I’ve actually studied the relationship between storm activities and tree falls in a rain forest, so when I saw this, I thought it was quite interesting.
Continue reading Storms and Tree Death in the Amazon
Monthly Archives: July 2010
The perfect cell phone
A regular cell phone does not do enough, and has a small screen. An iPhone or smart phone is not easy to hold as one might hold a phone, but has all sorts of functionality and an OK screen. An iPad is kind of cool, but it does not have phone capacities. And, if it did, it would be hard to hold up to one’s ear.
But, with a little tweaking ….
Continue reading The perfect cell phone
Michele Bachmann Intends to Take Over Republican Party Leadership
God, Darwin … or Both?
Speaking of Accommodationism and New Atheism and stuff, check out this 10 year old discussion:
Continue reading God, Darwin … or Both?
The French are about to Ban the Veil
The French have moved one step closer to banning purdah and other veil-wearing in public. In France, this intolerance of religious freedom /slash/ protection of vulnerable populations from the patriarchy is a feminist issue. Would this be the final paragraph of the final chapter of the recession of Islam (from France) following its high water mark in 1492?
Details:
NCSE (Including Sbling Joshua Rosenau!) at Netroots Nation
National Center for Science Education staff will be featured at two key panels at the Netroots Nation 2010 conference in Las Vegas at the Hotel Rio. Details below the fold.
Continue reading NCSE (Including Sbling Joshua Rosenau!) at Netroots Nation
Cuelty and Ants
Skeptically Speaking’s podcast on Cruelty is now available here. Next week’s show will be Adventures Among Ants, with my close personal friend Mark Moffett. You’re gonna like Mark. Details here.
Apple screws pooch with iPhone 4. But there is a fix.
“You’re holding it wrong,” is apparently the latest ‘advice’ from Apple’s Steve Jobs. When the iPhone 4 first came out, people noticed a lot of signal drops. To me, that would not be surprising because the iPhone requires the AT&T service, which, in Minnesota, totally sucks. There are vast areas of my own personal geography where AT&T has zero signal, and most of the rest of it ranges from acceptable to sucky.
But it turns out that the iPhone had low-bars to an extent beyond that expected. In early July, Apple explained this as a software problem. The signal was fine, but the software that set the bars was wrong making you think you had a bad signal when you really didn’t
That, dear reader, is absolutely remarkable because if true, it would be one of the most astounding examples of the Placebo Effect. You see, people were not only seeing low signal bars, but they were also losing the signal itself. So, according to Apple’s explanation, people’s phone calls were being cut off because they saw that the signal had low strength as indicated. This, then, caused the signal to actually become low, and sometimes the call to drop.
That is one incredibly strong Placebo Effect. If only we could come up with a form of sugar pill that would do that to cure cancer!!!11!!
In the mean time, iPhone users figured out that if you touched a certain part of the iPhone with your finger, the signal would reduce significantly. There’s a little gappy thing near one corner of the phone, and if you touch that you get a drop in signal strength. Sort of like if you take a sugar pill as a placebo but it is accidentally attached to some effective medicine. That could seriously boost the Placebo Effect!
But then, it turns out that when independent studies were done by Consumer Reports, it was true that the the iPhone’s signal problem is not a Placebo Effect at all. It’s a case, rather, of THIB. (The Hardware is Broken.)
It was about that time, according to some guy on the TV, that Steve Jobs suggested that the real problem was that iPhone users were holding the phone wrong. Which reminds me of a story
Continue reading Apple screws pooch with iPhone 4. But there is a fix.
Decades Old Skeptics Tape Surfaces
Waterbuck
… in Kruger Park. Waterbuck have a neat adaptation: Nasty tasting subcutaneous fat. It is said that lions and leopards avoid them for this reason. I assure you, however, that they do not avoid them totally. In fact, I’m not sure if it works at all. They seem to be hunted in reasonably close proportion to their numbers in the environment.
But then you have the lions all going “ick, ick … ptui … why do we kill these tings again?”
Polanski Walks
have decided not to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the US to face sentencing for a case dating back to 1977.
The spill from space
And an interesting animation of the spill so far:
Continue reading The spill from space
Uganda Bombings: Dozens dead
Sixty-four people were killed by two bombs set off at World Cup related events. Roughly the same number again were injured. The Somali group al-Shabab is suspected. One American is among the dead, and three American missionaries were wounded.
A very pretty space rock
This is Lutetia, as photographed by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Probe. Details.
BP Oil Well Will Be Capped By Monday
… Or not .
And if not, and if this keeps going for, say, a total of one year, this is what we can expect:
Continue reading BP Oil Well Will Be Capped By Monday