Not that anyone should care about the attempt by New York businessman Stuart Pivar to sue prominent science blogger PZ Myers of Pharyngula anymore, since the suit was just dismissed, but I just noticed that two of the pro-Pivar comments* on the original post in which I broke the PZ/Pivar story were by a "Matthew Richards," who claims to be an attorney...
Put up ya lighters, raise a glass of Henny, empty a clip into the night sky -- whatever it is you do when you want to party like it's 2999, 'cause the magazine that predates the American civil war, the only extant publication that used to run its own patent service, the joint that has played host to every great mind from Mark Twain to Albert Einstein to Tim Berners-Lee -- is celebrating its 162nd birthday...
A good way to convince people your opponents are wrong is to put a red 'X' through a cheesy and outdated depiction of one of their central hypotheses--and then write FALSE next to it.
From Scientific American editor Gary Stix :
The August issue of Scientific American included an article entitled "Race in a Bottle," by Jonathan Kahn, which portrays the development of BiDil, the first "ethnic" drug...
Talk about hot off the wires, the following was filed last Thursday, and if the lack of discussion of it on the usually endlessly self-examining ScienceBlogs is any indication, no one there has any idea about it either...
Sip of Conflict
copyright 2007 Exploratorium | Photo: Amy Snyder
And by interesting I mean hideously violational (not a word) of preconceived notions about, in this case, consumption and excretion, or the boundaries between clean and dirty...
credit: Lyric Rosatti
When scientists and science-fiction writers think about the unintended consequences of new technology, they tend to obsess about the far-out what-ifs: "What if the internet turns us into a world of shut-ins?...
Everyone knows that Young Earth Creationism has firmly established that the age of the universe is approximately 6,000 years, as illuminated by the obviously-better-than-radio-carbon-dating method of counting all the begats in the Good Book...
Surveys consistently report that men in the U.S. population average seven sexual partners, while women average four. Everyone assumes men are cads and women are out to protect their virtue, so this makes perfect sense, except.....
As Steve Mirsky reports in today's 60 Second Science podcast (which you can listen to here -- it will literally only take a minute), preschoolers -- that's 3 to 5 year olds -- consistently reported that food tasted better when it was presented to them in a McDonald's rather than a plain paper bag...
In the September issue of Scientific American, which should be arriving on newsstands and in subscribers in-boxes right about now, there is a totally awesome and, sadly, totally paywalled article entitled Sowing a Gene Revolution: A new green revolution based on genetically modified crops can help reduce poverty and hunger--but only if formidable institutional challenges are met...
"We are currently investigating methods to use DTNs, energy management, and programming languages to improve the state of the art in tracking small, mobile wildlife." --TurtleNet
Mark D...
We all know that Rush Limbaugh--global warming skeptic, proud owner of multiple SUVs--has been ridin' dirty for as long as he's been on the radio.
So it's no surprise that large swaths of the blogosphere find it highly ironic that Rush did an ad for GM in which he talks about how much he loves him some GM SUVs, and without missing a beat, touts GM's forward-thinking, environmentally friendly practices...
That's a trick question -- they already are. As Victoria Schlesigner and Meredith Knight reported in a just-posted expose for Scientific American -- Insurers Claim Global Warming Makes Some Regions Too Hot to Handle -- insurers are dumping coverage of those who may be in the path of global-warming-supercharged storms and rising sea levels...
The full title should be "Thing that reminds us of global warming, but, like all individual weather phenomena, can't be proved to be directly linked to it on account of the overwhelming complexity of the Earth's climactic system, which manifests itself in seemingly random (when localized) temperature, rainfall, and windspeed variations--a photo gallery (of the day)" but that wouldn't fit...
...as dinner winds down, George Csordas, a distinguished-looking functions theorist from the University of Hawaii, confesses that he never balances his checkbook.
I know there are disasters just over the horizon--terrorism, climate change, the rapture--but some ends to the human race are so profoundly unavoidable that they deserve further scrutiny, even if it's just to satisfy my need for some kind of secular eschatology...