Uncategorized
gregladen | March 6, 2009Climate change is already having a detectable impact on birds across Europe. This is the message from a group of scientists who have created the world's first indicator of the impacts of climate change on wildlife at a continental scale. "We hear a lot about climate change, but our paper shows that its effects are being felt right now", said lead author Dr Richard Gregory from the RSPB (BirdLife in the UK).
Of the 122 common species included in the analysis, 75% are predicted to experience declines across their ranges if they continue to respond to climatic warming in the way the models…
gregladen | March 6, 2009At the 2008 EG Conference, artist Miru Kim talks about her work. Kim explores industrial ruins underneath New York and then photographs herself in them, nude -- to bring these massive, dangerous, hidden spaces into sharp focus.
gregladen | March 6, 2009I hope you can see this. Your site is borked. A previously registered user name and comment does not work. Getting a new user name and comment does not work. Your "security code" words are usually illegible. Your "Email us" link is incorrectly configured. You can't do it the way you've done it for many system to read it. Borked.
So, I have a comment on this post of yours regarding this statement by Michele Bachmann:
If you want to look at economic history over the last 100 years. I call it punctuated equilibrium. If you look at FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama, this is really the final…
gregladen | March 6, 2009Perfectionism is the least of the behaviors that are encouraged in art but need to be set aside if the artist wants to be fully accepted in "polite society." Artists need the obsessiveness to see a project through with little feedback (or despite feedback). They need enough pride to believe that their ideas are worth executing. They need to be mercurial enough to suit their thinking to a new and very different project from their last. They need to ask uncomfortable questions and set aside polite fictions. They need to be willing to upset people. They need to be willing to manipulate their…
mikethemadbiologist | March 6, 2009Here are some links to start your weekend with. Science, health, and related things:
And the Oscar Goes to...Not Its Voting System
New Horizons
Yeast population genomics
Robots: The Big Picture
Hey NIH! How about using the stimulus as a testbed for new ideas?
Evolution in Action
Other:
Memo to Conservative Wingnuts: John Galt Is Not a Christian
Is the Treasury Planning on a Near Term Recovery in Bank Stocks?
Economists with a Clue: Supporting the EFCA
Billion Spermatazon-American March on Washington
Asymmetrical class warfare
Remembering the anthrax attack
Nationalize Atlas Shrugged
Wall…
gregladen | March 6, 2009...
*/
The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
CNBC Gives Financial Advice
Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin
Political HumorJoke of the Day
Hat Tip Miss Cellania
gregladen | March 6, 2009Putting Open Source to the Mom Test
I stumbled across Amber's blog by accident today - she's writing a series of posts that document her experience installing and using Linux distros and a variety of open source applications.
I hope open source developers are following along as stay-at-home-mom Amber shares her adventures in Linux and open source. She eloquently points out usability issues that make it hard for your average mom to race out and embrace open source. Developers: Take note. For that matter, publishers should take note - I hope Amber gets a book deal out of her blog series.…
mspringer | March 6, 2009Via xkcd, an unusually clever comic even by the standards of this unusually clever comic:
It goes right to the heart of one of the greatest philosophical difficulties of science. All we can do is measure correlation. We can never be assured that we're not just getting lucky and that in fact the fundamental-seeming physical laws we deduce are just flukes.
But science does seem to work pretty well, and in fact lots of things that correlate with each other do in fact cause each other. We seem to be able to tease apart the relationship on a case-by-case basis with pretty fair accuracy. Which…
sciencepunk | March 6, 2009
Thanks to BoingBoing for this great video of Mr George the SuperMagnetMan, vendor of all manner of high quality, super-powerful magnets. As he demonstrates in this video, these magnets aren't toys! Or rather they are toys, albeit ones powerful enough to crush your puny, fleshy fingers. The money shot is around the 3-minute mark...
So perhaps you've watched the lime getting pulverised into the beginnings of a good pie, and you're still not convinced these magnets are dangerous. Lucky then, that someone out there was unlucky so you don't have to be stupid. Here's the aftermath of Dirk's…
gregladen | March 5, 2009It turns out that Dolphin Safe Tuna is bad for sharks. And visa versa. More or less....
Let's as BlogFish about it...
Who's right depends on what you value more, dolphins or broader ocean ecosystem health. At least that's the way I see it. We could protect dolphins totally during tuna fishing only if we're willing to allow other animals like fish and sea turtles to suffer harm and become depleted (or further depleted).
Details Here.
gregladen | March 5, 2009 In this illuminating talk, Richard Pyle shows us thriving life on the cliffs of coral reefs and groundbreaking diving technologies he has pioneered to explore it. He and his team risk everything to reveal the secrets of undiscovered species.
gregladen | March 5, 2009NASA's planet-hunting space telescope Kepler is slated to launch the night of March 6 from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to find Earth-sized planets that could have liquid water at the surface and potentially harbor life.
"It's not just another science mission. This one has historical significance built into it," said Ed Weiler of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. "It very possibly could tell us that earths are very, very common, that we've got lots of neighbors out there. Or it could tell us that Earths are really, really, really rare."…
gregladen | March 5, 2009
Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent, will reportedly not leave his television career to become Surgeon General.
I read it here.
gregladen | March 5, 2009 Ed Ulbrich, the digital-effects guru from Digital Domain, explains the Oscar-winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create the older versions of Brad Pitt's face for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."
gregladen | March 5, 2009It is a long way from Kazakhstan to Kentucky, but the journey to the Derby may have started among a pastoral people on the Kazakh steppes who appear to have been the first to domesticate, bridle and perhaps ride horses -- around 3500 B.C., a millennium earlier than previously thought.
Archaeologists say the discovery may revise thinking about the development of some preagricultural Eurasian societies and put an earlier date to their dispersal into Europe and elsewhere. These migrations are believed to have been associated with horse domestication and the spread of Indo-European languages…
grrlscientist | March 5, 2009tags: OpenLab2008, Open Laboratory 2008, science writing, blog writing, books
Great news: as of today, Open Lab 2008 is now available for you to read and enjoy! My regular readers are aware that once again, one of my pieces was accepted in this year's OpenLab -- quite an honor since there are only three other people whose essays have managed to be included in all three volumes of OpenLab! Even more astonishing, only 50 essays, one poem and one cartoon were chosen from the more than 830 submissions to OpenLab2008.
OpenLabs are anthologies of the finest science, nature and medical writing…
choofnagle | March 5, 2009Who cares about moral hazard anymore! AEI, Cato, where are you when we need you?
It goes something like this: A group of companies that chose to put lead in children's toys, or to offshore their operations to countries with poor manufacturing controls in order to save money, are now upset that their schemes are going to cost them money. The government has the audacity to do something about this crisis, and guess what, it costs the industry money! Maybe they should have incorporated the costs of lead when they decided to offshore!
Joseph Pereira of the Journal reports:
Makers of children'…