Henry Reich is developing a YouTube channel for one-minute-physics presentations. Below the fold is one of the more recent productions.
Continue reading How the sun works: Fusion and Quantum Tunneling →

Michele Bachmann doesn’t really care about bullies, or if bullying leads to really bad things happening to children, because there is no bully bill in the US constittuion and it’s natural anyway. Here’s the audio of her senseless yammering about how an anti bulling bill could lead to the boys all turning gay.

Move over TED, make way for BILL.
Continue reading AudioVideo Things to Hear and See →

Pop the champagne corks. The Texas Board of Education has unanimously come down on the side of evolution. In 14-0* vote, the board today approved scientifically accurate high school biology textbook supplements from established mainstream publishers–and did not approve the creationist-backed supplements from International Databases, LLC.

Read More

Cut a hole in a watermelon! Brilliant!

I think Rebecca Watson makes a great skeptic and spokesperson for the skeptics community, but I think her real calling is in giving dating advice.

Continue reading Dating Advice from Rebecca →

President Barack Obama shut down dozens, possibly hundreds, of web sites of members of US congress moments ago when during a moving oration about the US Budget Crisis he suggested that people contact their members of congress immediately. In particular, Obama stated that it has become the norm to consider “compromise” to be a dirty word in American politics.

We’ve been checking on all the sites for our local representatives and they are all down.

I don’t know if I should worship my backpack or drive a wooden stake through its heart and shoot it with silver bullets. For three days I obsessively looked through every pocket knowing my keys were in there somewhere, and never found them. Today, I was looking for something else and guess what popped out. I had the same backpack in Mexico a couple of years ago, and stuck a bottle of some cool looking hot sauce I picked up in a small market in one of the pockets. Forgot about it. That backpack then traveled with me, Julia, or Amanda to four cities and three or four countries over the next year or so before the Department of Homeland Security found the sauce. The backpack? It’s one of these, with, like, two zillion pockets.

Now, a couple of items for you: Don’t forget that Abbie Smith of ERV will be the next guest on Skeptically Speaking. The details about the live interview, to be done Sunday Afternoon, are here.

But before that, don’t forget to wake up early in the morning to catch Matthew Chapman on Atheist Talk Radio on Sunday (details here when available).

That is all for now.

This week’s featured musical artist for your enjoyment: K. Flay
Continue reading K.Flay →

A Hadron is a kind of particle, made of quarks. There are two kinds of hadrons, baryons (made out of three quarks) and mesons (made out of a quark and a quirky quark known as an antiquark).

The particle of interest is made up of an up quark, a strange quark, and a heavy bottom quark. I’ve known a few bluegrass bands that fit that description, but this particle is called the Xi-sub-b baryon.

The observation was made at the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) .

The neutral Xi-sub-b belongs to the family of bottom baryons, which are about six times heavier than the proton and neutron because they all contain a heavy bottom quark. The particles are produced only in high-energy collisions, and are rare and very difficult to observe*.

I have a new post up at 10,000 Birds: How much bird is there, anyway? Please have a look and leave a comment!

Also, as a reminder, there is still time to make your opinion known regarding the proposed Sandhill Crane hunt in Kentucky: Last Gasp for Sandhill Cranes–Act Now!. And if you want to know why I never shot any cranes you can find out here: The first crane and the last crane

For now.

When it comes down to it, benevolent dictatorship resting on a perfectly anarchistic base is the only way to go. Democracy is too easily bought. Free Market Forces do not make everything all nice and efficient and stuff. Wherever information can be OpenSource and OpenAccess it should be; No institution should be allowed to exist for more than a few years; Somehow the infrastructure needs to be efficient, effective, and free (OpenInfrastructure) and then, everything else, we’ll let Google take care of.

Or at least that’s the plan for now. And when Google goes evil? Revolution!!!!!
Continue reading I would like to be the first to welcome our Googley overlords →

Gregor Mendel is the Augustinian Monk and Scientist who developed the model of genetics that held sway all the way through the Darwinian Synthesis (when, essentially, it was introduced and integrated) and right up until recently, when it has weakened considerably compared to other conceptions of genetics based on observations not possible in his time. “Mendelian Genetics” still “works” more or less, it just applies to fewer cases in its original simple form. Mendel’s main contribution was probably to demonstrate that inheritance involves both parents in roughly equal ways ant that the unit of inheritance is bot particulate and immutable between generations, so that even if a trait is invisible in an individual, the genetic material was not necessarily absent and could contribute to future generations. That (assuming “immutable” is not perfect) is all still pretty much both true and important.