Nov 30 2011
Via The Guardian (disturbing photos on the landing page): Seventeen-year-old Neela Khatunis is one of more than 2,700 victims of acid attacks in Bangladesh over the past 10 years. ‘My husband was angry … because he claimed a dowry but my family couldn’t provide one,’ she says. ‘His plan was to sell me in Saudi …
Nov 30 2011
Via Universe Today, an explanation from NASA of the auroras that probably bombard exoplanet gas giant CoRoT-2B and how the planet’s location and speed is very likely causing much of the x-ray bombardment it experiences from its sun.
Nov 29 2011
Reader Michael Fisher passed along a post by Christian sociologist Margarita A. Mooney of Black, White and Grey (a Patheos blog) lauding Haitians for turning to God in their extreme suffering. It is apparently a repost from her post last Thanksgiving, and it seems to wholly miss the crux of the issue: that being, the …
Nov 28 2011
Have I mentioned that I love In the Hall of the Mountain King? The rest of the Peer Gynt Suites less so, but they’re still worth a listen — if you’ve somehow not already heard them through their gross overuse in all manner of media since.
Nov 28 2011
The skeptical and atheist communities overlap significantly with a great many other social causes. The confrontational and the accomodationist have pressed into the northeast and southwest; feminists and male supremacists carved out chunks on each side of a great rift down the center; gun control advocates and self-proclaimed gun nuts both push toward the middle …
Nov 27 2011
My brother-in-law Shannon sent along this image, evidently clipped from a Christian textbook for kids. I suspect it’s been floating around the blogosphere for a bit, though this is the first I’ve seen it. He says he can try to obtain the book from one of the many local religious bookstores. I’ve told him I …
Nov 27 2011
The climate denialsphere, having learned exactly the wrong lesson from the last email hack, has attempted to overshadow another international talk on climate change by releasing the remainder of the e-mails illegally obtained via a hack of university mail servers in the original incident now known as “Climategate”.
Nov 26 2011
A paper by another team at Gran Sasso, ICARUS, contradicts the OPERA neutrino results by measuring the energy spectrum of the supposedly speeding neutrinos and finds that they could not have traveled faster than light.
Nov 26 2011
Via Astronomy Picture of the Day, my premier space porn site, comes this amazing time-lapse video shot from the International Space Station. Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo. Some random other links below the fold.
:)
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