Astronomer and blogger Phil Plait has a good summary of climate concerns here. As he notes, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the independent research group Berkeley Earth all concur … Continue reading
The United States Department of Agriculture has ended a longstanding practice of making animal welfare reports available on its website. Previously tens of thousands of reports could be read online concerning treatment of animals at nearly 8000 facilities, including about … Continue reading
Suppose you’re designing a language course. All else being equal, you’d probably want to teach the most common words first, and there are a number of references you can check for that purpose. (For example, Wikipedia’s page for the most … Continue reading
An article on the Vox website (link) argues that in many ways the world is getting better, vastly so in comparison with 200 years ago. For example: In 1820 about 90 percent of the world population lived in what we … Continue reading
This video does a nice job of highlighting some weird aspects of human vision in just three minutes. Link: https://youtu.be/0NPH_udOOek This first oddness it mentions is the blind spot, a place on the retina devoid of imaging cells where the … Continue reading
President Obama today awards the Medal of Freedom to Margaret Hamilton, not the late actress famous for playing the Wicked Witch of the West but a pioneering computer scientist who programmed computers for the Apollo missions to the Moon and … Continue reading
Alton Brown, Stephen Colbert, and Science! Or engineering anyway: Link: https://youtu.be/wkHJgJeo7xQ “Any sufficiently commonplace magic will be deemed technology.” — Nimblespheres’ Law by … Continue reading
OK, the headline might be a slight overstatement, but not much of one. At least in terms of the number of disease-causing bacteria, floors tend to be cleaner than kitchen counters and toilet seats cleaner than both. Seriously. Pediatrician and … Continue reading
Below is yet another notable installment of the XKCD web comic that is very much worth a look. It addresses the far-too-common misconception that since the world’s temperature has changed before, global warming is no big deal and possibly just … Continue reading
George Manbiot’s succinct August 3 piece in The Guardian takes note of how well-to-do fossil fuel interests continue to promote misinformation about global warming in news coverage. As most of us are well aware, last year was the warmest ever … Continue reading