Everything I’m about to tell you in this story is true.1 This is a long story, so it may span more than one blog post. You might not want to read this story while you are alone or while sitting in the dark.2
Continue reading A true ghost story. Part I: A City of Death and Misery
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Science, Religion, and Science Education
Physioprof recently posted some comments on science and religion that I basically agree with.1 But I want to add an observation that I’ve been thinking about since this Pew Research report came out.
Law and Theory in Science
There’s a lot of philosophical discussion about what, precisely, constitutes a law or a theory in scientific practice. There’s also a lot of usage of the terms that has come to us over several centuries of not-quite-consistent application of terms.
Check out this interesting essay at The Austringer
“I only fish for the fishing, not the catching”
There are two lies you will hear from anyone who is into the sport of angling. 1) “It was THIS BIG!” and 2) “Catching fish isn’t the point. It’s the experience of fishing that matters.”
The Mocking Bass. For four years this fish watched me cast lures and live bait from the end of the small dilapidated dock in the lagoon behind the cabin, without ever showing interest in what I had to offer. Two weeks ago I dropped a plastic worm on his head. The worm slid off and rested on the bottom. The mocking bass reoriented towards the worm and took a sniff. I jiggled the worm. And, BANG. He took the bait. My drag was set to medium, so WZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ .. he took off across the lagoon. I tightened the drag a little because he was running into brush and he turned direction and jumped. But I kept the rod tip up and used his jump to bring him in. He ran back and forth across the lagoon two more times and then headed out. WZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ against the harder drag with his last bit of strength, and one more jump. Then I brought him in, letting him struggle and tire a little more because they always manage to pull off that one last bit of resistance, the one where you lose most of the big ones. I got on my knees and pulled him out just as he got near the dock… And that fish was THIS BIG!!!!!
Continue reading “I only fish for the fishing, not the catching”
Which is more agile: Cats or dogs?
Dogs:
Cats:
More reading on the Neoatheisticaccomodationism schism.
Lousy Canuck has ramped up the metaphor with Two boats tethered together on a lake as his method of addressing the 1% solution. Also, there is now a very interesting post on Quiche Moraine regarding the Hollywood Case Study and the book Unscientific America
See also this at Pharyngula.
Accommodationists and New Atheists Sail in the Same Boat
… In which I narrow the gulf between two allied factions enough that with a running start you can jump across … maybe.
Continue reading Accommodationists and New Atheists Sail in the Same Boat
Oooh look… Shiny
So the other day I stopped at the grocery store to get a few items for the trip up north. One of the things I needed was water. I know, I know, if I buy bottled water the earth will split in half and we will all die. But you have not tasted the water that comes out of the tap at the cabin. Anyway, I bought a couple of gallons, and then decided to buy a six pack of bottles, because we had four people going up in the car, two were kids who never drink enough water, and I thought this would be a good idea.
Continue reading Oooh look… Shiny
Unscientific America
Book note: I have received my copy of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future
Do not rip DVD’s in Linux
This is illegal. Do not do this in the US. Or, do it only for CD’s that you totally own. Like, you are the artist formerly known as Prince and you are going to rip your own DVD off of your own DVD. That is probably not legal either.
So, for those of you tuning in from Bora Bora:
And remember, Linux is not for everyone.
Arrrrrr….
VLC Media Player hits Version 1.0
VideoLAN’s VLC media player, arguably the world’s best media player, hit version 0.9.9 in early April. Three months and more than 78 million downloads later, VideoLAN has announced VLC 1.0.0, or “Goldeneye.”
Your media will never be the same.
In fact, with VideoLAN’s VLC media player for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it doesn’t have to be. One of the amazing things about VLC is that it can play anything that you’ve ever even thought about playing. That random media format that one site in Ecuador requires–VLC likely plays it, while Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. likely will not.
It is the best, and it is open source. Suck eggs, proprietary stuff!
Has the foundation under Microsoft suddenly shifted?
…. or is there a honest to goodness glitch in the way browser shares are counted?
There is indeed evidence that IE browser share has dropped at the expense of Firefox over recent months. There is some evidence that there are problems with the way in which different versions of IE are counted which could be screwing up the stats. Regardless, Market Share by Net Applications, the service which provides a monthly market share assessment, has failed to produce the July 1 results claiming that the data are under review.
Can you say … “Confirmation Bias?”
Some details of this murky situation and links can be found here.
Wildlife in Protected Areas Compared to Non-Protected Areas of Kenya
It has become virtually axiomatic that as climate shifts or other potential insults to the ecology of a given area occur, plants and animals enclosed in parks bounded by “impermeable” landscapes are at great risk. Instead of the extreme ranges of a plant or animal moving north or south, or across a gradient of rainfall, or up or down in elevation, organisms that are protected in parks are also stuck in the parks and risk local extinction when change happens or disease becomes endemic, or poaching uncontrolled or fire more common or …. well, we can go on and on.
In a new study on “The Status of Wildlife in Protected Areas Compared to Non-Protected Areas of Kenya,”, the famous Kenyan wildlife ecologist David Western has demonstrated the severity of this problem in that East African nation.
From the abstract:
Continue reading Wildlife in Protected Areas Compared to Non-Protected Areas of Kenya
Minnesotan Citizen Jury will Evaluate Recount Process
The Citizens Jury on Election Recounts is a privately funded entity that has assembled 24 jurors and given them stipends and various resources to evaluate the recount process and make recommendations. The “jurors” are randomly selected regular people.
Continue reading Minnesotan Citizen Jury will Evaluate Recount Process
FFMPEG in Linux (converting videos)
Stuff you can’t really do in Windows. Sort of but not really.