Monthly Archives: June 2008

So mike did come by

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to get is phone. He even brought some muscle. Some tough looking guy.He tried to claim the fish was his, of course. He was like “Yea, I had that in my pocket. I was gonna eat it later” and shit. But I didn’t even listen ’cause I remembered it from last month, not making it home from the store in all. It was in the car the whole time.Which all leads me to ask: What ARE all those spaces where things can fall into and get lost in your car doing there? Can’t they be designed OUT of the system?

The Perfect Bird Family Tree…

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… is certainly still in the future. But we have seen a step in that direction in a new paper, coming out this week in Science. This research applies intensive and extensive genomic analysis to the avian phylogenetic tree. The results are interesting.ResearchBlogging.orgThis paper is summarized in a number of locations, most notably here on Living the Scientific Life. Here, I will summarize it only very briefly. However, there are two observations I would like to make about this paper and its apparent meaning. One has to do with the nature of science, and the other has to do with the nature of evolution in particular. I’ll argue that we can quantify (almost non-trivially) the number of times science is wrong. I’ll also argue that Stephen Jay Gould was wrong (not totally, but not trivially) about one of his most important assertions (other than his musings about the myth of vaginal orgasms … we’ll talk about that another time). Continue reading The Perfect Bird Family Tree… →

Pile On

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Join Zuska and her commenters in a pile on regarding the Smithsonian Magazine’s recent article on the archaeology of southern Africa.It’s racist, it’s sexist, and it’s even anti-Neanderthal. (The article, not Zuska’s post)Regarding the writing about the use of stone tool technology in the article:

It says, “could be women – but no one really knows, do they? The safe bet is on men.” It’s the equivalent of saying “the PC police are always watching, so we’d better pretend like there is an actual possibility that we are including women in this discussion, even though we know we’re talking about Man, i.e. men, not women.”

HERE

Some Nature and Science News

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NASA warming scientist: ‘This is the last chance’ from PhysOrg.com
(AP) — Exactly 20 years after warning America about global warming, a top NASA scientist said the situation has gotten so bad that the world’s only hope is drastic action.
[…]

Some searchers still expect to see rare woodpecker from PhysOrg.com
(AP) — For the last three years, researchers in camouflage and waders have slogged through the east Arkansas woods hoping to spot a rare bird that so far seems unwilling to be seen.
[…]

Canadians argue for polar bear hunt from PhysOrg.com
(AP) — Officials from northern Canada were in Washington on Monday to make an unpopular argument: Let U.S. hunters continue to kill polar bears for sport.
[…]

Celestial clues hint at eclipse in Homer’s Odyssey from PhysOrg.com
Among countless other debates about Homer’s Odyssey — not the least of which is whether the entire poem can be attributed to Homer himself — is whether Odysseus returns home to experience a total solar eclipse. But a Rockefeller University scientist and a colleague from Argentina believe they have found astronomical references in the Odyssey that provide corroborating evidence of this celestial event. The finding is reported in this week’s online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[…]

Jennifer assures us we will not be sucked into a tiny black hole later this month.

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Given the limited and limiting nature of the discussion of the Large Hadron Collider firing up in a very short time, which could then destroy this corner of the solar system according to some, I have been hoping that blogger Jennifer Ouellette would chime in and make sense of it all.And she certainly has taken a stab at it.Go read this now!!! Before it is too late!!!!!

Optical Character Recognition in Linux

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I don’t think Optical Character Recognition (OCR) works that well, frankly. But it can be done and it can be better than retyping piles of text.It does seem to work nicely when the text is nice and clean on nice clean white paper with a good contract between ink and background and no garbage on the page. But in my experience, when I have those conditions, it is because i have an electronic version already! When I have a PDF file that consists of scans of photocopies, OCR tends to see flecks of yeck as accents (or entire letters) and things get messy. Continue reading Optical Character Recognition in Linux →

Evolution Fight in Texas School Board Expected Shortly

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This summer, in fact.Don McLeroy, dentist and chair of the Texas School board (a state-wide elected body) is a creationist. Of evolution, he says “I just don’t think it’s true or it’s ever happened.”The 15 member board is stocked with seven creationists. It could have been worse, but the outcome of recent elections was slightly favorable. The governor of Texas is a creationist. Hell, most Texans are creationists.The most likely creationist effort will be to insert a “strengths and weaknesses” clause … an academic freedom provision, into the language.Here is a current PDG essay on the situation by Joyce Anderson writing for the Jewish Times.Here is a recent post on the academic freedom issue, and here is Mike and me talking about it on the radio.