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gregladen | September 9, 2013Pacific Island Nations Tell The World ‘Climate Change Has Arrived’
“Climate change has arrived,” and the world must act. That’s the message from fifteen nations in the southwestern Pacific, who signed a statement yesterday calling on other countries to join them in “the urgent reduction and phase down of greenhouse gas pollution.”
With Climate Journalism Like This, Who Needs Fiction?
(Just go read the post)
U.S. Navy Triples Clean Energy Startup Funding In Hawaii
A clean energy seed money startup program in Hawai’i will now have triple its existing budget courtesy of the U.S. Navy’s Office of…
carlyo | September 9, 2013This past June, more than 2,000 business, government, and education leaders gathered in Austin, Texas, to discuss the state of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education in the United States at the U.S. News STEM Solutions National Conference. The USA Science & Engineering Festival was honored to attend and we are looking forward to our partnership for the 2014 National Conference this coming April.
"This is the absolutely perfect time to be talking about STEM education," explained Barbara Bolin, executive director of the Michigan STEM partnership. "Because STEM…
egrossman | September 9, 2013Nearly 50 billion pounds of chicken (about eight billion chickens’ worth, or 37 billion pounds of poultry products) were processed in the United States in 2012 by about half a million workers, many of whom handle more than 100 birds per minute. This labor involves standing in chilled processing plant facilities, cutting, gutting, scalding, defeathering and hanging birds as they speed by on automated machinery, often at more than one bird per second. According to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), since 1975,workers in this industry have consistently suffered injuries…
jrosenhouse | September 8, 2013The second Problem of the Week has now been posted. More of a puzzle this week, rather than a conventional math problem. Enjoy! I've also posted a solution to last week's problem. Enjoy that too!
Gotta run now. Breaking Bad is on in just over two hours, and I have to begin my preparations.
gregladen | September 5, 2013Years ago I knew Richard Dawkins as a fellow evolutionary biologist (met him only once, at a memorial event for WD Hamilton, but we have numerous mutual friends and colleagues). To be frank, and I'm only being frank now because I'd prefer not to use my real name, Dawkins was considered a bit of an enigma. He had great fame (and fortune and privilege) but that was without doing much important research. I always defended him back in those days. His fame came from The Selfish Gene and his subsequent books, and his popularization of science was well done and important. Those who complained,and…
jrosenhouse | September 4, 2013I'm teaching a lot of calculus this term, and we just spent the last class period or two talking about straight lines. That makes sense. Calculus is especially concerned with measuring the slopes of functions, and straight lines are just about the simplest functions there are.
Now, the textbook we're using this term, like pretty much all textbooks, defines a linear function as one that can be written in the form
$latex y=mx+b$
I hate that!
It's not that it's wrong. It is perfectly true that straight lines, and only straight lines, can be expressed with equations of that form. But…
jrosenhouse | September 2, 2013Things move quickly in the math world. It was only the end of May that we heard of a stunning development regarding the long moribund twin primes conjecture. The problem is to prove that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers that differ by two, such as 3 and 5, or 17 and 19, or 101 and 103. The development was that a previously unknown mathematician named Yitang Zhang proved that there are infinitely many pairs of primes whose difference is...wait for it... no greater than seventy million. Seventy million is certainly a long way from two, but it is even farther away from…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2013I'm not saying that my mind is particularly august.
First Aid Kit rule. And are godless: "There's one life and it's this life and it's beautiful"
After listening to Ken & Robin's latest podcast episode I did some reading on Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais. The mind boggles at the idea of a Medieval army lead by two violently delusional psychotics.
Reading a book that shows its author, an American teacher of creative writing, to have a tenuous grasp on English. He writes shown for shone, immure for inure and lumpen for lumpy. Boo to his editor!
For the first time in 30 years I've seen a…
gregladen | September 2, 2013In this Labor Day message, Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor and subject of the upcoming documentary “Inequality for All,” breaks down what it’ll take for workers to get a fair share in this economy — including big, profitable corporations like McDonald’s and Walmart to pony up and finally pay fair wages.
Here's the petition.
jrosenhouse | September 1, 2013Our school year started last Monday. My teaching muscles atrophied a bit over the summer, so last week's classes were the pedagogical equivalent of stretching exercises. But starting tomorrow we're really going to hit the ground running. Do you know what that means?
That's right! It means that Problem of the Week makes it's triumphant return. This term's theme: A Tribute to Sam Loyd.
Problem One has just been posted. It's a fairly straightforward algebra problem, but good if you're in the mood for some mental calisthenics. New problems will appear every Monday. Enjoy!
gregladen | September 1, 2013I suspect Scienceblogs.com is under attack. Why? Because the site is going really really slow, and the spam coming in is different ... huge spamy comments with a zillion links which I think send the server into conniptions. I've closed comments on all posts over five days in age on this blog, for the time being. Sorry for the inconvenience.
illconsidered | August 30, 2013Watch some time-lapse video of super-cell thunderheads taken in June over Texas this year. A thing of true beauty, but awesomely powerful and deadly dangerous as well.
A Supercell Thunderstorm Over Texas
Video Credit & Copyright: Mike Olbinski; Music: Impact Lento (Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech)
(seen on APOD)
sgorman | August 29, 2013In Los Angeles in 1924, after a series of mysterious deaths, Yersinia pestis, or bubonic plague, was swiftly identified as the culprit. Immediate quarantine of exposed people in selected areas helped to make the outbreak less than a devastating epidemic. But some public officials and newspaper reporters, in a desperate attempt to explain the origins of the illness, began equating the disease with people of Mexican descent. Panic quickly struck the city. Hotels and restaurants fired thousands of Latino workers. Health officials destroyed houses in low-income neighborhoods deemed “public health…
egrossman | August 28, 2013On July 5, James Baldasarre, a 45-year old a Medford, Massachusetts US Postal Service employee who had worked for USPS for 24 years, died from excessive heat. According to news reports, shortly before collapsing in the 95-degree heat, Baldasarre texted his wife to say, “I’m going to die out here today. It’s so hot.” On July 9, Juan Ochoa, a 37-year old farm worker in Tulare County, California about 35 miles north of Bakersfield, died from heat while checking on irrigation equipment in a lemon orchard. The temperatures that day reportedly climbed to 105º and 106ºF. According to his brother,…
gregladen | August 28, 2013A virtual tour of the areas threatened by the Yosemite Rim Fire.
Hat Tip Mother Jones
gregladen | August 28, 2013Climate science denialist Christopher Monckton wrote a post at WUWT blog in which he describes the non-existent stall in global warming. At the end of the post he writes:
Meanwhile, enjoy what warmth you can get. A math geek with a track-record of getting stuff right tells me we are in for 0.5 Cº of global cooling. It could happen in two years, but is very likely by 2020. His prediction is based on the behavior of the most obvious culprit in temperature change here on Earth – the Sun.
My friend and Colleague, John Abraham of St. Thomas University (he blogs here) wrote the following letter:…
Reading Diary: How to fake a moon landing: Exposing the myths of science denial by Darryl Cunningham
jdupuis | August 27, 2013Darryl Cunningham's How to Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial is a bit different from most of the graphic novels I've reviewed in this space. Most of the earlier books I've reviewed have been biographical or historical in nature with the more expository ones at least having some fictional narrative wrapped around the scientific content. I guess you could say there's quite a bit of sugar to make the medicine go down a bit more smoothly.
This book however is really nothing but exposition with just enough bare-bones narrative to keep the facts rolling. It's a series of…
gregladen | August 25, 2013!!! WARNING *** POST IS META *** WARNING !!!
We’ve been watching the new House of Cards (produced by Netflix). Here’s how I can tell it is good. Amanda actually started to watch it, which is unusual because she rarely watches anything. But she watched the first one, liked it, then tuned in to the second one a few days later and I had the opportunity to watch it with her. But I decided not to for reasons I won’t bore you with. However, I did catch the first two or three minutes. Which caught my attention so I caught the next five or six minutes. And so on. I ended up watching the…
gregladen | August 24, 2013News from Fukushima Update # 69
by Ana Miller and Greg Laden
Over the last several weeks we’ve heard repeated, alarming, and generally worsening, news from Fukushima Diachi, the Japanese nuclear power plant that suffered a series of disasters that make The China Syndrome look like a Disney family movie. One question is this: Has a new set of problems (new leaks, apparently the fifth such “unexpected” leak) occurred that is really significant, or is this level of spewing of radioactive waste from the plant pretty much run of the mill but somehow the press only now noticed something TEPCO has…