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cmcclain | April 24, 2008Reading over my morning blogs, Rick at MBSL&S reports news that is going to make Craig extremely cranky for the rest of weekend (and just plained pissed afterwards). In the backass wisdom that is the CNMI Legislature, they have adopted a resolution opposing the proposed Northern Islands Marine National Monument. It looks like the logo "You'll Love How Deep We Go" will not see daylight. The reasons for the blockage ranges from stupid to idiotic to just plane asinine. Rick as the full list and its utterly shocking how many of these are moot points.
I find it alarming that this comes…
cmcclain | April 24, 2008Figures. I am out of town for a week and someone feels the need to generate some gossip about me. The latest heinous character assassination comes from Rick at MBSL&S claiming that I broke MBARI's beloved Western Flyer. To bring you up to speed you can read this post. Now I whole heartedly admit that I am tough on things...clothes, vehicles, mountain bikes, previous girlfriends and my wife, laptop. However, I was nearly 1,200 miles when the great boat was broken. I have witnesses and documentation. If Rick would bother doing some research he would have seen the MBARI website.
MBARI's…
esiegel | April 24, 2008Even creationists have said that if you find something that's alive now that's over 6000 years old, it would prove to them that the Earth is at least that old.
Previously, the oldest tree in the world was thought to be a Bristlecone Pine in California, known as the Methuselah tree, at 4,840 years old (as of 2008).
It's huge! But you can also date a tree not by its trunk, but by its root structure. And as The Log Blog reports, Swedish researchers have found a tree on Fulu Mountain that is over 9,000 years old! Although it looks puny because its trunk dies every few hundred years or so and it…
gregladen | April 24, 2008Skeptic's Circle #85: Looking under rocks
The Carnival of the Fraudless: Spoofing & Exposing the Cult of Scientology
Carnival of Space Week 51
Carnival of the Liberals #63
kevin z | April 24, 2008Bowie Seamount, Canada's newest Marine Protected Area.
OTTAWA (AFP) -- An underwater volcanic mountain teaming with ocean life off Canada's Pacific Coast has been added to the nation's growing list of marine protected areas, officials said Tuesday.
"Bowie Seamount is an oceanic oasis in the deep sea, a rare and ecologically rich marine area, and our government is proud to take action to ensure it is protected," Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn said in a statement.[...]
The seamount, located 180 kilometers (110 miles) west of Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) in Canada's Pacific…
kevin z | April 24, 2008Did you know that the U.S. government has allowed the practice of shark-finning for several years? You might have thought this was a practice relegated to Asian countries, where shark fins are used in a local soup. In the past, fishermen could horde piles of shark fins alongside the shark bodies so long as the weight of the fins did not exceed 5% of the total weight. Shark fishermen could cheat this system though by piling fins from every shark caught, then filling the hold with the bodies of smaller sharks. New Scientist reported on Earth Day that U.S. is ending shark finning in its water.…
petnoyer | April 24, 2008Chris Mah's Echinoblog is off and running with a wealth of weirdness. Today he features the crinoidea, or crinoids, with some terrific images of open and close-fisted crinoid forms I've never seen before, and frankly, scare the daylights out of me (see the image from Charles Messing at Chris' website).
It's scary enough being in a research submarine, as if you need to worry about scaled urchins and the like. I never realized echinoderms were so... creepy. Now I'm worried.
gregladen | April 24, 2008You can pay someone to throw a pie in PZ Myers' face. And you won't get in trouble. Well, I think if I did it, I might get in trouble. But you can do it.
Sign up HERE.
cortex | April 24, 2008It sounds like one of those 1950's psychological experiments that scientific ethics boards no longer allow: Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in New York City's McGraw-Hill building for forty-one hours. Just thinking about such an ordeal gives me shivers of claustrophobic anxiety. Forty-one hours! In a suspended box!
Thankfully, security cameras caught the whole thing on tape:
And then read the article, which is fascinating throughout.
esiegel | April 24, 2008Warning: Crazy talk ahead. Some of you may remember that I wrote about inflation and why its alternatives fail awhile back. Apparently, Louise Riofrio didn't get the memo. When there's misinformation about cosmology out there, it's up to me to set the record straight. (And I am not alone.) Let me first remind you about one of the alternatives to inflation I debunked last month:
Add defects and vary the Speed of Light. This one’s out. Why? Because we would see defects in the Cosmic Microwave Background, and we don’t. The constancy of the speed of light is highly supported by experiments, but…
petnoyer | April 24, 2008If you look at the Mediterranean Sea on a globe, you may get the impression that its just one contiguous water mass, but really its not. There are thirteen seas in the Mediterranean Sea. The Alboran Sea is the one closest to the Straits of Gibraltar, between Spain and Morocco. The Straits are shown in the lower left of the image. The Alboran Sea water mass is part of the western Mediterranean, separated from the eastern Mediterranean by a fluid boundary 200m thick called the Almeria Oran front. Below that fluid boundary lies a deeper colder layer, called Levantine intermediate water.
You…
cortex | April 24, 2008Go see his new show at MoMA. Here's Peter Schjeldahl:
Eliasson is entertaining, yet his central concern seems less a working of spectacular magic than an investigation of how spectacular magic works. He raises awareness of the neurological susceptibilities that condition all of what we see and may think we know. This can be humiliating, as it often is in encounters with the menacingly proportioned spaces, grim videos, and noise assaults of Bruce Nauman, the greatest of post-minimalist explorers, whose influence Eliasson is quick to acknowledge. But with Eliasson the experience of our…
cortex | April 24, 2008Rebecca Solnit, author of some wonderful books, astutely describes one of the worst side-effects of testosterone:
We were preparing to leave [a party in Aspen] when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money in advertising or something like that.
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."
I replied, "Several, actually."
He said, in the way you encourage your friend's 7-year-old to…
grrlscientist | April 24, 2008tags: Cabbage, Charles Simic, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me). My poetry suggestions are starting to run dry, which means I can start posting my own favorites (but you've seen many of those already) or you can send me your favorite poems, which I probably haven't read before! Today's poem was suggested by a reader, Digital Cuttlefish, who writes; "Another poet, perhaps known to you, that I only recently (I blush to admit…
kevin z | April 23, 2008
New Scientist's technology blog has a cool post on robot jellies! This is real slick engineering done by the German automation company Festo, which describes its AquaJelly as ""an artificial autonomous jellyfish with an electric drive and an intelligent, adaptive mechanical system." Some cool features include:
* tentacles designed after fish fins to maximize propulsion
* motion controlled by shifting its weight
* 4-arm pendulum that enables steering in 4 directions
* communicates with charging station, regulates own energy supply
"Whenever the AquaJelly comes to a charger located above the…
cortex | April 23, 2008Did you know that more than 53 percent of the prisoners in Federal prisons are serving time for drug offenses? That's crazy. When will our politicians realize that drug addiction is a mental illness, and that the War on Drugs is essentially a futile struggle against the dopamine reward pathway? Addicts need treatment, not incarceration.
This article remains one of the best things I've read on the failures of American drug policy.
cortex | April 23, 2008Over at the wonderful World's Fair, Ben Cohen has an interview with Kelly Joyce, author of the forthcoming Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency. Here is how Joyce summarizes the main argument of her book:
In the United States, MRI is socially constructed as a sacred technology--one that represents progress, certainty, and good health care. The technique's sacred status is achieved in part because cultural ideas link anatomical pictures and mechanical reproduction to transparency and truth. But, it is also achieved because information about contexts and actors is often missing…
grrlscientist | April 23, 2008tags: I wandered lonely as a cloud, William Wordsworth, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me).
I wandered lonely as a cloud (The Daffodils)
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars
that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in…
petnoyer | April 23, 2008Shiver me timbers! The RV Tangaroa has a poet on board, and he's makin' jingles at sea.
The mate is there up on the bridge, steering us south down the Ridge. It's blowing a lot when he gets to the spot, so he alters the course, just a smidge.
The deckhands are standing about, so the bosun is starting to shout, "Quit all ya blabbing, these moorings need grabbing"- he's laid money on how many come out.
"Get to work," calls the bosun, "understand? I want all those deck winches manned!" But they all have to wait, cos the mooring guy's late........then he appears, transducer in hand.
Now the…
kevin z | April 22, 2008We previously brought you part 3, here is TOXIC-Garbage Island Part 4 and 5 from VBS.tv. Contains some vulgar language.