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gregladen | March 17, 2009On March 29th the Minnesota Atheists will have a Flying Spaghetti Monster Dinner!!!!!
Come bring your pirate hat, or arrive as ye be! Minnesota Atheists will be honoring that great noodly deity, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, by dining on noodles prepared in His image. There will be salad, bread, noodles and sauces galore, including vegetarian and vegan options. We will also have dessert and drinks. If you are interested in helping out by bringing a sauce to share, or some other booty, we'll take yer treasures if you reply to this here email.
We'll be crewing up in the Party Room at the…
sb admin | March 17, 2009Alison Bass, an award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize nominee, will be here at George Washington University tomorrow to speak about why the system of drug research and development in the United States is seriously flawed and what reforms are needed.
Wednesday, March 18, 4:30pm
GWU-SPHHS Health Policy Department
2021 K St. NW, Ste. 800, Washington, DC
Sponsored by the EOH and Health Policy Departments
Bass is the author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial; copies will be available for purchase and signing at the event. The book tells…
grrlscientist | March 17, 2009
Image: (Royalty-Free) Corbis.
ScienceBlogs' newest member, ScienceBlogs Brasil, was just launched with 23 Brasilian science blogs, many award-winning. These science blogs are published in either Portuguese, the official language of Brasil, or English, and frequently, in both languages. So if you speak Portuguese or if you are Brazilian, please do add this site to your list of bookmarks. I am sure you will discover some science blogs there that you will love as much as those you've already been following for years.
Here's five blog entries that have been translated from Portuguese to…
cortex | March 17, 2009War is rapidly becoming a video game. Here, from the NY Times, is a fascinating behind the scenes look at the increasing reliance on drones by the US military:
The Guard members, along with Air Force crews at a base in the Nevada desert, are 7,000 to 8,000 miles away from the planes they are flying. Most of the crews sit at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers. Many fly missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan on the same day.
On a recent day, at 1:15 p.m. in Tucson -- 1:15 the next morning in Afghanistan -- a pilot and sensor operator were staring at gray-…
gregladen | March 17, 2009Thick ice is not good ice. Even thick ice can become ice that will break up on you if it experiences warm conditions for a while. Therefore, right now in much of Minnesota, NONE OF THE ICE IS SAFE. None of it.
Here is the rule: If you get two days above freezing, it takes two days below freezing (all day) to "reset" the ice. We are, at this point, beyond any possibility of that happening. The part of the year where you drive your pickup around on the ice ... is over. We don't need your stinking environmental hazard when you go through.
The previous message was applicable only to…
mspringer | March 17, 2009Sometimes I watch Survivorman on the Discovery Channel. It's a good show - much better than that other one - by virtue of the fact that the survival is real and he doesn't have a camera crew around to help him out. Sure he has a way to contact rescue should something go wrong, but it doesn't change the fact that he really is very good at wilderness survival.
One of the things he points out is that pretty much wherever on the planet you find yourself, you're going to find trash. This is especially true in island survival. Years of trash washing up can be useful when surviving, though he…
gregladen | March 17, 2009The big risk in practicing science is that you may not like the answer it provides. The previous administration, when faced with results it didn't like, decided to censor the results. I don't see how this makes any sense. How can a government make decisions and policy when the facts are hidden or discredited based on predetermined biases?
Read the rest here
gregladen | March 16, 2009My wife just got a link sent to her by a fellow teacher that points to a site that shows visually what a trillion dollars and two cents would look like if you put it all in one place. Check it out:
What does one TRILLION dollars look like?
But be careful, DO NOT CLICK ON THE SITE. Just use your scroll bars to move around on it, because it will throw one of the more obnoxious ads evah in your face just when you least expect it.
Oh, I was only kidding about the two cents part.
gregladen | March 16, 2009At age 62, political activist and actor (Reversal of Fortune, West Wing). He was a co-founder of the Creative Coalition.
He was a good Democrat who Went Rogue after 911.
goodmath | March 16, 2009 I'd like to apologize for the slowness of the blog. Fortunately,
there's a very good reason: I've got a book contract! "Good Math" will
be published by "The Pragmatic Programmers" press. The exact
publication date isn't set yet, but my schedule plans for a complete
draft of the book by summer. (And I used the scheduling rules proposed by one
of my favorite managers. He said that when a programmer gives you an estimate
of how long something should take, multiply it by two and increase the unit. So
if they say it'll take a day, assume two weeks. If they say a week, assume
two months. In my…
gregladen | March 16, 2009... cool! Oh, but wait, it's all Flash Multimedia stuff and you have to install extra plugins and that doens't really work that well (their servers may be jammed).
OK, NASA is going to eventually have Space Satellites in 3D. Click here to check it out, and let me know if it starts working properly.
grrlscientist | March 16, 2009Here's the latest carnivalia for you to enjoy;
Did you know that there are a LOT of people out there who really love books? Well, if you didn't, a look through the latest Book Review blog carnival should be proof enough of the public's passion for all types of literature.
cortex | March 16, 2009David Dobbs has a really excellent and thought-provoking article on the diagnosis (and perhaps over-diagnosis) of post-traumatic stress disorder over at Sciam. The essential point is that it's extremely hard to define a normal psychological response to traumatic events. Are nightmares normal? Is it normal to experience bouts of anxiety or depression? Dobbs profiles several big name psychiatrists who think that PTSD has become too vague for its own good, and is creating a generation of patients who are trapped in a self-fulfilling vision, in which the diagnosis actually makes it harder for…
mspringer | March 16, 2009Driving in my car for five hours today, I had plenty of time to think about velocity. There's not much you can do about it, speeding doesn't take much time off the trip but it does add the risk of an expensive ticket. We single classical particles don't have a lot of options for getting from place to place very quickly.
The situation is a little more interesting with flows of current. If you want to fill a large bucket with water from a garden hose at one cubic foot per second, the hose is going to have to be turned on very high. Water will be flying out of the end of the hose at some…
gregladen | March 16, 2009The survey site burst open releasing all the data into .... wherever. So please go do it again. Scicurious has a more robust survey site that won't break. It might not feel as natural but it won't break.
HERE
Actually, if you took the survey and were able to finish, then you can relax, have a smoke, take a nap, whatever, and you don't need to do it gain. If, however, you were unable to finish last time, you can now go and try again.
sb admin | March 16, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
There is an attitude toward the prospects of an influenza pandemic and what, or what not, to do about it that I have little patience with. We saw examples a couple of years ago with the writings of Wendy Orent and Marc Siegel and now it is surfacing again from Philip Alcabes, in an op ed in the Washington Post over the weekend. All three are smart and well informed -- but that doesn't prevent them from being wrong headed. The Alcabes piece, ironically entitled "5 Myths About Pandemic Panic" is either built on myths or strawmen, take your pick. Here…