The just uploaded podcast of Skeptically Speaking is a must-hear:
Whether you’re dropping a last-minute hint to a relative, or buying science books for the people you love, Skeptically Speaking has you covered. We’ve enlisted two dozen scientists, science writers and bloggers, including some of our favorite past guests. They’ll bring you their favorites from 2012, and some classics to help fill out anyone’s science library. Happy holidays!
(Mine is at about 19 minutes.)
From UCB:
Below the fold is a description from Wikipedia of the Red Lake School Shooting. Consider the details in relation to issues of gun ownership, safety, school security, and whatever other issues it brings to mind.
Warning, this is graphic and horrid.
The web site pertaining to the following video is HERE. Click through to participate.
Ooops, I may have put on the wrong video. Sorry about that NRA.
Scene: Berkeley, California, April 1986. A bar. Five conference attendees, myself included, grabbing a hamburger and a beer in a fern-bar on or near Telegraph.
All eyes are on the TVs mounted over the bar, where we watch footage of an air strike against Libya. This is the retribution by Ronald Reagan against Insane African Leader Muammar al-Gaddafi. The White House was issuing statements about al-Gaddafi’s involvement in bombings in Europe, the OPEC oil ministry kidnapping, linkage to the infamous Jackal, and so on. Nikki, a friend and colleague, said something, and I remember asking her to repeat it. Nikki is a low-talkier. You’ve got to lean in really close. So I leaned in and heard her say, “Lybia is the only country in Africa where the people get to share in the national wealth. They love Gaddafi. Others should take a lesson from him.”
Continue reading Pan Am 103 from Frankfurt
American Atheists and two co-plaintiffs today filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Kentucky a lawsuit demanding that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) stop giving preferential treatment to churches and religious organizations via the process of receiving non-profit tax-exempt status under the Internal Revue Code (IRC) procedures and definitions.
“American Atheists receives tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3),” said American Atheists President David Silverman, “but because the organization is not classified as religious it costs American Atheists, along with all other secular non-profits, significantly more money each year to keep that status. In this lawsuit, American Atheists and the other plaintiffs are demanding that all tax-exempt organizations, including those characterized as religious by the IRS, have the same requirements to achieve tax-exempt status.”
For example, in order to qualify for nonprofit tax-exempt status, any religious or secular organization must demonstrate it exists to benefit the public. After that basic element is established, religious non- profits are almost always declared automatically tax-exempt under the current IRC rules and definitions. However, secular non-profits face a lengthy application and a fee, which can be as high as $850.
1) The number of people who care more about gun control than about the 2nd amendment has been greater for some time now, and it has shifted even further. This is according to a new poll by Pew Research Center: After Newtown, Modest Change in Opinion about Gun Control
Most Say Assault Weapons Make Nation More Dangerous
2) NASA has a new design for their next generation space suit, and it looks familiar. Have a look. NASA’s is the one on the left:
3) Facebook is going to start charging one dollar per message for certain messages. They say it is for your own good.
In a statement posted online, the Menlo Park, Calif.-based social site cited research showing that “imposing a financial cost on the sender may be the most effective way to discourage unwanted messages and facilitate delivery of messages that are relevant and useful.”
Facebook already lets members send messages to those outside their network of contacts, but those messages are routed to an often-overlooked “Other” folder. This new feature would let users send messages directly to a user’s main “Inbox”—for a small fee.
Each message sent will initially cost $1, though Facebook plans to continue tinkering with prices.
That article is from a source that is regarded at least in the science community, as highly unreliable so if you need to know more about it you may want to check out other sources.
4) Matt Ridley, the author of a handful of pretty good but uninspired science books, also famous for being in charge of a bank or something that he ran into the ground due to utter incompetence, tuns out to be a Climate Science denier. Here’s an article about that.
5) Hey, I have an idea, let’s make sure, instead of limiting the number of guns out there, that there are numerous highly well armed and trained professionals around to stop shooters safely in their tracks without anyone getting injured. Like this.
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| Golden Eagle |
I hope I won’t disappoint you … this is not about John Ashcroft. It is about golden eagles (actually, maybe its about one golden eagle in particular).
Continue reading Let The (Golden) Eagle Soar
Mitochondria are cool, important, and fascinating. You know the basic story. Mitochondria are the result of endosymbiosis. A bacterim or bacteria-like organism insinuated itself into another bacterium or bacteria-like organism. The former was small, the latter large. A relationship started up whereby the smaller one became an organelle in the larger one, and Eukaryotic life was formed. You probably also know that in multi-celled organisms mitochondria may be passed on by one sex (female) so paleogenetic research can sort out female lineages by looking only at the DNA found in the mitochondria (mtDNA). But there are things that perhaps you did not know, like the relationship between the whole mitochondria thing and why sex exists, various diseases including cancer, and aging (of cells and of organisms). Also, mitochondria related to organismic complexity, warm bloodedness, and a range of other basic biological facts of life.
Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life
I know some teachers who read the book and have found much useful current, integrative material for use in their advanced biology classes. That’s a hint: If you know a life science teacher, this is a great stocking stuffer!
Sometimes you just know something is going to happen, and then it happens. And if that doesn’t happen to you enough, try some confirmation bias, that always works! I have a friend who just got a new cat and at the same time moved into a new house, and one of the first things that happened was that the cat disappeared. The Cable Guy had been in and out and it was assumed the cat had escaped that way. At this point, I don’t think anyone is 100% clear on what happened, but about a day after the cat vanished it re-materialized. Personally, I think it was in the Cosmic Sock Drawer.
This reminded me of a story. One day many years ago in a galaxy far far away (The is a euphemism for “before Amanda”) we got this cat named George. Everything was just like that … as in we had this cat named George … for months, then I went away for a few months, to Africa, to search for ancient fossils and stuff. My Significant Other would occasionally send an email, and we would even chat on the phone now and then, and initially I would hear a story about the cat, and a story about the dog each time. Then one day the stories about the cat stopped.
A couple of weeks went by without any stories about the cat and then one day we were on the phone and there was a story about the cat again. So, Sherlock Holmes like, I said, “George was in the garage for the last 10 days, wasn’t he?”
Silence. More silence. Then, “How did you know?”
I had noticed that every time the garage door was opened, which was rare (we never put the car in there), George would run in and in order for me to close the door again I had to get him out. This had been discussed but I was pretty sure I was the only person in the household who was fully tuned into the fact that George did this. When mentions of George the Cat stopped in the irregular updates, I inferred he had gone missing. That could have been for a lot of reasons. But when he reappeared a while later, I realized the most likely scenario was temporary incarceration. The actual period of entrapment was about a week, during which time George would have eaten all the mice in the garage then gotten hungry for a few days. Confirmation bias: In a post hoc world, it makes for a great story!
My friend’s cat might have a secret place she hides. I wonder if it will ever be discovered? Quite likely not.
Funny moment at 2:15 by the way:
He made a gingerbread slave house. A gingerbread plantation!
The gun nuts did not waste much time after the brutal slaying of 20 six year olds, some teachers, a principal, and some others at a school in Newtown Connecticut to start suggesting that everything would have been fine if only the teachers were armed. And now, after more days have gone by, it seems that the gun nuts are making this suggestion even more frequently.
The evidence suggests that when there are more guns around, especially in the hands of untrained individuals, there is more rather than less danger. Don’t let anyone tell you that an armed population is a safe population. That is a blatant lie. The evidence also suggests that the few times there is an armed citizen in a position to to intervene in a spree killing, they don’t manage it. Arming citizens does not help. These two facts together explain why spree shootings in towns, neighborhoods, places, where people are constantly yammering about their guns and touting their conceal-carry behaviors all the time (like Colorado and Arizona) did not involve response by armed citizens even when they were present.
But none of that is as important as one simple fact. Well, two simple facts, regarding arming teachers in schools. Fact 1: The teachers want no part of it. Fact 1: The parents will not allow this.
There is a very good rational argument to not arm teachers, and there is not rational argument to do so. So we should not. But sometimes we also just need to do what people really want to do, or avoid doing what people just don’t want to do. That counts too, depending on what issue we are talking about. Here we have a situation where the gun nuts would really like to see teachers armed, but they are not teachers and they probably don’t even have kids in schools, and where the teachers themselves are saying they won’t do it. The parents are saying they don’t want it to happen. In this case, then, not only is there a rational argument to not arm teachers, but nobody involved who counts (the gun nuts don’t count) is going to allow it.
Today, a staff member (not a teacher) in a Minneapolis school who has a carry permit brought her pistol to school in response to her own fears raised since the Sandy Hook Massacre. The boneheaded gun nut bragged to her colleagues about it. Someone called the cops, the cops came in and found the gun and took it away, and the school administrators sent her home and have her on leave (charges are being considered). And guess what? The parents are livid.
If you work for a school and you think you know better than everyone else and unilaterally decide to bring your firearm to work, then you you should be fired and jailed.
Last night Julia sent me a link to a video of a Golden Eagle swooping down into a Montreal park, picking up an infant/toddler and lifting it several feet into the air before dropping it and flying off. Since then many on the Intertubes have declared the video to be a fake while others insist it could be real, but unfortunately many of the reasons given for it being a fake or for being real are misconceptions or inaccuracies. I’m sure the event depicted in the video is faked … no eagle picked up a child as depicted … but the reasons for it being a fake are not as many have suggested. One of the main reasons that this is interesting is because we saw perfectly intelligent people who clearly identify as “skeptics” writing off the video as fake mainly on the grounds that others said it was fake, or where those reasons were inaccurate. In other words, this may be an example of hyper-skepticism. The apparent fact that the video really is a fake does not ameliorate the terrible harm that has been done to Truth and Humanity from falsely labeling the fake video as fake for false, fake reasons!
Here is the video:
Some people who have discussed this video may have seen only a shorter version showing the last bit.
Here are some of the arguments given pro and con on this video’s realness, and my assessment of them.
1) It is real because Golden Eagles occasionally eat children. Maybe. There is no particular reason that a Golden Eagle would not eat a child, though I know of no confirmed reports of this. This particular question … could or would a Golden Eagle do this … is part of a larger theme of belief in non-human animals eating humans. People are mostly divided on this issue. Lions, it is said, don’t eat humans because they don’t like the taste. However, they do now and then. Lions and other cats tend to specialize on their prey, so day to day, healthy pride lions eat one or two species of antelope (or something) as do leopards and other cats. Switching to humans is not uncommon for large predators, but once they do they are killed. So, you don’t have very many long-career human-eating large predators. The idea that a predator won’t eat a human because of some mystical exceptional property of humans (including taste) is wishful thinking. But, predators who do so immediately face serious odds against them because humans are a bad-ass species. There is no a priori reason to say that a Golden Eagle would not or could not attack and/or eat a human infant and/or toddler. It is, however, unlikely. But, unlikely events happen. Conclusion: This point does not tell us if the video is fake.
2) It is real because Golden Eagles can and do eat large prey. This is absolutely true. Golden Eagles are the (mostly) Temperate version of the large Monkey-Easting and other eagles found in many areas across the world, and they tend to specialize on largish prey. The better known (to the average Westerner) “Bald Eagle” and its sister species in Eurasia are in that size range, much more numerous, but specialize in fish, but even they occasionally take a fawn or other large non-fish (and often, they take birds). Conclusion: Plausible.
3) It is not true because Gold Eagles are rare in Montreal. True, they are in fact rare everywhere as most large territorial predators are (with some exceptions) and Golden Eagles are especially rare and “shy” of human settlements. They do live in the general area, though, and they seem to migrate from Canada to points south, so a Golden Eagle passing through is not at all impossible. Conclusion: Plausable.
4) It is not true because it is an Osprey not a Golden Eagle. I believe that this was said by a bird expert who may have seen only the shorter version of the clip. On watching the clip, I believe it is an Eagle because it looks like one. It could be an “immature” (year old, full grown) Bald Eagle, but the markings on the wing actually look like a Golden Eagle. However, telling an immature Bald from a Golden is tricky and actually requires more of a look than we get in this video. Conclusion: Nothing is disproven here.
5) It is not real because an Eagle of this size can’t lift something as heavy as an infant or toddler that high in the air. This is my personal favorite for why the video is faked, and as far as I know I’m the only person to have noted this (on various facebook posts) so far. People have argued against this saying “Eagles take large prey” and “There’s this video of them taking a wolf” and “There’s this video of them lifting mountain goats” but all that is wrong. There is one “real” video shown on Animal Planet shot from above of a gold eagle grasping a mountain goat kid that it has dragged off a cliff and “guiding” its body down as it falls, seemingly dragging it across a ravine to a cliff face. But at no point does the Eagle lift the kid. In other videos of a Golden Eagle attacking (under human command) wolves or in other cases hunting Geese does a Golden Eagle lift anything off the ground.
Bald Eagles, which are about the same size, or a bit smaller depending on which population we are looking at, lift fish they’ve caught out of the water and fly off with them, but it is a struggle. If a Bald Eagle grabs a fish that is too big, the bird will fly just above the water dragging the fish on the surface. In some cases, the Bald Eagle virtually swims atop the water with the entaloned fish under or just on top of the water, to the nearest shore, where it drags it (with difficulty) to the land, kills it, rests for a while, then eats it. (Then spends considerable time drying off!) The fish that are too large for the Eagle to lift out of the water are significantly lighter than a human infant. Conclusion: The part where the eagle lifts the child up into the air is fake. This still leaves the possibility that an Eagle or Eagle like raptor swooped down on a child, but there was no lifting.
6) It is not real because this is not how Golden Eagles hunt their prey, for a couple of different reasons (this is an extention of #5). The large eagles such as the Golden Eagle and the various monkey eating eagles do knock large prey (like monkeys) off of branches or cliffs, pounce on them, rip them up and eat them on the spot. But they only carry off bits and pieces if they carry anything off at all. I’ve seen this in the Congo: You find a monkey killed by an Eagle, but abandoned (because humans came along). You convince the Pygmies to leave the monkey there and come back later in the day and a limb is missing. You come back still later in the day and only half the body is there. You come back even later and it is all gone. Conclusion: Not relevant, but instructive, and there is always room for a Pygmy story.
7) It is fake because the carrying-off of prey behavior is done during nesting and this eagle was not nesting. Eagles carry food to their nests only when they are feeding young that are there. There are no nesting Golden Eagles near any parks in or near Montreal, and this is not really nesting season. When the Canadians are wearing warm clothes, the only “nested” eagles are large enough to fly to the food mom or dad have killed on the ground. The Golden Eagle would have killed the infant/toddler on the spot and eaten it there… But that would not have happened because an Eagle would not try to kill and eat a small human while the other, large humans are standing around ready to stomp the Eagle. Conclusion, the Eagle in question was an idiot.
It is possible, as I suggested above, that a large raptor did swoop down and strike a kid. That is not entirely impossible. Had that happened, a lot less of the video would have to be faked! But the bit of the video where the eagle lifts the child into the air did not happen. That is faked.
UPDATE: 8) It is fake because someone admitted to having faked it. Conclusion: Assuming they are not faking having faked it, this would indicate it was faked.
This is being discussed on my facebook page, Don Prothero’s facebook page, here, here, and here.
From NASA:
On Oct. 17, 2012, during its 174th orbit around the gas giant, Cassini was deliberately positioned within Saturn’s shadow, a perfect location from which to look in the direction of the sun and take a backlit view of the rings and the dark side of the planet. Looking back towards the sun is a geometry referred to by planetary scientists as “high solar phase;” near the center of your target’s shadow is the highest phase possible. This is a very scientifically advantageous and coveted viewing position, as it can reveal details about both the rings and atmosphere that cannot be seen in lower solar phase.
The last time Cassini had such an unusual perspective on Saturn and its rings, at sufficient distance and with sufficient time to make a full system mosaic, occurred in September 2006, when it captured a mosaic, processed to look like natural color, entitled “In Saturn’s Shadow” (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA08329). In that mosaic, planet Earth put in a special appearance, making “In Saturn’s Shadow” one of the most popular Cassini images to date.
The mosaic being released today by the mission and the imaging team, in celebration of the 2012 holiday season, does not contain Earth; along with the sun, our planet is hidden behind Saturn. However, it was taken when Cassini was closer to Saturn and therefore shows more detail in the rings than the one taken in 2006.
The new processed mosaic, composed of 60 images taken in the violet, visible and near infrared part of the spectrum, can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini , http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org .
“Of all the many glorious images we have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those taken from Saturn’s shadow,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini’s imaging team lead based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.