jfiore | April 28, 2007No, this is not some weird porno contest, I really want you to try to identify a couple little snakes I found in my garden. First an explanation. I have a couple of large four foot window boxes with everbearing strawberries in them that I leave on an elevated deck during the summer (no problem with bunnies until they learn how to fly). I don't get a ton of berries but it's nice to walk out and occasionally grab a few for breakfast. During the winter I bury these boxes up to their rim in my fenced in garden. They over-winter with no problem.
Today I went out to dig them up and when I pulled…
bushwells | April 25, 2007How many oratorios begin with a song celebrating biogenesis and conclude with an epilogue advising us to be good caretakers of our four billion year old home? As far as I know, only one and that would be Lifetime: Songs of Life and Evolution by David Haines. Lifetime had its North American premiere at the Kresge Auditorium at MIT last Saturday, April 21.
The oratorio, which celebrates evolution and life on Earth is part of this week's Cambridge Science Festival. The the great man himself was there all the way from South Devon, UK, to play the piano accompaniment and direct the North…
jfiore | April 24, 2007As noted in an earlier entry, Richard Dawkins was on the BO'R show last night. There's some discussion of it by fellow sciblings here and here. I didn't expect much and thus I wasn't disappointed.
There is one item though that I would like to address and that's the line often used by the hyper-religious and duly repeated by BO'R regarding the worst butchers of the 20th century (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) being atheists. Dawkins started to address the issue by noting that Hitler was Christian but this line was squashed in short order. Certainly one could go on about Hitler's use of symbols…
jfiore | April 20, 2007OK, we've seen the overtly religious blame atheists and "evolutionists" for much of the evil in the world such as the recent tragedy in Virginia, but did you know that if you don't mention the glory of JC specifically when bad things happen, you're a bad person? Check out this dreck. Here's a taste:
"Our Lord, Jesus, was not mentioned one time in that convocation," Benham asserts. "I think ... every parent who has a child that's going to school at Virginia Tech needs to know that the name of Jesus is not going to be mentioned, even though He is the resurrection and the life and that no one…
bushwells | April 20, 2007...until Movable Type will allow me to embed one of my own images, and that nasty Forbidden message stops taunting me.
Or I'll take that as one more hint that this Friday feature's entertainment value is minimal at best.
bushwells | April 18, 2007This is entirely unscientific, unless one wishes to calculate to trajectory of the flying pizza wedge, but entirely hootworthy. It had me hooting partly because I can just imagine how the Sox fans drenched in beer sounded, but mostly because the announcers for the New England Sports Network yammer on and on to the point of hilarity as they focus on the pizza wedge as weapon, or as they say, "a piece of pizzer." to the expense of the game.
God, I miss Boston...
bushwells | April 17, 2007If it's about spiders and sex, it's gotta be Live Science!
Well, to be accurate, the critters are not spiders, but mites from the family Crotoniidae. These mites reproduce sexually, which is not much of an eyebrow raiser until one considers that their close relatives, the Camisiidae, reproduce by parthenogenesis.
From Tiny Creatures Rediscover the Joy of Sex
Evolutionary biologist Katja Domes at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany and her colleagues examined genetic sequences in two Crotoniidae species and a diverse range of 13 other mite species. Their calculations show the…
bushwells | April 16, 2007I freely admit it. I routinely destroy my neoencephalon by watching all manner of crap on television. I am not one of those overweening snobs who daintily curl an upper lip as I sneer, "I never watch television." I love popular culture, and frankly, find a dose of mindless television to be relaxing, and occasionally thought-provoking.
Warning: This is recycled bonobo scat from the long defunct Refuge, ca. Nov. 5, 2005.
Such occurred recently when I watched the imaginatively titled, "Vampire Bats" featuring the unconquerable Lucy Lawless. Although I was not a devotee, I enjoyed watching…
jfiore | April 9, 2007The April 8th edition of ABC's This Week With George Stephanopulous featured a blurb with Walter Isaacson who will be releasing a biography of Einstein shortly. In it, he pushes the idea that Einstein was a deeply spiritual man:
He said he was like a child walking into a library, and you see the books and you know somebody must have written them, and you see them ordered and you know somebody must have ordered them, and there's a sense of awe that's manifest in that, where you kind of understand that there's an order underlying everything and the more you appreciate it, the more humble you…
jfiore | April 7, 2007A few stark lines on a white background could represent any number of things. What do you see?
(My cheesy drawing was inspired by the cover artwork from an early 80's Frank Zappa album.)
jfiore | April 5, 2007With all of the recent content ragarding the DI and other purveyors of hokum, I thought it would be an appropriate time to post an entry from a pre-scienceblogs version of the Refuge.
...and pretty soon there won't be no streets
for dummies to jog on and doggies to dog on
religious fanatics can make it be all gone
I mean it won't blow up and disappear
it'll just look ugly for a thousand years
-Frank Zappa
Did you ever wonder what the world would be like today if Western culture had never suffered through the Dark Ages? What if, given the controls to some omnipotent time machine, we could…
bushwells | April 5, 2007Dear Mr. Luskin:
In the interest of full disclosure, I have not fully engaged in the uproarious brouhaha surrounding Michael Egnor, and have been relatively silent here at the Refuge because I have concentrated on, well, my daily life in science rather than the blog. I'm one of those scientists who buries herself at the bench, or more accurately these days, herds the scientists under my managerial umbrella to do their jobs instead of flinging scat with the likes of the Discovery Institute. I'll leave that to Kevin who can handle that task most adroitly. I will also note that with regard…
bushwells | April 2, 2007For your perusal: Christian warriors fighting immodesty one guilt-inducing erection at a time
The Feministe blog adroitly unzips, strips, and de-wingtips the Modest Survey from the "Rebelution," a Christian teenage rebellion against low expectations. The take home message of the survey is that women are expected to protect their brothers in Christ by wearing modest clothing. Although not quite venturing into burkhaville or the depeche mode of The Handmaid's Tale, it's great to know that women are still considered wicked temptresses and that men will easily "fall" because of "unguarded…
jfiore | April 1, 2007In order to learn how to design circuits and systems using transistors and other solid state devices, students of electronics are told in their courses how semiconductors function. The atomic structure of crystalline silicon is examined in its intrinsic and doped states. Discussion of energy levels, conduction band electrons and hole production quickly follow. Soon, the student encounters the PN junction, a basic building block of modern electronics, and learns about majority and minority carriers, depletion regions, barrier potentials, leakage current and other exotica. All of this…
jfiore | March 27, 2007I always snicker when I hear folks talking about "liberal leaning colleges", especially when they are referring to small junior and community colleges. I do not consider our community college faculty to be particularly liberal, nor is our campus a "hotbed of liberal activism". In fact, a number of my colleagues are staunch Republicans. Yet, one thing I can say is that I generally trust them to be rational, even if we don't always agree on matters of policy. In spite of this, there are always those who will decry the goings-on on campus. Here are just two examples of the crazy liberal thinking…
jfiore | March 21, 2007A recent analysis of the performance of our current president relative to that of someone many folks like to make fun of reveals a surprising conclusion.
Top Ten Reasons Paris Hilton Would've Made a Better President than G.W. Bush
10. Not beholden to the religious right.
9. Too distracted by self-promotion to actually follow Rove's Machiavellian machinations.
8. Her idea of an unavoidable foreign entanglement is driving a convertible down the Autobahn without wearing a hat.
7. Wouldn't have tried to out-do her father.
6. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer but at least she realizes it.
5. An…
bushwells | March 21, 2007Just as a toddler who persisently pokes the light socket with a fork, looking for the forbidden jolt, so I invariably open spider links on Live Science. This latest salacious spidey-bit did not disappoint. I'm beginning to think that spider sex on Live Science is equiavlent to the cheesecake shots in Rupert Murdoch tabloids.
Creepy: Spiders Love to Snuggle by Jeanna Bryner.
Excerpts below the fold...
While not usually considered paragons of tender, familial love, some spiders do have a touchy-feely side. Scientists have discovered two arachnids that caress their young and snuggle together…
jfiore | March 20, 2007An ancient National Lampoon once intoned "Fun is where you find it." I have found this to be a useful rule to live by. The intersection of humor, Dada, and a vacationer armed with a digital camera can bring entertaining results.
Clearly, these folks are fans of the Austin Powers movies, but it's nice to see a little environmental responsibility and civic pride mixed in with your basic amorous dalliances.
OK, the video tapes I can understand, but do you really need special shoes?
"Do you get wafers with it?"
And those associates would be Billy Joe, Earl, and Lerleen?
"Right this way, we…
bushwells | March 19, 2007...but on life support.
Sadly, the Frinksters and their fearsome pants-armadillos are entubated and awaiting a court order.
Frink Tank filled a much needed niche in the science blogs arena, and in fact they were part of this cozy community until they were sent packing into exile for something unspeakable.
A word from the Frinks:
beep - beep - beep
FrinkTank is currently in a persistent vegetative state. We're not pulling the plug, and our archives are fully viewable for all (eleven) of our fans to see, but the appearance of new content in the near future is about as likely as a postmortem…
bushwells | March 18, 2007Shelley at Retrospectacle tagged the Chimp Refuge for a Thinking Blogger Award Hey, thanks, Shelley, but when you mention "scathing wit," we know you're talking about Kev and Jim because women just aren't funny.
Anyway, the rules for the tag you're it blogger game are to be found here at The Thinking Blog
Here are the rules (via the Thinking Blog - see link):
Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme.
The participation rules are simple:
1. If, and only if, you…