John McKay at Archy has written an in-dept analysis of Minnesota Congressperson Michele Bachmann. Read it here.
Surly Amy address Religion vs. Faith.
And, of course, the Ultimate Death Match: Fungus vs Worm
Daily Archives: August 3, 2010
Nalini Nadkarni on conserving the canopy
Identify this bird!
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Science as a Contact Sport by Stephen Schneider
In the 1960s, the whole idea of a “greenhouse effect” was well understood, and assumed to be an important potential factor in climate change. So was glaciation, and the short and medium term future of the Earth’s climate was less clear than compared to now. But the basics were there … C02 was being released into the atmosphere, this could cause a greenhouse effect, and that would warm the earth. Certainly by the early 1980s, it was possible to make some thumb-suck estimates of how much the earth would warm given various assumptions about CO2, and it was not that difficult to see that a lot of fossil carbon was being put into the atmosphere.
Continue reading Science as a Contact Sport by Stephen Schneider
Technologically speaking …
There is a new blog you should check out: OpenSourcePhotography.org. It deals with, believe it or not, OpenSource stuff and Photography stuff. There is some real potential there, I hope it develops.
There is apparently a big fight among OpenSource community members about whether or not Ubuntu (pronounced Ubuntu) gives back to the community. In my view, not knowing much about the debate, the fact that the vast majority of desktops and laptops that run Linux these days do so because Ubuntu did what it did should be plenty, but apparently there is more to it than that. The fight, really, is about code. Read about is here: Ubuntu Empire Strikes Back
Tropical Storm Colin
Colin will almost certainly not become a strong hurricane or reach landfall as a hurricane, so we should be looking out for Danielle the next name in the sequence.
According to NOAA, Colin will continue to strength and follow a WNW path until curving north. It will maintain tropical storm status or possibly (ca 25% chance) reach low level hurricane strength at most between 1.4 and 4 days from now and stay that way for a few more days without strengthening. After that, the models diverge so a lot of different things could happen, but most likely dissipation.
(Keep in mind, of course, that a tropical feature can under certain conditions reorganize and become a factor again, though that is not likely here.)