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gregladen | July 18, 2012This one is a little different. It was an air to air missile, and five guys were thrilled to stand underneath it when it went off several thousand feed above them:
More on this film here.
gregladen | July 18, 2012I just got a copy of The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction. I read one review of it a while back which was quite positive, suggesting that the book was both really useful and really not boring. Here's the description from the publisher:
You've experienced the shiny, point-and-click surface of your Linux computer—now dive below and explore its depths with the power of the command line.
The Linux Command Line by William Shotts. No Starch Press. Image from the publisher.
The Linux Command Line takes you from your very first terminal keystrokes to writing full programs in Bash,…
gregladen | July 18, 2012The Olympics are old. The first ancient Greek Olympic game may have been held in 776 BC in the Greek city of Olympia. Almost 1,200 years later, when Greece was being Christianized, Theodosius I decided that the Olympics would not be played any more, so the last games of the original series was probably in 394 AD. These games had their own origin myth, and according to that myth, the first event was a race between two gods.
Apparently, the first actual (as in non-mythical) game was a race among women to decide who would be the Priestess for the goddess Hera. Later, a race was added for men…
gregladen | July 17, 2012Ten questions make up this AP style quiz provided by the Washington Post.
Click here.
gregladen | July 17, 2012Derek Muller is the Creative Director of Veritasium, a science video blog with 90 films based off of interviews with Australians about issues such as global warming, seasons and the scale of the universe.
gregladen | July 17, 2012Why can’t a baby bird just hatch out of the egg and fly away, or at least, be able to fly a little and not require weeks of constant feeding and attention? I suspect they CAN do this but just refuse to in order to steal parental investment, which is, after all, a very valuable resources. Baby turtles and crocodiles are born as miniature versions of adults. Some birds do this a little. Baby ducks and chickens s are the mensches of the bird world; they don’t spend all that time sitting there uselessly and constantly demanding attention. Sure, turtles and crocs are tiny and vulnerable and most…
gregladen | July 16, 2012This is baby bird week on 10,000 Birds. From the intro post:
Somehow it seemed fitting that after our last theme week – Bird Love Week – that we should spend a full seven days examining what could be the results of that theme. It’s Baby Bird Week on 10,000 Birds and the adorable, fuzzy-wuzzy, itsy-bitsy, baby birdies will be everywhere! Can you handle the cuteness?
If you go to the bottom of that post, you'll see a current listing of posts...as of this writing there are four beyond the intro...so you can explore them all. My contribution will be up tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.
gregladen | July 16, 2012Louisiana is preparing to spend over $11 million to send 1,365 students to 20 private schools that teach creationism instead of science as part of Governor Bobby Jindal’s new voucher program. It is time to halt the implementation of this creationist voucher program.
It is increasingly clear that one of Governor Jindal’s primary education goals is the teaching of creationism. He supported, signed, and defended the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), Louisiana’s 2008 stealth creationism law, which allows teachers to sneak creationism into public school science classrooms by using…
gregladen | July 15, 2012Google and Apple, you ruined my daughter's birthday!
Well, it wasn't that bad, but it could have been. Anyway, this is a warning to anyone who uses Apple products of any kind and who uses gmail as their main mail.
Google has started putting email from Apple directly into the spam folder. On her birthday, I sent Julia an iTunes gift card. She is overseas, and this is something she can use there. It never arrived. I checked my Apple account and apparently it had been sent, but I never received the usual email telling me I had been charged for it.
Suddenly, it dawned on me. Google and…
gregladen | July 15, 2012There are all kinds of reasons why it does not matter, apparently, that the US Athletes participating in this summer's Olympics in London will be wearing uniforms made in China. These reasons are things like "Everything is made in China" and "They don't make clothing in America anyway" and so on and so forth. But there are also reasons that it matters and that team should, in fact, be wearing uniforms made in US shops. Union shops.
Did you know that when a political party runs a candidate or pushes an issue, and they make t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other artifacts of rhetoric, they get…
gregladen | July 15, 2012Here's a pretty good video discussing the Higgs Boson and stuff. It turns out you can't have anti-gravity. Oh well. Hat tip Nathan.
gregladen | July 14, 2012Yesterday Huxley and I were out on the porch checking out the incoming thunderheads. Then we heard thunder. Huxley immediately ran over to the door and pulled it shut.
"We don't want thunder going in the house."
Good idea. Who knows what it would do in there.
Anyway, everybody knows that when you see lightning, the thunder takes a while to get to your ears because lightning is percieved by us first from its light which travels at...the speed of light!...while lightning is percieved by us later from the sound it makes which travels at...the speed of sound! The latter is much much slower…
gregladen | July 13, 2012Are you a Secular Woman? I am. Joined a couple of weeks ago. Kimm Rippere is the president of Secular Woman, and she'll be the guest on Atheist Talk Radio on Sunday Morning. Live, so you can call in. All the details are HERE.
gregladen | July 13, 2012Alan Cassels wrote Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease, which is all:
Why wouldn't you want to be screened to see if you're at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right?
Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears. He writes that promoters of screening overpromise on its benefits and downplay its harms, which can range…
gregladen | July 13, 2012Brian Clegg, author of A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable, was the guest on Skeptically Speaking last Sunday. I'm sorry I missed it, but I was recovering from several days hanging out with the very host of that show mostly working and hardly sleeping.
It will be available for download some time today (should be up by now).
Click here to get to the download link: #172 A Brief History of Infinity
sastyk | July 13, 2012There's a fascinating article using Zillow analysis to figure out the value of food gardens to residential housing. This isn't news to a lot of us, but it is nice to see the numbers quantified:
Minor Kitchen Remodel. Cost: $14,917 Return on resale: $14,645 Percentage Return: -1.8%
Major Bathroom Remodel. Cost: $26,060 Return on resale: $24,264 Percentage return: -6.9%
Here’s how a garden stacks up:
Average cost of a garden per year (what people spend today): - $70
Average value of a garden per year (in produce): + $600
Average value of a garden per year: + $530
So, the…
lborkowski | July 13, 2012by Kim Krisberg
Hunger in America can be hard to see. It doesn't look like the image of hunger we usually see on our TVs: the wrenching impoverishment and emaciation. Talking about American hunger is hard because, well, there's food all around us. Everywhere you look, there's food — people eating food, people selling food, people advertising food, people wasting food, people dying of eating too much food. The obesity epidemic alone is getting so big that it's slowly swallowing the health care system in billions of dollars of care.
We have a food problem.
But food cost money. So for some…
jdupuis | July 13, 2012This one is from the "kids today" file: Dubstep is "extra-terrestrial communication" NASA scientists reveal
My musical tastes are pretty catholic, but I gotta admit i don't get electronic music.
NASA today revealed that interstellar communications from an alien lifeform have been mistakenly interpreted as music, spawning a new sub-genre known as ‘Dubstep’.
*snip*
But popular music experts point out that it’s not the first time something has been wrongly interpreted as music to critical acclaim. A recording of an owl trapped in a wind chime shop recently topped the charts after being…
gregladen | July 12, 2012Just thought you'd like to know: Dropbox has doubled the amount of storage you get when you get Dropbox. I wonder if I can now fit my photographs on dropbox without resizing and compressing them first?
Probably. But the videos: no way. Damn you, Huxley, for being so cute!
gregladen | July 12, 2012Using a base ten numbering system. In another numbering system, it is a different numeral.