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gregladen | August 2, 2012I have been telling people for several months now that if you want to have an intelligent conversation about energy and especially the power grid, smart grids, electric cars, and electricity production you need to stop talking for a while and read my friend Maggie Koerth Baker's book, Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us. So just go do that.
If you want to cheat, and read only one chapter of the book, that is not as good but Maggie is making that easy for you. She is giving you are free chapter, HERE. I don't recommend that. I recommend reading the…
gregladen | August 1, 2012Seven Minutes of Terror is right around the corner. 5:24 UTC on August 6th. Nature has just come out with a short but nice overview including some very interesting graphics that I know you'll want to see. Click Here.
jdupuis | August 1, 2012
I Never Owned Any Music To Begin With
What Filesharing Studies Really Say – Conclusions and Links
IS STEALING MUSIC REALLY THE PROBLEM?
Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered.
What Happened to Silicon Values?
A call for disruptive innovation in science publishing
what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger
Two big mistakes in thinking about technology in education
What's Wrong With Almost Every Old Media-Inspired New Media Startup
What Is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in the Library?
Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?
So Shiny! Lest We Not Forget, iPads Require Purpose…
pronald | July 31, 2012PeerJ is an Open Access publisher of scholarly articles. We aim to drive the costs of publishing down, while improving the overall publishing experience, and providing authors with a publication venue suitable for the 21st Century. Our tag line is: "Your Peers, Your Science. Academic Publishing Is Evolving" and we are committed to improving the process of scholarly publishing.
We have two publications serving the Biological and Medical sciences: "PeerJ" (a peer-reviewed academic journal) and "PeerJ PrePrints" (an innovative ‘preprint server’). Authors pay for a lifetime membership, which…
gregladen | July 31, 2012What is probably the worst power outage India's history had has taken out electricity for fully half the country; This is apparently the "second outage" in two days. I'm not entirely sure how they count outages, however. I'm thinking it is more like a big giant outage that then got much smaller then got much (much much) bigger.
There have been all kinds of secondary effects; minors trapped in mines, people succumbing to fire in trains.
The reason for the outage is said to be incorrect levels of draw down from the grid by certain provinces. The ancient and out of date electric grids…
gregladen | July 30, 2012American Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney says they are. (Which is funny because he's Mexican, but whatever...)
Speaking of the accomplishments of Israeli Jews in the middle east, Romney said
"... I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things" including ... business climate, ... history of thriving in difficult circumstances and the "hand of providence." He said similar disparity exists between neighboring countries, like Mexico and the United States.
Romney had previously made disparaging remarks about their Olympics to the British and is now on his way to Poland where…
gregladen | July 30, 2012The Drought of 2012 rivals the Great Dust Bowl years of the 30s and is coming at a time of melting arctic ice, shrinking ice sheets, and extreme events across the planet, matching the projections of Climate models for global warming.
gregladen | July 29, 2012
Sarah Moglia and a toad at Camp Quest Michigan.
Camp Quest is a summer camp for "freethinking" children (or, more accurately, children of "freethinking" parents). Depending on where in the US you live, summer camps for children may be very secular, very religious, in betweeen, or more or less oriented towards science and technology vs. sports and so on and so forth. There is a lot of variation. Here in Minnestoa, the majority of camps (by count of camp and I'm guessing by count of "spots" at camp) are affiliated with a religion or have an explicitly religious mission. Having said that,…
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2012Last week my dad and his wife took us to Tärnskär, "Tern Island" again like three years ago. This time we looked closer at the lovely glacial abrasion features on the island's higher end.
gregladen | July 28, 2012It is my understanding that brucellosis, a disease that affects humans, bison, cattle, and elk, is transmitted from Bison to other Bison or to other animals such as cattle via contact with fresh afterbirth. This makes it quite possible for Bison with the disease to infect cattle, but only under very specific conditions, but those conditions do not include an adult Bison bull wandering around on ranch land. Nonetheless, "A bull bison was shot to death on Henry’s Lake Flat today, according to Buffalo Field Campaign volunteers and the Fremont County Sheriff’s Department."
The Island Park News…
gregladen | July 28, 2012Skeptically Speaking #175:
This week, it’s part one of a two-week focus on genetics. For our first installment, we’re looking at the ways that evolution might influence our modern lives, from obesity to overpopulation to heavy metal music. We spend the hour with Rob Brooks, Professor of Evolution and Director of the Evolution & Ecology Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. He’ll join us to talk about his book Sex, Genes & Rock 'n' Roll: How Evolution Has Shaped the Modern World. Email questions to live@skepticallyspeaking.com, or join us live in the chat!
More details…
gregladen | July 28, 2012Science Debate founder Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, David Gergen, and Michael Lubell spoke on Talk of the Nation Science Friday with Ira Flatow. The focus was on climate change.
In the face of a massive drought and climbing sea levels, are the presidential candidates going to talk about climate change? Why is science always at the bottom of the list of campaign issues that resonate with the public? Ira Flatow and guests discuss what scientists can do to shape the national dialogue in an election year.
Click Here to visit the…
gregladen | July 27, 2012It's over. The whole climate deinalism thing, that is. We can now get to the business of addressing climate change with well informed scientifically sound policy.
My friend Ronald Bailey reports:
Stress - this is a rumor. However, the rumor says that next week Richard Muller will release the latest Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature analysis of surface temperature data going back as far as the 18th century. Muller, once skeptical of the temperature records that showed considerable global warming in recent decades, set up BEST to reanalyze that data....
This has been cooking beneath the…
gregladen | July 27, 2012Especailly if it is actually frozen to the ice, I would imagine.
Check out this new book:
Winter-Over is a seriocomic, slightly obscene novel that tells the story of a year at Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole, including Cooper Gosling’s eponymous “winter-over” (very few people stay at the station over the polar winter due to harsh physical and psychological conditions). She is one of only a handful of women at the Pole, and must navigate the claustrophobic interior landscape of a remote station populated by a collection of people who don’t believe they belong anywhere else on earth—…
lborkowski | July 27, 2012by Kim Krisberg
In the fall of 2011, a new Texas statute took effect against employers who engage in wage theft, or failing to pay workers as much as they’re owed. The statewide statute put in place real consequences, such as jail time and hefty fines, for employers found guilty of stealing wages from workers. It was a big step forward in a state where wage theft has become as common as cowboy boots and pick-up trucks.
In El Paso, which sits on the western-most tip of Texas on the border with Juarez, Mexico, and is among the most populous cities in the nation, wage theft has become so rampant…
jdupuis | July 27, 2012Er, this one is pretty disturbing, perhaps not suitable for summer entertainment.
But still, sacred cows are always a target here in the Friday Fun space: The 5 Most Terrifying Ways Doctors Went Crazy on the Job.
And thankfully, I'm about mid-way between checkups so I'll have plenty of time to forget about his one...
#1. The Doctor Who Gave His Girlfriend a Corpse Hand
Everyone has done something a little embarrassing in the name of love. We've all stood outside someone's window with a guitar, or, you know, lovingly dismembered a corpse to offer as a tip for our stripper girlfriend. Wait,…
gregladen | July 26, 2012I think my "weblogue" series (here) is getting long enough (though it will get much longer) that it is worth listing out the posts thus far. These posts originally appeared on quichemorain.com or greg laden's blog; I've rewritten or updated them and put them in a special order.
Thump is about a recurring nightmare and its origins. There might be Nazis. I hate those guys.
My Journey Through Race and Racism is a white guy expressing his liberal guilt by showing how he isn't completely evil.
The Subtext is a Sandwich links the horrors of ordering a BLT at Subway with world starvation and…
gregladen | July 26, 2012UPDATE: The initial info I got clearly stated that this kind of magnet was being generally banned, but Nanodots, a brand name, and possibly some other brands are not being banned. "Buckyball" is the brand being banned. I wonder, can a company call themselves "buckyball" and trademark that name?
Original story:
I actually suggested this as a holiday gift NOT FOR KIDS a while back, so I want to tell you the latest news.
Neodymium magnets are ver powerful magnets that use the rare earth neodynium element. They are very powerful. The toys consist of little round balls that stick to each…
jrosenhouse | July 25, 2012I'm back in Virginia again, after another successful trip. This time I was mostly in Kentucky, visiting various friends.
It's a shame that nowadays Kentucky is known primarily for bourbon, horse racing and creationism, since it's really a very beautiful state. Among my ports of call was Morehead, KY to visit my friend Robin. She's in the math department at Morehead State University. She showed me around the area, including a stop at this lake, right on campus:
Not bad, but it was just a warm-up for what came next. Robin took me out to Lockegee Rock, in the Daniel Boone National…
sastyk | July 25, 2012M. is due with her baby any minute now, so at some point there may be a hiatus, but for now, she's got a lot to say about what her family is thinking about. You can read her bio here.
This week I did some very hard work for this class. I have to admit, it wasn't anything exactly on the homework, but there is a hard decision my family needs to make and this class has allowed me to approach it from a new angle and I think opened up the discussion more between me and my husband. Basically, we have to decide whether to stay in Maryland, where we have a lot of friends, a pleasant house and…