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neurotopia | July 15, 2006The first half of this year was the hottest on record in the US.
Temperatures for January through June were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average.
Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri experienced record warmth for the period, while no state experienced cooler-than-average temperatures, reported scientists from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
Scientists have previously said that 2005 was the warmest year on record for the entire globe.
Wish I had something insightful to add.
catdynamics | July 14, 2006Is every species of living thing on the planet equally deserving of protection?...
No.
Seriously. No.
Some must be protected.
Some ought to be protected.
It'd be pragmatic, prudent or prescient to protect most.
A few I'd just as soon see dead. Very few.
Some actually don't matter much either way, except in an abstract aesthetic sense.
Worst of all, the definition of "species" is biased towards charismatic species (we fine grain populations that look good, and coarse grain over populations we know little of or care little for); so at some deep level the question is poorly defined.
We should…
stcynic | July 13, 2006From last night's show. This is hilarious. Thanks to BigDumbChimp for the link.
worldsfair | July 13, 2006Peter Sis is probably best known for his Madlenka series, which I believe, have even been made into a few Sesame Street shorts. But in my view, his prowess in producing these intricate and pretty pictures are well used in two of his books that focus specifically on the life and times of two prominent scientists.
One of these, The Tree of Life is an illustrated children's biography of Charles Darwin and is just such a beautiful thing to behold that some colleagues of mine appreciate it more as a keepsake wth coffee table status (usually not a rank that is easy to come by for scientific tomes…
stcynic | July 13, 2006Came across this amusing suggestion from Frank Beckwith at Southern Appeal:
The JW's are having a convention not too far from my home. I was thinking that a bunch of locals should knock on the hotel room doors of all the JWs on Saturday morning, ask to visit with them, and then leave a bunch of literature.
Hear, hear!
purepedantry | July 12, 2006Is this really necessary?
Castrati played heroic male leads in Italian opera from the mid-17th to late 18th century when the bel canto was the rage in Europe. Farinelli, born Carlo Broschi in 1705, was the most famous of them all, in a stage career lasting from 1720 to 1737.
Carlo Vitale of the Farinelli Study Center in Bologna said they had recovered the bodies on Wednesday of the singer and his great-niece, who moved his body from a first grave destroyed in the Napoleonic wars.
His final resting place in Bologna's Certosa cemetery was only recently discovered.
"They are in a middling state…
stcynic | July 12, 2006For those experiencing problems commenting, please be patient. I'm trying to figure out how to turn off typekey authentication, but even with all the settings saying it's not required, it still says it's required and reroutes everyone to typekey. It's becoming very frustrating.
Update: Okay, the techs figured out the problem. Typekey is now gone, at least for now. We'll see how much spam we'll end up getting. If it comes back big, I'll put typekey authentication back on. A couple important points. They've now installed spam blocking software that prevents spam from even reaching the Movable…
razib | July 12, 2006Ask a Science Blogger ?:
On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?...
Well, I waited this week to see if someone would say what I would say to save me the trouble of responding. Dynamic of the Cats hit it about right.
Also, the talk about stem cells in some of the comments is really pointing to where the action is going to be. Myself, I am very pro-stem cell (hell, aren't we all? Either adult or fetal?), and for a particular reason that is very anti-clonal. Today, mixed-race individuals…
purepedantry | July 11, 2006I was listening to the Leonard Lopate Show yesterday on WNYC (my local NPR affiliate), and I heard this great interview with Sharon Weinberger, a defense reporter, about her new book Imaginary Weapons.
In the book, she details all the crazy, fringe science ideas that they come up with at the Pentagon, and how these things are still getting funded. And these ideas are truly crazy, like research into how we can telepathically beam voices into enemy soldiers brains.
If you are pissed about how your last grant didn't get funded, you should listen to this. We are all in the wrong business.…
stcynic | July 11, 2006I want to thank Tim and the interns at Seed for doing all the hard work in moving over all of the old posts from stcynic.com over to here. We're talking some 3000 posts, so this was not a minor project. It took the better part of 3 days to complete, so they really deserve some credit. But now finally everything I've ever blogged about is available here in one place. The internal links won't be consistent, of course, and I'm not gonna spend the time to change them all. But for those who only recently discovered this blog, there's now a huge archive for you to wade through if you're either…
stoat | July 11, 2006The betting on climate change thing seems to have gone rather quiet. This post is prompted by a comment posted to an old entry on my old blog Probably not betting on climate with Lubos Motl (that post is still worth reading, I think, for the attempt to calculate what are "fair odds". In some email discussion afterwards, I think I discovered that there isn't really a good answer to that question). But if you haven't seen the circuit before, look at James A's stuff and Brian Schmidt's. That last post offers a list of bets that GS is prepared to take.
My anonymus commenter said:
I have been…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2006
Dontcha love photoshop?
(more below the fold)
I didn't get to see the last match in the World Cup. Needless to say, I was disappointed. But a friend emailed this really cute picture, which I had to share with all of you (of course). I also wanted to include a link to an online game where you could make Zidane headbash Italian players to earn a score, but it appears that site has been temporarily shut down due to excessive web traffic. Bummer.
.
tags: World Cup, futebol, soccer
stcynic | July 10, 2006Someone told me once that I looked like Todd Brunson, professional poker player and son of the legendary Doyle Brunson. They were right. This could be my twin:
Now if only I had his money. Paul Phillips casually mentioned once that he saw Todd get up from the table at the Bellagio with 4 racks of $25,000 chips - a cool $10 million.
stcynic | July 10, 2006Okay, how much of a right wing looney do you have to be to think that Tom Monaghan and the Thomas More Law Center are too liberal?
tqa | July 10, 2006A few of you might have noticed a drop-off in posting activity over the last week or so. My wife is preparing to deploy to Iraq - we've got a couple of weeks left before she heads out. She took some leave, so we were enjoying some family time. Posting will continue to be a bit erratic for the next couple of weeks, until she deploys.
nisbetmc | July 10, 2006In an editorial in the latest issue of BIOSCIENCE magazine, editor Timothy M. Beardsley discusses the importance of framing when it comes to communication strategy, and highlights some of the points I raised in a recent presentation at the annual meetings of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS.) The discussions at the meeting and the editorial are another sign that organizations within the scientific community are getting serious about complementary forms of public engagement that go beyond the traditional focus on popular science and science literacy.
ddobbs | July 10, 2006You don't see this every day:
Jake at Pure Pedantry draws due attention to an incredible case report in the American Journal of Psychiatry showing that a lesion in a patient's brain cured the patient's drug addiction, apparently by knocking out the reward circuit that made the addiction pleasurable. (It also made the man badly depressed.)
A stroke that destroyed parts of a drug addict's globus pallidus (pale areas) left him depressed but ended his addiction. Neither drugs nor (alas) wine gave him pleasure any longer.
The article, unfortunately, is pay-per-view, but Jake's summary is…
purepedantry | July 9, 2006On July 5, 1996, Dolly the sheep became the first successfully cloned mammal. Ten years on, has cloning developed the way you expected it to?
Yes and no.
Yes, cloning has developed the way I thought it would in terms of it continuing to develop. There was much ado in our culture about whether we should have cloning at all and if so what kind. All the fuss always struck me as somewhat self-defeating considering how tremendously difficult it is to clone anything. When you can clone a complex animal without 80 tries come back and talk to me about the issues. We need to know so much more…
neurotopia | July 9, 2006Red card for headbutting another player. Good job, dipshit. Your last chance at winning a Cup and now you're down a man with 10 minutes left. Now I almost hope it goes to a shootout.