tqa | July 18, 2006OK, I've been behind the times lately. I've got to admit it. I haven't had the time to check the news as much as usual. I haven't been able to keep up with the blogs. I have virtually no idea what's been going on in the world lately, except for a vague sense that the entire Middle East is just a tad less stable than usual.
So when I sat down for a couple of minutes tonight to watch the Daily Show, I have to admit that I thought Stewart had finally gone over the edge. It's good to be funny, after all, but there have to be limits. Accusing the President of the type of thing that could be…
tqa | July 16, 2006Ever have an almost perfect day?
I'm not talking about a perfect day - there are lots of those. I'm not talking about the kind of day where everything was fantastic, right up until cousin Jimmy puked in the punchbowl - those happen with alarming regularity. The kind of day I'm talking about is the day where everything works beautifully, and everyone has a fantastic time, and the whole thing would be absolutely perfect, except for some little nagging detail in the background, sitting not quite entirely out of sight.
That was yesterday.
Our little clan headed out to Bellows Air Force Base for…
tqa | July 10, 2006A few of you might have noticed a drop-off in posting activity over the last week or so. My wife is preparing to deploy to Iraq - we've got a couple of weeks left before she heads out. She took some leave, so we were enjoying some family time. Posting will continue to be a bit erratic for the next couple of weeks, until she deploys.
tqa | July 8, 2006Over at The Island of Doubt, James Hrynyshyn has a brief post up about this Guardian article. The article in the Guardian discusses a large rockfall that is expected to happen in the next few days - about two million cubic meters of Mt. Eiger in the Swiss Alps are expected to take a short, quick trip down. The Guardian reports that a scientist monitoring the situation calls it an indirect result of global warming. James correctly notes that the article provides no explanation of why this might be the case, so I thought I would.
Increased erosion rates probably aren't the first thing that…
tqa | July 5, 2006I'm not the biggest Hillary Clinton fan on the planet, but this time she almost got it right. In a statement yesterday, Clinton said that while she hopes that Joe Lieberman wins his senate primary in August (OK, that part she didn't get right), she will ultimately support whoever does win the primary during the general election.
For those of you who haven't been following internal Democratic politics closely, here's a quick overview of the situation, and why Clinton's comment is both right and important - and why this situation proves that the party might just be hopelessly lost.
For the…
tqa | July 3, 2006
The ScienceBlogs Bloggers' Challenge was wildly successful, raising well over 30,000 dollars in 15 days to fund education projects at individual schools. The challenge here at The Questionable Authority was also successful, bringing in a bit over $650.00, meeting the goal that I set.
Thanks to all of the donors to both my own little contribution and to the broader challenge.
tqa | June 29, 2006Religion's been on my mind a lot lately. It's come up in a number of blog posts and articles I've read recently, and there have been some acrimonious debates on the topic at Panda's Thumb and elsewhere. All this thinking about religious issues has sparked a crisis of belief for me. That's nothing new, really. It happens so often that I've got my own mug down at the crisis center. I've actualy become almost comfortable with the uncertainty.
I mention this because it might explain why, after reading this post at The Island of Doubt, I went and read Barack Obama's speech at the Call to Renewal…
tqa | June 28, 2006The rise of factory farming over the last half-century has resulted in a crisis for family farms. Factory farming benefits from the economy of scale, producing much, much more of whatever their product is - milk, beef, pork, whatever - at costs per unit that are far lower than a family farm can achieve. This allows the factory farms to sell their products cheaper than the family farmer can, driving the small farms out of business.
Over the past decade or two, the decline of the family farm has received a fair amount of attention, mostly focused on the people who are affected, but there's…
tqa | June 27, 2006It's taken me a while to take a swing at this particular Ask A ScienceBlogger question, mostly because I just don't know the answer.
It's definitely true that some science teachers are better than others. The best teacher I had in high school was my physics teacher. The worst teacher I've ever had was for biochem. Thinking about it, I can figure out what made the bad teacher bad, but I'm having a much harder time figuring out what makes a good teacher good. If I had to guess, I'd say that the traits tha make a good science teacher are probably the same traits that make a good teacher in any…
tqa | June 27, 2006I've been rather lax in promoting my Donors Choose challenge, and it's time to change that. The initial three challenges I picked have all been funded, mostly by people not involved in my challenge. That meant that I hadn't come close to fulfilling my goal, but didn't have any projects left on my list for people to donate to. I just went back to the Donors Choose site, and added three more projects to my challenge.
If you haven't already done so, I'd like to really encourage you to donate - if not to my challenge, then to one of the other challenges that ScienceBloggers have running right…
tqa | June 26, 2006Here's a nice bit of breaking news from the conservation biology front: The birth of two Whooping Crane chicks in Wisconsin. (Scroll down this page at Operation Migration's site to the June 23rd entry for pictures of the birds.)
This is absolutely tremendous news. These birds are part of the reintroduced Eastern Migratory Population, and these births mark the first time in over a century that Whooping Crane chicks have hatched in the wild in the Eastern US. There's still a long way to go, though. The chicks have a couple of months to go before they're ready to leave the nest, and even if they…
tqa | June 26, 2006Remember Ward Churchill? He's the apparenty-soon-to-be-former University of Colorado academic who stirred up controversy when he referred to 9-11 victims as "little Eichmanns" in a 2001 essay. Today, the UC Boulder Interim Chancellor announced that the university, following a very lengthy investigation, intends to fire Churchill for cause. (Hat tip: No Se Nada)
Back in 2005, when the whole Churchill affair was big news, I wrote a letter to the campus paper explaining why I disagreed with the decision a number of university groups had made to bring him out to UH as a speaker. That was in my…
tqa | June 26, 2006Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I find this Washington Post article about the effect of the Daily Show on attitudes towards politics and politicians. The article reports on the results of a published study that found that people who watch the Daily Show regularly are more likely to be cynical about politics. The authors of the study (and the author of the WaPo piece) conclude that this is a Bad Thing, because, "negative perceptions of candidates could have participation implications by keeping more youth from the polls."
The WaPo article, with it's uncritical recitation of the study's…
tqa | June 26, 2006In the first post in the Hawaiian Evolution series, I wrote a bit about why evolution is so readily apparent on Islands. Today, I'm going to shift away from the biological a little bit, and talk about a different type of evolution - the evolution of the islands themselves. Because of the way that the islands are formed, they go through a distinct lifecycle as they form over the hotspot, then move off to the west and erode. The evolution of the islands is one of the things that shapes the evolution of life on the islands, so let's take a look at it.http://scienceblogs.com/cgi-bin/MT/mt.cgi
The…
tqa | June 23, 2006In the latest news from the planet the Republicans wish we lived on, weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. This news comes to us courtesy of a couple of Congresscritters - Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan , and Senator Rick Santorum, Theocrat of Pennsylvania. Supporting their bold statement, these exemplary members of the surreality-based community have - wait for it - a newly declassified intelligence report, courtesy of Bush appointee John Negroponte.
I am shocked, shocked I say, to find the Republicans resorting to selective declassification of…
tqa | June 22, 2006Today's episode in the ongoing tragicomic farce that is the American Congress involves the renewal of several provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Over the years, the VRA has gained a wide base of bipartisan support, and renewal of the act has typically been relatively easy. This time wasn't looking all that different - the Democratic caucus, White House, and Republican Congressional Leadership were all in favor - but that seems to have changed rather quickly today.
Apparently, the Republicans are (again) having problems with their rank-and-file members. The revolt apparently revolves…
tqa | June 21, 2006There are a number of places on this planet where the signal of evolution is readily apparent to anyone who cares to look. Most of those places are islands. It's no coincidence that Darwin made the Galapagos famous, or that Wallace did his most important work in the Malay Archipelago. As helpful as those places were to the discovery of evolution, they pale in comparison with the Hawaiian Islands, and I'm not saying that because I work there. We've got examples of evolution out here that will knock your socks off.
More than ninety percent of everything that is native to the above sea level…
tqa | June 19, 2006One of the things I've been thinking about doing in this new version of the blog is a series of posts on the biology of the Hawaiian Islands. The designation of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a National Monument earlier this week gave me both a kick in the right direction, and a geographical starting point for the series.
In the next couple of days, I'll get the series started. The first post or two will discuss some general features of the geological history of the islands, and how that relates to the historical biology of the islands. With any luck, I should be able to convince you…
tqa | June 18, 2006Japan managed to buy enought votes at the recent meeting of the International Whaling Commission to pass a resolution declaring that the moratorium on whaling was meant to be temporary and is no longer needed. The resolution is not all that significant from a practical standpoint - it takes a super-majority to actually end the moratorium, and Japan's going to have to bribe a bunch more countries before they hit that mark. However, it apparently did enough for the morale of the Japanese whalers enough for them to unilaterally declare that they are going to increase their "scientific" whale…
tqa | June 16, 2006I'll be more or less out of the loop this weekend, due to some family things in another state. (That's one of the downsides to living in Hawaii. Any out-of-state travel requires a minimum of 10 hours in the air roundtrip.) I'm hoping to have a few things go up on the blog while I'm away, but comments and trackbacks might not appear immediately - some get held up for approval by the moderation system.