Tag: environmentalism

  • The Smithsonian Natural History Museum

    I’ve got a huge backlog of photos I need to get up on Flickr, enough to cover several months worth of Saturndays. Here’s two sets from the Smithsonian Natural History Museum: Hall of Bones Man and the Manlike Apes The Hall of Bones does a great job of illustrating the incredible biological and adaptation diversity…

  • Inhofe’s Global Warming Book Report Continued…

    My deconstruction of the logical fallacies in Inhofe’s recent report, titled Senate Report Debunks “Consensus” on Global Warming drew a whole lot of comments on my otherwise thoroughly-ignored blog. I really wish the report had come out at a more convenient time, instead of when I had the blog on auto-pilot for the holidays. I…

  • Senate Report Debunks “Consensus” on Global Warming

    Senator Inhofe’s latest U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007 is generating a lot of attention on right-wing news sources like Faux and the Mooney Times. A quick google search showed the parrotheads got the morning e-mail, and unthinkingly cut and pasted the appropriate quotes into their blogs…

  • Science Gift Ideas: Worldchanging, A User’s Guide to the 21st Century

    Worldchanging A User’s Guide to the 21st Century “Happiness demands giving up all hope of a better past.” – Buddha I dilly-dallied about checking out this book when it came out last year. Then one day, I happened to pick up an opened copy at the bookstore and immediately fell into profound ionian enchantment with…

  • Science Gift Ideas: Howtoons, The Possibilities are Endless

    howtoons.com Cloud of Legends I was all about Do It Yourself (DIY) as a kid. I built a crossbow out of tree branches that shot bamboo arrows, a boat out of an innertube and piece of plywood, and was forever tricking my dirt bike out. Inventors Dr. Saul Griffith and Dr. Joost Bonsen and comic…

  • Holiday Light-emitting Diodes (LEDs)

    LED Holiday Tree at Port Discover LEDs are the future of light, and may soon overtake Compact Fluorescent bulbs as the best choice for efficient home lighting. LEDs don’t have filaments, the part that easily burns out in ordinary bulbs, and they do not product heat like incandescent bulbs. LEDs also last far longer than…

  • Environmentalism as Religion?

    Despite all their lambasting of Environmentalism, the last thing Anti-Environment pundits want to do is engage in a scientific debate on global warming, collapsing ecosystems, pollution, or overtaxing natural resources. That’s because they don’t have any science to support their side of the political aisle. So what do you do when you don’t have facts…

  • “Life Flows on Within You Without You”

    World clock in Ulm, Germany Tempus Fugit In the last second, cesium-133 atoms around the world oscillated through 9,192,631,770 radiation cycles in atomic clocks measuring International Atomic Time (TAI)*. While you read the previous sentence, 400,000 billion neutrinos from the sun passed through you*. By the time you finish reading this paragraph, you will have…

  • Global Dimming – Yet Another Complication in Climate Modeling

    Detail of Chris Jordan’s Jet Trails Depicts 11,000 jet trails, equal to the number of commercial flights in the US every eight hours. This research is old news, and complicates the whole Global Warming debate even further. Air pollution might be behind observations that the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface has gone…

  • Review of Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”

    LOLQuack Michael Crichton So I found a copy of Crichton’s book, State of Fear, in a box labeled “Free Books!” at the Coast Guard base, and figured I should go ahead and read it. I’ve read most of his other fiction, which is equally disposable, but usually a fun and brainless way to burn some…

  • Global Warming: What Me Worry?

    Road In Front of My House This is the road in front of my house at high tide. On the left, where there are now recently-planted trees you can’t see in this photo, I’ve been told there were once houses, but the flood zone claimed them. Several locals tell me that it was foolish of…

  • Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center

    I spent my last Saturday at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center. It’s been almost two decades since I last visited the tourist attraction, and I was instantly blown away by how much it had grown. Where previously there was a single tiny building with a dock leading out to the neighboring marsh, there…