Output Stream of Consciousness

I must admit, after seeing the sort of commentary and reaction she generated with her extremely well-spoken remarks about evolutionary theory, Elizabeth Liddle has earned herself a new fan. Well, there's actually a line-up of fans now; I might just be… more »

You might have to be pretty darned science nerdy to sit and watch the entire presentation by Michael Strauss like I did. These are some fairly serious results back from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. more »

Admittedly, this is a little harder than your average quiz on identifying various kinds of creationists, with the addition of odder categories like Omphalos Creationist and Vedic Creationist, but it pays to know your creationists. What would this be?… more »

I have gone ahead and added some forums, since Halton Arp's site has been offline for "maintenance" for an awfully long time. It may come back, it may not. In the meantime, it's a decent excuse to experiment with new forum software. I had a tough time… more »

Today is the 10th Anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan. Joel Schlosberg has organized a Carl Sagan Blog-A-Thon. Nick Sagan has a very nice retrospective of his own, providing some interesting, and nice, views of Carl Sagan as a father. There is also… more »

Something someone wrote today reminded me that in the discussion of biology and evolutionary theory, everyone looks at mutations, mutations, mutations, but they miss out the extremely powerful silent partners, chromosomal crossover and its most… more »

Today's big announcement from NASA was more signs of possible water on Mars. Not that this will turn out to be any guarantee for life on Mars, or indeed whether the effect is caused by water, but with all the liquids we have been finding around the… more »

There is a certain fascination to getting blood drawn. No, I don't even really like to watch it being done, but phlebotomists are rather interesting and slightly nerdy folks, and there are interesting pieces to the process. Only from a phlebotomist are… more »

This video of a talk by Michael Shermer is definitely one of the niftiest videos you may see about how your senses can be fooled. He's the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine. I must admit, though, I've bought the magazine before, and struggled to… more »

Having gone back and read about virtual particles once more, I must say that they have become less, rather than more clear. more »

There was an interesting phenomenon that took place on the horizon opposite the sunset when we were leaving the Masai Mara game park one evening. It was a stark diagonal band in the sky, that resolved itself into a couple of bands a little later. Dena… more »

Caught this show on television tonight. It's a science show of the type that's been desperately missing from television for the better part of a decade, apart from perhaps Mythbusters: fun, madcap and informative. The episode today featured a dairy… more »

I had always wondered whether the cosmic microwave background radiation ought to have shadows in it where it fails to shine through nearby clusters. Apparently, it should. Also apparently, it doesn't. At least, not consistently, and that's a problem.… more »

(A side note: I know there's a lot of jargon in here. One of these days, I'll have to tackle one jargonesque term at a time and try to bring it to a public level. In the meantime, if there's something that looks interesting but total Greek, just ask) A… more »

Yay! They're back into space, up in orbit. No explosions, no Busey-esque terrorists on the platform. We took a break around lunchtime at work yesterday to watch the launch. I'd forgotten what it felt like to watch a launch, in particular when it's… more »