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gregladen | March 2, 2009Apparently, there has been some significant movement in Florida, as a major shift has occurred in public opinion regarding evolution vs. creationism. Nearly 100 percent of readers of the Orlando Sentinel, it would seem at least on the surface, to support the teaching of evolution, and not creationism, in public schools. See?
Incredible.
illconsidered | March 2, 2009Over 12,000 people are expected at a student climate conference this weekend and today over one thousand will gather today in Washington DC.
The focus of the DC protest is the local coal fired plant that powers capitol buildings heat and air conditioning. The target is symbolic, and congress has preemptively agreed to switch the plant to natural gas.
But the most compelling reason to pay attention to this:
Jim Hansen at NASA, [...] may be arrested today with us all
We can all expect more of this from the attack dogs, of course. (BTW, when I went to that link, the Google Ad prominently…
mspringer | March 2, 2009In high school and introductory college chemistry you're going to do a lot of problems involving the ideal gas law. It runs something like this:
PV = nRT
So simple I don't even have to typeset it. Pressure times volume equals the number of moles (n) times a particular ideal gas constant (R) times the temperature in Kelvin. It's an idealization, but a pretty good one. For your average gas at roughly room temperature and pressure it's good to within a few percent. In those intro chemistry courses, that's the end of the story. The equation says what the equation says, and that's the end of…
pharyngula | March 2, 2009There are some things you'd rather not have associated with your country in the medical nomenclature, and deadly diseases are one of them. Notice how this New Zealand newspaper refers to a recent outbreak as the "English measles" — isn't it nice how the anti-vaccination folks have made a significant contribution to the language?
(via Bad Science)
cwilcox | March 1, 2009I want to warn y'all - I'm probably not going to be posting much this week.
I gotta see off Barry's family, have a whole ton of work, get back to exercising off the weight I gained by eating out all week with the rents, visit my grandparents, and all the while try not to rip my hair out while anxiously awaiting the cursed letters from the PhD programs I applied to (that are supposed to inform me this week or so as to whether or not I'm cool enough for school).
In other words, I'm totally swamped.
If you're overwhelmingly bored without my pretty-much-daily ramblings, check out the new edition…
gregladen | March 1, 2009... explained.
I heard the first 50 minutes or so of a one hour edition of This American Life dedicated to explaining the banking crisis in terms that can be understood by any reasonable smart (or even not so smart) person. The bottom line: Nationalize the banks, then re-privatize them as soon as possible. One expert said it this way: If you covered up the name of the country involved and showed the numbers to any World Bank operative, they would all say the same thing. Nationalize the banks right now, then re-privatize them as soon as you can. And round up the head bankers and put them…
cortex | February 28, 2009First of all, a huge thank you to everyone who came to one of the events on my book tour, from Seattle to The Strand. Thank you for listening and for your questions. It's been such a deep pleasure to meet so many people interested in dopamine, Proust and Cheerios. Also, a sincere thank you to everyone who bought the book and helped put it on the New York Times Bestseller List.
On an entirely unrelated note, I've got a new review in the San Francisco Chronicle (long may it live!) on the philosopher Alva Noe's new book on consciousness. I really enjoyed the book, and see it as yet another…
razib | February 28, 2009You can watch me talk to Greg Cochran about his book The 10,000 Year Explosion on bloggingheads.tv this weekend....
There's something interesting about the front page of bloggingheads.tv right now.
Check it. Not only are the two colored people on the front not talking to each other (yeah, I'm talking about the Glenn & John duo), but both happen to be secular Bangladeshi American Republican males. Who have met each other to boot. Conspiracy? Or coincidence? You decide.
grrlscientist | February 27, 2009The latest blog carnival to be published is the Carnival of the Vanities, which is devoted to excellent writing recently published in the blogosphere, regardless of topic.
The Friday Ark, issue 232. This blog carnival is all about sharing images of animals, although there might be text associated with those images, too. While you are there, be sure to add a pin denoting your location to the Friday Ark Frapper map (can you find my pin?).
Also, my notice is a little late, but the Radical Progressive Carnival, 13th edition, was published one week ago. This blog carnival focuses on politics and…
jwilbanks | February 27, 2009Big news today at the CHI Medicine Tri-Conference. Merck has pledged to donate a remarkable resource to the commons - a vast database of highly consistent data about the biology of disease, as well as software tools and other resources to use it. The resources come out of work done at the Rosetta branch of Merck (you might remember them as the company whose sale capped a boom in bioinformatics) and is at its root a network biology system. In use inside Rosetta/Merck last year alone it led directly to a ton of publications.
This is all going to happen through the establishment of a non-profit…
mspringer | February 27, 2009Here's a rather harrowing video I recently watched. It's a commercial airliner on approach to a runway during a severe crosswind. The plane is attempting to perform a maneuver to keep itself flying over the runway without drifting off course, but this requires flying at an angle into the wind. It's difficult and the pilot narrowly averts disaster by aborting the landing at about the last possible second.
The difficulty is one of relative motion. If you're in a boat crossing a river to a point directly opposite your starting point, merely plowing straight ahead will result in your landing…
bushwells | February 27, 2009My Illinois homeboy, Philip Jose Farmer, died on Wednesday Feb 25. Please find linkage here: the obit in the New York Times and the announcement at his website. From the NYT:
Philip José Farmer, a prolific and popular science fiction writer who shocked readers in the 1950s by depicting sex with aliens and challenged conventional pieties of the genre with caustic fables set on bizarre worlds of his own devising, died Wednesday. He was 91 and lived in Peoria, Ill.
As a pre-adolescent sprout, I'd sneak out copies of my older brother's PJF paperbacks and devour them. The Riverworld series…
sciencepunk | February 26, 2009
A mischievous octopus is being held responsible over the flooding of a Californian aquarium after sabotaging the filtration system. Employees at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium arrived at work yesterday to find their offices soaked with hundreds of gallons of seawater. The source of the flood was traced to the aquarium's small two-spotted octopus. Staff member Brianne Emhiser stated in a press release:
"Our best guess is that the octopus, who is incredibly gregarious and curious, tugged on a valve in her tank last night causing a steady stream of water to overflow out of the tank."
The…
gregladen | February 26, 2009We are expecting the storm of the year today in the Twin Cities. I'm looking at a weather map, and there is snow everywhere around Minneapolis and Saint Paul, including where I am. Events have been canceled. The whole nine yards (important planning related sports metaphor).
Yet when I look outside, I see not one flake of snow, and when I look at the news on TV I only see stories about a revolution happening in Mexico.
What is going on here, people???
mspringer | February 26, 2009Swans on Tea posts a parody Pesudoscientific Method followed by cranks worldwide. One item:
Accuse anyone asking for empirical evidence of being 'close minded'; try to protect your ideas from this sort of pessimism.
I hate to be pessimistic, but I can't help what I notice. I've listened to economists on everything from NPR to CNN to Fox News to Keith Olbermann. The hosts like to ask a fairly obvious question of the economists they interview: how will we know if the stimulus worked or not?
And they never get a quantitative answer. Never.
Now I don't pretend to be an expert economist. But…
illconsidered | February 26, 2009...and he puts you on his mailing list! [Please note: Marc Morano is nowhere near as relevant as Beelzebub!! It is just a gimmick for a blog title.]
So I poked fun at Marc Morano the other day, and though he thankfully did not pop up in my comments he must have read the post because the next day I started receiving his spam.
The first email was approvingly quoting Pielke Jr, which I have no doubt thrills him. Roger's fear? Not that humanity is facing daunting challenges and may not act quickly enough, no what keeps Roger awake at night is James Hansen's belief that politicians should take…