiar to the outdoorsman in that kind of terrain. A few hundred feet below the ground in Carlsbad Caverns, the temperature is essentially stable in the mid-50s no matter how scorching or frigid the air a few feet above happens to be.
Fig 1: Experimental physicists also tend to live in caves.
You can think of the earth's surface in New Mexico as subject to two superimposed sinusoidal periodic heat pulses. One has a period of 24 hours and corresponds to the heat rising and falling over the…
grrlscientist | October 23, 2009
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 just published recently. This edition is entitled Scientia Pro Publica -- 14th edition. The author of Genetic Interference is speaking (right now!) at the American Society of Human Genetics Annual Meeting and is planning to "live blog" that conference as well, despite the fact it's in Hawai'i, so be sure to poke around on his blog to find those essays.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is a…
gregladen | October 22, 2009... as in folds Fox over her knee and spanks it.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | October 22, 2009I never liked Tucker Carlson.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
gregladen | October 22, 2009The Minnesota Flu Hotline that I had mentioned earlier is a failure. The state is calling it a "hiccup." Basically, no one can get through because a lot of people are calling in. The local news is reporting that they have yet to get through themselves or to see anyone get through.
Reports are that the state or its contractor were not expecting the volume of calls they are getting. I wonder why it did not occur to anyone that they would get a lot of calls DURING A PANDEMIC!!!!
Anyway, not to throw gasoline on the fire or anything, but if you ARE sick and you REALLY do have the flu, and you…
gregladen | October 22, 2009Map of newly extended certainty of Eurasian Neanderthal range. From Nature
It has for some time been difficult to assess the eastern limit of classic "Neanderthals." Some have claimed that Neanderthals were limited to western Asia, others that they extended across much of Asia. The fossil remains themselves have been difficult to interpret. One reason for this is that Neanderthals are not different enough from other contemporary hominids to assert a similarity or difference for a particular fossil, unless you have enough of it, and the fossil record in Central Asia and East Asia for the…
gregladen | October 22, 2009Surprise! That's the name of a town in Arizona, and that's where the victims in this particular story live. A young Iraqi-American woman was living a very westernized lifestyle, and that lifestyle would not play in Peoria. And by Peoria, I mean Peoria Arizona, where the young woman's crazy "traditional" father lived.
PEORIA, Ariz. - Police in a Phoenix suburb are looking for a man suspected of running down his daughter because she was becoming too "Westernized" and was not living according to their traditional Iraqi values.
Police say 48-year-old Faleh Hassan Almaleki of Glendale…
gregladen | October 22, 2009Peter Tu masterfully crosses face recognition technology, the Naturalistic Fallacy, and engineering in Faces, brains and prairies, oh my.
cortex | October 22, 2009In the latest Mind Matters, the psychologists Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn review some interesting new work by Nate Kornell and colleagues, which looked at the advantages of learning through error. Conventional pedagogy assumes that the best way to teach children is to have them repeatedly practice once they know the right answer, so that the correct response gets embedded into the brain. (According to this approach, it's important to avoid mistakes while learning so that our mistakes get accidentally reinforced.) But this error-free process turns out to be inefficient: Kids learn…