Before I took the snap, I had a funny feeling that Alec was trying to tell me something. Not verbal communication or any facial expression or signal; whatever it was, I knew that he wanted the deep ball. So I called hike and the ball was snapped to me and I threw the ball as far as I could. The defense looked back, only to see that my brother Alec caught the ball with nobody contesting him. He leaped into the end zone and we celebrated our touchdown. “Wow!” said Victor. “You guys are an amazing team, it’s like you guys used some kind of twin telepathy on that play.

Find out what’s going on here…

The earthquake was 7.0 or more (see Eruptions for info and discussion) and was not far from Port-au-Prince. Apparently damage is widespread and intense, and casualties high, but accurate information is limited because the information infrastructure was destroyed (see this for news details).

She was born as Hermine Santrouschitz in Vienna in 1909.
Continue reading Miep Gies died today →

The National Academy of Sciences is to honor NCSE’s executive director Eugenie C. Scott with its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal. … “the medal is presented annually to honor extraordinary use of science for the public good”; Scott was chosen “for championing the teaching of evolution in the United States and for providing leadership to the National Center for Science Education.” She will receive the award on April 25, 2010, during the Academy’s 147th annual meeting.

The president of the National Academy of Sciences, Ralph J. Cicerone, commented, “Eugenie Scott has worked tirelessly and very effectively to improve public understanding of both the nature of science and the science of evolution,” and the chair of the Public Welfare Medal selection committee, John Brauman, added, “We honor her for many years of organizing coalitions of scientists, parents, teachers, business people, clergy, and others to defend the teaching of evolution.”

All the details are here.

This blog and a few others were down for a while this morning. We apologise and promise it will never happen again.

Continue reading The Blog was Down but now it’s Up →

I don’t know what I want for christmas

… Or what I want to be when I grow up, or what to major in in college.

But I can write a poem with Google Search Box:

I am going crazy
I am going to die.

I am going in Spanish
I am going to die alone.

Hat Tip Science Punk

First, following Ethan‘s Fitness Challenge (to which I responded here) there is another new entry by Dunford here.

Discovering Biology in a Digital World gears up for Science Online 2010: Citizen Science: all fun and no data? ScienceOnline 2010

Isis is branching out from the realm of incivility to the world of diversity, also at Science Online 10: Dr. Isis Continues to Ponder Diversity for #scio10. She’s asking for your ideas as to how to respond to certain question about diversity.

EM Johnson has the third (and I think final) installment of his Social Darwinism posts.

If you follow the race-IQ discussion, you’ll note that the entire edifice is calibrated to questions of work and class. As long as classism stands, the arguments of inherent ability will be plausible to far too many people, and the problem of blacks in poverty will be used to justify itself. Just as racism has always been used to justify poverty.

Read: At the Corner of Race and Class at Quiche Moraine by Stephanie Zvan.

Science Online 2010 is coming up in a few days. There is a post at A Blog Around the Clock that is a veritable clearing house for all of the blogospheric information on this conference, including ways for you to participate in the conference even if you do not attend in physical form. I’m sure I’ll be blogging from the conference. For now, I just want to talk about conferences in general, as part of my mental preparation for the impending event.

Continue reading #scio10 Conferencing →

What is the answer to this age old question?
Continue reading Which is bigger, cats or dogs? →

Please make yourself aware of this situation described on Phil Plait’s blog.

And here we are not really talking about the operating systems, but the philosophy that derives decision making and development. An OpenSource system, according to J.H., is “real people oriented.” Read “There’s a problem on your computer”

The process of using critical thinking involves several steps. These steps work formally in experimental design and analysis, studying and mastering new concepts as we learn and in making decisions that people need to make in the various aspects of our lives. They also work informally and people process these steps often when we are not aware of them, nor even that we are following them.

Mike Haubrich on Critical Thinking, a propos Science Online 10