A walk along the Charles River

Since I had the day off, I decided to take a walk along the Charles. I started off by crossing the footbridge behind the Shaw’s market on River Street (click on any of the pictures to see the full size):

Behind the footbridge is an old train bridge which is, I think, no longer used. The [...]

Not a good week

The natural disasters in Asia are sobering:

a typhoon killed hundreds in the Philippines (at least 240) before moving into southeast Asia and killing tens in Vietnam (at least 41 and at least 10 in Cambodia) before the weakened storm headed into Laos.
scores were killed in Samoa and American Samoa (at least 154) when a 8.0 level earthquake triggered [...]

Saturn pictures and a poem

Today I offer you two pictures taken by the Cassini spacecraft.
The first is of one of Saturn’s moons, Rhea (credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, taken 8/19/08). To me it looks like the inside of a golf ball, baseball after the string or rubber bands have been taken off:

The second is a nice full picture of Saturn [...]

Smells and Mates

I have posted about how scent can drive mate selection before (based on this article). It seems there was a follow up study (which I see via here and here) that is talked about on MSNBC. I’m sure you’ll be stunned to learn that the part of the study that MSNBC talks about is the part [...]

Study Needed for Solar?

The Bureau of Land Management has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public lands:
The land agency’s manager of energy policy, Ray Brady, said the moratorium on new applications was necessary to “ensure that we are doing an adequate level of analysis of the impacts.”
That sounds good. The projects would occupy a large amount [...]

Idiots and Global Warming

A while ago I wondered how Lomborg was able to get a column in the NY Times given how stupid it was. I guess the LA Times felt they had to match this, so they have a column about almost exactly the same thing (but talking with Roger Pielke instead). Here’s their argument:
His research has [...]

Petunias

As you can see, I have added a page for petunias. My interest in petunias has very little to do with the plant and much to do with the word itself. I have always had an interest in the way words sound, hence the poetry, and I have always liked the way petunia sounds which [...]

Animal Politics

This is another in the line of people are just another animal:
“Rhesus males are quintessential opportunists,” Dr. Maestripieri said. “They pretend they’re helping others, but they only help adults, not infants. They only help those who are higher in rank than they are, not lower. They intervene in fights where they know they’re going to [...]

Rulings on Endangered Species

I would think this would get a bit more play:
The Fish and Wildlife Service reversed seven rulings that denied increased protection for endangered species, after an inquiry found that the actions had been tainted by political pressure from a former Interior Department official. In a letter to Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia, [...]

Pigs, Humans, and Disease

It turns out that MRSA might have come from animals, pigs specifically:
Canadian researchers who studied farmhands and the pigs they tend found that a quarter of the swine and a fifth of the humans harbored Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium that’s especially feared because first-line antibiotics are useless in treating it. And it wasn’t just [...]

Arctic Interest

Here’s an article that show how intense the interest is in the Arctic:
The best candidate to date for the world’s northernmost point of land — a mythical place sought by explorers for centuries — was spotted in July during an expedition led by Arctic veteran Dennis Schmitt.
California-based Schmitt, best-known for his 2005 discovery of Warming [...]

Grandmothers–the Start of Civilization?

I don’t think much of people who try to figure out why we evolved in certain ways (it doesn’t really seem like science to me), but I like this article:
Dr. Hawkes lends a new spin to the debate, combining elements of each camp and adding a few bold spirals of her own. She agrees with [...]

Birds is Smart

This is one in my occasional notes where I note that other animals seem more intelligent the more they are studied, in this case birds:
The world lost its most famous bird brain this month: Alex, an African gray parrot who lived in a Brandeis laboratory and possessed a vocabulary of nearly 150 words. Yet as [...]

Lomborg and Global Warming

How does Lomborg get a column devoted to him in the NY Times? Look at this:
The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a [...]

More Bush Interference

The more reporters look at the Bush administration, the more examples are found of interference with science.  Another example, the HHS toned down breast-feeding ads when baby formula manufacturers complained:
Plans to run these blunt ads infuriated the politically powerful infant formula industry, which hired a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former [...]

Examples of Confusion

Here are a couple examples of how things work:

One of the arguments against single payer is that it will cause waiting lists and rationing (ignore the fact that there is rationing by ability to pay right now in the US).  Let’s look at an example of how the US system works:

For a Botox injection, patients [...]

How Science Works

For all the creationists and intelligent designers out there, here is an example of how science works:
Einstein’s predicted warping of space-time has been discovered around neutron stars, the most dense observable matter in the universe.
The warping shows up as smeared lines of iron gas whipping around the stars, University of Michigan and NASA astronomers say. [...]

Jupiter: Friend or Foe?

Let’s stay with the space angle here for a moment.  I like the title of this article. If we decide Jupiter is a foe, our next step will be to decide if they’re terrorists.  If they are, we should start planning an attack.  If we do nothing, why the next thing we know, even little [...]

A Hole in My Pocket

Hmm, a second post about space.  Astronomers have found a hole in the universe a billion light years across.  I swear I had nothing to do with it and if I did, it was just a mistake. Really I didn’t know that–nothing, I know nothing.

Pink

A study purports to have shown that men prefer blue and women prefer pink perhaps based on evolution.  I hope they were more careful than this:
In the study, the researchers asked a group of men and women to look at about 1,000 pairs of colored rectangles on a computer screen in a dark room and [...]