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gregladen | April 18, 2009As expected, New York Gov. David Paterson (D) unveiled legislation Thursday morning to allow same-sex couples to marry in the Empire State.
Standing beside New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R), openly gay Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D) and state leaders and union leaders, Paterson said "Marriage equality is about basic civil rights and freedom. That is why we stand together today to embrace civil rights for every New Yorker."
Paterson's bill would amend the domestic relations law allowing civil marriages between same-sex couples, and he called on the Legislature to approve the bill.…
mspringer | April 18, 2009An emailer sends in a link to a comment on The White Coat Underground. It's in the context of naturopathy, the idea that medical problems ought to be treated with natural means. Some of it's a good idea - eating right, exercising, that sort of thing. Those sort of things aren't going to cure much, but they're good things to do. Other aspects of naturopathy pretty much go off the deep end, as ably discussed by any number of medical bloggers on ScienceBlogs and elsewhere. The point argued by this particular commenter went as follows:
Speaking of pseudoscience, what do you all think of…
grrlscientist | April 18, 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 about science, nature and medicine for inclusion in its upcoming edition on Monday, 20 April 2009. To send submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or send it directly to ScientiaBlogCarnival at gmail. Be sure to include the URL or "permalink", the essay title and a brief summary.
If you are interested in hosting an…
gregladen | April 18, 2009As many as 107 Tennessee public school districts could be illegally preventing students from accessing online information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues, according to a letter to sent to school officials by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The letter demands that Knox County Schools, Metro Nashville Public Schools, and the Tennessee Schools Cooperative unblock the Internet filtering category designated "LGBT" so that students can access political and educational information about LGBT issues on school computers.
read about it here
cortex | April 18, 2009Just a quick note to say that I'll be at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute this coming Monday, at 6 PM, in conversation with Robert Lee Hotz. We'll be talking about science journalism, blogging, aha moments, the prefrontal cortex, etc. It's free and open to the public.
Note: Thanks to everyone who pointed out my mistake! The conversation begins at 6 PM, not 7 PM.
mspringer | April 17, 2009It was a dark and stormy night. Well, it was day. And it wasn't all that dark either, but it was very stormy. Yes, in College Station today it was pretty miserably wet and so was everyone on campus. Even if you had an umbrella.
Not actually very glorious.
Well, I thought, I wonder if you could do something with all this rain? Maybe generate electricity?
Unlikely, because it's a pretty obvious idea and were it practical surely someone would have tried it. But it can't hurt to run the numbers for ourselves.
The physics building at Texas A&M is five stories high, and at a very rough…
gregladen | April 17, 2009An agreement stating that girls under 18 will not undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) in Sierra Leone was recently signed by village chiefs and other community leaders, including women who perform FGM. The agreement affects the Kambia district, which is in the northernwestern part of the country.
At puberty, the majority of girls in Sierra Leone are initiated into the Bondo Society, a secret society of women that uses circumcision to initiate new members abducted the women. Gloria Bella, of Sierra Leone's Human Rights Commission, told IRIN, "community leaders feel that [initiation] is…
jrosenhouse | April 17, 2009In the spirit of ending the week with lighter fare, don't miss this article, from Slate, extolling the considerable talents of action star Jason Statham. He is one of those actors who, even when he is in bad movies (as he often is) , always comes off looking good.
gregladen | April 17, 2009... there is no way to turn way from it, but we are often poorly prepared to deal with it, especially when it involves teenagers. Face it: adults like it when teenagers finally learn to hide some of their emotions. Maturity = knowing how to leave other people out of your bad shit. We reward this behavior and we model it by building and maintaining a Barbified and Kenified culture. But every now and then a kid goes too far for their own good and, not to shock you or anything, but the morgue is not the appropriate place to have "that conversation" about life.
I've been lucky. I was never…
gregladen | April 17, 2009One of the nice things about Linux -- but by no means the most important -- is the enhanced security that comes along with running it. That doesn't mean Linux never runs into security issues, though, and this week, the vulnerability in question centers around a nifty little service called udev.
According to advisories from several distributions, including Fedora, Ubuntu, and SUSE, a bug has been discovered that allows a local or remote user to exploit the udev service in order to gain root access to the system....
You can read the rest here, but mainly, just update your system frequently…
grrlscientist | April 17, 2009Here's the latest blog carnivals to be published for you to read and enjoy;
Carnival of the Vanities, 16 April 2009 edition. This blog carnival celebrates the vest writing in the blogosphere, regardless of topic.
Just Write blog carnival, 17 April edition. This is filled with lots of good writing, including ... book reviews!
I and the Bird #98. This blog carnival is all about wild birds and bird watching.
grrlscientist | April 17, 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 about science, nature and medicine for inclusion in its upcoming edition on Monday, 20 April 2009. To send submissions to Scientia Pro Publica, either use this automated submission form or send it directly to ScientiaBlogCarnival at gmail. Be sure to include the URL or "permalink", the essay title and a brief summary.
If you are interested in hosting an…
gregladen | April 17, 2009Same-sex domestic partners would have all the rights and benefits that Washington state offers married couples under a bill passed Wednesday by the state Legislature.
The Democratic-controlled House approved the Senate-passed measure on a mostly party-line 62-35 vote after nearly two hours of debate. It next goes to Gov. Chris Gregoire, who said she will sign it into law.
"Our state is one that thrives on diversity," Gregoire, a Democrat, said in a statement. "We have to respect and protect all of the families that make up our communities."
Washington = Sane
grrlscientist | April 17, 2009tags: HR669, pets, exotic animals, invasive species, politics
[larger view]
Feel free to download, email, print and distribute or post this fact sheet among your friends, colleagues, and the pet stores that you patronize.
The text of this poster states:
HR 669 prohibits what YOU can do with your pet bird (or other exotic animals).
You may NOT take your pet bird (or other exotic animals) if you move to another state [Section 6(a)(2)] or country [Section 6(a)(1)]
You may NOT travel across state lines on vacation with your pet bird (or other exotic animals) [Section 6(a)(2)] NOTE:…
gregladen | April 17, 2009this:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
pharyngula | April 17, 2009Old timers here may recall the saga of Abunga Books, an online bookstore with the sole distinction of having a feature that allowed customers to ban books from the inventory that they didn't like…which meant, of course, that evolution and atheism and anything that touched on those two was promptly purged. You can imagine how people here responded to that empowering policy: they scurried right on over to help ban the Bible and C.S. Lewis. The hypocrisy of Abunga was then exposed: they honored requests to ban Phillip Pullman, but banning the Bible was not allowed. So much for the illusion of…
sb admin | April 17, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
This year's flu season isn't over, but it's almost over, and it was fairly typical and much better than last year, which was nasty. It began at the end of September but didn't take off until early January, peaking in mid Februrary. New cases are still appearing but much less frequently and they are mainly influenza B, which tends to be milder than influenza A. Most of flu/A this year was also of the milder H1N1 sort, which probably contributed to the better outcomes. Here's where we are (source for all charts here):
Comparing this year with…