04.29.09
Let’s hear it for the bees
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/guest-column-lets-hear-it-for-the-bees/
April 28, 2009, 9:49 pm
Guest Column: Let’s Hear It for the Bees
Idealism vs materialism
The interaction of idealism and materialism tends to go nowhere. And the term itself doesn’t have much meaning as is.
The so-called ‘transcendental idealism’ of Kant is a unique way to mediate idealism and materialism, or naturalism.
And, as the eonic effect suggests, this has direct relevance to the question of evolution.
1918 flu, a comment
Comment on Microevolution and Swine Flu
Bo Thompson said,
April 28, 2009 at 4:16 pm · \
In 1918:
In large U.S cities, more than 10,000 deaths per week were attributed to the virus. It is estimated that as many as 50% of the population was infected, and ~1% died. To compare, in “normal” (interpandemic) years, it is estimated that between 10-20% of the population is infected, with a .008% mortality.
Read the rest of this entry »
Bawer article
Comment on Bawer and European immigration debate
As noted yesterday this debate have become impossible due to the political polarization. I think the obvious point has come where some limit on immigration is required, along with an equal set of gestures against Islamophobia.
This Is Your Brain on Pork Rinds
It believed that this is an evolutionary tool that enabled our distant ancestors to remember where rich sources of food were located.
Now they hope to develop drugs which mimic the effect of fat rich foods in order to boost memory in those suffering from brain disorders or who need to cement facts in their brain.
I believe every word of this. BECAUSE IT’S SCIENCE. And if science says a bacon doublecheeseburger will make you smarter, then who are you to question?
It all makes sense now: Why is it I can never remember where I left my keys but I ALWAYS remember where Phat Burger is? It’s evolution!
Spanish judge and guantanamo
Published on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 by Agence France Presse
Spanish Judge Opens Probe into Guantanamo Torture
MADRID – A Spanish judge on Wednesday opened an investigation into an alleged “systematic programme” of torture at the US Guantanamo Bay detention camp, following accusations by four former prisoners.
Native American ancestral group
Native Americans Descended From A Single Ancestral Group, DNA Study Confirms
ScienceDaily (Apr. 29, 2009) — For two decades, researchers have been using a growing volume of genetic data to debate whether ancestors of Native Americans emigrated to the New World in one wave or successive waves, or from one ancestral Asian population or a number of different populations.
Early man and genetic engineering
Early domestic animals show manipulated genes
29 April 2009 by Andy Coghlan and Ewen Callaway
THEY may not have known about genes and Darwinism, but our ancestors knew how to drive the evolution of once-wild beasts to serve their own needs. A spate of studies published last week show how domestication suddenly gave horses coats of many colours, cows the extra genes to produce milk and fight infection – and even shrank sheep’s horns.
Insult to the intelligence
Creating an insult to intelligence
Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design Read the rest of this entry »
ID vs shoddy engineering
Shoddy Engineering or Intelligent Design? Case of the Mouse’s Eye
We often hear from Darwinians that the biological world is replete with examples of shoddy engineering, or, as they prefer to put it, bad design. One such case of really poor construction is the inverted retina of the vertebrate eye. As we all know, the retina of our eyes is configured all wrong because the cells that gather photons, the rod photoreceptors, are behind two other tissue layers. Light first strikes the ganglion cells and then passes by or through the bipolar cells before reaching the rod photoreceptors. Surely, a child could have arranged the system better — so they tell us.
The problem with this story of supposed unintelligent design is that it is long on anthropomorphisms and short on evidence.
Darwin dogma
Darwin Dogma
Posted by George Berkin April 29, 2009 5:30AM
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.Although “Inherit the Wind,” the movie “based” on the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, is highly polemical, at least it has a message of academic freedom.
Read the rest of this entry »
Giant petrosaurs grounded
gnxp
The winged reptiles wouldn’t have been able to flap fast enough to get off the ground or keep themselves airborne, says a new study of how modern birds soar
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/04/090428-giant-pterosaurs-fly.html
Genes/autism
gnxp
A genetic variant carried by more than two thirds of people with autism might eventually help identify babies at high risk of the disorder
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17041-gene-variant-found-in-65-of-autism-cases.html
Burden or blessing?
gnxp
For 22 years, Marilyn vos Savant has been writing a question-and-answer column in a magazine – an odd choice of career for the record holder of the world’s highest IQ
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4add9230-23d5-11de-996a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a712eb94-dc2b-11da-890d-0000779e2340.html
The end of overeating
gnxp
Former FDA commissioner David Kessler examines the causes of excessive eating in his new book, “The End of Overeating”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124084009832659309.html
Largest known virus, and life
New Details About Mysterious Giant Virus Uncovered
ScienceDaily (Apr. 29, 2009) — An international team of researchers has determined key structural features of the largest known virus, findings that could help scientists studying how the simplest life evolved and whether the unusual virus causes any human diseases.
Hyena laughter
Identifying Hyenas By Their Giggle
ScienceDaily (Apr. 28, 2009) — To human ears, the laughs of individual hyenas in a pack all sound the same: high-pitched and staccato, eerie and maniacal. But every hyena makes a different call that encodes information about its age and status in the pack, according to behavioral neurologists from the University of California, Berkeley and the Université de Saint-Etienne, France. They have developed a way to identify a hyena by picking out specific features of its giggle.
Comets and life
Did Comets Contain Key Ingredients For Life On Earth?
ScienceDaily (Apr. 29, 2009) — Comets have always fascinated us. In early cultures, a mysterious appearance of a comet could symbolize a deity’s displeasure with humankind or mean a sure failure in battle, at least for one side. Now Tel Aviv University research adds a new twist to that fascination: comets might have provided the elements for the emergence of life on our planet.
Rogue black holes roaming the Milky Way
Hundreds Of Rogue Black Holes May Roam The Milky Way, Swallowing Anything That Gets Too Close
ScienceDaily (Apr. 29, 2009) — It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie: rogue black holes roaming our galaxy, threatening to swallow anything that gets too close. In fact, new calculations by Ryan O’Leary and Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) suggest that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way.
The 2012 Apocalypse
The 2012 Apocalypse — And How to Stop It
By Brandon Keim April 17, 2009
For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.
Entitled “Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts,” it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth’s magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States “$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year,” concluded the panel, and “full recovery could take 4 to 10 years.” That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.
Good-bye, civilization.
Too big to fail
Published on Wednesday, April 29, 2009 by The Nation
Planet Earth: Too Big to Fail
by Philip Radford
The Obama administration has given itself an extraordinarily powerful tool that could help the president achieve all three of his top domestic goals at once–but only if he has the political moxie to deploy it to its full extent.
That tool is the proposed Endangerment Finding–a formal declaration by the Environmental Protection Agency that global warming indeed threatens human health and welfare. Once the administration issues the final declaration, the Clean Air Act is triggered, giving the administration sweeping authority to decide how to reduce global warming pollution from power plants, vehicles, and other sources, how much, and how fast. According to a groundbreaking new analysis from New York University, the administration could even unilaterally establish a cap-and-trade system very similar to what Congress is considering.
The Mad Men Did Well
Obama’s 100 Days — The Mad Men Did Well
April, 29 2009By Pilger, John
The BBC’s American television soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.
Meat Industry’s Monstrous Power
The Swine Flu Crisis Lays Bare the Meat Industry’s Monstrous Power
By Mike Davis, Comment Is Free. Posted April 28, 2009.
Animal husbandry now more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm.
The model of exponential growth
The Earth Is a Ponzi Scheme on the Verge of Collapse
By Matthew Stein, Huffington Post. Posted April 28, 2009.
Our model of exponential growth in consumption of energy, natural resources and raw materials cannot last forever.
Racial gap
sciftp
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/education/29scores.html
April 29, 2009
Persistent Racial Gap Seen in Students’ Test Scores
By SAM DILLON
The achievement gap between white and minority students has not narrowed in recent years, despite the focus of the No Child Left Behind law on improving the scores of blacks and Hispanics, according to results of a federal test considered to be the nation’s best measure of long-term trends in math and reading proficiency.
Monster at our door
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee240
The Monster at Our Door
April 29, 2009
By Scott McLemee
Laid low with illness — while work piles up, undone and unrelenting — you think, “I really couldn’t have picked a worse time to get sick.”
It’s a common enough expression to pass without anyone ever having then to draw out the implied question: Just when would you schedule your symptoms? Probably not during a vacation….
Noose tightens in Kabul
RG mail
http://www.counterpunch.org/patrick04292009.html
April 29, 2009
The Noose Tightens in Afghanistan
The Taliban’s Roads to Kabul
By PATRICK COCKBURN
Kabul.
Hamid Karzai, who played host to the British prime minister, Gordon
Brown, in Kabul two days ago, will have been delighted to hear the
Prime Minister confirm the long-standing Afghan belief that there can
be no long-term success against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan so
long as they base themselves in Pakistan.
The Nafta flu
sciftp
http://farmingpathogens.wordpress.com/2009/04/28/the-nafta-flu/
The NAFTA Flu
April 28, 2009 by rgwallace
Cases of swine flu H1N1 are now reported in Honduras, Costa Rica, Brazil, Argentina, Austria, Thailand, Israel, etc. Can’t keep up at this point.
H1N1 is making its way across the world by hierarchical diffusion. By the world’s transportation network it is bouncing down a hierarchy of cities defined by their size and economic power and their interconnectedness to Mexico City, the international city closest to the initial outbreak. It’s no coincidence that New York and San Diego were among the first cities hit. The virus is also engaged in contagious diffusion, spreading out within each new country hit.
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
RG mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090428.COWENT28ART1953/TPStory/?query=wente
Globe and Mail April 28, 2009
The ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Five years ago today, the CBS program 60 Minutes published shocking photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Suddenly, the new face of the Iraq war was not that plucky heroine Jessica Lynch but the sadistic Lynndie England, who held a naked prisoner by a leash around his neck and had the photos to prove it.
For many people, those photos were a moral turning point. The United States was not supposed to do that kind of thing.
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