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gregladen | September 13, 2014My friend Iain Davidson tagged me with the facebook novel meme. Here are the rules: Oh, hell, never mind the rules. I wanted to provide links to the books so I decided to do this as a blog post which I'll paste on my facebook page (and of course tag some unlucky facebook friend).
Here it is. I broke some rules. So what?
Moment in the Sun: Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment by Dr. Robert Reinow was my Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. As a child I watched Reinow’s Sunrise Semester course on TV a couple of times. He would give a lecture on some manner or other by…
gregladen | September 13, 2014There are over 10,000 species of bird on the Earth today. There is one blog called "10,000 Birds" for which I write a monthly article, in case you did not know. But this post is about Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin, a book by Tim Birkhead, Jo Wimpenny and Bob Monegomerie.
Birds and various studies of birds are central to evolutionary theory and the development of all of the surrounding biology and science. Here's a short list of key roles birds have played in evolutionary biology:
Darwin's study of pigeon breeding was central to On the Origin of Species and later works.
The…
gregladen | September 12, 2014Did you ever read a textbook on economic history, or an in-depth article on the relative value of goods over the centuries expressed in current US dollars? Have you ever encountered a graphic that shows long term trends in rainfall patterns or other climate variables, using a couple of simple lines, designed to give a general idea of relative conditions during different eras? Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about.
This is a graphic made by a major investment firm culling information from dozens or perhaps hundreds of sources into a single graphic. This is the graphic as it was…
kkrisberg | September 12, 2014For eight years, Dora worked at a frozen pizza factory in Romeoville, Illinois, called Great Kitchens. For eight hours a day — sometimes seven days a week — she assembled pizza boxes or arranged cheese and other toppings on pizzas. The consequences of years of such repetitive work surfaced in October 2012, when her hands would go numb and a painful cyst formed on her left wrist. She told her supervisor about the problem, but he said he couldn’t do anything about it — Dora was a temporary worker hired through a staffing agency and so Great Kitchens wasn’t responsible for addressing her injury…
gregladen | September 11, 2014It is called Spinosaurus aegyptiacus but it sounds a bit more like Godzilla. Spinosaurus is a theropod dinosaur (that's the groups birds evolved within) found in what is now NOrth Africa, between about 112 and 97 million years ago. It was first discovered about one century ago, though those bones were destroyed during WW II. Spinosaurus aegyptiacus might be the only species of this genus, or there may be two. It is probably the largest carnivours dinosaur, up to 18 meters in length. Up top of the post is the picture from Wikipedia. Although the head looks a lot like a crock, you can see…
gregladen | September 11, 2014In the earlier days of the West African Ebola outbreak, it was not uncommon to hear people note that we should not panic about Ebola because, after all, far more people are killed from Malaria than Ebola. This is of course an irrelevant argument. That is like telling a person who has lost their family in a tragic airplane accident that it isn't so bad because, after all, far more people die in car crashes than aircraft crashes. For example, on August 5th, James Bell write in the Guardian, in a piece called Concerned about Ebola? You’re worrying about the wrong disease:
Since the Ebola…
kkrisberg | September 9, 2014Across the country, roughly 10 million construction workers spend each day in a dangerous and fickle industry. They hang drywall, lay carpet, shingle roofs. Yet in the eyes of their bosses, they aren't employees due the benefits the government requires.
That’s the intro to an extensive series of articles that McClatchy DC recently published called “Contract to Cheat,” which chronicles a year-long investigation into the consequences of misclassifying workers as independent contractors and how government regulators are doing nothing to stop it. The in-depth series offers investigations from…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2014I'm feeling a bit bereft now that the Sinquefield Cup is over. Fabiano Caruana won his first seven games, and then drew his last three, to win the tournament by a ridiculous three points (ahead of World Champion Magnus Carlsen). This is certainly one of the great tournament performances in chess history, worthy of mention alongside Anatoly Karpov's six straight wins in the 1994 Linares tournament, or Victor Korchnoi's eight straight in the 1968 Wijk aan Zee tournament. Not quite at the level of Bobby Fischer's twenty straight wins over grandmasters, though. Just saying. The incredible…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2014The second POTW has now been posted, along with one possible set of solutions for the first problem. This week's problem has a similar flavor to last week's, so if you liked that one you'll like this one.
gregladen | September 6, 2014Nine months after the Polar Vortex covered a good part of American with freezing cold, there appears to be a baby boom, according to one unverified news story:
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – It’s been nine months since our bitter cold winter ended.
Now, delivery rooms are bracing themselves for a Polar Vortex baby boom.
All 39 maternity rooms and the NICU are full this weekend at a Des Moines hospital.
Doctors believe the baby bonanza is a result of the polar vortex last December and January.
In case you forgot, it was one of the snowiest and coldest winters on record.
August and September are usually…
gregladen | September 5, 2014I'm sure you've heard. The most complete skeleton of a titanosaur, a newly named species, Dreadnoughtus schrani, is being reported from Argentina.
It is not a bird. I mention that because we've been talking about how birds are dinosaurs lately (see:"Honey, I shrunk the dinosaurs" and "Flying Dinosaurs: A new book on the dinosaur bird link.").
Dreadnoughtus schrani is a sauropod. Brontosaurus, if it existed, would be a sauropod. These are the dinosaurs with the little heads, long necks, and long tails. In cartoons they are sometimes called "long-necks." Dreadnoughtus schrani is, as…
gregladen | September 5, 2014This is not a peer reviewed meta-study, but a meta-study nonetheless. Reuters has engaged in a major journalistic effort to examine sea level rise and has released the first part (two parts, actually). It is pretty good; I only found one paragraph to object to, and I'll ignore that right now.
There are two reasons this report is important. First, it documents something about sea level rise that I've been trying to impress on people all along. The effects of sea level rise do not end at one's perceived position of a new shoreline. Here's what I mean.
Suppose you are standing on a barrier…
jrosenhouse | August 31, 2014If that last post did not satisfy your need for brain food, then let me mention that as of today the Problem of the Week returns. This semester's theme: Fun With Arithmetic! What's that? You don't like arithmetic? Well, let's see if you're still saying that at the end of the term.
In general I try to choose problems that are accessible even to people in lower level classes. I go for things with a brainteaser quality to them, as opposed to problems that require knowledge of calculus or something higher. Also, I'm perfectly aware that solutions to just about any brainteaser are readily…
jrosenhouse | August 31, 2014The Sinquefield Cup is turning out to be not just one of the strongest chess tournaments in history, but also one of the most exciting. In today's round five all three games ended decisively, but the commentators were lamenting that the games were not as thrilling as in previous rounds. The sensation of the tournament has been Fabiano Caruana of Italy...who currently has a perfect score. You read that right. He's five and oh, winning three games as black no less. And it's not like his opponents have just been blundering left and right. Meanwhile, the rest of the field is mostly losing…
gregladen | August 29, 2014UPDATE (January 2, 2016): The makers of Scrivener have decided to abandon their Linux project. Kudos for them for giving it a try. The Scrivener on Linux users were not many, and almost nobody donated to the project, and as far as I can tell, the project was not OpenSource and thus could not have attracted much of an interest among a community of mostly OpenSourceHeads.
So, I'm no longer recommending that you mess around with Scrivener on Linux, as it is no longer maintained. Back to emacs, everybody!
Scrivener is a program used by authors to write and manage complex documents, with…
jrosenhouse | August 27, 2014The start of the school year, coupled with the looming deadline for the book I'm coediting, has left little time for blogging. I do, however, feel compelled to point out that six of the world's top ten chess players have gathered in St. Louis for what is arguably the greatest chess tournament in the history of chess tournaments. Six different countries are represented and, interestingly, none of them are Russia. Hikaru Nakamura is representing the United States. The other five players are Magnus Carlsen of Norway, Levon Aronian of Armenia, Fabiano Caruana of Italy, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave…
aardvarchaeology | August 22, 2014Has it really been almost four years since I blogged about mushrooms? This afternoon me and my wife repeated our September 8, 2010 expedition to the hills between Lakes Lundsjön and Trehörningen and picked almost a kilo of mushrooms in a bit more than an hour. We got:
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Bay bolete, Brunsopp, Boletus badius
Orange birch bolete, Tegelsopp, Leccinum versepelle
Birch bolete, Björksopp, Leccinum scabrum
Entire russula, Mandelkremla, Russula integra
Two kinds of red or brown brittlegill, mild-tasting and thus non-poisonous. Scandyland has more than…
pharyngula | August 21, 2014How about another of those non-awkward Dawkins Twitter questions? Although this one actually is kind of awkward, in a non-offensive way. I don't quite know what it means.
Does evolution rely upon digital genetics? Could there be an analogue genetics? What features of life have to be true all over the universe?
I don't understand what 'digital genetics' is…it sounds very Mendelian, I think. There is a reasonable but overly simplistic perspective on genetics, a very old school way of thinking, that mutations are binary -- you've either got a trait or you don't. We also use a linear sequence of…
gregladen | August 21, 2014Do the math:
There are actually two answers to this question.
First, "maths" looks plural and is preferred by some because "mathematics" is plural. The problem with that is "mathematics" is no more plural than "physics" or any other compound noun. It is a rational sounding utterly incorrect argument. If we said "mathematics are cool" then there might be a case. But we say "mathematics is cool."
Second, some people say maths and some people say math, and that's how language works. That is a valid argument, but if you are walking around in the US saying "maths" instead of "math" be aware…
gregladen | August 19, 2014There is a fantastic paper just out in Science: “Sustained miniaturization and anatomoical innovation in the dinosaurian anceestors of birds” by Michael Lee, Andrea Cau, Darren Naishe and Gareth Dyke.
I want to talk about this research but if you really want to know more about it, don’t rely on me; one of the co-authors of this important paper is Darren Naish, who happens to be a stupendous blogger, and he has written the research up here. So go read that for sure, and revel in the excellent graphics. Meanwhile I have a few random thoughts....
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