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pharyngula | August 30, 2015NASA has put out a call for novel ideas in space exploration, which I think is an excellent way to do science. More creativity!
But this feels like they're just pandering to me (I know, they're not): building robotic squid to explore the oceans of Europa? What's not to love about that idea?
pharyngula | August 30, 2015I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
--Oliver Sacks
The man himself has died.
gregladen | August 27, 2015We're gonna run out of food. When, why (not what you think), can we put it off, and if so, how? And GMOs, what about them?
I interviewed food supply expert Emily Cassidy on Atheist Talk Radio, Mike Huabrich hosting. You can CLICK HERE and listen to the interview. Additional background and some more links, including Emily's Ted Talk, here.
gregladen | August 25, 2015This Sunday, August 30th, at 9:00 AM, I'll be on the radio with John Abraham, climate scientist. This will be an edition of Minnesota Atheist Talk Radio hosted by Mike Haubrich.
The discussion of climate change will be interesting and important and you should listen live or listen to the podcast.
But this is a special week for another reason. Mike Haubrich, host of this Sunday's show (and many other shows on Minnesota Atheist Talk) will be leaving the Twin Cities in just a few days, to live in a different part of the country. It is up to him to tell you his story if he wants to. I'll…
gregladen | August 25, 2015The terrorists have defeated the railroads, and by extension, the people. Well, not totally defeated, but they won a small but important battle.
We have a problem with the wholesale removal of petroleum from the Bakken oil fields, and the shipping of that relatively dangerous liquid mainly to the east coast on trains, with hundreds of tanker cars rolling down a small selection of tracks every day. I see them all the time as they go through my neighborhood. These trains derail now and then, and sometimes those derailments are pretty messy, life threatening, and even fatal.
There has been…
gregladen | August 24, 2015This is a repost from here. John is a friend and a great guy and I hope you can do as he asks. Thanks.
Please help Tessa and Marlowe
This is a plea to save my ex from a financial death spiral. The short, short, short version is that she needs about $3500 by the end of next week or she loses both her car and her apartment.
Tessa lost her job soon after the crash in 2008 and hasn't had a permanent job since then. For a while, we tried to build a home business around soaps, lotions, and scents that she made, but that never did more than break even. She's an experienced technical writer and…
jrosenhouse | August 20, 2015I'm in the mood for something light-hearted today, so here's a YouTube clip for you:
It's from the Firing Line debate in 1997 about evolution and creationism. Representing darkness and obscurantism were William F. Buckley, Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and David Berlinski. Sunshine and goodness were represented by Barry Lynn, Eugenie Scott, Michael Ruse, and Kenneth Miller.
Back in 1997 I had not yet developed an interest in evolution and creationism, so I paid no attention to this debate at the time. Years later I read a transcript, but that's never the same as seeing it live. So,…
gregladen | August 20, 2015The academic world and its detractors are all a-tizzy about this recent news reported here:
Springer, a major science and medical publisher, recently announced the retraction of 64 articles from 10 of its journals. The articles were retracted after editors found the authors had faked the peer-review process using phony e-mail addresses.
The article goes on to say that science has been truly sullied by this event, and anti-science voices are claiming that this is the end of the peer reviewed system, proving it is corrupt. The original Springer statement is here.
See this post at Retraction…
jrosenhouse | August 19, 2015I see that Barry Arrington is blogging up a storm lately over at Uncommon Descent. It's all his usual silliness--bad arguments coupled with denunciations of anyone who dares disagree with him--but this post was eyebrow-raising even for him.
The set-up is this: Arrington is in the habit of making big bold claims about what is possible and what is not. Sometimes his readers challenge him to back up those claims. These challenges are met with insults and condemnations.
In the present instance the claim is that the brain cannot be a fully naturalistic organ because mere chemicals cannot be the…
jrosenhouse | August 18, 2015Planned Parenthood heroically provides medical services to a great many women who otherwise would receive little or no health care at all. This can be thankless and even dangerous work, because there are fanatics out there who do not like what they do. They perform abortions, you see, though this is a tiny fraction of their work. Some people think abortion should be illegal, arguing, preposterously in my view, that a fertilized egg is already the moral equivalent of a human being.
Some of the fanatics are well-funded and well-organized, and they devote considerable effort to “exposing”…
lborkowski | August 15, 2015Beginning on Labor Day 2012, we have published a yearbook on U.S. occupational health and safety. Here are the links to each year's report:
Yearbook 2017
Yearbook 2016
Yearbook 2015
Yearbook 2014
Yearbook 2013
Yearbook 2012
jrosenhouse | August 13, 2015It used to be a major American art form for white actors to cover themselves in make-up and pretend to be black. This persisted for roughly a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. What a golden age for comedy that must have been!
As recently as the 1970s we had shows like Three's Company, that was in large part centered around some very hoary stereotypes of homosexuals. Those were good times. Too bad we have all those politically correct buzzkills nowadays to protest that real gay people rarely act the way they were portrayed on that show.
Lately there's…
jrosenhouse | August 12, 2015I'm finally home again after all my recent travels. Back to back math conferences is fun, but also a bit stressful and tiring. While I was away, my extended family welcomed two new additions:
Meet William and Charlotte. Charlotte is the one with the white detailing. My brother and sister-in-law just adopted them from a local shelter. Actually, that picture looks a bit like a two-headed cat, so here's another one:
Looks like they've taken over the really important room.
The word is that William and Charlotte have settled in quickly to their new home and are getting along fine…
pharyngula | August 5, 2015Here's a cool kickstarter: it's for a real chemistry set, like the ones we had in old days. Go watch the video, and you'll see that it actually lets you set things on fire!
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2015
Jrette wandering around watching TV on the iPad, overturning and breaking things in the kitchen. *sigh*
Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
Jrette stole my zombie novel -- Carey's 2014 Girl With All The Gifts -- and proclaimed it to be the best book she's read in ages. Now I am bookless.
Mistakenly read two global catastrophe novels in a row. Now everything around looks temporary.
Jrette is twelve today! I asked her if she doesn't find the Vampire Diaries scary. "I would, only with a dad who's a scientist, I'm not afraid of supernatural things."
Pittentian in Perthshire is a fine…
jrosenhouse | July 29, 2015I'm writing this from my New Jersey office, which is to say that I am visiting the 'rents. But it's a very short visit. In fact, I'm mostly just using them for their garage. I'm stashing my car there for a few days while I go galavanting around to various math conferences, with a little vacation thrown in for good measure.
Tomorrow I'll be taking a train up to New York City. (Though it looks like riding NJ Transit is a bit risky these days.) A few days of vacation come first. Figure I'll catch a few shows, eat some good food (I might just have to stop by Katz's Deli at some point),…
jdupuis | July 24, 2015Gabriella Coleman's Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous is largely a laudatory history of the Anonymous hacker activist movement with some anthropological and political analysis. Whitney Phillips' This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture on the other hand, is much more geared towards an analytical and philosophical analysis of past and present (and even future) of how online trolling relates to contemporary culture.
Neither book is perfect, and both tend to falter where it comes to how closely…
jrosenhouse | July 21, 2015This is perfect:
The latest polls are out, and just as I predicted, I'm leading the Republican presidential race by a wide margin. You might be wondering how that could be. After all, it's hardly been a month since I entered the field and I've already alienated America’s largest immigrant population, seen dozens of my high-profile business deals implode one after the other, and publicly insulted a national hero’s military service, all while not offering a single viable policy idea. But none of that matters at all, and my candidacy continues to surge forward, because none of you—not a single…
jrosenhouse | July 20, 2015So, has anything been happening lately?
Well, the Supreme Court got a big one right. Marriage equality is now the law of the land, which is a very good thing. There will be pockets of resistance for a while to come, but mostly this news has been met with the yawn it deserves. Of course gay people should have their marriages recognized by the state. Most people have figured that out by now. You can find the text of the decision and the dissents here.
The legal argument seems pretty straightforward to me. Writing at The New Republic, Brian Beutler spells it out:
As both a moral and…