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gregladen | May 8, 2012Next week, Amanda and I will be Dining in the Dark. It has been determined that I will be wearing a suit.
If you are in the Twin Cities, why don't you join us! Click Here to find out what it is all about.
I just checked and there are a few tickets left. Better hurry!
gregladen | May 8, 2012Starting now, I will be writing blog post now and then at Minnesota Progressive Project. I'll be focusing on the intersection of science and politics, the politics of science, and now and then I'l rant wildly about something random.
My inaugural post is HERE. It is about the possibility of a Science Debate in Minnesota and consists mainly of an interview with Shawn Otto.
gregladen | May 8, 2012... for the idiot from Madison Wisconsin who has been commenting on this site on a very regular basis for a long time and has recently taken to writing a comment several times a day, using different names, and quite often, using YOUR names. His regular use of the names of regular commenters on this site is very annoying and destructive, the kind of thing only someone with his mental illness/political orientation would do.
The way commenting is handled on this site, Scienceblogs.com, makes it almost impossible for me to stop him from doing this. All I can do is delete the comments as I…
gregladen | May 8, 2012The Heartland Institute is tonight's tool time for putting out insane ads attacking the theory of climate change. The Heartland Institute is a deep pocketed conservative organization that counts Koch industries, Phillip Morris and Microsoft among its well-heeled donors. The Institute is funding a school curriculum to question the theory that carbon emissions have caused global warming and recently funded billboards in Chicago highlighting the fact that a handful of unhinged individuals believe in the theory. The billboards read "I still believe in global warming. Do you?"
gregladen | May 8, 2012The author of the historically transformative and widely loved book "Where the Wild Things Are" had died. He was 83.
Standing with a character from his book Where the Wild Things Are, author and illustrator Maurice Sendak speaks with the media Jan. 11, 2002, at the Children's Museum of Manhattan in New York City. Sendak died in Danbury, Conn., on Tuesday. He was 83. Story from NPR, photo from Spencer Platt/Getty
gregladen | May 7, 2012This was just posted on State Farm's facebook page:
State Farm is ending its association with the Heartland Institute. This is because of a recent billboard campaign launched by the Institute.
That was a result of this: An Open Letter to State Farm about Climate Denial
Bwahahahaha...
Go "like" it!!!! on Facebook!
gregladen | May 7, 2012Shawn Otto, author of Fool me Twice, will be on Science Friday this week talking about Science Debate with Ira Flatow and Vern Ehlers.
Fri 1-2 CT, 2-3 ET
gregladen | May 7, 2012A more sophisticated form of underwear bomb has been developed, but the CIA has thwarted an attempt to deploy it to blow up a US based plane.
The plot involved an upgrade of the underwear bomb that failed to detonate aboard a jetliner over Detroit on Dec. 25, 2009. [it has] a more refined detonation system...
... the device did not contain metal, meaning it probably could have passed through an airport metal detector.
But it was not clear whether new body scanners used in many airports would have detected it.
The bomber, who was with an al_Qaida affiliate based in Yemen, had not yet…
gregladen | May 7, 2012Discussed: The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality, which I've got my copy of and am now reading, and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion which I'm probably never going to get to.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
You see the game the guy on the "left" is playing? Psychologists....
gregladen | May 6, 2012Tom Levenson will be on Skeptically Speaking later today, talking about his book Newton and the Counterfeiter.
gregladen | May 6, 2012We had a hella storm come through the Twin Cities last night. Some hail, some wind, but piles of lightning. And then this happened in Dinkytown: Lightning struck a high power line, which fell across a couple of parked cars and stayed "live." The live line heated up the pavement on the street enough that it caused a buried gas line to explode.
I'm pretty sure there are details we don't know yet. Perhaps there was already a leak and the gas that caught on fire was already out of the pipe. Perhaps the lightning grounded through the gas line and that is what sparked the fire. Either way it…
gregladen | May 4, 2012Thank you to all the bloggers and others who jumped immediately on the Heartland Institute for putting up horribly offensive billboards equating scientists with the scientist/mathematician killing terrorist Unibomber. I have heard unofficially that Heartland will be taking down those billboards.
We'll see.
more details:
4 p.m. update: Heartland Institute President and CEO Joe Bast has issued the following statement:
We will stop running [the billboard] at 4:00 p.m. CST today. (It's a digital billboard, so a simple phone call is all it takes.)
The Heartland Institute knew this was a risk…
gregladen | May 4, 2012.... comparing holocaust survivors to Hitler? Hmong refugees to Pol Pot? Well, maybe not exactly but there is a structural similarity.
People at the Heartland Institute have very little to do with science and very little experience in that area of academics. Otherwise they would remember the Unibomber days, when everyone was worried about the packages they were receiving in the mail, but especially those in mathematics. Now, the Heartland Institute has a billboard campaign with a picture of the Unibomber on it, making the claim that only very fringe people, such as the Unibomber, still "…
gregladen | May 3, 2012Have a look at this story.
The first blind patients to be fitted with electronic eye implants in a UK clinical trial have regained "useful vision" only weeks after surgery....
The implants are basically little camera chips that get hooked up to the neural circuitry in the eye. The results are not normal human developed vision, but the patients can see stuff.
Having gotten your attention with that remarkable story, let me remind you of this:
Dining In The Dark: Hope for Retinal Disease
Thank you very much.
gregladen | May 3, 2012These are two of a series of videos made by faculty and students at various Twin Cities area schools as part of a contest to get a local furniture store to help them improve their teacher's lounge. These are my two favorite videos of the bunch.
Nellie Stone Johnson Community School, in North Minneapolis, an area you will know from this blog because of the tornado that went through there about a year ago:
Edison High School, in Nordeast, Minneapolis, MN, which is the part of the Twin Cities where much of Amanda's family originally comes from (some still live there):
Go here and "like" a…
gregladen | May 2, 2012Martha and I were walking down the street...Downer Street, if I recall correctly...heading north from the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. We were close to the Kinko's, which was on the west side of the north-south trending street, and about to cross. We were in fact off the curb and checking for traffic. A car was heading to the north, away from us. Since we were walking north and crossing the street diagonally, we were looking at the car from behind, but I could see that the light blue sedan was driven by a middle-aged woman with curly hair and largish glasses.…
