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gregladen | April 25, 2009.... The Web Carnival, not the General Feeling We All Have, is up at Quiche Moraine Dot Com.
This is a good one. It has videos and everything.
gregladen | April 25, 2009
Shane Murphy, second-in-command aboard the ship seized by Somali pirates this month, is happy to be home. But he's not happy to be sharing turf with land-lubber Rush Limbaugh, who politicized the pirate affair by referring to the pirates as "black teenagers."
"It feels great to be home," said Murphy in an interview with WCBV in Boston. "It feels like everyone around here has my back, with the exception of Rush Limbaugh, who is trying to make this into a race issue...that's disgusting."
source
pharyngula | April 25, 2009When I heard that Sean Hannity had jauntily offered to allow himself to be waterboarded, I confess to a moment's small, viciously gleeful anticipation. However, archy makes a good case for not doing it. After all, if it really is torture, and torture is wrong, and we argue that we shouldn't even be doing it to putative terrorists…we also shouldn't be doing it to the small, weak-minded, and stupid.
drorzel | April 25, 2009Chad Orzel now knows more than he would like to about the loathsome political views of some old acquaintances.
Chad Orzel is pretty sure the people in question don't read the blog, or at least won't know he's talking about them.
Chad Orzel is grateful for the feature that allows him to stop receiving those updates.
Chad Orzel really wishes he had better killfile options, though.
Chad Orzel longs for a Fire Upon the Deep style sentient AI killfile.
Chad Orzel also wants better tools for distinguishing spam comments from slightly off-kilter real comments.
Chad Orzel has nothing substantive to…
gregladen | April 25, 2009
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
mspringer | April 25, 2009[This post is tremendously nerdy Star Wars fan ranting. There is no physics. You have been warned!]
Let me get this straight: I tremendously enjoyed Star Wars: Episodes 1-3. I enjoyed them in all their badly-acted, incoherently characterized, effects-dependent glory. Every single one of them I walked into and out of the theater with a huge grin on my face. Yes, even Episode 1. They weren't works of art by any stretch, but they had enough of the classic Star Wars magic to turn me back into that wide-eyed little kid watching in wonder as Luke blew up the Death Star.
So ignore all the…
cortex | April 25, 2009Just when you thought people couldn't get any sillier or more confused, psychologists uncover yet another innate foible. This one is called "choice blindness," and it refers to the ways in which people are utterly blind to their own choices and preferences. We think we want X, but then we're given Y, and so we invent all sorts of eloquent reasons why Y is actually a much better alternative and how we wanted Y all along. (What sort of fool would choose X?)
Lars Hall and Peter Johansson explain:
For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them…
gregladen | April 24, 2009I was trying to explain to a friend who does not read my blog what I'd written about a set of related topics, and realized that what I've done may be a bit confusing. So, I've assembled the titles and links to these posts into a simple chronological list. If you've only read one or two of these, you might want to read them all. Or, just go back to sweeping out your garage, or whatever you were doing this fine day.
This is also relevant in relation to the Pro-Test thing that has been going on.
From Graduate School to Prison: What is the rational argument for ELF or ALF?
Dinner at Azia…
gregladen | April 24, 2009I had mentioned earlier the discovery of Morris the Jewish hardware store owner and Mr. Bryne the Jewish department store owner. There are two ways in which Jewish people seemed to play a disproportionate role in the retail world when I was growing up. In fact, there was an overarching ethnicity to much of the business community; Diners tended to have been owned by Greeks, sit down restaurants tended to be Italian; and clothing and textile stores Jewish.
In those days, much of the clothing worn by my mother and sisters was made by my mother on her sewing machine using patterns she'd buy at…
sb admin | April 24, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
As an academic epidemiologist I routinely do NIH funded research involving human subjects. That means my university must adhere to very strict regulations and guidelines for the protection of research subjects. Approval and monitoring of the ethical conduct of research funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), of which NIH is a part, was made a legal requirement in the 1970s following widespread abuses, of which the Tuskeegee Syphilis Study and the experiments by Nazi doctors were the most notorious. But less flagrant ethical…
gregladen | April 24, 2009I had the strangest afternoon yesterday. I went and picked up Julia at school and brought her back to the U. My plan was to attend the retirement party of an honored colleague, Phil. The first strange thing was hanging out for fifteen minutes or so with my 13 year old Daughter at the University cafeteria ...
... Of course, I 've hung out with her on campus before, but not recently, and not so much post/mid prepubescently. This was strange because it was actually easy to imagine her there as a frosh in some far away college in a few years from now.... (shudder).
So then I went up to the…
grrlscientist | April 24, 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) blog carnival is seeking your recently published blog entries (within the previous 60 days) about science, nature and medicine for inclusion in its upcoming edition on Monday, 4 May 2009. To send submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or use the cute little widget on the right. Be sure to include the URL or "permalink", the essay title and, to make life easier for the host, a 2…
mspringer | April 24, 2009"Everybody listen up!" shouts the high school PE coach, "I'm splitting you up into N teams of equal size. I'm going to make the selection of players randomly, so with any luck the teams will be of equal skill. The players with high skills all the way down the continuum to the players with low skills are going to be partitioned among the ensemble of teams and I hope it will make all the games competitive. If it doesn't and some teams dominate while other teams collapse, I'm going to swap out players until we reach an even equilibrium. Them I'll keep scrambling things randomly just to keep…
tqa | April 23, 2009
Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.
Terry Pratchett
Equal Rites
grrlscientist | April 23, 2009Here's the latest to appear in the blog carnival circuit;
Carnival of the Vanities, the "Back to Normality" issue. Hrm .. what is "normality"?
Carnival of the Cities, which is where we can tell others about our cities, regardless of where we live.
gregladen | April 23, 2009Please read these over and get back to us in the comments section.
The Startling Effects of Going Vegetarian for Just One Day
13 Breathtaking Effects of Cutting Back on Meat
awild | April 23, 2009On the homepage of the Proceedings of the Royal Society? Really?
I expect this kind of screwup in, say, USA Today, but a major scientific society really ought to have someone on staff who can correctly identify a honeybee.
mspringer | April 23, 2009Today we're going to have to do some groundwork to set up for a step we're going to need a post or two from now. It has to do with density in a slightly more abstract context than usual.
Imagine you want to know how many people are living in a particular region. You can multiply the population density by the land area and find out. But things get complicated if the density isn't uniform. You'd have to separately multiply the density of each small uniform sub-region by the area of each sub-region and add them all together. Mathematically we'd call this integrating the density over the…