See Paul. I won’t tell you why, but I will tell you this: Drive out of your way if you need to in order to see the film at a theater that will be filled mainly with very Christian Christians. Then, as you watch the movie, pay attention to the audience.
You’ll love the movie, and you’ll love the audience … reaction. Trust me on this.
This is the time of year the Red River floods (or not). This is an item that appeared on Quiche Moraine last year during flood season:
A Simple Assignment
Red River Flood
Mike Haubrich
This was a simple assignment, really. Drive to Lakeville, examine a car for flood damage and send an estimate to the insurance company. It was a car that had been transported from East Grand Forks, Minnesota to Lakeville. It was owned by a married couple with two kids, people evacuated when the Red River crested nearly five feet higher than estimated and swamped the entire city of East Grand Forks. People who were refugees of the 1997 flood.
I watched the flood news on TV. The Red River of the North wrested control from human attempts to subdue it. It called out “This is MY valley, and I will have my way with it this year.” I had not seen such a flood in all of the time I live in the Red River Valley. The flood of 1979 was close.
Some time ago we had a party in Minneapolis to celebrate the one millionth’s comment on Scienceblogs. Finally, I’ve uploaded the video taken at that party, at the Black Forest Inn.
Continue reading PZ and Greg’s Excellent Party: The Movie
Reverend Mike gives it a try.
Also, don’t forget that March 16th is St. Urho’s Day!
What? We missed it? I guess I’ll have to save my purple beer for next year.
I will be over by the holy water waiting for an apology on behalf of most of humanity from the nearest religious person …
Continue reading A Christian Perspective on the Japanese Earthquake
Today is DuWayne Brayton’s birthday. His web site is here, but his best writing is in comments on my blog!
Happy Birthday DuWayne. Many happy returns. Though I actually have no idea what that means, and assume it has to do with gift receipts.
James at Class:M has an important post on the perception and cost of Nuclear Energy: What Fukushima doesn’t change
PalMD at The White Coat Underground has an important rant about iodine, which is much in the news these days for obvious reasons: Saturday Evening Rant, Iodine Edition
Skepchick Evelyn (who also comments here now and then) is writing an interesting series of posts that consist of interviews by her of her dad, an Nuclear Engineer, regarding what is going on in Japan. I think this link is probably the best way to get to them.
Speaking of Skepchicks, you should check out this post. It’s amazing. Yet mundane. You will, like, totally LOL. Hebbo.
The amount of water available to produce floods is at a much higher than average level for Minnesota, including the Minnesota, Red, Mississippi and Saint Croix river drainages, not to mention smaller rivers and streams. As I write this personnel at the National Weather Service are dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on watches and warnings for this area.
The snow pack has been melting for a few days and continues to do so, and is actually doing it at a nice pace. The melting stops over night as it gets cold, and only slowly resumes until the warmest part of the day, then slows down again. If the melting stays like this, flooding will be reduced. If it rains and gets very warm, we’re screwed.
It will be interesting to see how Fargo and other communities along the Red River react to there being no significant flooding, should that happen. Will the hundreds who have spent thousands of hours messing around with sand bags over the last couple of weeks take credit for stopping a flood that didn’t happen? Will he good citizens of the Red River Valley realize that they spent piles of time and money for something that didn’t happen, and thus, experienced a costly non-flood that would not have happened if the floods were not an issue? What I’m getting at, here, is the prospect that even in years when there is no flood, the threat of a flood is real, and costly, and that cost (monetary, emotional, social) should be considered when thinking about things like “do we move our homes and businesses out of the flood zone?”
The next few days will stay cold at night and not too warm during the day, but tomorrow there will be enough rain to hasten snow pack disintegration. There may be some flooding in spots, therefore, on Sunday. We are expecting more rain mid week, but still temperatures will be cool and Wednesday’s rain may actually fall as the frozen stuff (a.k.a. snow). And, remarkably, next weekend it will snow a bit more, and over the next 10 days, the high temperature will not pass about 40F and the lows will be below freezing almost every night across most of the state.
This means that a) the flooding may end up not being as bad as it could be, if enough snow pack gently melts away and b) the original forecasts, dating back a week or so, of major flooding happening in early April seem right. But do beware: Tomorrow’s rain may be a problem for you, depending on where you live.
Don’t drive into the water. Sounds like simple advice but some of you will, and some of you will ruin your cars or die or some other stupid thing. We have a whole warehouse of Darwin Awards.
Here’s a nice list of flooding related resources from WCCO.
Join artist Lynn Fellman and Professor Perry Hackett for a science and art presentation at Hennes Art Gallery in Minneapolis. It’s an evolutionary tale about an ancient fossil gene discovered by Hackett’s Lab at the University of Minnesota. The lab awakened the gene from an evolutionary sleep and named it “Sleeping Beauty”. Intrigued by the science and the metaphor behind a 14 million year old gene, Lynn created a dimensional art titled “Waking Sleeping Beauty”
In a lively exchange, the artist and scientist tell the bench-to-bedside story how the gene was developed as a valuable biomedical tool. Lynn will show the creative process from sketches to science poster to the dimensional art. The art is on display along with Lynn’s DNA Portraits and other work currently handled by Greg Hennes at Hennes Art Company. Read more about “Waking Sleeping Beauty” here.
Who: Lynn Fellman, artist and Professor Perry Hackett, geneticist
What: Presentation and conversation about evolution, genes, and art
When: Thursday, March 31st, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Presentation begins at 7 pm.
Where: Hennes Art Company, 1607 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, MN, 55403
RSVP: Reserve by Tuesday, March 29th. Click here to email
Lynn Fellman is a visual artist who also speaks and writes about the intersection of art and science. See her work at FellmanStudo.com.
Dr. Perry Hackett, professor of genetics, cell biology and development at the University of Minnesota, has practiced genetic engineering in animals for the past three decades with the motto “no organism is too insignificant”.
You can’t explain this.
There will not be a Mark Zuckerberg action figure.
After being told it can no longer sell its Apple CEO Steve Jobs action figure, M.I.C. Gadget has been ordered to kill off its Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg action figure as well. The lifelike Zuckerberg doll was available for $70 online, but now Facebook has had it banned, just like Apple did for the Jobs doll.
This time around, M.I.C. Gadget made a point to call the action figure the “Poking Inventor” and not “Mark Zuckerberg.” It wanted to avoid Facebook getting involved, since Apple threatened it with legal action if it didn’t stop selling the Steve Jobs version.
17 year old kid wins Intel science prize, nets 100 large.
A California teenager who cracked a complex mathematical equation has been awarded the Intel Science Talent Search’s $100,000 first-place prize. Evan O’Dorney, 17, won the prize for “his mathematical project in which he compared two ways to estimate the square root of an integer. [He] discovered precisely when the faster way would work,” Intel announced Wednesday.
He is the first Bay Area student to win what is considered the high school equivalent of a Nobel Prize and the sixth from California since the contest started in 1942. He appears to be the first homeschooled winner as well, according to organizers. Evan, 17, beat out 39 other Intel Science Talent Search finalists from across the country with a mathematics entry summarized as “Continued Fraction Convergents and Linear fractional transformations.”
Check out this new kind of microscope.
In some cases, looking at a living cell under a microscope can cause it damage or worse, can kill it. Now, a new kind of microscope has been invented by researchers from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that is able to non-invasively take a three dimensional look inside living cells with stunning results. The device uses a thin sheet of light like that used to scan supermarket bar codes and could help biologists to achieve their goal of understanding the rules that govern molecular processes within a cell.