History
pharyngula | August 6, 2010History is not going to judge us kindly for this crime against humanity. Never again.
In the following waves [after the initial blast] people's bodies were terribly squeezed, then their internal organs ruptured. Then the blast blew the broken bodies at 500 to 1,000 miles per hour through the flaming, rubble-filled air. Practically everybody within a radius of 6,500 feet was killed or seriously injured and all buildings crushed or disemboweled.
Japanese doctors said that those who had been killed by the blast itself died instantly. But presently, according to these doctors, those who had…
pharyngula | August 5, 2010There really were savage battles between man and giant squid in the 19th century. They all come off as a little bit one sided, though: some poor sick squid floundering on the surface is encountered by a passing ship, harpoons and gaff hooks are thrown, and if the dying beast manages to fling a tentacle across the deck, the brutes hack it off with axes.
drorzel | August 2, 2010Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau proposes an an experimental test of Murphy's Law using the lottery. While amusing, it's ultimately flawed-- Murphy's Law is something of the form:
Anything that can go wrong, will.
Accordingly, it can only properly be applied to situations in which there is a reasonable expectation of success, unless something goes wrong. The odds of winning the lottery are sufficiently low that Murphy's Law doesn't come into play-- you have no reasonable expectation of picking the winning lottery numbers, so there's no need for anything to "go wrong" in order for you…
cagapakis | July 30, 2010
I have a very weak constitution. It doesn't take much time on a moving vehicle of any type to make be barf, and I've hurled all over gorgeous coastal areas in tourist destinations around the world. There was that one time in Italy, snapping photos of the incredible shoreline caves (now dubbed barf grottos), that one time scuba diving in Belize (after I had made it to the surface, thankfully), and in lobby trashcans of various finally stationary destinations (the video is of me, my sister, and my fiancé inadvisedly spinning around while at an archeological site in Greece earlier this summer…
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2010In the early 15th century, Imperial Chinese mariners under the eunuch admiral Zheng He made great voyages of discovery in enormous ships. Then the Hongxi Emperor decided that what they had found on far shores was underwhelming, the whole fleet was scuppered and the Chinese paid no further attention to seafaring. In 2007 I discussed a silly story about alleged descendants of Zheng He's non-eunuch crew in Kenya who had suddenly remembered their Chinese heritage, which was convenient since the Chinese were interested in local mining rights.
Now the Guardian has news about the Kenya - Zheng He -…
oracknows | July 25, 2010Longtime readers know that I'm a bit of a World War II buff. In fact, that's how I ended up developing such a profound interest in Holocaust denial, to the point where I used to write about it rather frequently. I don't write about it as often these days, not so much because I'm not still interested in countering it but rather because I don't routinely come across it in the news as often as I used to.
Be that as it may, I happen to love WWII propaganda posters. American, British, Russian, German, I collect digital images of them all, and although my collection is only a couple of hundred…
grrlscientist | July 18, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
jdupuis | July 9, 2010I love Wikipedia. I probably use it every day. It's become an indispensable part of the modern information landscape.
But.
A few months ago, I was doing a session in our lab with a bunch of high school students. When I do these sessions I try and illuminate how the modern information landscape is a bit more complicated than they think -- I try and instill a little doubt and humbleness into their mostly quite confident attitudes. I talk about Facebook and privacy and Wikipedia and a whole bunch of things. Anyways, I'm talking about Wikipedia and demoing how easy it is to randomly change…
clock | July 6, 2010If you picked up The Poisoner's Handbook (amazon.com) looking for a fool-proof recipe, I hope you have read the book through and realized at the end that such a thing does not exist: you'll get busted. If they could figure it all out back in 1930s, can you imagine how much easier they can figure out a case of poisoning today, with modern sensitive techniques? And if you have read the book through, I hope you found it as fascinating as I did. Perhaps you should use your fascination with poisons to do good instead, perhaps become a forensic toxicologist?
My SciBling Deborah Blum (blog, Twitter…
emjohnson | July 6, 2010My response to David Klinghoffer's piece in the Huffington Post has just been published:
Creationists are fond of laying the blame for Nazi eugenics on Charles Darwin. They insist that his materialist argument that humans evolved from animals and his conception of natural selection inspired the Nazis to implement a widespread policy of artificial selection within the Fatherland. However, these claims are as baseless as was the so-called "science" that the Nazis employed.
The latest example of this ignorance disguised as revelation was recently published on The Huffington Post by a Senior…
sastyk | July 4, 2010Some years ago, I had the occasion of being at a dinner party on the fourth of July with a bunch of graduate students, and we realized that among 11 of us, we came from 9 different countries. After commenting on this and the date and discussing American fireworks laws for a while, we began to compare what we'd been taught in our home countries in school about the history of both our own nations, and about the world. It was a deeply enlightening, often funny conversation.
One of the funniest and most worriesome parts of the evening occurred when the other American and I compared notes. I had…
oracknows | July 1, 2010Regular readers may have noticed something happening around ScienceBlogs. As PZ pointed out, a little malware somehow infiltrated the ScienceBlogs collective, and many of us appear to have turned into zombies. It's a veritable Zombie Day, complete with illustrations by Joseph Hewitt, creator of Gearhead.
Obviously, with anything having to do with zombies, there's only one thing for this blog, namely a certain undead German dictator with an insatiable thirst for human brains, who leaves idiotic analogies in his wake. Unfortunately, with the 2008 election being behind us, there was a dearth of…
oracknows | July 1, 2010Regular readers may have noticed something happening around ScienceBlogs. As PZ pointed out, a little malware somehow infiltrated the ScienceBlogs collective, and many of us appear to have turned into zombies. It's a veritable Zombie Day, complete with illustrations by Joseph Hewitt, creator of Gearhead.
Obviously, with anything having to do with zombies, there's only one thing for this blog, namely a certain undead German dictator with an insatiable thirst for human brains, who leaves idiotic analogies in his wake. Unfortunately, with the 2008 election being behind us, there was a dearth of…
grrlscientist | June 27, 2010tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books.
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…
clock | June 26, 2010You may have heard some hypotheses. But you may be wrong. Go here to read the most current explanation.
sschoenbaum | June 24, 2010Steve Schoenbaum writes: "Inside the Outbreaks", Mark Pendergrast's wonderful history of the Centers for Disease Control's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), can be read on many levels. I confess that as a former EIS officer (1967-1969), personally familiar with most of the "elite medical detectives" of the first few decades, I tended to read it "between the lines". I found myself recalling many personal incidents, interactions with others, and themes mentioned but not necessarily fully developed in the book. I'd like to consider a couple of those here:
Early on in "Inside the Outbreaks…
jdupuis | June 23, 2010Nice post by Stephen Wolfram on the Wolfram|Alpha blog, Happy Birthday, Alan Turing:
He was in some respects a quintessential British amateur, dipping his intellect into different areas. He achieved a high level of competence in pure mathematics, and used that as his professional base. His contributions in traditional mathematics were certainly perfectly respectable, though not spectacular. But in every area he touched, there was a certain crispness to the ideas he developed--even if their technical implementation was sometimes shrouded in arcane notation and masses of detail.
In some ways he…
grrlscientist | June 23, 2010tags: Great Microbiologists, Lego, brickfilm, animation, technology, scientists, history, microbiology, animalcule, streaming video
This is yet another Lego animation. This time, instead of recreating highlights of the World Cup 2010 games, this one shows highlights for the history of the field of microbiology. It's actually good enough to show as an intro to a microbiology course.
More Lego films can be found at Brickfilms.
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…