Come on out to Morris and learn about clouds.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Come on out to Morris and learn about clouds.
Pretty and awesome.
Jebus. Sometimes I forget how freakin’ obnoxious creationists can be. Below is a video made by Megan Fox, about her visit to Chicago’s Field Museum. Who is Megan Fox, you ask? Not that Megan Fox, this one:
Megan Fox is a homeschooling, Tea Partying, conservative mother of two (with another on the way!) out and about in the suburbs who is also a popular columnist for PJ Media.
You can already guess what she’s going to think of the Field Museum, one of the best museums in the country, and its “Evolving Earth” exhibit. But what you won’t know yet is how goddamn smug, arrogant, and ignorant she can be. Watch the video and learn.
Take a look at this paper that was accepted for publication by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology (pdf). It’s beautifully clear and simple, and could have been written by non-advanced computer technology.
There’s an ugly turn. The story about a company creating probiotics to make vaginas smell like peaches is wrong, that’s not what the company was trying to do; instead, the “biotech entrepreneurs” who presented it as their own were lying, did not understand the project, and completely mangled the purpose. According to the actual founder of the company,
Brandenburg is a physicist who submitted a paper to the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference a few years ago. It’s way outside my area of expertise, but it postulated an interesting scenario from the ratios of rare isotopes in the atmosphere of Mars: that there was evidence of a natural nuclear reactor, like Oklo on Earth, that had exploded over 180 million years ago. He makes a good case, at least to this biologist’s eyes, and it seems reasonable.
Natural Nuclear Reactors formed and operated on Earth, there is no reason this could not have happened on Mars. Conditions on Mars: lack of plate tectonics, and nearness to the asteroid belt, may have favored such occurrences in larger size and duration than on Earth. Changes in groundwater distribution, due to either climate change of loss of geothermal heat, may have triggered this event. The occurrence of such a large natural reactor may explain some puzzling aspects of Mars data, such as the superabundance of K and Th on the surface and the large inventory of radiogenic isotopes in the Mars atmosphere.
It’s more like telling them to be curious and have fun.
Every year in my intro biology course, I try to do one discussion of bioethics. One lecture is not much, but this is a course where we try to introduce students to the history and philosophy of science, and I think it’s an important issue, so I try to squeeze in a little bit. So we spend one day talking about eugenics and the Tuskegee syphilis study, and I have them read Gould’s Carrie Buck’s Daughter, and I try to provoke them into arguing with me, or at least questioning a few default assumptions.
This semester, though, I’m going to have them read something with some subtler concerns. I’m going to ask them to read about the invention of the modern speculum. It was surprisingly problematic.
