If you ever get to see “Millhouse” do so! I’d love to watch it along side any similar documentary on George Bush. I don’t have the film, but here is a documentary about the documentary.
Part I
Continue reading The Making of the Richard Nixon Film “Millhouse: A White Comedy”
Ecologist Eric Berlow doesn’t feel overwhelmed when faced with complex systems. He knows that more information can lead to a better, simpler solution. Illustrating the tips and tricks for breaking down big issues, he distills an overwhelming infographic on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan to a few elementary points.
Continue reading How complexity leads to simplicity
We laugh at the idea of you burning in hell and we hope you get hit by a church van tonight!!”
… Richard Dawkins reads some of his hate mail while relaxing at the hearth.
Continue reading “Richard Dawkins, your theory sucks!
First, this one that Julia just sent me:
Then, this one I just made. It’s experimental.
From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity’s most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach — calculation by hand — isn’t just tedious, it’s mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.
Continue reading Teaching kids real math with computers
The distinguished evolutionary biologist Morris Goodman died on November 14, 2010, at the age of 85, according to the Wayne State University School of Medicine. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 12, 1925, Goodman attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, before enlisting in the United States Air Force in 1943. Returning to Wisconsin, he earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in zoology. After a series of postdoctoral appointments, in 1958 he took a position at Wayne State University, where he remained for fifty-two years. In the late 1950s, he became interested in evolution, and swiftly became a pioneer in molecular systematics, especially as applied to primates. Describing a 1975 paper using hemoglobin sequence data, he commented, “I think we were the first to get hard evidence of Darwinian evolution.” His honors included election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and the Charles R. Darwin Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
Goodman’s scientific prominence, as well as his controversial proposal that chimpanzees and bonobos be reclassified from the genus Pan to the genus Homo, resulted in his frequently serving as a target of creationists.
Paul was a real live scientific meteorologist who accidentally ended up a TV weatherman. (The regular one was sick, the substitute was sick, so they threw him in front of the camera.) He then became so popular that they fired him during a budget crunch. He was one of the first weather reporters anywhere, and certainly the first in Minnesota, to tell people that AGW is real.
Don’t worry he didn’t die or anything. (Don Shelby is retiring thus this conversation):
Murkowski Wins Alaska Senate Race
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Wednesday became the first Senate candidate in more than 50 years to win a write-in campaign, emerging victorious over her Tea Party rival following a painstaking, week-long count of hand-written votes.
Nancy Pelosi elected House Democratic Leader, 150-43
…Nancy Pelosi was elected House Democratic Leader by the overwhelming margin of 150-43. This is a crushing, more than 3-1 defeat for her Blue Dog challengers. It’s even a bigger margin than Dick Gephardt’s post-1994 victory of 150-58. No matter how much press attention Blue Dogs got with their whining, it didn’t get them many votes.
Let’s have a look and see if we can decide.
Continue reading An excellent example of either crappy science reporting or crappy science …
Denis Dutton is a philosophy professor and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In his book The Art Instinct, he suggests that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty.
Continue reading A Darwinian theory of beauty
Cats:
Dogs:
The first order of business of the lame duck House of Representatives was to pass a resolution (as far as I know resolutions have no meaning) to oppose through federal legislation (which only has meaning if it is written, passed, signed into law, etc.) to ‘address’ (ban? regulate? tax? allow under only certain conditions?) the interstate sale and distribution of videos showing small animals being slowly crushed to death by women, using their bare feet or high heeled shoes.
Last year, the American Freedom Alliance, a California based Don’t Think Tank, attempted to insert, Trojan style,* a creationist film called Darwin’s Dilemma into the repertoire of films shown at the California Science Center.
The film is a pro-Intelligent Design film, and behind this insulting and immature ruse was, you guessed it, the Discovery Institute.
Continue reading California Science Center Strikes Back against Discovery Institute/AFA Conspiracy
No, wait … not exactly. Well, sort of.
We all thought Facebook would be announcing Facebook.com, the email server to end all googles. But instead it launched something else. It is called a “Modern Messaging System” and it combines email, instant messages, and SMS.
Hold on, I’ll be right back.