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jrosenhouse | February 20, 2016Over at Uncommon Descent, Granville Sewell has popped up one more time to write the same post he always writes. It's the one about how the second law of thermodynamics totally refutes evolution. It's a worth a look, since he is even more explicit than usual that there is nothing more to his argument than: The second law says things break down, but evolution says things get built up. His post comes in a series of numbered points. I especially liked this:
3. Since the reason thermal and carbon (and chromium, etc) distributions become more uniform in an isolated system is that the laws of…
gregladen | February 19, 2016Back in the old days, yesterday, making comments on the mobile version of Scienceblogs.com was sometimes difficult because the thingie at the bottom of the post that suggests the other wonderful blog posts you might want to visit tended to cover up the comments.
That has been fixed!
That is all, thank you very much for your patience.
gregladen | February 19, 2016Classic dinosaurs went extinct long before humans existed. But birds are dinosaurs, and birds still exist. So, no.
But birds are not classic dinosaurs mainly because they are not extinct (a tautology) and they are not big and scary. But some of them were.
One of the last (but not the last) big scary bird-dinosaur creatures may have gone extinct because humans ate them, or more likely, ate their eggs. In Australia. Perhaps.
Anyway, I wrote this new finding up here, at 10,000 birds.
jrosenhouse | February 17, 2016I spent this weekend playing in the annual chess extravaganza known as the US Amateur Team East (epic blog post to follow). On Saturday night, I was having dinner at an excellent Japanese restaurant with some of my teammates. One of them, who happens to be a lawyer, had his phone out and said, “Hey, you know who just died?”
Since he knows the kinds of things I'm interested in, I was afraid he was going to say Richard Dawkins, who recently had a minor stroke. But then he said, “Scalia.” Now, this particular friend is supporting Bernie Sanders in the primary, so that at least suggests he…
jrosenhouse | February 17, 2016It went up a little late this week, because of my recent travels, but we do have a new Problem of the Week. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
pharyngula | February 16, 2016Uncommon Descent linked to my criticisms of the Biology of the Baroque, Intelligent Design creationism's latest misconception, that biologists believe every detail of every organism is the product of natural selection…but they didn't bother to quote any of my criticisms. It's weird. They could have quoted the gist of my complaint:
So evolution should produce only the biological equivalent of sterile gray Soviet architecture, and if you find something that is the equivalent of a Baroque church, then evolution is refuted. This entire argument is built around what Michael Denton calls the…
jrosenhouse | February 12, 2016I'm about to leave town for the weekend, but I did want to poke my head up just long enough to wish everyone a Happy Darwin Day! And just in time for this most wonderful of holidays, my paper on anti-evolutionary mathematics has now been published. In the journal Science and Education, to be precise. Alas, unless you are at an institution that subscribes to this journal, Springer will expect you to pay for it. And it would be a serious copyright violation for me simply to post the paper freely at my website. But if you send me an e-mail at rosenhjd@jmu.edu, I will be happy to send you…
vlicata | February 11, 2016Internet Links and Social Links at McMurdo Station, Antarctica.
Here are some links of interest related to Trish Suchy and my NSF Antarctic Artists and Writers Project:
Trish Suchy’s blog about our Artist’s and Writer’s project.
David Ainley’s website about his research on Adelie penguins: Penguin Science
The weather in McMurdo is here.
Zach Sudman’s blog (who we photographed in the Dry Valleys):
And here is the blog of Shaun O’Boyle, one of the Artists & Writers who was in McMurdo immediately before we were. He was/is doing a beautiful black and white photography project on McMurdo.
One…
gregladen | February 11, 2016Just a quick note that will be of interest to my local readers. Senator Leo Foley passed away at the age of 87, just a few days ago. Senator John Hoffman, who now hold Senator Foley's old seat, wrote this:
Last Friday, Feb. 5 former Coon Rapids Senator Leo T. Foley passed away peacefully surrounded by his loved ones; he was 87. Sen. Foley served the Coon Rapids area for 14 years, serving from 1997 to 2011. I took up the mantle of serving the area following Sen. Foley’s retirement.
I first met Leo in 2002, and ever since then I was incredibly proud to call him my State Senator. Leo Foley…
vlicata | February 7, 2016Our most recent helo trip out from McMurdo on our NSF Artists & Writers Project took us to Cape Evans, the site of Robert Scott’s Terra Nova Hut, where they based their 1910-1913 trip to the South Pole. We went with Anthony Powell (the filmmaker from Scott Base who made the movie “Antarctica: A Year on Ice”. He has an engineering/tech “day job” at Scott Base and is a moviemaker in his off time). The Terra Nova Hut is the most elaborate and extensive of the 3 main historic huts in the McMurdo-ish area (the other 2 are Discovery Hut, right at McMurdo, and the Shackleton Nimrod Hut at Royds…
pgleick | February 4, 2016By Peter Gleick, Brett Walton, J. Carl Ganter
Water was a Top Risk on the 2015 Global Agenda
In early 2015, participants at the World Economic Forum, a who’s who of the political and business elite, ranked water crises as the top global risk. Water was also a key factor in the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a blueprint for international development over the next 15 years. Ensuring safe drinking water and sanitation for all by 2030 is one of six water goals for the SDGs. In December at the UN climate change conference in Paris,…
tsmith | February 3, 2016Like cockroaches, the conspiracy theorists suggesting the Zika virus outbreak is anything but a normal, naturally-occurring event have begun to come out of the woodwork. To be expected, the theories they're espousing make no sense scientifically, and each theory is incompatible with the others, but why should anyone expect that conspiracy theorists would actually use logic?
Claim One: the current Zika virus outbreak is due to the release of genetically-modified mosquitoes by British company Oxitec. The suggestion is that GMO mosquitoes were released in the same area of Brazil now…
jrosenhouse | February 1, 2016The second Problem Of The Week has now been posted, along with an official solution to the first problem. Enjoy!
jrosenhouse | January 31, 2016Helpmates occupy a curious position in the world of chess problems. On the one hand, they seem to be the most popular form nowadays for composers. There are just so many possibilities for original content, especially when fairy pieces or conditions are added to the mix. On the other hand, they are sometimes sneered at by other composers. You sometimes encounter the attitude that direct mates and studies are serious compositions, while everything else is just candy.
Whatever. Personally, I sometimes find modern direct mates a little too dense to be enjoyable, while helpmates usually bring…
vlicata | January 30, 2016On the next leg of our NSF Antarctic Artists & Writers project we flew to the Antarctic Dry Valleys from McMurdo. It is almost an hour helicopter ride across the ice shelf, and we hopped from site to site all day: landing at Lake Hoare for a moment to drop off someone and pick up Zach Sudman, a stream hydrologist who we spent most of the day with. We flew with Zach another 10 minutes to Lawson Stream – yes a flowing stream (from summer glacier melt) in the Taylor Valley. We video photographed Zach Sudman using surveying equipment to measure the height of the lake and the stream.
Here is a…
jrosenhouse | January 27, 2016For about a year in graduate school, I was a serious Go player. I read a few books and even played in a tournament. It's a beautiful game, no question about it, but after wasting so much time just to become a mediocre chess player, I eventually decided not to repeat the process with Go.
One thing I noticed, though, was that Go players were constantly comparing their game to chess. In particular, they were really keen on the idea that Go was more complex than chess. They liked to point out that computers were competitive with the top human chess players (and are now superior to them), but…
vlicata | January 26, 2016As part of our project we just flew to Cape Royds on a helicopter to take photographs of Dr. David Ainley among the penguins he’s studied for many years. It is about a 10 minute helicopter ride from McMurdo. We arrived in strong winds (maybe 30 mph? – enough to stop you from walking and have to brace yourself from being blown backward during gusts). The helicopter dropped us off and left, and after a short walk we arrived at Shackleton’s Hut (the nicest of the main huts on Ross Island). It’s beautiful and warm inside the hut. Despite the wind it feels comfortable and cozy inside, with lots of…
jrosenhouse | January 26, 2016Snow? Bah! Problem Of the Week doesn't care about snow.
That's right, it's time for another semester of teasers, enigmas, and conundrums. Our theme this term is:
NUMBER THEORY, WITH MATH JOKES
As always, we start with a fairly easy problem. Overall, though, I think the problems this term are a little more challenging than my usual fare, so don't get cocky!
Feel free to post solutions in the comments. Though this is nominally a competition, I'm not worried that my students are going to read this blog, desperately looking for the solution to the problem. This is entirely voluntary for…
sastyk | January 26, 2016I don't know a single person on any end of the political spectrum who doesn't want to see an end to police shootings of black folk. I don't know a single person who doesn't want to make sure that shootings like the Charleston one never happen again. But most ordinary white people also don't have a clue how they could help with that, other than posting the occasional facebook meme or generally feeling it would be a good thing if something were done. Or maybe they'd like to do something, but are nervous about it - how will other people feel if they just show up to a protest or meeting? The…
sastyk | January 26, 2016But just in case you were wondering, there is basically no chance whatsoever that Climate Change could be happening without human intervention. I realize that we'll be hearing about this point 0.01 possibility until we all die, but just so we all know.