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petnoyer | May 9, 2008"Dead men tell no tales" - Hiriam Breakes
Hiriam Breakes was a Dutch pirate, the second son to the Councillor of the Island of Saba in the Netherlands Antilles. In his twenties, he stole the ship and cargo of his employers and renamed the vessel The Adventurer. Almost immediately he came upon the Chilean vessel "Acapulco" which was carrying 200,000 small gold bars. The hapless crew were all murdered in a most despicable manner, and being the Acapulco was better ship than the The Adventurer Breakes stole the ship and refitted it for piracy.
Now there's a good lad.
From "Wanted for piracy"
pharyngula | May 9, 2008The town of Frankenmuth, Michigan likes to flaunt their crosses — they've put them up on signs, and they've got one on the city logo. I suspect the town contains a Christian majority, so their local news probably felt safe putting up an online poll asking,
Should Frankenmuth remove its cross from the city shield?
They don't expect a horde of ravening godless atheists to descend on them and vote "YES!" — they never do. Mount up, internet warriors, and assault their poll with fire and sword and level it until they reel back crying for mercy.
Frankenmuth won't know what hit them.*
*Literally;…
cortex | May 9, 2008From the new Atlantic:
Four researchers compared the effectiveness of a cell phone equipped with a GPS receiver to traditional paper maps and to "direct experience" (first walking through a route with a guide, then trying it alone). They asked 66 participants to each walk six different routes, finding their way each time using one of the three navigational aids, and later to sketch from memory the routes they had taken. The GPS users traveled longer distances, walked more slowly, and made more stops during the walk than the participants using the low-tech methods, and they made more…
cortex | May 9, 2008Sorry about the light posting - I've been traveling. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing about air-travel (besides the safety aspect) is that I get to read novels. For some reason, I've decided that I can't work or sleep on planes, so I always make sure that my carry-on bag is stuffed full of fiction. On my last flight, I consumed Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. I won't bore you with my praise, but it's a remarkable collection of short stories. The sheer fluidity and poise of her writing is, as a fellow writer, somewhat depressing. She makes it look so easy. I'm really curious about…
cmcclain | May 9, 2008One of the best versions I have heard. Perhaps a funnier version below the fold.
esiegel | May 8, 2008Space, if nothing else, is an awfully pretty place. This week over at Space Cynic lies the 53rd Carnival of Space.
Some of the highlights of this weeks Carnival include the following:
Cosmic Chocolates -- Japanese chocolates designed on the Planets.
The Space Elevator -- We're still a long way away from this one.
The Earth from other worlds -- See what the Earth would look like from Saturn or Mars.
Private Space Tourism -- You've seen Virgin Galactic's plans, now see the Russian plan that will certainly be ready to go much sooner!
Have a great weekend, and don't forget to read and comment…
cmcclain | May 8, 2008This week I have found that my cup runneth over with work. Several things around the web have caught my eye which deserve substantial commentary. That's what you pay for, right? Unfortunately, today they get a link.
First, here is a specific example of push into the deep as shallow fisheries collapse. In this case, the dwindling numbers of blue crabs in Chesapeake Bay is providing incentive for companies like Benthic Fishing Corp. to fish for the vaguely named "deep sea red crab", Chaceon quinquedens
Rick at MBSL&S gives us an update of Nautilus Mining's activities in PNG. Rick…
cmcclain | May 7, 2008A new study lead by Chao in Science estimates that nearly 10,800 cubic kilometers of water are stored in artificial reservoirs. That is little over twice the volume of Lake Michigan. The authors estimate this quantity of water reduces global sea levels by -30mm, with an average rate of -0.55mm per year over the last half century.
jrosenhouse | May 7, 2008It's sweet. It's soooo sweet. All the years of hiding, of playing along, of pretending to be one of them, just to get to this point. How many times did I sit there during afternoon tea, throwing darts at the board with Michael Behe's face on it, laughing at their sick little jokes:
How many Creationists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Creationists don't use lightbulbs. They prefer the Dark Ages!!
Hahahahahaha! Hey, that's a good one. Tell me that one about William Dumbski again...
Sure, I went along. I participated in all those morbidly anti-religious initiation rites…
pharyngula | May 7, 2008The Catholic church is always ripely ridiculous, and it's a fine fillip on the rococo elaborations of their dogma when some silly news organization tries to turn them into a poll. Here you go, two, count 'em, two polls at once on the absurd entity called the Virgin Mary. You get to vote on "Do you believe the Virgin Mary has appeared as an apparition?", which is silly as it stands, but then there's also this ambiguous question, "Are you surprised the church officially recognized the Virgin Mary sightings from the 1600s?". So we've got "do you believe in ghosts with hymens?" and "are you…
esiegel | May 7, 2008The American Association of Physics Teachers just published a study of 1,000 likely U.S. voters about science, religion, evolution, and creationism. The results are frightening. Here are some of the "highlights" of their study:
38% of Americans are in favor of the teaching of religion in public school science classrooms.
65% of Americans do not think that it is an important science goal to understand the origin and diversity of biological life on Earth.
47% of Americans believe that the earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
21% of Americans do not believe that the…
grrlscientist | May 7, 2008tags: Another Reason I Don't Keep a Gun in the House, Billy Collins, poetry
"A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful implanted in the human soul."
-- Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
I received so many poetry suggestions from you that I decided to continue to publish poetry on my site once per week for you to enjoy. One of my SB colleagues, John Lynch, posts a poem every Friday (here's his poetry archives), so I will post a poem on Wednesday at 10 am ET, as long as…
cortex | May 7, 2008Over at Mind Matters, my other site, we just posted a rather interesting article on the ways in which ordinary cell phones can alter your patterns of brain activity, and even interfere with sleep. Here's Doug Fields:
Hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones, because their electromagnetic transmissions can interfere with sensitive electrical devices. Could the brain also fall into that category? Of course, all our thoughts, sensations and actions arise from bioelectricity generated by neurons and transmitted through complex neural circuits inside our skull. Electrical signals between…
cmcclain | May 6, 2008Findings by Daniel Odess, curator of archaeology at the University of Alaska Museum in Fairbanks, suggest that whale hunting dates back at least 3,000 years. Odess's team found a piece of walrus ivory inscribed with scenes of hunters in boats pursuing whales. Wood directly adjacent to the ivory was radiocarbon dated to arrive at the age. This predates previous evidence of whaling by 1,000 years.
pharyngula | May 6, 2008So here's another one. A West Virginia newspaper poll asks,
Should local governmental bodies be allowed to open their meetings with a prayer?
You know the answer to that one.
cortex | May 6, 2008British papers are fun. The Daily Mail recently ran a deliciously nasty article on hippy-crites, those pious celebrities (like John Travolta, Chris Martin and Brangelina) who talk endlessly about global warming and yet still fly in lots of private jets. Travolta, for instance, recently few by himself from Europe to the United States in a Boeing 707, which can normally hold more than 100 people.
But this isn't just a problem for celebrities. A new paper in Conservation Biology looked at how the "environmental attitudes" of individuals affected the location of their home in the Teton Valley of…