Pay attention. Take notes. But be sure you read it. By a guy handled “Taavi,” at a LiveJournal site.
Pat Frank: When is your paper due out?
Nine lies about climate change
March 30, 2008
5 Comments | 
Accuracy, Climate change, Global warming, Science | Tagged: Accuracy, Climate change, Global warming, Science | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Don’t look now: Businesses ask Uganda to block DDT spraying
March 27, 2008News comes out of Kampala that the delay in implementing the use of DDT in a Rachel Carson-approved program of integrated pest management — for indoor residual spraying only — faces strong opposition.
From environmentalists? No, you’ll recall that Environmental Defense, the group that led the fight for a ban on broadcast use of DDT in the U.S. has been pressuring the Bush administration and others to use DDT appropriately for years.
The opposition comes from Uganda businesses.
“Zero tolerance on DDT spraying is the feeling of the private sector. Even at the East African Community DDT is a condemned chemical. Government should look for other alternatives,” Mr David Lule, the managing director of Hortexa, a horticultural exporting association to the EU [European Union], said.
Don’t look for corrections or apologies from the pro-poison lobbyists yet. Junk “scientist” Steven Milloy, the “Competitive Enterprise Institute” (which claims to represent businesses) and others have yet to correct any of the many errors they’ve made in their slash-and-burn campaign for poisoning Africa. Why would they change now?
1 Comment | Accuracy, DDT, Junk science, Politics, Rachel Carson, Rampant stupidity, Science | Tagged: Africa, DDT, Environmental protection, Junk science, Malaria, mosquitoes, Politics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Carnival of historic proportions
March 27, 2008Lent’s over, Easter’s done — time to carnival once again.
Very good stuff in several different carnivals on history and other subjects we like to peruse and ponder while soaking in Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.
The passings of those who saw history, commemorated at the 12th Carnival of Military History, at Thoughts on Military History:
Next we have a series of posts commemorating the deaths of veterans who have recently passed away. First, at UKNIWM we have a post about the passing away of the last Scottish veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Second, again at UKNIWM, we have a post on the death of the last French veteran of the First World War. Finally, we have a post at Rantings of a Civil War Historian about the anniversary of the death of Sir Henry Shrapnel, the inventor of the shrapnel artillery shell. [Link on Shrapnel not working]
There’s a whole lesson plan in that paragraph, all of it important and fascinating, and none of it important in your state’s history standards, probably.
A Hot Cup of Joe, appropriately, hosts the Four Stone Hearth #37, the carnival of archaeology — in a strangely futuristic Pulp Science Fiction fashion. Go see the thing just for the pulp sci-fi images, if you must — but as usual there are great gems there. This week our youngest son expressed some exasperation at the short shrift given Angkor Wat in high school texts, which led to a discussion about cultures and histories generally not part of the U.S. canon. Four Stone Hearth features a post at Wanna Be An Anthropologist that digs through Angkor Wat in some depth. I love timely posts.
These things lead off into all sorts of rabbit trails. Wanna Be An Anthropologist also has this post on “Mogollon Snowbirds,” a wry title twist on a very good, deep post on archaeology and anthropology study in the Mogollon Rim area of Arizona. No bit conclusion, but sources you can use, and a great look at what real scientists really do.
We’re all back from spring break in our household, but still appreciative of the Teachers Gone Wild edition of the Carnival of Education (#165), at Bellringers.
New elementary school in Toronto, Ontario; architecture by Kohn Schnier Architects.
One feature on the Education Carnival midway was this post, “Luddite Lite,” at Teacher in a Strange Land. It’s sharp little spur under my seat, about actually using technology to promote learning for the students, rather than as a crutch for the teacher. But in that blog’s archives, right next door to that post, is this evocative post from a 30-year, in-the-trenches veteran teacher, to my old boss at Education, Checker Finn — a response to one of his posts (which we’ve commented on before). What makes education work? Are you delivering it? Check out both posts.
Oops. Gotta scoot. Lesson plans to tweak.
3 Comments | Anthropology, Archaeology, Education, Education blogs, History, History blogs, Science, War, World War I | Tagged: Archaeology, Education, Education Policy, History, Technology, War, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ben Stein busted for Godwin’s law violation
March 26, 2008Godwin’s law predicts, reductio ad Hitlerum explains.
And Vox Day explains it doesn’t mean what Ben Stein thinks it means. Day and Stein ought to get together to coordinate — of course, as Twain noted, if they’d just stick to the facts, they wouldn’t need to coordinate at all.
Lacking any significant response from the movie’s creators or fan, scientists and skeptics have turned to debating who gets to kick the turkey while it’s down.
11 Comments | Creationism, Intelligent Design, Rampant stupidity, Science, War on Education, War on Science | Tagged: Ben Stein, Creationism, Entertainment, Movies, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Annals of Global Warming: Plants refuse to listen to climate change skeptics
March 22, 2008March 20 brought the Spring equinox, but our daffodils have been up for a couple of weeks. Spring comes a little earlier every year.
That fact, and news stories like these below must cause great angst in the bowels of the offices of U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and other places climate change deniers hold sway. One can almost imagine some poor sap of a Coburn minion laboring away long into the night trying to devise legislation that will prevent Canadian thistles, redbuds, marigolds, wheat, soybeans and corn from reading about climate change or going to see Al Gore’s movie, and getting the wrong ideas.
I hope that minion is imaginary.
Here’s story #1: The Tuesday Science Section of the New York Times carried a story by Jim Robbins, “In a Warmer Yellowstone Park, a Shifting Environmental Balance.” Longtime readers probably know of my deep affection and ties to Yellowstone and the Mountain West. So of course this story catches my eye.
Robbins details an interesting set of changes being studied by Robert L. Crabtree, who is “chief scientist with the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center in Bozeman, Montana”: Invasive Canadian thistle, an exotic weed harries cattlemen throughout the world for the ways it destroys pasture land; despite its name, this thistle is an exotic from Asia, accidentally introduced to the Americas. The Lamar Valley in Yellowstone, formerly a wetland, continues to dry as a result of rising temperatures and lack of usual rainfall (a predicted effect of global climate change). Canadian thistle loves drying wetlands, and has invaded along the Lamar River. Officials fought the invasion for several years, but the fight seems lost.
The changes are dramatic, to observant ecologists:
Enter the pocket gopher, a half-pound dynamo that tunnels into the ground near the surface. The gophers love the abundant, starchy roots of the plant and burrow beneath it to harvest the tubers. What they do not eat they stockpile under plants or rocks.
The expansion of pocket gophers and thistle is not gradual, Dr. Crabtree said, but a rapid positive-feedback loop. As the gophers tunnel, they churn surface soil and create a perfect habitat for more thistle. In other words, the rodents help spread the plant. And more plants, in turn, lead to more pocket gophers.
“The pocket gophers are unconsciously farming their own food source,” said Dr. Crabtree. Their numbers here have tripled since the late 1980s, he said.
For their part, grizzly bears have discovered the gophers’ caches and raid them. As a result, the Lamar Valley is pockmarked with holes where grizzlies have clawed up bundles of roots. Bears also devour gophers and their pups.
Dr. Crabtree thinks the bears started feeding in earnest on the new food source in 2004 — a poor year for another bear staple, the white bark pine nut. Now, he adds, they seem to be eating the gophers and roots more routinely.
Tom Oliff, chief scientist for Yellowstone, confirms that the growing season for the park has expanded 20 days a year since the mid-1990s, which may explain the spread of Canada thistle. Mr. Oliff said the park reduced control efforts because evidence showed that the plant ebbed and flowed and that the range would probably shrink on its own.
One doesn’t have to be a fan of the Craigheads or a biologist to be dimly aware that the Yellowstone ecosystems are intensely studied and intensely threatened. Climate change played a contributing role in the cataclysmic fires in the park in 1988; reintroduction of wolves still sparks some controversy, though the return of a top predator has already produced other dramatic changes in Yellowstone ecosystems. Yellowstone is home and refuge to a wild bison herd, and beautiful and unique — generally revered as a “crown jewel” of America’s features.
Nor does one need to be a climate scientist to recognize the signs of warming listed in the article, and the dangers that are implied: Drying wetlands, invasive species, dying traditional foodstocks for grizzlies, population explosions that almost always are a symptom of serious trouble in an ecosystem.
So I was surprised, dumbfounded even, to see The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE claim this as a good story. Why?
Something absolutely unheard-of before: an entire New York Times article talking about Global Warming but… with no hint of impending doom or catastrophes:
In a Warmer Yellowstone Park, a Shifting Environmental Balance by Jim Robbins – published: March 18, 2008
Destruction of wetlands, displacement of native species, upset of the ecological apple cart — and this is “no hint of impending doom?” (While you’re at the NY Times site, also see this story, about how warmer temperatures threaten the grizzly.)
Here’s story #2:
Cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., now appear weeks earlier than they used to. April 5 was the date of the debut of the blossoms 30 years ago, according to a story at National Public Radio, but they are out already and will have peaked by the end of March this year.
Washington’s blossomless Cherry Blossom Festivals (the dates for the festival have not kept pace) provide one more indicator that spring comes earlier. A geographer from Virginia Tech, Kirsten de Beurs, uses remote sensing satellite data to look at the dates plants spring forth, and has determined that spring is moving up 8 hours every year. (Go to the NPR site and listen to the story.) (This science is called “phenology,” the study of the timing of biological phenomena.)
Here’s the problem for climate change deniers: How can they convince the birds, bees, grizzlies, and especially the trees and flowers, that they shouldn’t be acting as if the climate were changing? How can the climate change skeptics get the Canadian thistles to stop invading, the Japanese blossoming cherry trees in the Tidal Basin to delay their blossoms, the bluegrass of Kentucky to delay its greening, the prairies of Kansas to delay the wildflowers and grasses?
Have all those plants been suckered in by Al Gore’s movie? Don’t those plants know that Anthony Watts has shown that the weather measuring stations across the U.S. are placed wrongly, and so there cannot be warmer weather?
Church authorities got Galileo to lie low on the issue of heliocentricity centuries ago; but according to the legend, as he left the room where he had agreed to keep quiet, he muttered, “but still, it moves,” referring to the motion of the Earth about the Sun. This is the problem of the climate change deniers: Still, the climate changes.
Canute couldn’t command the tides not to flow; climate change deniers cannot command the flowers not to bloom. That force that through the green fuse drives the flower? It’s the destroyer of skepticism, too. Climate change skeptics curse it today.
Satellite photo composite: “Land surface phenologies across CONUS in 2000 revealed by hree AVHRR biweekly composites.” From USA National Phenology Network (USANPN)
- Project Budburst: You can be a citizen scientist, and help climatologists and geographers map the coming of spring. Details here. Contact Barron Orr at the University of Arizona, barron@email.arizona.edu.
24 Comments | Climate change, Economics, Environmental protection, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Global warming, Natural history, Science | Tagged: Climate change, Economics, geography, Global warming, Politics, Science, Yellowstone Park | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
NASA needs eyewitnesses: Were you at the intersection of Milky Way and Bootës on the evening of March 19?
March 21, 2008No kidding. Our Italian physicist friend Dorigo passed along the note on his blog, Quantum Diaries Survivor. George Gliba at NASA (gliba@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov) hopes someone was watching Bootës at about 6:10 UT (which would be about 1:10 a.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT), if I’m calculating that correctly).
Gliba said:
Last night the NASA SWIFT spacecraft saw the most extrinsically luminous Gamma-ray Burst ever known. Some ground based telescopes recorded the visual optical afterglow to be 5th magnitude!
Here’s your chance to make science history: If you may have seen the thing, or better, if you have a videotape of the incident (which may have lasted a few minutes), scientists would sure love to see it.
Here’s what the Swift telescope captured:
The extremely luminous afterglow of GRB 080319B was imaged by Swift’s X-ray Telescope (left) and Optical/Ultraviolet Telescope (right). This was by far the brightest gamma-ray burst afterglow ever seen. Credit: NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler, et al.
So, did you see it? Call George Gliba; details, Gliba’s note to physicists and astronomers below the fold.
Most gamma ray bursts occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. Their cores collapse to form black holes or neutron stars, releasing an intense burst of high-energy gamma rays and ejecting particle jets that rip through space at nearly the speed of light like turbocharged cosmic blowtorches. When the jets plow into surrounding interstellar clouds, they heat the gas, often generating bright afterglows. Gamma ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe since the big bang.
“This burst was a whopper,” said Swift principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “It blows away every gamma ray burst we’ve seen so far.”
Calculations show this one was 7 billion light years away. Cool!
1 Comment | Astronomy, Physics, Science | Tagged: Astronomy, Cosmos, Gamma Ray Burst, March 19 event, Physics, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Icebergs in Florida: History anecdotes, or data?
March 20, 2008“Bergs and British Climate: That Old Yarn of the Effect of Greenland’s Floating Mountains,” reads a headline from the New York Times, April 26, 1908.
The story wanders about reports of icebergs floating far south of where people might expect them in 1908, what their drift tells us about various currents, and conjectures about hypotheses of climatic effects of the ice and the currents. Some of the icebergs would indeed be monsters, poking more than 400 feet above the waterline; some of the bergs might provoke discussion drifting as far south as Florida.
I mention this article because the archives of the New York Times is open and free for searchers, and many of the articles prior to 1922 are available in .pdf form for free. It took me five or six minutes to get a search that produced fewer than 10,000 stories to pick this one from.
And if I may, it tends to show the difficulties of climate change skeptics who yank a few old articles out of journals of 100 years ago to suggest that, since scientists and navigators wondered about the weather then, climate change is not occurring now. I can imagine there are a lot of stories available in various newspaper archives; if we make a methodological search of them, we may find data that can be turned into real information about climate.
I mention this because Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That? features a couple of articles relying on old weather reports to suggest that concern about warming in the 1920s and 1930s demonstrates that warming isn’t happening now. See this one, too, from a 1922 article, on ice retreating.
In the concluding remarks, the is the recognition of climate change to a warmer regime:
All of these confirm the general statement that we are in the midst of a period of abnormal warmth, which has come on more less gradually for many years.
Of course we all know what happened next, 1934 became the hottest year on record, the dust bowl and great depression occurred, followed by World War II. The climate changes again, a return to a colder phase lasting all the way until about 1978 when the “new ice age” was being discussed. Then the great PDO shift occurred and warming has been the norm since then.
Watts is a former television weatherman now making the big bucks with his own forecasting company. His blog continues among the most popular on WordPress with a regular feature showing photos of U.S. weather service weather stations that are positioned in less-than-optimum places to record cool weather, such as in asphalt parking lots, or near heat exhaust vents from the HVAC systems of nearby buildings. Watts engages in occasionally heated disputes on his blog, and he often highlights the work of some of the more suspect cynics of science like Tim Blair.
Watts has a cadre of faithful followers and defenders; poking at his posts generally produces a swift onslaught of invective from them.
Watts’s blog provides a good resource for counter examples to those offered by policy makers who urge more serious action to control pollution. I’m skeptical of Watts’s skepticism.
For one thing, the charts he shows with these historic articles show a long-term warming trend, which he dismisses. As evidence against global warming, though, these articles’ highlights fall more into the anecdote side than on the data side.
Anecdotal evidence abounds in that article from the New York Times that I note above, too. It’s anecdotal in opposition to Watts’ claims, but it’s still just anecdote.
This is a potentially rich area for local and amateur historians. Meteorologists and other climate scientists are hampered in their analysis by a lack of data, and often by a lack of context of the data they do have. Newspapers now buried in libraries and other archives may offer rich sources of data, and especially context. Mining these sources will be amateur operations, mostly. There is too much ground to cover, too many places to visit, for a major project coordinated out of one institution.
In 1908, stories of massive iceberg mountains were no older than a generation. They are anecdotes, sure — but they may be data points, too. When was the last time anyone sighted an iceberg 400 feet above the water? (The article claims one berg was 700 feet from waterline to peak; when was the last one of those sighted?) When was the last time a significant chunk of ice wandered as far south as Florida? Can you find some of these stories to calculate whether such things still occur, or if not, when they stopped?
My fear is that Watts is mining a rich lode of stories written by newsmen with no institutional memory of ice or other weather phenomena. The institutional memory becomes apparent only in retrospect, only in the archives of the stories, and only compared longitudinally, that is, over time. 20-year periods would probably provide two generations of reporters at a long-established news outlet; reporters in those generations would not be aware of the changes.
The New York Times archives are open. What others?
Historians? High school teachers with students who need projects? What do you have in your town that may shed light? Teachers, pay special attention to the comments on Watts’ blog; many readers write about their historical experiences, such as with the heat waves of the 1930s, and they provide links to news stories and history writings. Even if your town is landlocked, there is weather history to find.
2 Comments | Capturing history, Climate change, Global warming, History, Science, Student projects | Tagged: Climate change, Global warming, History, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
8 year-old kid finds dinosaur tracks
March 18, 2008Here’s a great story about a kid who made a significant dinosaur-related find: 8 year-old Rhys Nichols found the dinosaur tracks as he was strolling along a beach near his home in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.
Found the story via Prehistoric CSI, a blog which normally tracks dinosaur digs in Texas at the Seymour, Texas, “red beds” — and which is billed as having a limited run. Texas history and science teachers need to get over there to see what’s up. (Seymour is about midway between Fort Worth and Lubbock.)
Prehistoric CSI has some wonderful stories about digging and researching Texas fossils — see this one featuring 3-D images of a still-rock-encased critter.
I hope that site stays alive for a while.
Leave a Comment » | Natural history, Paleontology, Science, Texas, Travel | Tagged: Dinosaurs, History, Paleontology, Science, Texas, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Problem for climate change skeptics: Climate changing
March 17, 2008It’s just one more report to throw on the pyre of reports to be burned if it ever turns out as skeptics say and others hope, global climate change is just a momentary trend: From 1999 to 2006, the pace of glacier melting worldwide picked up.
We had a cold winter; skeptics will argue that the winter of 2007-2008 was not included, and it reverses the trend.
If only that were so.
9 Comments | Accuracy, Environmental protection, Global warming, Politics, Reason, Science | Tagged: Climate change, environment, Glaciers, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
War on Science: CDC publishes suppressed study
March 15, 2008On the eve of a major conference on health effects of DDT, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control published a study it had suppressed for several months, detailing pollution effects in the Great Lakes area. The author of the study, demoted but still outspoken, was grudgingly granted permission to attend the Kenaga International Conference on DDT and Health, which opened yesterday at Alma College in Alma, Michigan.
Science won the skirmish, getting the study pried out of CDC. News coverage of the conference stopped short of spectacular so far: Only local Michigan media outlets provided coverage. If we won the war, but no one knew . . . ?
The Morning Sun suggested that further studies of health effects in the area are required, and that no successful cleanup of a toxic site is ever done without health studies showing the need.
[Jane] Keon[, chairwoman of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force] hasn’t read the entire report but did read the portions about Gratiot County.
“There’s no new information, and everything mentioned is well-known and verified by ATSDR and CDC,” she said. “I understand that in addition to 200 researchers and much peer review the report data was reviewed by state and local health departments in the areas of concern without the complaint that the science was weak.
“We in the task force view the report as further proof that a full-blown health study is needed in Gratiot County. From our own studies we also know that communities with contaminated sites that have a health study to point to get very thorough cleanups, while communities that do not have a health study do not get thorough cleanups.”
The task force has twice applied for grants to perform a comprehensive local heath study but were turned down both times.
“The reasons offered (for rejection) seemed lame and illogical,” Keon said. “One time we were told that we didn’t have enough data, and yet that is why we desired the health study – to have a scientific collection of data.”
A citizens’ group in Washington, D.C., the Center for Public Integrity, obtained a copy of the study last year and made it available on the internet. There is no indication I can find of whether there were changes made in the study between the leaking and the formal publication.
2 Comments | DDT, Environmental justice, Environmental protection, Research, Science, War on Science | Tagged: CDC, DDT, Great Lakes, health, pollution | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Astronomy Day, May 10: Sponsors needed!
March 15, 2008In all of Texas, only residents of El Paso have a sponsor for Astronomy Day activities (participating astronomy groups are the Gene Roddenberry Planetarium, El Paso Astronomy Club, and Junior League of El Paso, meeting at El Paso Desert Botanical Gardens at Keystone Heritage Park). Celebrate Astronomy Day on Saturday, May 10, 2008.
Why is this a big deal?
Chiefly because I know there are students in Lubbock, Odessa, Killeen, Houston, Galveston, Victoria, Beaumont, Tyler, Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, and San Antonio — plus starry spots in between — who should have a chance to see some stars on National Astronomy Day.
Plus, Astronomy Magazine has a deal with Meade Instruments 4M to give away a telescope at each sponsored site.
We need a sponsor here in Dallas!
“The Meade Instruments 4M Community will donate an ETX-80 telescope for each venue to give away and also provide a 8-inch LX 90 for the grand prize — Astronomy will pick the grand-prize winner from names collected at each venue.”
Where can you view? Check Meade’s site for a list of physical sites participating on May 10. Check Astronomy Magazine for an interactive map of sites.
Astronomy Day is a grass roots movement to share the joy of astronomy with the general population – “Bringing Astronomy to the People.” On Astronomy Day, thousands of people who have never looked through a telescope will have an opportunity to see first hand what has so many amateur and professional astronomers all excited. Astronomy clubs, science museums, observatories, universities, planetariums, laboratories, libraries, and nature centers host special events and activities to acquaint their population with local astronomical resources and facilities. It is an astronomical PR event that helps highlight ways the general public can get involved with astronomy – or at least get some of their questions about astronomy answered. Astronomy Week is the same concept as Astronomy Day except seven times long.
Novices get a chance to look at the stars, and one person at each site wins a telescope; one person in the nation gets a very nice 8-inch telescope. What are your chances? Last year 28 telescopes were given away; there were 3,700 people who registered to win the things.
Just for looking at the stars! What a deal.
Who will sponsor more sites? Where is the Texas Astronomical Society? The Fort Worth Astronomical Society? How about the Olympus Mons Astronomical Society (at UT-Arlington)? The Lockheed-Martin Astronomy Club?
2 Comments | Astronomy, Science, Travel | Tagged: Astronomy, Astronomy Day, May 10 2008, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
World’s oldest playable musical instruments: Listen
March 14, 2008About that 5,200-year old animation: Was there a musical score to accompany it?
Certainly flutes could have provided accompaniment: Research establishes that several neolithic bone flutes found in China are 7,000 to 9,000 years old.
A 1999 release from the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) discussed the dating of the flutes:
Recent excavations at the early Neolithic site of Jiahu, located in Henan province, China, have yielded six complete bone flutes between 7,000 and 9,000 years old. Fragments of approximately 30 other flutes were also discovered. The flutes may be the earliest complete, playable, tightly-dated, multinote musical instruments.
Garman Harbottle, a chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and member of the Jiahu research team, helped analyze data from carbon-14 dating done in China on materials taken from the site. “Jiahu has the potential to be one of the most significant and exciting early Neolithic sites ever investigated,” said Harbottle. “The carbon dating was of crucial importance to my Chinese colleagues in establishing the age of the site and the relics found within it.”
These flutes were found in modern China, and the bowl with the jumping goat images was found in modern Iran. The spread of technology may have worked on a millennial time scale then. Did the flute technology cover the approximately 3,500 miles between the sites, in the 3,000 to 4,000 years in between their creation?
At least two .wav files exist of one of the flutes being played (here, and here), again from BNL; the actual tunes the flute creators played, we do not know, ASCAP and BMI did not protect the publication of the tunes.
What other astounding archaeological finds are out there, relatively unpublicized?
Resources:
- “The Early Development of Music: Analysis of the Jiahu bone flutes,” Antiquity, 2004 paper by Juzhong Zhang, one of the lead discoverers of the bones. Zhang has also done work on early beer making — beer, music, images, it seems the ancients lacked for very little.
- Letter to Nature, “Oldest playable musical instruments found at Jiahu early Neolithic site in China,” Nature 401, 366-368 (23 September 1999) | ; Received 15 February 1999; Accepted 30 July 1999
9 Comments | Archaeology, History, Music, Science | Tagged: ancient technology, Archaeology, bone flute, China, History, Media, Music, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Sticks nix creationist pic
March 14, 2008“Expelled!” producers gave away free tickets. They invited legislators personally. But only about 100 people showed up for an IMAX showing of the movie in Tallahassee, Florida.
Hey, I got 1,000 times that many people to click on an 8-frame .gif animation of an ancient goat. Real science trumps creationism again.
Real science is almost always more popular than faux-science and bad religion, but that will not stop creationists from creating trouble in any state agency in any state they can.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Pharyngula.
[Yes, I’m aware of the historical implications of the headline.]
88 Comments | Creationism, Evolution, History, Movies, Politics, Science, State school boards | Tagged: Ben Stein, Creationism, Evolution, Florida, Media, Politics, Science, State school boards | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
State of museums
March 12, 2008Teachers: Run out to your local Starbucks, or newsstand if you’re luckier, and get today’s New York Times. Check out the special section on museums.
Science, arts and social studies teachers especially, go look. What local museums are you overlooking? Which museums should you plan a long-distance trip to see?
Duncanville ISD teachers sometimes require “field experience” for students, including visits to local museums. I doubt we’d have gotten our kids into the African American Museum otherwise; I think too few kids bother with the Frontiers of Flight Museum (or the C. R. Smith Museum closer to DFW Airport), and I know way too few bother with the Jack Harbin Museum of Scouting, a great shining gem obscured by its working class, Scout camp location and the proximity of the National Scouting Museum in Irving, Texas.
Our family plans to visit Lucy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science this weekend. I had a great time with Abe in Springfield last month, courtesy of the Bill of Rights Institute and the Liberty Fund (and I have not written about it, bad boy that I am).
The Times’s section makes me lust for Star Trek™-style transporters that take a whole classroom of kids, cheaply, to see the real stuff. Be sure to check out the on-line videos and slide shows, too.
Leave a Comment » | Art, History, History and art, Museums, Newspapers, Science, Travel | Tagged: Art, History, Museums, Newspapers, Science, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Homeschooler says ‘teach kids about Darwin’
March 11, 2008Thoughtful post from a homeschooler, Geek Dad. Check out the responses. The heated exchanges reveal a lot.
6 Comments | Accuracy, Creationism, Darwin, Education, Evolution, Homeschooling, Science | Tagged: Creationism, Darwin, Education, Evolution, Homeschooling, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
