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grrlscientist | March 9, 2009Here's the latest carnivalia for you to read and enjoy;
Academy of Science and Technology, issue #1. This was a homeschooling blog carnival that has undergone a change of name and focus, so now it is a forum for teaching and mentoring kids about science and technology.
Homeschooling Showcase, issue #19.
Total Mind and Body Fitness Blog Carnival #92. This is a new blog carnival for me, so be sure to check it out.
sa smith | March 9, 2009If we are made in Gods image, God is made of gag, pol, and env.
And God sent his only son to Earth, ERV9, to perform miracles in His name. Like bringing dead genes back to life.
LOL!
A fun paper in PLOS Genetics describes an absolutely bizarre scenareo-- A gene, IRGM, was 'lost' in the primate lineage like 50 million years ago. It turned into a pseudogene thanks to an Alu insertion, accumulation of a couple premature stop-codons, and a nice little frame-shift.
Well, about 24-20 million years ago, a retrovirus (ERV9) plopped its little butt upstream of IRGM, IRGM lost its stops and…
pharyngula | March 9, 2009Waaaaa. First I get a pile of porn in my mailbox (wait, that's not so bad…except that none of it matched my particular interests), and then I get sent a free DVD: Expelled. This is shaping up to be the suckiest birthday ever.
Alright, I confess, the DVD was a good present, so I could have a copy in my archive of creationist material. And it was obtained by an industry insider who didn't have to pay for it, so no money passed to the hands of Premise Media, which is even better. It's actually appreciated, so thanks Stranger Who Asked That His Identity Remain Secret. I don't know if I'll be able…
mspringer | March 9, 2009Imagine the scientists of the world got together and decided they didn't like the meter as a unit of distance. They were tired of traveling such long distances to conferences and decided that by redefining the new meters as two old meters, suddenly the plane flight was only 1000 kilometers instead of 2000 kilometers.
I don't think it's very plausible. Nonetheless, we do pretty much the same thing when we change back and forth between daylight savings time and standard time.
Now there are some good arguments for the change. It means kids don't have to stand in the dark waiting for their…
gregladen | March 8, 2009Consider this:
Apart from "Windows or Linux?" nothing will start an argument in a bar full of techies quicker than, "Which hardware gives you more bang for the buck, Mac or PC?"
It turns out that they are the same, but Mac's are more expensive.
Hey, don't yell at me, it says so here.
gregladen | March 8, 2009Do you see an ad floating over this blog post (or any other posts on this blog)?
If you do, and you like having this ad obscure what you are trying to see, let the marketing division of the company who's ad it is know.
Send your emails here.
Or maybe you don't like it. You could let them know that too.
gregladen | March 8, 2009The Bourne Shell, that is ...
... we speak to Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell, or sh. In the early 1970s Bourne was at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge, England working on a compiler for ALGOL68 as part of his PhD work in dynamical astronomy. This work paved the way for him to travel to IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in New York in 1973, in part to undertake research into compilers. Through this work, and a series of connections and circumstance, Bourne got to know people at Bell Labs who then offered him a job in the Unix group in 1975. It was during this time Bourne…
gregladen | March 8, 2009I have a bunch of designers at my job, and they all carry around an apple. No not the fruit, you know the vastly overpriced and over-hyped electronics brand. These guys think they are so cool with there notebooks running extremely expensive designer software. I think this is somewhat of a problem with Linux. While Linux is actually a lot cooler then apple, it's not perceived by enough people as being cool.
Linux the cool factor, Part I and Part I.
razib | March 7, 2009The Inductivist had a post up bemoaning the cultural liberalism and secularity of today's youth at the same time that I suggested that the culture wars will continue. My reasoning was that polarization still exists, and in fact is greater among the youth than the older cohorts. On the other hand readers observed that the trend is toward more liberalism.
One of the major changes over the past generation which has gone under the radar of the media is that rapid rise of disaffiliation. After the 20th century seemed to disprove a strong form of the secularization hypothesis, some began talking…
gregladen | March 7, 2009My first storage medium was paper tape. Narrow strips of tape with holes punched out of it to store programs and data, could be printed out of a tape-puncher attached to a paper-based TTY terminal, or read into the terminal. Then, I used punch cards. Eventually I upgraded to a casette player for small data sets, and a tiny magnetic rectangle for my TI 59.
And I can relive all of these experiences with a walk down memory lane. ...
Computer Data Storage Through the Ages -- From Punch Cards to Blu-Ray
By the way, when the 5.25 inch floppy disk was replaced with with the 3.5 inch plastic…
gregladen | March 7, 2009
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gregladen | March 7, 2009... giving talk at University of Minnesota.
taken from way far away with my very crappy cell phone camera.
grrlscientist | March 7, 2009Here's the latest carnivalia to keep you entertained;
Just Write blog carnival, 6 March 2009 edition, is now available for you to enjoy. This edition has several stories that I am interested to read, especially Results from the January 2009 Survey of Writer and Editors: 5 Ways to Boost Professional Credibility.
gregladen | March 7, 2009Dawkins at Oklahoma
And this update on the Okie Legislature's assholitude
This is funny. Julia's adding it to her homework assignment on Pluto
gregladen | March 7, 2009 The Humanism of the Star Trek Universe. Scott Lohman and Robert Price on Atheists Talk #0060, Sunday March 8, 2009
Gene Roddenberry convinced the executives at Paramount that a show about exploring space would appeal to a mass audience. They funded a weekly series for three beautiful years, and it turns out he was partially right. The show was not a ratings giant until it went into syndication and cartoons some five years after it had been canceled. From there it fostered a "Big Bang" of cultural infusion. Movies, fan fiction, spinoff series and "cons" exploded the concepts of Star Trek…
gregladen | March 7, 2009.. now, this is not a Congo Memoir. And it may be a distraction more than a reality. We'll have to see....
BUKIMA, Congo -- Jean-Marie Serundori's eyes light up when he sees his old hulk of a friend Kabirizi.
War, displacement and bloodthirsty rebels had gotten between them.
But for the first time in years, this section of a venerated Congolese national park is rebel-free. Government wildlife rangers, like Mr. Serundori, are firmly in control -- for the moment. And Kabirizi, a 500-pound silverback gorilla with a head as big as an engine block, seems to be flourishing in his kingdom of…
mspringer | March 7, 2009As ScienceBlogs' resident firearms enthusiast (I might own more guns than the rest of the SB writers combined - and I don't own very many), I've occasionally written about gun rights and related issues. One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of people aren't very familiar with what gun laws actually are in the US. Here I'm going to take you on a tour of what's legal and what isn't in the US. I'll try to do so in a mostly neutral way, but for full disclosure I'd generally want to change the law in two directions - fewer restrictions on use, greater penalties for misuse. When my…
grrlscientist | March 7, 2009tags: ScienceOnline09, blogosphere
I sometimes wonder what sort of impact I have on the world, beyond re-arranging a few bazillion electrons, so I was surprised and charmed to learn that Glendon Mellow wrote a very sweet essay at his blog, The Flying Trilobite, that was inspired by my friend and colleague, Kevin Zelnio and me that you might find interesting to read (and also thanks to ScienceOnline09).