BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Solar Systems look-alike found The newfound planetary system, which orbits the star OGLE-2006-BLG-109L, is more compact than our own and is about five thousand light-years away. The Ogle-Blogarians are a species of compulsive documenters. Every aspect of their lives, every passing interest, every offbeat opinion, every odd theory gets placed on their planetary net. They are extremely interested in their own doings and thus are both happy and agitated that other beings have also taken an interest. Pro- and anti- observationists are even now gearing for the inevitable protests, net-wide opinion surveys, and arts/music/Blogarian introspection…
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Archaeology in Europe: 04/01/2008 – 05/01/2008 Popular British archeology series Time Team is coming to America, as a joint production with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Cool! I’ve been envious of the reports about Time Team digs and episodes ever since I’ve been reading Archeology in Europe, which is written by the partner of a dear college friend of mine. The first series will cover six episodes, with the team of experts on Time Team, USA (working title) exploring some of America’s most intriguing archaeological sites, with locations under consideration including the pre-historic Mounds of Mississippi, earth pyramids outside St. Louis, Missouri…
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Because I had a positive experience playing around with WordPress 2.5 on Rileycat’s blog, I asked David to go ahead and upgrade me here. Some of the new features replace various plugins I was using before (Image Manager, and ST Visualize Advanced Features ). I’ll be using a new plugin – my husband David wrote a simple one for converting WP tags to Technorati tags, so I’m going to give that one a whirl. Whee! I will say that I like one feature; the edit window has a visual editor tab and an HTML editor tab, and previously, it would…
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Evidence Supports Earlier Date for People in North America – New York Times Exploring Paisley Caves in the Cascade Range of Oregon, archaeologists have found a scattering of human coprolites, or fossil feces. The specimens preserved 14,000-year-old human protein and DNA, which the discoverers said was the strongest evidence yet of the earliest people living in North America. Other archaeologists agreed that the findings established more firmly than before the presence of people on the continent at least 1,000 years before the well-known Clovis people, previously thought to be the first Americans. Recent research at sites in Florida and Wisconsin…
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As a religious liberal who enthusiastically embraces reality (and whose favorite college class of all time was Evolution 101/102/103 long ago), I have to savor the following: The Questionable Authority : Summary Judgment in California Creationist Lawsuit: Bottom Line, and What’s Next (Part 1 of 3) This means two things: first, the question of whether or not the University of California can reject courses from the Christian schools under any circumstances has been settled in favor of UC. The judge ruled that UC has a compelling reason to pick and choose the “content” and “viewpoints” that they will accept as…
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Seen various places, but most recently at The Lead: Many people around the world are planning on observing an hour of “darkness” tomorrow night as a way of participating in a global earth hour. The event was created by the World Wildlife Fund in 2007.From the Earth Hour Website: “Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More…
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I already noticed how having iPhones turns conversations with my husband David into The Search for Truth. We’ll have to watch this trend carefully. Maybe there’s a webapp to track it? The risk for iPhone users: They know too much
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PZ Myers got pulled out of the line for a private screening of Expelled, the creationist “documentary” by a rent-a-cop at the producers’ request. But his guest, Richard Dawkins, was not recognized. IM N UR THEETRE, MOCKIN UR DOGMAS! See all 1200+ comments for more enjoyment of the delicious irony at Pharyngula: EXPELLED! As seen various places, most recently OneUtah UPDATE: A video of a post-expulsion discussion between Dawkins and Myers is here. [kml_flashembed movie="http://media.richarddawkins.net/video/2008/RDPZweb.mov" width="426" height="260" wmode="transparent" /]
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My husband David and I – as he noted on his blog – were finally seduced by the Light Side, the Forces of Brightness, the White Lord of the Pith, the Core of All Good, etc. etc. We both got iPhones as we’d previously warned. Stupidly, we went to Woodfield Mall yesterday, rather than driving to the brand new AT&T store on Algonquin in Rolling Meadows, which as of March 17th had 16G iPhones. The Apple store was out of the 16G’s and didn’t expect to get any for some time, so we shrugged and said “Okay, we’ll take the…
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Electronic gadgets latest sources of computer viruses – CNN.com Recent cases reviewed by The Associated Press include some of the most widely used tech devices: Apple iPods, digital picture frames sold by Target and Best Buy stores, and TomTom navigation gear.In most cases, Chinese factories — where many companies have turned to keep prices low — are the source. So far, the virus problem appears to come from lax quality control, perhaps a careless worker plugging an infected music player into a factory computer used for testing, rather than organized sabotage by hackers or the Chinese factories.