jlynch | May 30, 2007For you whippersnappers who grew up on what counts for rock these days, here's what real rock n' roll sounds like - Neil Young doing "Rockin in the Free World" in 2004. Bonus points: Bruce Springsteen lends a hand. Play it loud!
jlynch | May 30, 2007
Golden eagles have bred in Ireland for the first time in nearly 100 years. The species became extinct on the island in 1912, and adults were re-introduced in 2001, giving a population of 46 adults. This year was the first that a pair produced young. More here.
jlynch | May 29, 2007Births
1423 - Georg Purbach, German mathematician and astronomer
1814 - Eugène Charles Catalan, Belgian mathematician
1908 - Hannes Alfvén, Swedish physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1912 - Julius Axelrod, American biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1901 - Victor D'Hondt, Belgian mathematician
1926 - Vladimir Steklov, Russian physicist
jlynch | May 29, 2007Events
1919 - Einstein's theory of general relativity is tested (later confirmed) by Arthur Eddington's observation of a total solar eclipse in Principe and by Andrew Crommelin in Sobral, Ceará, Brazil.
Births
1675 - Humphry Ditton, English mathematician
1716 - Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton, French naturalist
Deaths
1660 - Frans van Schooten, Dutch mathematician
1829 - Humphry Davy, English chemist
1896 - Gabriel Auguste Daubrée, French geologist
jlynch | May 28, 2007Events
1936 - Alan Turing submits On Computable Numbers for publication.
Births
1676 - Jacopo Riccati, Italian mathematician
1738 - Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, French physician
1807 - Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born zoologist and geologist
1836 - Alexander Mitscherlich, German chemist
1872 - Marian Smoluchowski, Polish physicist
1942 - Stanley B. Prusiner, American scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Deaths
1937 - Alfred Adler, Austrian psychologist
1980 - Rolf Nevanlinna, Finnish mathematician
2001 - Francisco Varela, Chilean biologist and philosopher
2003 - Ilya…
jlynch | May 27, 2007
Births
1623 - William Petty, English scientist and philosopher
1907 - Rachel Carson, American marine biologist and science writer
Deaths
1781 - Giovanni Battista Beccaria, Italian physicist
1896 - Aleksandr Grigorievich Stoletov, Russian physicist
1987 - John Howard Northrop, American chemist, Nobel laureate
jlynch | May 26, 2007
It's funny how much smaller the "Monster Pig" looks in this photo (source).
And for what it's worth, here's one of the "positive comments" the boy hunter got:
Don't pay attention to those west coast sissys, they live out there because homosexuality is fround upon in the USA
Your dad is teaching you how to survive in a world that's scareing most parents. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day
Teach a man to fish, and he has to take care of all the hippie wanna be seudo animal lovers who don't know squat aboutthe animals they eat, because they are to concerned with pushing same sex marriage…
jlynch | May 26, 2007Births
1667 - Abraham de Moivre, French mathematician
1669 - Sébastien Vaillant, French botanist
Deaths
1883 - Edward Sabine, Irish astronomer
1904 - Georges Gilles de la Tourette, French neurologist
2004 - Nikolai Stepanovich Chernykh, Russian astronomer
jlynch | May 25, 2007
Blame Mark Hoofnagle for the idea and Glenn Branch for the inspiration. Clickie for biggie.
Update: Also see LOLDembski
jlynch | May 25, 2007
In this photo released by Melynne Stone, Jamison Stone, 11, poses with a wild pig he killed near Delta, Ala., May 3, 2007. Stone's father says the hog weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9-feet-4 from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail. If claims of the animal's size are true, it would be larger than ``Hogzilla,'' the huge hog killed in Georgia in 2004. (AP Photo/Melynne Stone)
Apparently, we're supposed to believe that the eleven year old "shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it…
jlynch | May 25, 2007
Events
1925 - John T. Scopes is indicted for teaching human evolution.
1961 - Apollo program: U.S. president John F. Kennedy announces before a special joint session of Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a "man on the moon" before the end of the decade.
Births
1860 - James McKeen Cattell, American psychologist
1865 - Pieter Zeeman, Dutch physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1880 - Jean Alexandre Barré, French neurologist
1921 - Jack Steinberger, German-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1555 - Gemma Frisius, Dutch mathematician and cartographer
1632 - Adam Tanner, Austrian…
jlynch | May 24, 2007Rob mentions LOLcats (of which I am a fan - more here). I give you LOLpresidents.
jlynch | May 24, 2007Births
1544 - William Gilbert, English natural philosopher
1794 - William Whewell, English scientist, philosopher, and historian of science
1803 - Alexander von Nordmann, Finnish zoologist
Deaths
1543 - Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish astronomer
1734 - Georg Ernst Stahl, German physician and chemist
1843 - Sylvestre François Lacroix, French mathematician
jlynch | May 23, 2007I was wondering to myself what posts from 2006 still get significant views. After poking around in the statistics, here is what I found (in order of visits as of May 22nd): pictures of polar bears & mutant beasts from Maine, penis parasites from Grey's Anatomy, Ann Coulter as dashund (I was going to type "weiner dog" but ...), rainbows, shipwrecks that feature cannibalism, clouds, girls playing Tic-Tac-Toe, dumb Americans, and killer wasps. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what the public wants.
jlynch | May 23, 2007From 1788:
"I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character, by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I should have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so."
And still the Institute for Creation Research sees Linnaeus as a fellow traveller.
(And as an aside, Edmund Hovey's The Bicentenary of the Birth of Carolous Linnaeus [1908] is freely available online in multiple…
jlynch | May 22, 2007
As, no doubt, many will be posting today, Linnaeus (the "father of modern taxonomy") was born 300 years ago. It's a pity a tiny minority of taxonomists still dont get the genius of what he achieved under the guise of "complet[ing] the Darwinian revolution".
jlynch | May 22, 2007
Births
1707 - Carolus Linnaeus, Swedish botanist
1718 - William Hunter, Scottish anatomist
1734 - Franz Anton Mesmer, Austrian physician/hypnotist
1887 - Thoralf Skolem, Norwegian mathematician
1893 - Ulysses S. Grant IV, American geologist and paleontologist
1908 - John Bardeen, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1917 - Edward Norton Lorenz, American mathematician and meteorologist
1925 - Joshua Lederberg, American molecular biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Deaths
1691 - Adrien Auzout, French astronomer
1857 - Augustin Louis Cauchy, French…
jlynch | May 22, 2007AP is reporting:
Female sharks can fertilize their own eggs and give birth without sperm from males, according to a new study of the asexual reproduction of a hammerhead in a U.S. zoo.
The joint Northern Ireland-U.S. research, being published Wednesday in the Royal Society's peer-reviewed Biology Letter journal, analyzed the DNA of a shark born in 2001 in the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Neb. The shark was born in a tank with three potential mothers, none of whom had contact with a male hammerhead for at least three years.
The baby was killed within hours of its birth by a stingray in the same…