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tlambert | July 20, 2009This thread is for people who wish to engage Ray in discussion.
Ray, please do not post comments to any other thread.
Everyone else, please do not respond to Ray in any other thread.
mspringer | July 20, 2009Forty years ago two human beings traveled a quarter million miles in a tiny metal capsule and stepped out onto the surface of the Moon. It was the most dramatic footfall in the history of our species, I am in absolute awe of all the Apollo program accomplished. Though it's a long shot, I'm hopeful that space tourism will become practical and inexpensive enough that someday I can be maybe the millionth or so person to stand on our sister world and look back at home.
Until then, I can just admire the pictures just taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of some of the old Apollo sites…
sb admin | July 20, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
We've been talking about the possibility of a flu pandemic here for four and a half years. The cliché during much of that time was that the right way to think of a flu pandemic was not "if," but "when." As long as no pandemic materialized, however, there was great scope for what it would look like and hence what to plan for. The hoary adage, "Hope for the best, plan for the worst" made sense but left a great deal of scope for different approaches to planning. What, after all, was the worst we could expect? We had two models, one historical, one…
gregladen | July 20, 2009Did Past Climate Changes Promote Speciation in the Amazon?
Any time you've got a whopping big river like the Amazon (or a mountain chain like the Andes, or an ocean, or whatever), you've gotta figure that it will be a biogeographical barrier. Depending on the kind of organisms, big rivers, high mountains, oceans, forests, deserts, and so on can provide a habitat or a barrier, and when there is a barrier, populations may end up splitting across that barrier and diverging to become novel species.
The role of the big tropical rivers such as the Amazon and the Congo, and the role of rain…
grrlscientist | July 19, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 1851 - 1139 - 1091 - 738 - 562 out of 339 candidates registered. I have excellent news: I am once again in second place after one of my Reddit peeps whipped up support for me among my fellow Redditers! THANK YOU REDDIT!
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-word essay; hopefully, you will agree…
gregladen | July 19, 2009As promised, the footnotes for A True Ghost Story.
1Unless this statement itself is not true, in which case, how can you know what is true and what is not true? And besides, it can't really all be true because some of it is about ghosts.
2Who wants to be alone sitting in the dark?
3I use the term "non-White" along side the terms "Black" and "White" to signal that there is complexity here. There are three sources of complexity. One is linguistic, one is ethnic, and one is historical. First, the "ethnic" or "racial" issue: to the extent that these concepts are valid at all, which is very…
gregladen | July 19, 2009... continued
Finally, without any further interruption ...
One morning I was up a bit earlier than usual, and I was in the bathroom shaving. It was an hour or so before sunup. The lighting in the bathroom was poor, but there was a security spotlight outside the window, as I recall, so I had opened the frosted glass pane to let in a little more light, as well as the clean, cold but dry night air, which would keep the fogged over bathroom mirror clear.
As I was just starting to scrape the razor against my face in the bathroom, I heard the ghostly footsteps walking one way down the hall…
gregladen | July 19, 2009 A gingerbread computer can be complicated.
When you, Joe or Mary user, buy a computer at Best Buy or Computer Village or order a computer from Dell or Gateway, you get a computer with a system already installed. Do you think they had any trouble installing that system on that computer? Do you think that if Dell sells Mary a computer with Windows installed and they sell Joe a computer with Linux installed, that Dell had a differentially hard time installing one of those systems compared to the other?
Think about it.
~ Repost from one year ago this month ~
Linux and Windows each have…
grrlscientist | July 18, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 1831 - 1057 - 931 - 728 - 550 out of 333 candidates registered. I am in THIRD PLACE to a guy who STOLE one of the points I made in my essay and used it as his own -- hardly a stellar example of good sportsmanship or good writing ability.
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-word essay; hopefully,…
gregladen | July 18, 2009... continued ...
Since we are talking about geology, I do not want to give up the opportunity to bring up one of the coolest stories of geology ever, given the present day discussion of science and religion. You will be asking for a source for this story. Look it up in Wikipedia, where all knowledge resides, and you will not find it there.
There are things, it turns out, that The Great Knowing Web Site does not know. My source is a combination of primary and secondary documents, written histories, and a documentary that is not generally available.
Barney Barneto nee Barnet Isaacs was a…
gregladen | July 18, 2009Following almost exactly one month on earlier reports that he was gravely ill, which were followed, in turn, by denials of those reports, Walter Cronkite has died at the age of 92. And that's the way it was.
My earlier post, and one story of Cronkite's brush with Cronkite's brush with racism and a strong Latina woman, is here.
gregladen | July 18, 2009 An ugly fact killing a beautiful hypothesis I'm not mentioning any names, and don't ask me any details. In fact, don't repeat this story.
Some years ago, when I was a mere graduate student, a fellow student working in an unnamed country in Africa discovered a very very old stone artifact. To this day, this bit of chipped stone debris, representing the activities of an ancient very pre-human hominid, is one of the oldest well dated, in situ objects of its kind known.
The stone had some yeck on it, and for giggles, this stone got passed on to a physicist who had invented a new way of…
grrlscientist | July 17, 2009The current Antarctic Trip Vote count is as follows; 1821 - 1032 - 821 - 713 - 543 out of 328 candidates registered. I am in THIRD PLACE! Worse, second place STOLE one of the points I made in my essay and used it as his own -- hardly a steller example of good sportsmanship or good writing ability.
If you've already voted, then please encourage your family, friends, colleagues and neighbors to vote for the person whom you think would be best for this unique job: traveling to Antarctica for the month of February 2010 and writing about it for the public on a blog. Here is my 300-word essay;…
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2009Here are some links to start your weekend goofing-off. Science:
Why Jesus Makes Me a Bad Scientist...
Microcosm Week: How E. coli Sees The Future
Ace o'Science
Unscientific America: Is the (new) media to blame?
Other:
Exclusive Interview: Rolling Stone Journalist Matt Taibbi
Calpers: Rating Agencies to Blame for Huge Losses
Isaac Chotiner Gets Jonah Goldberg Wrong
The American Choice: Break up and regulate companies or suffer another crisis
People do what they do because they want to do it
gregladen | July 17, 2009Some time ago I announced that I was beginning on a new project. It is now time to tell you about it, and to ask for your help.
It will not be a huge surprise for you to learn that I intend to convert the blog posts known as "The Congo Memoirs" into a book. I have contracted with an agent, and I am currently writing a proposal for the book.
Over the last couple of months, I've also been working on the problem of the book's overall structure, and considering what else it will contain besides the 28 existing Congo Memoirs. Oh, and I should mention right away: This is not a memoir. The very…
kthompson | July 17, 2009Herman Melville has nothing on the researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. For one thing, you can read their article in the time it takes to leisurely eat a banana... I could never get past the first sentence of Moby Dick.
It all started when Delphine "Ishmel" Mathias and Aaron "Ahab" Thode from Scripps were called on by a snarling mob of Alaskan cod-fishermen who demanded something be done about their missing cod. The belligerent fishermen reported seeing groups of sperm whales loitering around some of their equipment and cod missing from their lines. Since sperm whales usually…
mspringer | July 17, 2009At the time I write this sentence it's 10:13 pm. The sun has been under the horizon for almost two hours. It's 93 degrees Fahrenheit outside here in College Station. I believe it peaked out right at 100 during the day, and it feels hotter in the sun. Even the animals are clearly not pleased.
Some of them are the cutest thermometers I've ever seen:
I wish I had taken a picture so I could show you exactly how the thermometer works. Fortunately there's nothing that's not on the internet, and other people have documented this particular phenomenon on film. The thermometer is a binary state…
gregladen | July 17, 2009 Sabertooth Cat, Megantereon nihowanensisl There are two kinds of "true cats." Cat experts call one type feline or "modern" partly because they are the ones that did not go extinct. If you have a pet cat, it's a modern/feine cat. This also includes the lions, tigers, leopards, etc. The other kind are called "sabercats" because this group includes the saber tooth. It is generally believed but not at all certain that these two groups of cats are different phylogenetic lineages (but that is an oversimplification).
It has been suggested for some time that the bite force mechanics for…
sb admin | July 17, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
Data from the Emerging Infections Program (EIP), one of the component parts of the CDC national influenza surveillance system, is showing that for some segments of its population the US did indeed experience a second flu season. The segment of particular concern are children between the ages of 5 to 17 years old, and to some extent adults between the ages of 18 and 49. The EIP counts only laboratory-confirmed hospitalizations in 60 counties located in 12 metropolitan areas in 10 states (if you are wondering, the 12 metro areas are San Francisco CA…