President Obama experienced a significant post-convention bounce. Already a little bit ahead, this places Obama more firmly ahead of Romney. But, the news would be so much more interesting if the two were much closer. How does one solve this problem if you are CNN? Make stuff up!
Yesterday CNN reported polls that showed Obama ahead of Romney by several points in key swing states of Virginia, Ohio and Florida. Then, according to Steve Singiser, “CNN’s Gregory Wallace, writing up the polls on the media outlet’s website, categorized Florida and Virginia as a tie. A tie.
Have you read, or at least acquired your copy of, Atheist Voices of Minnesota: an Anthology of Personal Stories? Just so you know, it is an anthology of (just like the title says) personal stories of individuals’ journey to atheism. And, those people are writing from a Minnesota perspective. There are a lot of really great stories in the anthology, and a forward by Greta Christina.
Anyway, this Sunday, at the Southdale Library in the Greater Minneapolis area (just south of the city), at the monthly Minnesota Atheist meeting, there will be a special event involving the reading out loud of portions of the book, by many of your favorite authors. Among the readers, I believe, will be PZ Myers and Stephanie Zvan. Further details are here.
Although I never planned on doing the reading, I was thinking I’d go to this event, but it turns out that I can’t make it. But I hope you do!
Fusion WallpaperThere comes a time in each person’s life when it is time to change the wallpaper. And the drapes, but we’ll focus on wallpaper here. And by wallpaper I mean the picture on your computer screen that is normally covered by icons and open windows. I came across a few neat individual wallpapers, as well as some good sources, and thought you’d like to see them. Since these wallpapers are from sites run by the artists who designed the wallpapers, it is appropriate that you go to those sites to get them, so here I’ll just show a few thumbnails but mainly talk about topics and themes. You’ll need to click through to see the true quality of these pictures, and to obtain them.
Most of these are science or nature themes or themes that would be of interest to geeky people like you, and thus the first one I’d like to mention is YourFather (see photo).
Steampunk Sci FiTwo great sources of wallpapers generally, including lost of science and nature stuff, are National Geographic (such as the 2011 best of collection or the space and science collection) and Flickr. National Geographic has mostly nature and science themed, while for Flickr you’ll need to select the right search terms. If you enter words like “space” and “science” you get mostly institutions and buildings related to these topics, which at first seems kind of lame, but then you think, “hey, this is obscure and will thus be very geekily impressive under the right conditions”.
The geekiest wallpaper on the internet might be here at alphacoders. You may not even be able to stand it.
One of the top iPhone education apps in the iTunes store is now available for Android. The free NASA “Earth Now” Android app immerses cyber explorers in dazzling visualizations of near-real-time global climate data from NASA’s fleet of Earth science satellites, bringing a world of ever-changing climate data to users’ fingertips. Available HERE.
TruthMarket by Rick Hayes-Roth on Point of Inquiry
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to make American politics just a little more rational, just a little more evidence based?
Wouldn’t it be even nicer if there was a website, or an app, that helped that process along?
Maybe, just maybe, a promising innovation called TruthMarket can help with the problem.
A number of lines of evidence have converged on the apparent fact that how you feel about Cilantro is a relatively simple genetic system. That Cilantro hatred is inherited genetically and not culturally has long been suspected, but now it is becoming clear enough that this could be a new module in the Science Classroom where kids are forced to taste it and record their level of disgust. It’s all written up here, in Nature.
In hopes of identifying the genetic basis for these traits, researchers led by Nicholas Eriksson at the consumer genetics firm 23andMe, based in Mountain View, California, asked customers whether coriander tasted like soap and whether or not they liked the herb. The researchers identified two common genetic variants linked to people’s “soap” perceptions. A follow-up study in a separate sub-set of customers confirmed the associations.
The strongest-linked variant lies within a cluster of olfactory-receptor genes, which influence sense of smell. One of those genes, OR6A2, encodes a receptor that is highly sensitive to aldehyde chemicals, which contribute to the flavour of coriander. This makes OR6A2 “a compelling candidate gene for the detection of the odours that give it its divisive flavour”, the researchers write.
It is said that the national conventions of the two main parties in the US influence polls. This is sometimes called the “Convention Bump” but that term is used for a lot of other things, like a network getting more viewership during a convention, or a candidate getting more funding or larger crowds for a while.
The convention bump probably has two different causes. One is the tendency of the party about to have the convention to pile on lots of ad time on many TV markets, and to continue those ads during the convention. The other is the added attention to the candidate from the convention itself. In theory, the latter should differentiate between the two parties with respect to how well the convention went for them. If overall opinions about the candidates and parties are roughly similar in intensity and popularity, and the conventions go about the same, each party should have a similar bump, which is typically reflected in polling trends after the convention for about a week.
So, this year, how did the Democrats vs. Republicans do? Here’s a graph from RCP showing average polls for several days in August and September. I’ve marked, with Republican Red and Democratic Blue circles, the last day of each of the two conventions . Clearly, the Republicans got a bump. Clearly, the Republican Bump disappears into insignificance compared to the Democratic Bump. I think we should look at this again in a few day to see what happens to that Democratic bump, but so far this is very interesting.
A brief informal look at the data from four years ago suggests that both parties got roughly equal bumps at their conventions when Obama and McCain were the candidates. If so, and if this year’s difference in “bump” hold true, than something rather historic may have happened over the last thirty days.
A young woman was driving along the road, at night, and needed to focus her attention on a cell phone call, so she pulled into an open parking lot of a closed restaurant along side the road and visible to passing motorists. She pulled her car into a parking space, switched it off, and made the call. Continue reading Remembering 9/11? No thank you, not at this cost.→
Generally speaking these days, progressive movements and for the most part the “left” in America speaks out against violence, is more or less either anti-gun or pro gun regulation, mostly anti-war, and mostly pacifist, while the right wing tends to form heavily armed paramilitary militias, is totally against almost any kind of gun related regulations, is pro war, and bellicose. So when someone from the right shoots someone on the left, it really is a natural extension of what they talk about. When someone on the left shoots someone on the right, that’s a crazy person.
Correct?
Today, I came across this interesting graph on Google+:
The so-called "Galilean thermometer."The object known as the Galileo Thermometer is a vertical glass tube filled with a liquid in which are suspended a number of weighted glass balls. As the temperature of the liquid changes, so does the density. Since each glass ball is set to float at equilibrium in a sightly different density of the liquid, as the temperature increases, each glass ball sinks to the bottom. It turns out that this thermometer was actually invented by a team of instrument inventors that formed a scientific society who had the impressive motto “Probando e Reprobando,” which in English means “testing and retesting.” The Accademia del Cimento operated under the leadership of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II from 1657-1667 in Florence, Italy.
According to Peter Loyson, who has written a corrective article for the Journal of Chemical Education, Galilio did invent a temperature measuring device called a thermoscope.
In the period 1602–1606, while he was professor at the University of Padua, he made a thermoscope, also called an air thermometer, for measuring relative changes in temperature. He took a “glass bulb with a long slender stem and as narrow as a straw; having well heated the bulb with his hands, he inserted its mouth in a vessel, containing some water, and, withdrawing the heat of his hand from the bulb, instantly the water rose in the neck more than a palm above its level in the vessel. It is thus that he constructed an instrument for measuring the degrees of heat and cold”, according to a letter written by Castelli, one of his pupils. The different degrees of temperature would then be indicated by the expansion and contraction of the air that remained in the bulb, so that the scale would be the reverse of modern thermometers, as the water would stand highest in the coldest weather. About 1611–1612 Galileo substituted spirit of wine for water and later still the Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Florence, a former pupil of Galileo, used colored spirit of wine and reduced the dimension of the tube.
Since the thermoscope also responded to air pressure it was both a thermometer and a barometer, until modifications in 1653 were made to the design to remove air from the area above the liquid.
It has always been difficult for people to come up with a nickname for me. One friend in high school called me Paris, short for G. Laden Paris, which I never quite understood. The Efe Pygmies called me Simon. Which I never quite understood. Lately many of us Progressive or Feminist bloggers have been routinely denigrated by worthless scum trolling drekazoids and nicknames have been involved, such as ‘Twatson’ for Rebecca Watson. My winged monkey nickname became Osama bin Laden which is totally stupid because it is just some dead guy’s name.
There are people who unilaterally decide to call me ‘Greggy’ when they want to be disrespectful, and I do find that annoying, but for reasons I never quite understood. I do know, though, that when I become ‘Greggy’ (or ‘Greggie’), the nicknamer from then on on is conversing alone.
But that was then and this is now. Those days of paucity in cleverness are gone, because one of my detractors has finally hit on a nickname I can live with. The term is, I am told, used in a hate video directed at me, that I’ve not seen (nor will I). In this production by a misogynist men’s rights advocate (most of them are former teenage molesters or rapists now busy turning guilt into blame, I suspect) I am known as …
? Just so you know, it is an anthology of (just like the title says) personal stories of individuals’ journey to atheism. And, those people are writing from a Minnesota perspective. There are a lot of really great stories in the anthology, and a forward by Greta Christina.
