It’s sad. I know it was a busy day on the Hill, but every day is a busy day on the Hill. So when I read that “only three U.S. Senators from the Senate Commerce subcommittee on global climate change attended hearings where the new head of the National Academies […]
Science
449 posts
There are only a few stories that just plain worry me. Most of them I find horrific, but somehow amusing (i.e. the suing of NASA by an astrologer over their recent comet mission). However, a story that is gaining momentum is the “request of U.S. Rep. Barton, member of the […]
NERD: The **N**eed to **E**xperiment on my **Rotten** **D**SL The NERD experiment is a very, very small effort to understand why the SBC Yahoo! DSL service provided to my residence is so freaking crappy. The collaboration, centered in Redwood City, CA, has recently collected its first month of data and […]
Meeting some new neighbors at breakfast yesterday turned out to have the added benefit of more useful reading material about the teaching of Evolution on par with religious motivations. In particular, the “AAAS”:http://www.aaas.org, which declined to participate in the farce in Kansas, has provided a nice document entitled “Q&A on […]
This morning, Jodi and I had the pleasure of breakfast with our landlord and landlady, along with several of our neighbors. Everybody at the table had an industry or academic background: chemistry, computer engineering, physics, psychiatry, and language. At this eclectic gathering of minds, over coffee, waffles, and mimosa, a […]
Last night, I had the pleasure of a long conversation with my colleague and friend Bob McElrath, a theoretical physicist. He had been down here at SLAC to give a presentation on his “recent paper describing how to search for low-mass dark matter at the B factories”:http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0506151. We stayed up […]
Here is an example image of what NASA has been showing on NASA TV. Here you can see the impact. The pictures will all be downloaded from the remaining vessel and cleaned up over the next few days, according to the interview that have been on tonight. This one is […]
Tonight, the Deep Impact NASA mission appears to have made history: the first probe, sent by our species, into the surface of a comet. This mission will shed new light on the early solar system as we break into this frozen snapshot. The first pictures are amazing – a white […]
As reported by the Associated Press, “the Kansas State Board of Education has started internal personal attacks over the issue of science education standards”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050615/ap_on_sc/evolution_debate;_ylt=Aq5Y1YhEiEiFnO2zSr2eYQUPLBIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl. Some personal venom is being exchanged between the subcommittee members, who held their sham hearings on the Theory of Evolution, and those who would maintain the […]
Well, “it looks like the Kansas State Board of Education is gearing up to revise state science education standards to try to make the theory of evolution look weak”:http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/061205/sta_20050612013.shtml. The subcommittee that held the hearings has made this recommendation, and the board is set to vote on the proposal to […]
“There is a strong Washington Post editorial that takes a fairly critical look at the recent behavior of Kansas in reviewing the educational, scientific validity of the Theory of Evolution”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/07/AR2005050700943.html. I am fairly fond of this framing of the hypothesis of “intelligent design”: Intelligent design is not your parents’ creationism. […]
Well, it appears to be the end of not only day 3 of the Kansas state board of education hearings, but also of the arguments by those who adhere to the hypothesis of intelligent design and the religious doctrine of Biblical creationism. I “just noticed the Kansas City Star article […]