ideonexus

Month: March 2008

  • Neil Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish”

    “The best road maps to human bodies lie in the bodies of other animals.” – Neil Shubin Your Inner Fish There’s a fascination to tearing apart an old house, tracing its history through what you find hidden behind the plaster. Electrical wires and pipes will run up to the attic and across, instead of taking…

  • ideonexus Now Powered by WordPress.org

    Spent yesterday setting up a wordpress.org blog and transferring everything I’ve written on wordpress.com over to it, AND IT WAS SO EASY!!! It’s about an afternoon’s worth of work. WordPress.com lets you export all your blog content to an XML file, which you have to cut down to several 2MB XML files and upload one…

  • North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: Underground

    Hiddenite crystal with card Mr. William Earl Hidden, July 24, 1905 This antique was my favorite object on display in the Museum’s “Underground” exhibit. A card from William Hidden (1853-1918), a mineralogist sent to North Carolina by Thomas Edison to look for platinum, and for whom the gem is named. See the complete flickr set…

  • 29-MAR-2008 @ 2000 Local: Earth Hour 2008

    Earth at Night Image by NASA Tonight at 8:00 pm is Earth Hour 2008, brainchild of Australia’s World Wildlife Fund. The idea is to turn off all your lights between the hours of 8 and 9 pm your local time. People all over the world are taking part, and even cities are shutting down lights…

  • Quoted in ABC Science

    I’m quoted in Fran Malloy’s ABC Science article Internet connectivity about social networking and it’s effects on culture: “A genuine science community is emerging online,” says science blogger Ryan Somma author of ‘ideonexus’. He argues that social networking also increases scientists’ accessibility to the public and accelerates the dissemination of new research. This is a…

  • Numerical Tic-Tac-Toe

    Here’s a cool spin on a game you probably haven’t played since you solved it in elementary school. You and another player take turns naming numbers one through nine. Each number may only be used once. The player who collects any three numbers that add up to 15 wins. If all numbers are used up…

  • Clarifying the Science Behind Global Cooling

    “It is easy to lie with statistics; it is easier to lie without them.” – Frederick Mosteller Global Cooling Trend Close-Up of Last Decade Yesterday I posted this image of what climatologists are claiming is evidence of warming in the last decade, and explained how it actually shows a cooling trend; however, it has come…

  • More Global Cooling Evidence Embarrasses the IPCC Orthodoxy

    A recent article that appeared in The Australian, Climate facts to warm to, has the transcript of an important interview with Dr. Jennifer Marohasy a biologist, free market advocate, and Global Warming skeptic. When asked “Is the Earth still warming?” Dr. Marohasy replied: No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your…

  • Between a Rock and a Hardplace: Debating Cranks

    Chris Mooney has an important article online about how scientists debating fringe groups like Creationists and AGW deniers in many ways actually hurts our causes. Sure enough, one of the Expelled trailers features the following quotation from Oxford evolutionary biologist and atheism apostle Richard Dawkins: “If people think God is interesting, the onus is on…

  • NC Museum of Natural History: Mountains to the Sea

    Wildlife-Friendly Backyard At the museum’s center is a huge recreation of North Carolina’s many ecosystems, filled with both living and taxidermied animals. One of my favorite side displays was on how to build an eco-friendly yard that invites, feeds, and shelter’s wildlife. The Four Fundamentals of Wildlife-Friendly Landscapes: Offer a year-round food supply along with…

  • Happy Near Miss Day!

    Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico Image by NASA 19 years ago, March 23, 1989, Apollo asteroid 4581 Asclepius passed within 700,000 km (400,000 miles) of Earth, passing through the exact position the Earth was only six hours before. Had it impacted, it would have generated an explosion thousands of times more powerful than the most…

  • Politicians Need to Improve Their Presentation Skills

    Here’s a question that started nagging me today: Why hasn’t it become standard for politicians to spice up their speeches with Power Point Presentations? Could you imagine a modern-day scientist getting up in front of a conference and try to make a persuasive argument with just an inspiring speech? “Every American must embrace String Theory…