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jrosenhouse | July 2, 2013Morgan Freeman is one of those actors who is always good, even if the movie is bad. Most recently I saw him in in Now You See Me, which I enjoyed, despite its preposterous story. He is also a big science booster. He hosts the show Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel. So, all in all, I'm a Morgan Freeman fan.
Here's a short interview with Freeman, in which he briefly addresses the evolution question. Let's have a look:
Do you believe in “intelligent design?” No. Let me clarify that answer. Because intelligent design is exactly what we see. But does that come from some being? I…
gregladen | July 2, 2013How to break into a car with your white privilage, or driving while black in America.
gregladen | July 2, 2013No, it turns out. Paul Douglass pointed me to this very interesting piece in Foreign Policy, from which I take a brief quote:
... The good neighbor has banked its economy on the cursed elixir of political dysfunction -- oil. Flush with visions of becoming a global energy superpower, Canada's government has taken up with pipeline evangelists, petroleum bullies, and climate change skeptics. Turns out the Boy Scout's not just hooked on junk crude -- he's become a pusher. And that's not even the worst of it.
With oil and gas now accounting for approximately a quarter of its export revenue,…
jrosenhouse | July 1, 2013The liar paradox is the statement:
“This sentence is false.”
Let us refer to this sentence simply as L. The paradox comes when we try to assign a truth value to L. Is it true or is it false? If we declare it to be true, then what it says must actually be the case. But it says that it is false. We would thus have a sentence that is both true and false, which is not possible. On the other hand, if we declare it to be false then we are affirming precisely what the sentence says. That makes it true! So, once again, we would have a sentence that is both true and false. We get a…
gregladen | July 1, 2013I'm sure you already know the story of Lonesome George:
And now, you can see "him" (as it were) at the American Museum of Natural History. From a press release:
Lonesome George Will Be on View at American Museum of Natural History
Museum will Oversee Preservation and Taxidermy of Famous Tortoise
Lonesome George, the 100-year-old (estimated) Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdoni)—the last of his kind—who died in June 2012, will be preserved for posterity by the same expert taxidermy and conservation team that worked on the acclaimed renovation of the Jill and Lewis Bernard Family Hall…
kkrisberg | June 28, 2013Sharon Thomas-Ellison works hard for her paychecks at Jimmy John's. On occasion when no one else is available, the 19-year-old has worked from 11 in the morning until 1 a.m. at night with just a 30-minute break — and it's okay, she says, she needs the extra income.
After a long day's work on her feet, often working split shifts, the St. Louis resident goes home to the one-bedroom apartment she shares with her brother, who also works for Jimmy John's, a fast food sandwich chain that's become a billion-dollar a year enterprise with more than 1,500 stores nationwide. It's a struggle to pay the…
pgleick | June 27, 2013For some time now, proponents of the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” have claimed there was little or no evidence of real risk to groundwater. But as the classic saying goes: “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” of a problem. And the evidence that fracking can contaminate groundwater and drinking water wells is growing stronger with every new study.
As most people now know, fracking is a method for enhancing the production of natural gas (or oil, or geothermal energy wells). Fracking involves injecting fluids -- typically complex mixes of water and…
gregladen | June 26, 2013In the old days, it was believed that you would save gas by leaving your car running if you planned to use it again within a few minutes. That has probably become less true over time as cars have gotten more and more efficient over time. Apparently, idling your car for even something like 10 seconds uses more gas than turning it off and on again. This is caused by the use of fancy fuel systems that cars use now. This technology is, of course, leveraged in hybrids which turn their internal combustion engines off and on as needed.
Anyway, here is an infographic that provides the details. The…
gregladen | June 26, 2013From Mercury News:
In a ruling that assures further legal battles, the high court found that backers of Proposition 8 did not have the legal right to defend the voter-approved gay marriage ban in place of the governor and attorney general, who have refused to press appeals of a federal judge's 2010 ruling finding the law unconstitutional.
It was a 5-4 decision, usual suspects.
Reminder: Who is on the Supreme Court matters.
Reminder: Who is in the White House matters to who is on the Supreme Court.
Reminder: Which party controls the Senate matters to the ability of whomever is in the White…
gregladen | June 26, 2013The Supreme Court of the United States has truck down the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" as unconstitutional. It was a 5-4 decision. A ruling on California Prop 8 is expected soon.
From NPR:
Section 3 of the law defines marriage as "a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife" and a spouse as "a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife." That provision had been struck down by eight lower courts before the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in United States v. Windsor.
This decision means that legally married same-sex couples are now entitled to the same…
carlyo | June 21, 2013By Festival Nifty Fifty Speaker Dr. Joe Schwarcz PhD
Living is a wasteful business. Just think of all the stuff we dispose of down are drains and toilets. Pharmaceuticals, oils, cosmetics, hair, condoms, glues, paints, nail polish removers, soap, urine, feces, food remnants, toilet paper, pesticides, dyes, cleaning agents, blood and even vomit. And there are plenty of bacteria and viruses that go down as well. The original answer to this onslaught to nature was that the “solution to pollution is dilution.” Basically that meant the mess would be diluted enough in natural water systems so that…
gregladen | June 21, 2013Kickstarter has said this, about this:
Dear everybody,
On Wednesday morning Kickstarter was sent a blog post quoting disturbing material found on Reddit. The offensive material was part of a draft for a “seduction guide” that someone was using Kickstarter to publish. The posts offended a lot of people — us included — and many asked us to cancel the creator’s project. We didn’t.
We were wrong.
Why didn’t we cancel the project when this material was brought to our attention? Two things influenced our decision:
The decision had to be made immediately. We had only two hours from when we found…
pgleick | June 20, 2013With Matthew Heberger. This is a version of a post from the blog "Pacific Institute Insights"
How much water is there in America’s rivers, and where is it? Perhaps unsurprisingly, people have little sense of how their local water resources compare in size to other water resources. “Is that a big river? A little river?”
One of us [Gleick] grew up along the Hudson River on the East Coast, and encountered rivers that seemed to be about the same size: the Susquehanna, the Delaware, the Potomac. Anyone living in the West working on water issues becomes more familiar with the Colorado, the…
gregladen | June 19, 2013CONvergence is the world's largest fan run science fiction and fantasy convention held in Bloomington, MN on or around July 4th every year. An informal subset of the activities that occur at this huge gathering of people wearing costumes and stuff is a set of panels organized by Skepchick, focusing on various aspects of skepticism and science. I'll be on a few of the panels this year, as usual.
Below is the poster for the SkepchicCON at CONvergence. Also, donations are needed to help fund this worthy effort. Click here to find out more and donate.
gregladen | June 19, 2013Science is good at seeing things that you can’t really see. For example, science can provide an accurate three dimensional model of a critically important molecule even though no one has ever directly seen what this molecule looks like. That three dimensional model of the molecule can be used to understand things such as a) how life works and b) how to address some important disease.
Science can measure the exact proportions of each of several elements that are invisible that make up the air. We can sense the air but we can’t see Nitrogen vs. Oxygen vs. CO2 in the air, while Science can.…
gregladen | June 18, 2013Intel ISEF finalist Evie Sobczak creates viable algae biofuel without using chemicals in processing.
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Photo of Science Fair Credit: RinzeWind via Compfight cc
gregladen | June 18, 2013Amazon has sent a letter to all of its associates based in Minnesota. All Minnesota based associates are being thrown out of the Amazon Associates program as of July 1st. This is because the State of Minnesota passed a bill that Amazon does not like. Amazon may well have a good reason to not like this (or any other) bill, but I'm shocked and dismayed that the response is to strike out against its loyal associates.
This is where fine print rears its ugly head. If the contract between associates and Amazon was a normal business contract, it would not likely be possible to terminate it with…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2013Despite loud (and in my opinion, well argued) opposition to the Swedish restrictions on metal detector use by honest amateurs, our authorities are sadly not coming round to anything resembling the Danish legislation that works so well.
My friend and fieldwork collaborator Tobias Bondeson is a skilled amateur detectorist who regularly publishes scholarly papers on his finds. He pointed me to the latest developments in Swedish officialdom on the topic, a 26 March proposition from the Ministry for Culture to Parliament: Kulturmiljöns mångfald, ”The Diversity of the Historic Environment”. Tobias…
esiegel | June 16, 2013"Illusion is the first of all pleasures." -Oscar Wilde
It's tough to tell fact from fiction, and sometimes just as hard to tell reality from illusion. As long as you're enjoying yourself this weekend, I'd have to agree with Buckwheat Zydeco, and say
Let The Good Times Roll.
But despite what these images you're looking at might seem to show, there's nothing rolling at all here.
Image credit: Illustrator Fiestoforo.
Nor is anything moving, nor is there a hint of animation in any of these. Yet, based on what your eyes show you, things appear to be bulging, spinning, or more generally, there…