j7uy5 | July 9, 2006
One of our cats is called Microsoft; another is called Patches.
I chuckle about that, sometimes.
Above is a picture of Patches, transformed by a java applet that can be
found here.
It appears that the original intent of the program was to
transform human faces to resemble those found among persons of
different ethnicities. However, they added some artistic
transformations as well. One option is to view a face as is
might have been portrayed by
href="http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/modigliani/">Modigliani.
HT:
href="http://climactericclambake.blogspot.com/2006/07/i-am…
j7uy5 | July 8, 2006
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-6232036444150437471"
allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" quality="best"
bgcolor="#ffffff" scale="noScale" salign="TL"
flashvars="playerMode=embedded" align="center">
href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6232036444150437471&q=How+To+Be+Popular"
onclick="setMyPlaylist()">
src="http://video.google.com/ThumbnailServer?app=vss&contentid=c79158189d625cc1&second=115&itag=w160&sigh=pcmnwty6Oc74LyNUiO-4ODNeT2k"
title="Are You Popular?" alt="" align="left"
border="0"…
j7uy5 | July 8, 2006I was happy to see this article in the New York Times:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/06/business/worldbusiness/06equator.html?ex=1309838400&en=372128defc2d33d5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">More
Lenders Join in Pledge to Safeguard Environment
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
Published: July 6, 2006
Three years ago, 10 financial institutions — with Citigroup
the only United States company on the list — announced that
they would abide by the Equator Principles, a set of standards intended
to ensure that the large projects they financed did not have a harmful…
j7uy5 | July 8, 2006I am having a bit of trouble publishing posts. So it may be a couple of days before substantive posting resumes.
j7uy5 | July 8, 2006Earlier, I wrote a post entitled
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/06/selective_moral_outrage.php#more">Selective
Moral Outrage, in that post, I discussed the fact
that some site, particularly conservative sites, picked on the New York
Times for reporting on the monitoring of international money transfers.
It wan't just two-bit pundits who got on this bandwagon.
href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,201549,00.html">Senator
Bunning openly accused the NYT of treason.
Now, we see a similar situation, but this time,
everyone is curiously silent.
I wonder if this…
j7uy5 | July 7, 2006Usability Tips: How to read blogs more efficiently
I can tell that people are clicking on my "add to Bloglines" button,
but few are actually completing the process. I can only
surmise that people are clicking on it in order to find out what it
does. But if you click on it and you do not already have a
Bloglines account, the page you go to might not be too inviting.
I've decided to write this explainer to help.
I think that more people will get involved in reading and writing
blogs, if someone takes the time to explain a few things that make it
easier, and more fun.
Continue reading…
j7uy5 | July 7, 2006
This is the Spiral Galaxy NGC 2403 from Subaru, as noted on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.
j7uy5 | July 6, 2006There has been some blogosphere and mediasphere activity regarding the
following article (
href="http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/160/7/739">Age
at Drinking Onset and Alcohol Dependence) in Archives of
Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The New York
Times picked it up (
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/health/04teen.html?ex=1309665600&en=64fcb20497217e6c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">permalink),
and Jake
href="http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/07/on_the_merits_of_postponing_yo.php#more">posted
about it at Pure Pedantry.
There'…
j7uy5 | July 6, 2006Is
href="http://skepticrant.blogspot.com/2006/07/thirsty-for-truth-try-skeptic-cola.html">up
at Skeptic Rant. Really cool graphics this time.
Took a lot of work. Clever. Plus, it
seems that everybody is reading it.
j7uy5 | July 5, 2006What do the following have in common: heliocentrism, evolution,
Freudian psychology, and neuroscience? And what does this
have to
do with the controversy about whether nonhuman creatures have emotions?
Pure Pedantry
href="http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/06/post_7.php">Do
mice have empathy?
Small Gray Matters
href="http://www.smallgraymatters.com/2006/07/02/the-science-of-empathy-sociology-of-affective-neuroscience/">The
science of empathy & sociology of affective neuroscience
The authors of those blog posts engage in informed speculation about
the existence of…
j7uy5 | July 5, 2006What part of the 50 US States is in the Eastern Hemisphere?
Hint: it was taken over by the Japanese in World War II.
Answer below the fold...
Answer:
href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3">Attu
Island, Alaska.
j7uy5 | July 4, 2006
It's funny how these things work out sometimes. I was reading
an article on the Christian Science Monitor website, about simmering
controversies regarding the religious views of our founding fathers (in
the USA). As I was reading it, it occurred to me that it
might be a good topic for a Skeptic's Circle post. Yesterday,
I had seen a
href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/07/last_call_for_submissions_to_t_1.php">call
for papers posted on Orac's site. So I went there
to find out who is hosting this time, and saw that Orac had already
posted on the same topic that I was…
j7uy5 | July 4, 2006I want to get back to reply to this comment:
Comments
The
Bush administration has not been against science in any conceivable
way. I hate to see people use a lie to push a political cause. I would
ask all those concerned with the advancement of science to stay true to
the calling of using empirically backed reason to further our
understanding of the universe. We should also be more prudent in how we
as scientists enter public discourse. Many scientists today have
resorted to crying wolf instead of laying out clearly what we know and
what we don't. The global warming
debate is one area where…
j7uy5 | July 2, 2006It was pointed out to me after I put up the FUD post, that Steven
Clemons (of the Washington Note) recently posted an
href="http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001502.php">excellent
example of the use of fear-mongering:
June 25, 2006
NATIONAL SECURITY FOR FAMILIES: IT'S
FOR KIDS TOO -- ESPECIALLY KIDS!!
Visit www.FamilySecurityMatters.org
-- a site seemingly devoted to convincing a large cross-section of
Americans that they must fear terrorism -- really fear it, now --
tomorrow -- and in the many years to come. It's high-fear exploitation
of the worst kind candy-coated with…
j7uy5 | July 2, 2006A long time ago,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/about.php">Grrlscientist
href="http://girlscientist.blogspot.com/2005/06/le-scholar-oblige-another-book-meme.html">tagged
me with a meme. So long ago, in fact, that
ScienceBlogs did not even exist. So it may as well have been
in a galaxy far, far, away.
It was a book meme. There were questions like "how many books
do you own." I finished counting several weeks later, and
started to write it out. Then the file was lost in an
unfortunate incident that we do not need to discuss here. I
never got back to…
j7uy5 | July 1, 2006{I actually started writing this weeks ago, got bogged down and
distracted, and never finished it. Now, I have decided to
just go ahead and finish it up, even though I am not entirely happy
with it. Hey, I am not getting paid for this, so so what if
it is not a polished piece of work.}
I just finished reading
rel="tag" href="http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/about.php">Chris
Mooney's column in Seed Magazine,
href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/06/as_science_goes_so_goes_the_na.php?utm_source=SB-rightcol&utm_medium=linklist&utm_campaign=internal%2Blinkshare">As…
j7uy5 | July 1, 2006For various reasons, I am now mostly using a computer in the living
room, rather than the study. That is fine, but it is far from
the
cable modem. That would be no problem, having a wireless card
installed. But the card is a Linksys card that uses a
Broadcom
chip. There is no Linux driver. I am not clever
enough to
get the Windows driver to work is Linux using ndiswrapper. I
did
get to the point where the OS could see the card, but I could not
actually get the card to work. I'm pretty sure that I was
getting
hung up on configuring the encryption. I thought briefly
about
using it…
j7uy5 | June 30, 2006There's a
href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/Migraines/tb/3663">brief
article on Medpage Today, about a small study that suggests
that improving sleep can improve the course of a particular type of
headache. (A nicety to the article is that it provides 0.25
CME's.)
They write specifically about
href="http://www.achenet.org/articles/purdy.php" rel="tag">transformed
migraine, which is a kind of headache that occurs
daily, with the daily headaches developing after a
person has had some episodic migraines.
...The study included 43 women with transformed
migraine treated at…
j7uy5 | June 30, 2006This is a response to this week's Ask-A-ScienceBlogger question.
I must say, it took a while to come up with a reasonable
answer. I finally settled on environmental policy.
The
rel="tag">Environmental Protection Agency
href="http://www.epa.gov/history/org/origins/first.htm">was
established in 1970, mostly in response to popular concern
about the damage that was accumulating in the environment as a result
of industrial activity. See the EPA page,
href="http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/epa/15b.htm">Why EPA
Was Established, for details.
There are two reasons for choosing…