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carlyo | March 18, 2013Celebrating Women's History Month with another STEM Role Model!
Read the biography of Nifty Fifty Speaker & NerdGirls Founder Dr. Karen Panetta and how YOUR SCHOOL can host a Nifty Fifty Speaker here
gregladen | March 18, 2013I'm not sure if it is really called "embalmed" when done to a tortoise, but it is the same idea. Lonesome George was a Galapagos Tortoise, Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii, who was known for some time a the last living individual of his subspecies. He lived on Pinta Island in the Galapagos. He died on my birthday last year at the age of "more than 100 years old." These tortoises numbered over a quarter of a million a few centuries to just a few thousand today.
The latest news is that George will be embalmed, or preserved, at the Museum of Natural History in New York City and returned to the…
jrosenhouse | March 15, 2013I've recently had it called to my attention that Among the Creationists has been reviewed in Perspectives on Science and the Christian Faith. That's the journal of the American Scientific Affiliation, an organization of Christian scientists. They are generally sympathetic to evolution and mostly have little patience for ID and creationism. On the other hand, they definitely like their evolution with a heavy theistic gloss. When I wrote the book, I was especially curious about how it would be received in quarters like this. So let's have a look.
The reviewer is Robyn Pal Rylaarsdam of…
carlyo | March 15, 2013Celebrating Women's History Month with another STEM Role Model!
To read the fascinating biography of Hedy Lamarr and all of our STEM role models click here
gregladen | March 15, 2013I put together a page of resources, just a few items but with a plan to grow it, HERE. This is for teachers and their allies, focusing on life science, an organized list of selected posts on this blog that should be of interest. Let me know if there is anything you'd like to see here sooner rather than later.
gregladen | March 15, 2013Fracking, or Hydraulic Fracturing, is a method of extracting hard-to-get oil and gas from shale. For the most part, fossil fuels originally formed in shale, which was in turn laid down by near surface life in anoxic seas. Sunlight powered a high turnover of near surface plankton, algae, and bacteria, but oxygen-poor conditions just a little deeper in the sea made it unlikely for much of that life to be recycled through other life forms. So, during periods of anoxic seas, which lasted for millions of years now and then in earth history, much of that organic material from near the surface of…
mspringer | March 15, 2013Question from a reader:
Pick up a comb, rub it with your hair and you have got some electric charge. Now shake it and you are generating an electromagnetic wave. Am I right?
Yes indeed. So why don't we see light emitted when we brush our hair? Let's run some numbers. If you wiggle around an electric point charge, electromagnetic radiation is emitted. The power carried by this radiation is given by the Larmor formula:
$latex \displaystyle P = \frac{e^2 a^2}{6 \pi \epsilon_0 c^3}&s=1$
Well, a comb isn't a point charge. But if we're just interested in an order-of-magnitude estimate, we can…
jrosenhouse | March 14, 2013Slate has an interesting article, by Tara Haelle, discussing a math problem that recently received some attention on Facebook. The problem is to evaluate this expression:
$latex 6 \div 2(1+2)$
Obviously, the challenge here is not the arithmetic itself. It is to figure out the order in which to do the operations. I suspect most people would naturally do
the parentheses first, leading to this:
$latex 6 \div 2(3)$,
but what now? We could argue that we should first multiply the two by the three, leading to this:
$latex 6 \div 6$,
which is obviously equal to 1. Alternatively, we could…
carlyo | March 14, 2013Celebrating Women's History Month with another STEM Role Model!
Dr. Penelope Boston, geologist-microbiologist from the National Cave and Karst Research Institute, loves exploring caves where she finds a "virtual treasure trove of scientific information!"
Click here to read Dr. Boston's full biography and find out how you can host one of our Nifty Fifty Speakers at your school or nominate an inspiring STEM role model to be considered as part of this elite group
gregladen | March 14, 2013The Republican dominated Minnesota Legislature got almost nothing done over the last two years that they were in power. But they did manage to put two boneheaded constitutional amendments on the ballot for last November, one to restrict voting rights in a way that Republicans would have a better chance of winning, the other making it unconstitutional for same sex couples to marry. Same sex marriage was already illegal in the state, but the GOP saw the handwriting on the wall and knew that this legal restriction would not last, so they imposed the amendment on us.
Both of those amendments…
gregladen | March 14, 2013As you know, I write now and then for the Minnesota Progressive Project. I should do more there, I know, and I try. But anyway, the MPP has a new blog layout which preserves the Kos-esque diary thingie but loads faster and is easier to navigate, with a few cool "discoverability" features that link readers to writing about key issues and candidates. Please go check it out.
While you are there check out the right sidebar for a place to click to sign a petition to encourage our state legislature to support same sex marriage by passing a bill that is right now before them.
jrosenhouse | March 13, 2013By now I'm sure you've heard that we have a new Pope. He is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, form Argentina, but from now on he will be known as Pope Francis. It appears he is a doctrinaire right-winger on issues related to homosexuality, abortion and conctraception, which is no surprise. Andrew Sullivan provides other reasons for concern. On the other hand, he does seem to have a genuine commitment to speaking out on behalf of the downtrodden. He took his name from Saint Francis, who famously took a vow of poverty. He also has a background in science, specifically chemistry, so perhaps he will…
carlyo | March 13, 2013Guest Blog by Festival Nifty Fifty Speaker Joe Schwarcz PhD
Unfortunately chemistry is a mystery to many. And that suits the hucksters just fine. It sets the stage for cashing in on chemical ignorance by bamboozling people with scientific sounding balderdash. Ignorance, though, is not total. There is one molecular formula that people do tend to recognize and that is, good old H2O. Then if you press them to name an important chemical in the body, chances are they will come up with DNA. And they are likely to have some sort of mental picture of the double helix structure of DNA, since…
gregladen | March 13, 2013In response to a comment on my blog, I issued a snarky tweet (and repeated it on Facebook) to the effect that if your argument involves the phrase "World View" you might be wrong. This led to a number of light hearted but snarky, and often helpful, responses on Facebook and Twitter indicating that the term "World View" could mean a lot of different things, such as opinion, paradigm, or point of view. So I thought I'd expand on the concept a bit. In short, "World View" does not mean any of those things, and is in fact a term with a very weighty and rather specific meaning.
The term is an…
lborkowski | March 13, 2013Alabama's poultry industry produces more than one billion broiler chickens each year and accounts for 10% of the state's economy. According to the new report Unsafe at These Speeds, this production comes at a steep price for the low-paid, hourly workers working in poultry plants.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and Alabama Appleseed interviewed 302 poultry workers from Alabama's poultry industry and heard about grueling work that has left nearly three-fourths of them reporting significant work-related injuries or illnesses. A fast-moving processing line has small teams of workers handling…
sastyk | March 13, 2013This is an interesting paper indeed - a new PNAS paper argues that before an abrupt climate change, there is a characteristic SLOWING DOWN of climate change that might be a warning sign:
Putting our results in an even wider perspective, it is important that slowing down is a universal property of systems approaching a tipping point. This implies that our techniques might in principle be used to construct operational early warning systems for critical transitions in a wider range of complex systems where tipping points are suspected to exist, ranging from disease dynamics and physiology to…
jrosenhouse | March 12, 2013Writing at The New Republic, Paul Berman has an interesting, if rather lengthy, article about Les Miserables, the book. I like his opening:
The most famous and revealing scenes in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables get underway fairly late in the novel—on page 1,280 in the Pléiade edition—at the moment when the physically powerful Jean Valjean pries loose an iron-bar sewer grill in a Paris street and prepares to escape into the underground tunnels, carrying on his back the half-dead body of young Marius, the barricade fighter. It is 1832, a year of insurrections. Marius has been battling against…
carlyo | March 12, 2013By USA Science & Engineering Festival Founder Larry Bock
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." - Carl Sagan
The excitement, the rigors and the risk of scientific discovery: Sagan loved and shared these emotions more effectively and openly with us than perhaps any other contemporary scientist. And in the process he helped catapult "science outreach" into the public lexicon.
Today more than ever, if we are to inspire the next generation of innovators and better inform the public about science, we, with Sagan-like boldness, need to rethink science outreach, especially…
gregladen | March 12, 2013This is an event some of you in the Twin Cities may be interested in attending
Viewing of American Meat at the Bell Museum
"A fabulous panel of dedicated agri-food issue talkers have agreed to walk us through this conversation with the film’s director after the film, all with tremendous credentials relating to supportive critique of issues we need to face in the food system (panel listed below!)"
Wednesday, March 13, 6 p.m. Reception, 7 p.m. Film with panel discussion to follow
Bell Museum Auditorium, free and open to the public
Panel:
Jan Joannides, of Renewing the Countryside, is a key…
jrosenhouse | March 11, 2013Writing in The Week, Damon Linker has a strange essay arguing that atheists who are honest about the consequences of their beliefs ought to be sad and mopey. The subtitle of his essay is, “That godlessness might be both true and terrible is something that the new atheists refuse to entertain.”
This is a trope that arises from time to time in anti-atheist rhetoric, but it is one I find incomprehensible. Partly this is because I contrast atheism with the alternatives on offer, and find it fares well in the comparison. The most common forms of Christianity, for example, tell me that human…