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illconsidered | February 23, 2009I am a bit slow off the mark with this posting from Nature's Climate Feedback blog, but last month they put up a little news about iron fertilization of oceans as a geoengineering technique for removal of atmospheric CO2.
Have a read, but in a nutshell: that Indo-German experiment is going forward in the Southern Ocean and recent studies of naturally occurring blooms are not cause to celebrate, as actual sequestration into deep water is not very high.
As with this story, humanity needs to keep the cork in the champagne bottle for at least a little while longer...
sb admin | February 23, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
DemFromCT continues his public health series over at DailyKos, thus also continuing to make my early week blogging easier. This week is a brief look at this year's flu season, already in full swing, including what is happening in pediatric deaths from flu. He follows this with another interview, this time the American Lung Association's Director, National Advocacy, Erika Sward. Topics are timely: SCHIP (the Children's Health Insurance bill, just signed into law) and tobacco control.
These topics are intimately connected. Children are harmed by…
gregladen | February 22, 2009Item one: How to wash a cat.
Item Two: From Slashdot ... Steve Ballmer says Apple must switch to more open model. HAHAHAHAHAAHAHH. Zap!
gregladen | February 22, 2009"The large print giveth, the small print taketh away. Microsoft, which recently laid off 1400 employees, is now claiming that some of those lucky schmoes were inadvertently overpaid on their severance package. A letter from the company, which was subsequently circulated on the internet, states: 'We ask that you repay the overpayment and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience to you.' Microsoft has confirmed the authenticity of the letter, but it's not known what the amounts in question are, or how many of the 1400 were affected."
slashdot
(This is snidely whiplash, in case you didn't know.)
gregladen | February 22, 2009... At sixteenth. Barack Obama was number 1, edging out Jesus who was forced into the number two spot.
God, the omniscient entity hisself, came in 11th, sandwiched between Mother Teresa and Hillary Clinton. Don't think about that to closely.
source
The poll results, from Kos:
casiopea's diary :: ::
The results are in:
President Obama
Jesus Christ
Martin Luther King
Ronald Reagan
George W. Bush
Abraham Lincoln
John McCain
John F. Kennedy
Sully, the hero of the Hudson
Mother Teresa
God
Hillary Clinton
Billy Graham
FDR
Gandhi
Colin…
gregladen | February 22, 2009Rick Santelli = Asshole. (There, I said it.) Here.
NPR blows it with Michael Egnor: Say It Ain't So, NPR! at Digital Cuttlefish.
gregladen | February 22, 2009I know we've had a lot of ups and downs, but I wanted to wave hello and say "We'll have a hamburger today in your honor!"
Details at Paul's blog.
cortex | February 22, 2009For the last week, I've been suffering from one of those head colds that won't go away. The worst part of the cold isn't the raw nose, or the sinus headaches, or the scratchy throat - it's not being able to smell. I really hate not being able to smell. A world without scent is just so much less interesting, like a color photograph that's faded to a monochromatic gray. You know something is missing but you don't know what it is. Just this morning I was frying bacon and was seized by this peculiar feeling that something was wrong. That's when I realized: I couldn't smell the bacon. The most…
gregladen | February 21, 2009... on the economy. And some other related topics. (Darwin and human evolution at 16 minutes.)
cortex | February 21, 2009Over at Mind Matters, I recently interviewed Matthew Lieberman, a social neuroscientist at UCLA. The previous week I asked Ed Vul, lead author of the "Voodoo Correlations" paper a few questions, and I wanted to make sure I gave some of the scientists he criticized a chance to rebut the accusations. (Here's some excellent background reading on the Voodoo controversy.) I think Lieberman makes some excellent points:
The argument that Vul and colleagues put forward in their paper is that correlations observed in social neuroscience papers are impossibly high. There's a metric (the product of the…
gregladen | February 20, 2009
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Just Dess
pontiff | February 20, 2009Okay, so keeping running notes on friendfeed isn't going to work for me. Just too hard to do this and make a readable record. Really we should just be taping the talks.
Summary of day one below the fold (this may be a bit off as this is being written a day later.)
Jack Harris, Optomechanical systems
Papers: arXiv:0811.1343, arXiv:0707.1724.
Jack talked about his cool work coupling optical systems to mechanical systems. Take a cavity and stick a mechanical system (a dielectric membrane of thickness 50nm and quality factor of about a million) into it. Jack showed how you could cool the…
nisbetmc | February 20, 2009Not surprisingly, Carl Safina's Feb. 10 essay at the NY Times calling for an end to Darwin worship generated a fair amount of criticism.
Safina's suggestion to frame information in terms of the nature and benefits of evolutionary science rather than the more traditional "great man of science" narrative is a sound one. In fact, it's the exact strategy that the National Academies used in last year's educational backgrounder on evolution. In the Academies report, Darwin is mentioned only a few times, same thing with the Galapagos (for more on the framing and structure of the report, see this…
sciencepunk | February 20, 2009
The Space Game might not have the most inspired title, but beneath the nondescript exterior lies a jewel of a real-time strategy game with some interesting quasi-bioinformatics. Made by the Casual Collective for games portal Candystand, it runs in-browser and saves your progress as a cookie, and games last a nice 10-15 minutes - perfect for a short break.
The principle of the game is fairly straightforward - you control an asteroid mining company and your job is to extract as much mineral as you can whilst fighting off bands of space pirates. Enemies come in different flavours and you…
sb admin | February 20, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
Nothing like a massive food contamination outbreak from a plant in your state to concentrate the minds of state legislators (more here and links therein). Especially when an important industry is involved. We're talking Georgia peanuts, of course. Peanuts employ an estimated 50,000 workers in Georgia, accounting for some $2.5 billion in the state's economy. So yesterday the Georgia Senate unanimously passed a food safety bill and sent it on to the Georgia House. On the surface it seems like a good move, but its chief sponsor was a Republican, so…
rallain | February 19, 2009After talking about textbooks, commenter Kevin posed the question: which would cost more, printing out a free book or reusing a purchased textbook. Great question. How about some quick estimation (some of this stuff I have no clue about). First, how much do high school textbooks cost? Probably the most popular is Glencoe Physics: Principles and Problems. Amazon lists this for $95.55 (which I will call "about a hundred dollars"). How much do schools pay for this? I have no clue. I imagine if a whole state adopts it, they can get some deal. Maybe they could get it for $50 a copy.
How…