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gregladen | August 25, 2012This week on Skeptically Speaking:
This week, we’re discussing some fascinating science focused on the liquid portions of our big blue planet. We’re joined by graduate researcher Andrew David Thaler, founder of Southern Fried Science, to talk about the weird and wonderful networks of life that exist in the Deep Sea. And on the podcast, University of Alberta researcher David Schindler joins us to talk about the work, and the uncertain future, of Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area and its freshwater ecosystem research.
We record live with Andrew David Thaler on Sunday, August 26 at 6 pm MT. The…
denialism | August 24, 2012Timothy Egan nails it, the Republican caucus is composed of crackpots and cranks.
Take a look around key committees of the House and you’ll find a governing body stocked with crackpots whose views on major issues are as removed from reality as Missouri’s Representative Todd Akin’s take on the sperm-killing powers of a woman who’s been raped.
On matters of basic science and peer-reviewed knowledge, from evolution to climate change to elementary fiscal math, many Republicans in power cling to a level of ignorance that would get their ears boxed even in a medieval classroom. Congress incubates…
gregladen | August 24, 2012According to data just now available, the total surface area of the summertime Arctic Sea that is covered in ice has reached the lowest point ever recorded.
Every (northern) summer the sea ice in the Arctic melts to some degree, reaching a minimum around the middle of September. Over the last several years, the amount of ice at this minimal point has been lower than previously recorded. Accurate records go back only a few decades, so this shift in ice cover reflects only the most recent period of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
Today, I got an email from my colleague John Abraham (the…
gregladen | August 23, 2012Soon To Be Hurricane Isaac
Isaac is a tropical storm currently located south of Puerto Rico and heading for Haiti and Cuba. After rolling over those land areas for several hours, and reaching the southeastern Gulf of Mexico, Isaac is expected to become a modest hurricane, likely to menace the west coast of Florida and the Florida Panhandle and nearby Mississippi. Conditions are actually right for Isaac to become a fairly strong storm, even though at the moment it is very poorly organized.
Arctic Cyclone
The other storm of interest is now historical, but worth a mention. This was the arctic…
sastyk | August 23, 2012M. is back with her view from how the class is going - after an amazingly brief pause to give birth to a new baby!
o my week 4 update was simply labor, labor and more labor. We finally had the baby! We are home and healthy. And I get to brag that he was born in a bathtub (it was a water birth)! Do you think he will appreciate that when he's twelve? After another sleepy week off, I am back with week 6.
The class has been slowly zeroing in on brainstorming solutions to some of the more mundane issues of low power living. Things like sustainable rat population control, stockpiling toilet…
sastyk | August 23, 2012I find the ways we define ourselves by what we eat fascinating. We do this project of self-definition both through what we DO eat and what we refuse to eat. In Martin Jones' fascinating book _Feast: Why Humans Share Food_, he observes that our taboos about food can be so powerful that they are actively detrimental - observing that are indications that ancient peoples in coastal areas have had such a strong taboo against the ocean and fishing that they starved to death with easy access to plenty of fish. Most of us have a powerful sense, instilled culturally, about what we do and don't…
sastyk | August 21, 2012So apparently in my sleep-deprived, brain rotted state, I managed to leave out the start date of my food storage and preservation class - it starts on Thursday, August 23rd, ie, this Thursday. I still do have spaces, and as it is asynchronous and online, you don't have to be able to drive to my house ;-) (which is probably good, since it isn't very clean at the moment.) It will help all of us build up that reserve and deal with the summer's glut before the long winter (and high foot prices) to come! Email me for more details or to register at jewishfarmer@gmail.com. Cost of the class is $…
jrosenhouse | August 21, 2012During my recent trip to New York I found some time to visit the American Museum of Natural History. I wanted to see their spider exhibit, you see.
Of course, step one was finding the place. Seventy-eighth and Central Park West, as I recall. Ah, this looks right:
The exhibit itself was a bit smaller than I had expected. I went through it in forty-five minutes, and that was after reading every sign and watching every video. The place was also overrun with screaming, squealing little kids, so that marred things a bit for me as well. But it was still fascinating and I'm glad I went.…
gregladen | August 21, 2012Mimicry is when one species has changed over time via Natural Selection to look like another species. Three commonly defined forms of mimicry are:
Batesian mimicry, named after Henry Walter Bates, a 19th century Natural Historian, where one species is poisonous or otherwise dangerous to a predator, and another species takes evolutionary advantage of that by looking like it but not actually being poisonous;
Müllerian mimicry, named after Fritz Müller who worked at about the same time as Bates, where two species that are poisonous or otherwise bad for predators evolve to look like each other…
choofnagle | August 20, 2012Earnest reporting or catty criticism? Fareed Zakaria, according to the Times, is on the short list of Lynda Resnick's dinner parties, along with "Queen Noor of Jordan, George Soros, the financier, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California."
Is the Times' Christine Haughney critiquing Zakaria or not? Resnick is well known for being a marketing personality, one that makes broad, unsubstantiated health claims about "POM," her silly juice that you should not waste your money on. Nor should you ever buy anything from her former business, the Franklin Mint, or Fiji, her overpriced…
gregladen | August 18, 2012"World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet" by Michael Chorost will be the subject of discussion, with the author himself, on this week's Skeptically Speaking. The show airs live before an Internt Audience on Sunday, with the podcast coming out later in the week. Details and links will be found here.
lborkowski | August 17, 2012by Kim Krisberg
For years, Peter Rosenfeld was looking for an effective way to treat what doctors had diagnosed as severe and intractable migraines. He'd heard of medical marijuana, but thought it was a joke — that it was just a way for people to justify their marijuana use.
Then in 2000, the New Jersey resident enrolled in a California program studying the effects of medical marijuana. It was a blind study, so Rosenfeld didn't know whether he was one of the participants being given marijuana or not. It turns out he was. And it worked.
"Marijuana was the first effective treatment that I had…
choofnagle | August 16, 2012Have you heard of App.net? If not, check it out. The basic premise is to create a social media platform that is aligned with users' interest. And so, gasp, it costs money! The CEO, Dalton Caldwell, has a neat video explaining the inception of the project and the philosophy of the venture. Critics have said Caldwell's proposal is misunderstood, and that users are projecting their own ideals onto the platform. They have said that there are too many men on App.net. They have said that it's just another gated community, and segmenting away users is a bad thing.
I joined and still think it…
jrosenhouse | August 16, 2012My cat, Emily, tends to get a bit sulky when I leave her for long periods of time. So when I returned home from New York the other day, having been gone for a week, I was not surprised when she did not greet me at the door. Par for the course, I thought. She'll appear on her own in five to ten minutes.
When fifteen minutes went by and she still had not appeared I decided to go hunting. My first pass around the house was unsuccessful. Emily was not in any of her usual hiding places. Then I heard meowing. It was weird since it sounded like it was coming from directly underneath the floor…
esiegel | August 16, 2012"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning." -Albert Einstein
The Mars Curiosity Rover and the Mars Science Laboratory mission are so important that writing about the landing, going on the news, and writing about it again simply wasn't enough. So when the Portland Tribune called me and invited me to write an op-ed for them (my first!) on the topic, I just had to say yes.
The Curiosity rover is inside Gale Crater, where a liquid lake almost certainly once existed and billions of years of geological history are waiting to be explored…
illconsidered | August 15, 2012The Bottleneck Years
Chapter 0
Table of Contents
Chapter 2
by H.E. Taylor
Chapter 1
The Burning Lake, May 11, 2055
I don't know what Matt said to dad, but whatever it was, it didn't take long. I had a quick shower downstairs and changed clothes, thinking to head back to university. By the time I got back upstairs, Jon had arrived. He had been in the Arctic doing community outreach work for a mining company and now he was in the kitchen talking to dad. For a second I stood at the top of the stairs watching them.
Jon looked incredibly straight --- like an advertisement for the chamber of…
jrosenhouse | August 15, 2012One thing I have learned from more than a decade of teaching mathematics is that it is very easy to bamboozle people with numbers and equations. I do it all the time in my calculus classes, and that is when I am bending over backward to be as clear as I possibly can.
Creationists are especially unscrupulous about exploiting this fact about mathematics. At one creationist conference I attended, the speaker went on for close to an hour spouting the sheerest nonsense about information theory and probability. He received a standing ovation for his troubles. Another time, in a small,…
gregladen | August 14, 2012Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories will be officially released on August 28th, though you can of course get it now if you click on this secret link (or this secret link for the Kindle edition).
I just received a press release for the book, and thought I'd pass it on to you.
Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories will be released August 28th
“A chorus not of arguments and positions but of shared human lives . . . At turns smart, funny, and deeply touching.” – Dale McGowan, author of Parenting Beyond Belief
ST. PAUL, Minn. (8/14/2012) —…
sastyk | August 14, 2012It is hard to believe that summer is coming so rapidly to a close, and that the opportunity to put up for winter will pass so fast. So if you'd like help and guidance in doing so, I'll be running my food storage and preservation class starting Thursday, August and running for six weeks into October. The class is online and asynchronous and will cover everything from putting up the summer's glut to building up food storage and a reserve to help temper hard times. That's going to be particularly important this year with predictions of skyrocketing food prices due to drought and other…
sastyk | August 14, 2012On my lap, I’ve got a set of school books that date from the 1850s to the 1890s. They belonged to various of my father’s family – my great-uncle, George Hume, who died long before I was born and studied Eaton’s Common School Arithmetic in Amesbury, MA in the late 19th century, 20 miles from where I would go to school 100 years later. The majority belonged to my great-grandfather, Edgar White, who studied latin and algebra in Jonesboro, Maine, and later went on to teach school in Cheshire, Connecticut, using the same books. My grandfather’s books were mostly published in the 1860s, right…