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cwilcox | October 31, 2008Top five natural horrors that are sure to give you a fright this Halloween! Go to my other site and check it out! You just might recognize #1, though... read more | digg story
mspringer | October 30, 2008So Seed magazine has endorsed Obama. Quelle surprise! I suppose I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds me, but of course I'm on record as supporting the "anyone else" ticket. I am under no illusion that it will be anything but a lost cause.
One of the things that leads me to believe this is poll data. Poll data is sort of the sociological version of many-body theory.
In physics, "many" often has a particular meaning. According to a guest lecturer we had today who works with semiconductor lasers, "many" means "more than two". He's working with the difficult problem of theoretically…
cortex | October 30, 2008Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan discusses a fascinating new paper on how psychotic delusions take on different manifestations over time:
A Slovenian research team, led by psychiatrist Borut Skodlar, discovered that the Ljubljana psychiatric hospital had patient records going as far back as 1881. They randomly selected 10 records from every 10 year period to see how delusions matched up to the society of the time.
One key finding was that paranoid and persecutory delusions seem much more common now, with a big jump after the 1960s, in line with other studies that have found that paranoia is much…
gregladen | October 29, 2008Live blogging the Obama Infomercial .... so you don't have to.
(see this, this, this)
Wheat .... Flags .... Fans in slow motion. Children and uncertainty.
Ooops. He's standing in a room thta looks a little too presidential, Kennedy eskqe. Looks good but a little OTT.
Please, Barach, don't be OTT. Not now.
Rebecca. Rebecca looks like she could take Sarah Palin easy.
Rebecca is a White Flightist. That's funny.
Husband with surgery. Only seen in a photo. That's not looking too good for the husband. this is like the intro to Whole House make over.
She's a football mom who can do…
jwilbanks | October 29, 2008Subject says it all...the editors of SEED have endorsed Obama for President.
cwilcox | October 29, 2008John Mayer told us that "when you trust your television/What you get is what you got/Cause when they own the information, oh/They can bend it all they want." Well, it turns out it's worse than that - even if you think you're somewhat knowledgeable in an area, the media's coverage may affect the way you think.
At least that's what a new study published in PLoS ONE has found when it comes to diseases. Researchers at McMaster University wanted to see how media coverage of diseases affects the perception of their prevalence and severity. To do this, they asked undergraduate and medical students…
grrlscientist | October 28, 2008I have an announcement and a request for your assistance. First, I have been offered my own column in the Avicultural Society of America Avicultural Bulletin and because I am a perpetual blabbermouth when it comes to birds and science, I accepted. Yay, me! However, I have a dilemma that perhaps you can help with: I need a name for this column.
I was given a deadline to name the column, so I sent them a few suggestions, but I just learned today that they are still seeking a name! Obviously, the names I suggested were not inspirational enough to capture their imaginations since, as they write…
gregladen | October 28, 2008In this moving talk, documentary photographer Kristen Ashburn shares unforgettable images of the human impact of AIDS in Africa.
Kristen Ashburn's poignant photographs bring us into close contact with individuals in the midst of enormous hardship -- giving a human face to struggles that much of the world knows only as statistics and blurbs on the news. She has photographed the people of Iraq a year after the U.S. invasion, Jewish settlers in Gaza, suicide bombers, the penal system in Russia, victims of tuberculosis and the aftermath of the tsunami in Sri Lanka and Hurricane Katrina in New…
pharyngula | October 28, 2008I'm going to be in Toronto this weekend, and everyone wants a piece of me. I'll tell you right now that I'm letting Larry Moran referee some of my time. I'm getting into Toronto in the early afternoon, checking into my hotel, and going off with Larry and a few other people for dinner before my talk. And then there's a catered reception at 6, the talk, and then free time afterwards — go ahead, drag me off somewhere nearby and force me to drink that dangerous Canadian beer.
On Saturday afternoon, I'll be at the University of Guelph for an informal discussion, so you can ask me questions there.…
grrlscientist | October 28, 2008Hre's the latest Carnivalia for you to enjoy
Carnival of Homeschooling, issue 148, which focuses on all aspects of homeschooling.
mspringer | October 28, 2008In the United States, there are about 4 million 8-year-old children. To the extent that statistical averages hold true, around 640 of them will die this year. The largest single cause is motor vehicle accidents, killing a quarter. Cancer will kill another sixth, heart disease around fifteen percent, drowning will kill four percent, fires will kill about the same, and so it goes. Fewer than one percent will die of accidental discharge of firearms, about the same as inadvertently poison themselves with household cleaners. This year, one of them was named Christopher Bizilj, and he lived in…
mspringer | October 28, 2008Let's say we want to know how big the earth would be if it were compressed down so far that it became a black hole. We don't really know much about black holes, but we do know something about escape velocity. Stand on the surface of the earth (which had radius r) and fire a projectile upward, and it will escape if the kinetic energy we gave it at launch is equal or greater than the gravitational potential energy. But at a black hole surface, we the escape velocity is the speed of light. Why not plug that fact into the equation and see what we get?
We start off with the potential energy on…
pharyngula | October 28, 2008Stuff is accumulating in my mailbox far faster than I can put it out here with commentary, so I'm just going to dump the recent pile of links here rather than my usual tactic of simply letting them disappear by neglect.
John McCain may not be the biggest jerk in his family.
The McCain campaign is handing out Christian voter guides. Vote for McCain because he's not immoral!
Chuck Norris's nephew got an F in fifth grade because he wrote an essay on evolution that instead said god created the earth…and the teacher had a degree from the "University of Berkeley".
Christopher Hitchens…
illconsidered | October 28, 2008Over at DesmogBlog, I saw an interesting video that covers some of the history of climate change denialism, starting with its roots in tobacco-lung cancer denialism.
Interesting how some of the names are so familiar, such as Steve Milloy and Myron Ebel.
Is "sociopathic whore to industry" too strong a term for those characters? Real people die as a direct result of their actions, and it is next to impossible to believe that they don't know full well of exactly that consequence.
A name missing from that list with Milloy and Ebel is Fred Singer, also very active in the tobacco propoganda wars…
cortex | October 28, 2008You know what I think about when I hear about the epic failure of all these fancy financial models that were designed to calculate risk? I think about the Atlantic Cod. These fish used to be everywhere. (Once upon a time, they were considered the cash crop of the ocean. Spanish fishing vessels would trek across the Atlantic just to fish the abundant cod off the coast of Canada.) Now the Newfoundland cod fishery is gone, yet another victim of overfishing.
The story of cod is usually told as the tragedy of trawlers. A trawler is boat designed to drag a massive net behind it. These nets are…
cortex | October 28, 2008Comes courtesy of David Brooks:
This [financial[ meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It's a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren't true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.
For more, see here.
cwilcox | October 28, 2008I have tried really hard not to write a blog post about this book for awhile now, but I had to move recently, and in packing and unpacking I happened to run across my copy of it at least a dozen times. I can't resist it any longer. For those of you who have read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you probably think you've read the best book that has ever been written. Well, you're close, but not quite there (if you haven't read Hitchhiker's, I don't really know what to tell you - you can't even imagine the best book). The best book ever written is by Douglas Adams, but it's not his…
gregladen | October 27, 2008Previously, we thought they were sahing "bzzzzzz..zzzzz bzzzzzzzz" and stuff like that....
Researchers in Australia have discovered that honey bees have the ability to count -- at least to the number four.
A scientist from the University of Queensland put five markers inside a tunnel and placed nectar in one of them, Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio reported.
Honey bees placed in the tunnel flew to the marker with the food, and would still fly to the same marker stripe when the food was removed.
source
I have only this to say about the intelligence of bees.
gregladen | October 27, 2008A couple of years ago, Amanda and I got new cell phones from a company with service up at the cabin. This was the only company with service in that area so we were stuck. Since then, Verizon, the company in question, has over charged us and otherwise screwed up our bills numerous times, their sales people have lied to us, and so on and so forth. Verizon totally sucks. But this useful information is a digression.
... continuing with a slightly different but related digression.... we got these phones the day before memorial day weekend. We were promised that if the service up at the cabin…