Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist and science communicator. His research has covered North American prehistoric and historic archaeology and African archaeology and human ecology. He is an OpenSource and OpenAccess advocate. Greg's wife, Amanda, is a High School biology teacher, his daughter Julia is a world traveler and his son Huxley is 2.
A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin--author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement--made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.
"I…
Final notes on the election
This is it. This is the last time I'm talking about the election. I'm quite worn out and the Republican National Convention was the last straw. I am still feeling nauseated from it. So other than a few comments below, this is the LAST political commentary you will…
Read the following text. As you read it, try to empty your mind. When you encounter grammatical errors or jargon that is impossible to understand, do not try to translate what you are reading. Rather, become one with the obscurity. Read slowly, thoughtlessly, with emptiness of purpose, as…
It is raining cats and dogs in Florida, thanks to Tropical Storm Hanna. Ike remains a real threat. Josephine is a giant question mark. Details below the fold.
Hanna is a really large tropical storm that is eventually ... by tomorrow AM ... be more or less over land, where it will quickly move…
Former Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has been sentenced to four years in prison for corruption.
A Washington court found Abramoff guilty of trading expensive gifts, meals and sports trips in exchange for political favours.
bbc
In a possibly related matter ...
A review of campaign finance…
Ike is now a Category Four Hurricane, and quite a nice looking one at that.
Hurricanes are giant engines made of air that are driven by the transfer of heat from the sea surface to the top of the troposphere. The greater the difference in SST (sea surface temperature) and higher altitude…
Webster Cook is the young man attending a Florida University who was assaulted by Catholic Host Watchers because he did not chew the sacred cracker fast enough in church several weeks ago. This led to the incident that became internationally known as Crackergate. The internet itself became the…
Just so you know. Bob Dylan's original name was Bob Zimmerman and he is from the Iron Range region of Minnesota. He actually named (it is said) the busy business student neighborhood by the main campus here at The U: "Dinkytown" ... because he thought it was like a town, and it was dinky. The…
Have you ever visited a culture entirety different than your own (or even moderately different, like you're from New York and you visit Kentucky, or you're from Belgium and you visit Italy)? You will see things .... things people do differently, right away. Then you leave and you figure these…
How can Google be taken seriously if a) it runs it's own business on LAMP servers using mainly Python; b) develops a multi-threaded browser with a memory-conservative development API; c) call it all open source and d) make it available only on Windows?
Since Google Chrome is probably very good…
Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering…
GOP's Secret Internal Talking Points For Delegates About Palin Family are HERE. So if you are with the GOP and don't have these, better have a look. Otherwise, STAY AWAY THIS IS SECRET.
Futures Trading in Palin's Likely withdraw from the VEEP sweepstakes have started, details here.
But don't…
"It is true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could abort every black baby in this country..."
Republican Secretary of Education William Bennet, 1985 to 1988
Hat tip: Javier,who tells me that this video is "from the same guy who did the Expelled/astrology parody."
How do athletes in Olympic level endurance competition do it?
From the abstract of a paper -- How Do Humans Control Physiological Strain during Strenuous Endurance Exercise?:
To evaluate the physiologic strain during competitions ranging from 5-100 km, we evaluated heart rate (HR) records of…
Of course, I agree with Barack Obama as well as my colleagues on scienceblogs that people's families should be off limits in campaigns. Thus, discussion of Sarah Palin's unwed young daughter getting knocked up out of wedlock is totally irrelevant. As PZ puts it, we should instead focus on Sarah…
Natalie has sent me a link to a great photo. I'd love to put it up on the blog, but rights are reserved and I spent my allocated two minutes looking for a way to get permission and failed. So I'll just give you the link. Worth a look.
This gives a reasonable idea of what it is like to get tear gassed:
Why is this important? Remember this:
In my view, which may not be popular, when the Ohio National Guard shot dead four kids, at least one of which was, by the way, a passer-by unrelated to the demonstration, and all of whom…
Anarchists, clashing. Macy's, St. Paul Police, and Fox News suffered attacks by anarchists wearing clothing that did not match, facial scarves, and silly goggles. There were at least two different fronts to this attack, one along the designated protesters parade route, where the anarchists…
Tropical Depression Ike has just recently been upgraded by Dan Abrams of MSNBC to Hurricane Ike, but I think that may be premature. Gustav is still a hurricane (barely) and Hanna is a Hurricane, so if Ike does make the grade very soon, that would mean that there are three simultaneous hurricanes…
Well, yes, it is too early to say good by to Gustav. Gustav is still a hurricane and is still affecting the Louisiana coast. The worst that can happen may still be in the future for this storm, depending on the effects of rain over the next 72 hours. It does not seem as though any major levees…
Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming I've been putting off posting my review of this book until just the right moment. Perhaps that moment is now, with the juxtaposition of a serious storm ... hurricane Gustav ... arriving in the vicinity of New Orleans and the…
This is a rough sketch of the actual path of the eye of hurricane Katrina compared to the current projected path of the eye of hurricane Gustav.
Now, this is NOT Gustav's actual path. We don't know what the path is going to be. But this graphic allows for a few key points to be made.
First,…
A new species of giant clam has been discovered in the Red Sea.
Fossils suggest that, about 125,000 years ago, the species Tridacna costata accounted for more than 80% of the area's giant clams.
The species may now be critically endangered, researchers report in Current Biology journal.
BBC
