51. Hubble Celebrates Its Seventeenth Birthday with the Birth of a Star

Comment #35891 by cassdenata on April 29, 2007 at 7:54 am

Over at the Bad Astronomy blog, he has links to VERY high resolution (500 MB!) versions of this image and a dissection of what is happening in a few regions of this image.
Well worth checking out to enhance the viewing experience
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/04/24/hubbles-17th-chaos-birth-and-near-death/

52. Bill Maher - APATHEIST

Comment #35292 by cassdenata on April 26, 2007 at 7:34 pm

Fair enough Bonzai. He is definitely nowhere near as brilliant or funny as John Stewart. I just appreciate another show that a left-leaning, intelligent?, atheist can laugh at and get his politics fix. There are too many inane, idiotic shows on.

53. Bill Maher - APATHEIST

Comment #35289 by cassdenata on April 26, 2007 at 7:26 pm

Oh and his monologues are usually awful. New Rules is perpetually awesome though.

54. Bill Maher - APATHEIST

Comment #35288 by cassdenata on April 26, 2007 at 7:25 pm

Bonzai, what do you disagree with him about. I honestly find myself agreeing with him most of the time although I disagree with him on his animal rights stance.

55. Bill Maher - APATHEIST

Comment #35268 by cassdenata on April 26, 2007 at 6:36 pm

Alright, you guys are a bunch of snobby bastards, aren't you. Bill Maher is great and his show is a must watch. I am a big fan. Not everybody has to toe the line of being a no-holds barred atheist, like Dawkins et al. He bashes religion almost on a daily basis on his show. The fact that his show is even on the air in this day and age is amazing.

56. NEXT MONDAY: Bill O'Reilly interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #33245 by cassdenata on April 19, 2007 at 5:07 pm

I think that Bill is more civil to Sam Harris because Sam can appear anti-Islamic, which Bill laps up. Not to say that Sam is anti-Islamic. But I love how at the end of the interview with Sam, Bill responds to Sam Harris by saying, "So you propose to shut religious people out of the debate" and then the music comes on, with Sam blind-sided saying, "I would shut dogma out of the debate". For some reason, I think Bill will come at the interview with Mr. Dawkins, a foreigner, with a book that has an offensive title, with full guns blazing.

57. Who Needs Sex (or Males) Anyway?

Comment #32750 by cassdenata on April 18, 2007 at 7:02 am

Very interesting study. Am I right in saying that 'random mutations' during and before mitosis would then be the sole agent for natural selection to work on. Obviously, the genetic mixing and reshuffling that goes on in meiosis isn't occurring, which was thought to speed up adaptation. It would seem that adaptation would be much slower in this instance and the species would have to fill a relatively safe and productive niche to not require rapid adaptation.

58. The Age of Darwin

Comment #32224 by cassdenata on April 16, 2007 at 8:32 am

This is actually a great article, though I am no fan of Brooks. I interpret it as a pretty concise, devastating blow to the traditional homo sapien narrative of the independent "ghost in the machine". We are what we are precisely as a result of evolution. But the flexibility and complexity of our nervous system does a very good job of mimicking complete freedom because it is evolutionary advantageous. At the end of the day, it is a fine line between complete freedom with a rational actor and an extremely complex system of numerous but finite neural networks designed to maintain a flexible strategy. If we designed a robot that we could make to feel pain, happiness, intellectual stimulation and love, would that not be the exact same thing. The only thing that is missing from this article is concrete examples, that help elucidate the abstractions to the general public. Maybe a good example of brain-damaged patients losing some function that is directly traceable to portions of their brain.

59. Is God poison?

Comment #30898 by cassdenata on April 10, 2007 at 9:06 am

I have never in my life had the same feelings of wonder and awe as I got when I read the Selfish gene...or the description of bats in the Blind Watchmaker...or hearing Professor Dawkins speech on the queerness of science at TED talks.

For a guy who doesn't appreciate or understand wonder/awe, he sure is good at dishing it out :)

60. U.N. Draft Cites Humans in Recent Climate Shifts

Comment #30559 by cassdenata on April 8, 2007 at 4:29 pm

Here is a report that a colleague just sent me including his words about the report.

"Someone may have sent this out to the listserve before, but the following is a link to a page in which you can download what, in my mind, is the most definitive and objective paper about contemporary ethanol and biodiesel production in the US. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences in June 2006, and the title is the "Environmental, Economic, and Energetic Costs and Benefits of Biodiesel and Ethanol Biofuels." It is essential reading for anyone who wants to contemplate the great promise and inherent limitations of biofuels."

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0604600103v1

61. Prophets of the new atheism

Comment #30480 by cassdenata on April 8, 2007 at 6:54 am

I'm sure there will be a load of Letters to the Editor after this. Seattle is a pretty liberal place. I'm sure that the percentages of non-believers is much higher than the national average in Seattle. Those that are christian are mostly of the liberal variety.

62. How to defend your faith with an electric wheelchair

Comment #30357 by cassdenata on April 7, 2007 at 7:55 pm

This article actually brings out one very strong point where I disagree with Professor Dawkins. He says that we would be better off without religion and I completely disagree. When religion is seen for what it is, the entertainment value never ceases to amaze. It is like people watching at a Wal-Mart (not sure the brits will get that joke). How dull would life be if we didn't have people fighting about not recognizing the King James passage in a dusty old book.

63. Answers To the Atheists

Comment #30262 by cassdenata on April 7, 2007 at 11:03 am

Just a reminder that I would encourage everyone to double-post at the Washington Post website as well. No use preaching to the choir and the Washington Post is a widely read paper.

64. U.N. Draft Cites Humans in Recent Climate Shifts

Comment #30227 by cassdenata on April 7, 2007 at 8:48 am

Oh ya and the Kary Mullis, the man who invented PCR is definitely the right guy to go to and discuss climactic and biogeochemical interactions between land, sea and air and the best way to model them. He is my go to guy. Did I mention that he believes he was encountered by an alien?

65. U.N. Draft Cites Humans in Recent Climate Shifts

Comment #30226 by cassdenata on April 7, 2007 at 8:43 am

It's funny to me that we are debating this issue, whether it is true. It is based on pretty simple science. It is well known that CO2 is the reason our planet is not frigid, without which we wouldn't be here AT ALL. It is well known that extremely destructive and unpleasant climate change has happened in the past and will happen in the future. It is well known that burning fossil fuels and deforestation releases CO2. It is well known that there are some sinks in the environment that retain that CO2 and buffer the system. But beyond that buffering capacity, it is expected that CO2 will rise and so will temperature. The rest is just specific details.

66. U.N. Draft Cites Humans in Recent Climate Shifts

Comment #29934 by cassdenata on April 5, 2007 at 3:02 pm

From what I have read, solar power efficiencies have increased and new materials are being used to make them that are cheaper in the last few years. These technologies are all recent and would take some time to market. One problem with solar is the economics. The traditional silicon solar panel, takes a lot of energy to create and has a pretty limited lifetime. So it takes awhile to break even and then it needs to be replaced fairly rapidly.

67. U.N. Draft Cites Humans in Recent Climate Shifts

Comment #29902 by cassdenata on April 5, 2007 at 12:06 pm

I'll try to break it down but even though I have read much on this topic, I am no expert.

The ethanol example, actually is a bit of a dubious example of how science can make decisions for us, simply because to a large extent the jury isn't out. I have read reports by viable organizations that say it takes more fossil fuels to create ethanol than you get out of it but I have also read reports by viable organizations that say the opposite. The energetics depend largely on the feedstock (corn, sugar cane, waste cellulosic products). Corn is the least energy efficient, sugar cane is a huge improvement. The use of cellulosic products is very promising because much of it typically goes to waste. For instance, when loggers clear-cut a forest, they usually pile up the wood debris and burn it. This could be used to make ethanol. In addition, fast-growing, high-energy weedy plants that don't require much fertilizer or water, such as switch-grass could be used.

Other factors come in to play. I read a study about the potential to use agricultural crops to produce the fuels for the state I live in, Florida. It would take an area larger than the size of the state of Florida to grow enough crops to supply Florida's power needs...and these would all have to go towards foods not fuels. Although, I will admit that many people smarter than me have found fault in these studies. Brazil can use sugar cane because it has higher energetic output than corn and their energy demands per-capita and otherwise are much lower than they are in the extravagant U.S.

Some problems with ethanol are no-brainers. A new ethanol plant is looking to go in to the state of Florida that uses corn, shipped down from the midwest. It is likely that the fuels used to ship it here will outweigh the benefits.

There are other promising technologies for mobile fuels. Biodiesels made up out of algae, would likely take up much less land, not compete with food supplies and could be fertilized with many waste products. Digesting waste products such as sewage, landfill waste, etc anaerobically and microbially yields methane and requires very little energy for continued production. This is one of my favorite technologies due to its sustainability and its ability to make something out of waste.

Transportation fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel, require energy for their creation and all other aspects of their supply. Until the source of this "non-mobile" energy is composed of solar, wind and more controversially nuclear, we will never be carbon neutral.

Having said all this, there are amazingly heated discussions about these topics and like I indicated, there are intelligent people who conflict in many of these pessimistic findings.

68. U.N. Draft Cites Humans in Recent Climate Shifts

Comment #29883 by cassdenata on April 5, 2007 at 10:23 am

The fundies who believe that jesus is coming back is definitely part of the story but not the whole thing. The publics misunderstanding of science and their plain indifference to science as not essential to "anything" in their lives plays a larger role. If only people knew how close we came to destroying the earth before we even knew what was happening, with the hole in the ozone layer. If we would had used bromoflurocarbons instead of chloroflurocarbons for refrigeration (both provide the same service but bromofluorocarbons are much more destructive to the ozone and luckily, slightly more expensive) it would have been extremely destructive. The public doesn't understand the science of climate change. The public doesn't comprehend that science is a study of reality, it isn't (or shouldn't be) politically motivated, or emotionally charged. This disconnect from scientific research and reality is a big part of the problem. With a more all encompassing understanding of science, our political/economic and social policies could be mostly driven by that science. While many have begun to realize the threat of climate change and unstable foreign oil supplies, they rush right to energy sources that could possibly cause greater environmental and social destruction than oil/gas (I'm thinking ethanol here). If our policy were guided by science we would weigh the alternatives and base our answers on energetics, CO2 emissions and other issues.

69. Atheist says he's victim of religious hate crime

Comment #29403 by cassdenata on April 2, 2007 at 7:29 pm

What is the purpose of separating a crime specifically as a hate crime? I look at all criminal punishments as strategic placements of deterrents. Why would it be important to specifically separate crimes against an "idea" or a "type" of person?

70. Is this another Sokal Hoax?

Comment #28999 by cassdenata on April 1, 2007 at 5:39 am

"Genuine new knowledge comes slowly, painstakingly, and with increasingly industrial-sized research projects (dark energy, LHC, human genome project, etc), but every day there are hundreds more PhDs with pressures to publish."

I disagree with your statement. There is lots of amazing science going on in other fields, at smaller scales in topics that aren't as exciting to the general public but are for their current discipline. You are just listing the most popularized forms of science. You are like the person who goes to the Amazon rainforest and spends the whole time looking in the trees to see a few monkeys but doesn't notice the amazing plant-life all around you.

71. A History of Violence

Comment #28921 by cassdenata on March 31, 2007 at 3:45 pm

I am reading The Blank Slate right now. It is a very important, intriguing and somewhat sobering read so far.

72. Saving believers: Former Christian finds calling to preach the good news of atheism

Comment #26806 by cassdenata on March 21, 2007 at 6:56 pm

Caveat - below are some ideas for discussion. I bring up these comments because I am seriously interested in this issue. I am open to your comments and I haven't made up my mind. Isn't an open-mind great.

In thinking about the case of Cory who was an alcoholic but has turned his life around and now has a family, it reminds me of a dilemma that I have been grappling with. In this specific case I think it is much more...healthy, for Cory to acknowledge the sacrifice of his wife, the doctors, etc. What I do find difficult is if I were in a situation where I was giving advice to the old lady across the street whose health is failing, a person finding god in the midst of a drug addiction, etc, do I have the right to press them on this issue of god versus reality. At what point do I look the frail old lady across the street in the eye when she asks me what church I go to. Do I just say some slightly dishonest answer, "my wife and I aren't really in to church" or do I answer, "I don't believe in god". I know this sounds kind of elitist but it is easy for me to cope and even invigorating to acknowledge the non-existence of god but for others I'm not so sure. I had a very easy childhood, great parents, a good support group and a thorough scientific education. My wife reminds me of this frequently when she reminisces about her father who passed away in her teenage development years. I know that at this age if something like that happened to me, I wouldn't turn to god but still I've had a quite easy life.

73. Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior

Comment #26633 by cassdenata on March 20, 2007 at 7:27 pm

I generally agree with the comments above on the genetic fallacy argument and I won't add anything to that discussion. But I do think that from evolutionary biology we can learn about some behaviors that may be quite important in our development and evolutionary history that generally get labeled immoral, wrong or are more mildly shunned. For instance, the study on this website that rough-housing helps with building social skills in rats. Who would have thought that when mom told you not to rough-house, she was doing something wrong...impairing your development. I can't wait for the study detailing the positive developments that masturbation imparts. That would drive the Catholic fundies mad.

74. A 'Sad First' in the History of the Congress

Comment #26049 by cassdenata on March 16, 2007 at 8:59 am

Man, this story is going to have legs. With a comment like this, news shows will be begging to interview him. He will be forced to give in to the pressure and go on shows and mention his lack of belief. He won't be able to hide. For some reason having a senator do this is much more powerful than Richard Dawkins. Lets all hope that he is eloquent and well studied on the typical debating points which will be thrown his way.

75. When They Came for the Homosexuals...

Comment #26048 by cassdenata on March 16, 2007 at 8:46 am

While I agree that the religious right is dangerous and should be fought, I think it needs to be put in perspective. When the guy begins talking about assigning gay people numbers it seems a little too over the top. There are a lot of problems in America but this is way too extreme of a statement. It especially saddened me when I read a comment on this forum about somebody afraid to visit America.

This reminds me of a lot of the 'conspiracy theory minded folks' that I used to bump in to in Seattle. In many ways our court system has maintained a great rigidity against deep attacks on civil liberties, obviously there have been setbacks but the system is strong enough to withstand the grave injustices mentioned in this article. This is not to say that continued vigilance isn't required. Why if the religious right is so powerful do the democrats, who are no friends to homophobic inspired fascism to say the least, now hold the Senate and the House.

I know many people in this country, some religious, some conservative and honestly, not one of them would even consider this type of fascism directed at homosexuals. In all honesty the only thing I run in to at the very worst are people who know that they need to treat homosexuals equally but find it a bit icky, or don't think they should be in the military, etc. Not to say that more extreme forms of homophobia aren't out there, having a gay friend in high school and meeting some people from Alabama exposed this to me, but I don't find them to be common. I do acknowledge that in many cases the more subtle forms of homosexual intolerance can be devastating. My friend in high school who was gay was subtly and politely condemned by his liberal christian parents. It was hard on my friend who tried to be straight as a result. Although this rise of the christian right needs to be vigilantly fought, things need to be put in to perspective.

76. Top Scientists Warn of Water Shortages and Disease Linked to Global Warming

Comment #26024 by cassdenata on March 16, 2007 at 6:45 am

Seti, I posted your link discussing the program below because I think it was a good refutation. GW involves many positive and negative feedbacks. Looking at the net impact is what is important. Anybody who brings up the charge, "the earth cooled in the recent past and scientists were warning of an ice-age" is immediately discredited from offering an opinion on the issue in my mind.

"Seti wrote"
OK, there's a discussion forum, and I found this stuff rebutting the programme (these are summaries of the points several people have made - the "I" is the original poster, not me.)

1) The programme showed solar variability versus temperature, and then ignored the last 30 years when temperatures have shot up but the sun has not changed much. Half of the warming in the last 100 years occurred after 1980 while the solar variation did not increase.

2) The programme showed old results when they said that the troposphere warming is less than surface warming. This was the initial result before the new satellites had been properly calibrated.

3) The programme said that volcanoes produce more CO2 than man. Not true. The easiest way to check is to look at the CO2 observations, and to note there is no blip or notable rise following an event such as Pinatubo or Mt St Helens (or any volcano).

4) Man produces only a small amount of CO2 compared with nature. Yes, but it is additional CO2 which has been proved to cause the 30% increase (because you can tell by the isotope make-up of the CO2).

5) When they showed the "poor" CO2 fit, they neglected to point out that scientists accept that there are a number of contributers some of which warm and some of which cool - these include CO2, CH4, solar effecs, land-use changes, ozone and aerosols. When they are all included the fit is very good.

6) CO2 follows warming. Already accepted by the science that oceans release CO2 when warmed. Warming also follows CO2 rise.

7) The programme talked about an 8 year global cooling period after 1940 when carbon production was on the increase. It neglected to mention that after the war, a lot of coal was burnt which produced a lot of soot. This is what causes the cooling after the war, and it goes away when the clean air acts come in. If you look at the science they consider CO2, solar variation, and aerosols (soot from coal pollution) as well as other things. But the programme neglected these.

Cool The programme talked about the medieval warming period and little ice age using a graph that was drawn by hand in the 1980's as a guess. In fact the Medieval warming period was not a period of global warmth. I checked scientific papers of tree-ring data in New Zealand and found that when the Vikings were colonising Greenland, New Zealand was going through its coldest spell for 1200 years. Here's the narrative. European history reports Vikings colonising Greenland, wine grown in England etc in medieval times, and ice fairs in the 1500-1800 period. Initial observations support some sort of Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA). A guy draws a sketch to show current warming in the context of these in the 1980s and the diagram is widely used. However, when the more detailed research is done, it is found that the warm periods in weren't as warm, or weren't warm all the time. Furthermore, when it was warm in one place it might be cooler in another. When all the measurements are averaged to produce a global average temperature back to 900AD the result shows generally constant temperatures and a marked warming in the 20th Century which became known as Mann's Hockey Stick. The people who don't like the Global Warming theory don't like the hockey stick diagram because it says that temperatures now have never been hotter, and try to discredit it. So that's the narrative.

9) Slightly more devious was to claim that none of the (nine) scientists in the programme are paid for by lobbyists and the oil industry when we know that Professors Patrick Michaels, Ian Clark and Richard Lindzen are. Ian Clark, for example, works with a Canadian free-market lobby group called the Fraser Institute. Linzden allegedly charged oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services. Interviewed Piers Corbyn. To be polite, he's a maverick. I followed his forecasts for a few months and they're rubbish. Claimed that the Met Office forecast an extremely cold winter in 2005-6 when they actually forecast a 2 in 3 chance of a below average winter. Claims he bet *against* the Met Office - he actually bet against the climatology using Met Office data. I bet he didn't really make money - certainly the William Hill guy they interviewed in a documentary about Piers looked somewhat smug.

10) My experience of the debate, is that the anti-GW arguments are usually repeated ad nauseum long after they are proved wrong. Where more technical arguments have been used, eg. in a climate change denier site such as co2science.org I have read their summary of scientific papers and then read the papers myself and found that the papers often say the exact opposite.


Hmmm - we are well familiar with that final tactic!

77. Out There

Comment #25285 by cassdenata on March 11, 2007 at 5:11 pm

So, if 4% of the universe is made up of the type of material that we know of as matter and sustains us and our planet. The other 96% isn't perceivable by any of our senses and doesn't interact with our protons and neutrons. Is it possible then that there are whole other planets (clumps of matter) created out of this etc. material we call dark matter and dark energy and possibly other evolved beings that could occur right alongside the universe as we know it? I guess the evolution of life requires specific properties but the idea of other "planets" of dark matter, is that possible? Maybe I'm too imaginative but that is the first thing I thought of.

78. Response to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris

Comment #25013 by cassdenata on March 9, 2007 at 5:23 pm

I actually enjoyed the part where he mentioned some of the negative byproducts of our modern system of agriculture, along with its amazing ability to feed people. I would also add that much of the phosphates and nitrates, run off agricultural fields and enter groundwater and surface water causing large ecological problems. I personally work, as a scientist on projects to minimize the impacts of excessive nutrients on aquatic systems. The point though is that I am using science to solve the problem...that and government enforcement.

79. Why there are almost no genuine atheists

Comment #24546 by cassdenata on March 7, 2007 at 7:29 am

I highly suggest that you express your comments in a civil way, in the comments section of the article itself. At least to present our opinion. I think that comments in the RD forum on this topic is an example of preaching to the choir.

80. Pope speaks out against 'designer babies'

Comment #23128 by cassdenata on February 26, 2007 at 1:17 pm

The pope has drawn the line in a much different place than I have. But in all honesty, I think this is something that we will have to face in our lifetimes. Testing for spinal bifida and down syndrome is one thing but with improvements in genetic detection of the probability of getting diseases, cancer, etc. It seems like a dangerous slippery slope.

81. Is America Too Damn Religious?

Comment #22588 by cassdenata on February 19, 2007 at 5:42 pm

Mind Rebel. That honestly doesn't sound like a good enough reason to stop talking to your parents. It is important to discuss these issues and hopefully religious extremism will play a lesser role in our lifetimes with our help, but you have to put it in to perspective. I don't know, something about your post seemed a bit holier-than-thou and sad.

82. Guinness 'Evolution' Ad

Comment #22163 by cassdenata on February 13, 2007 at 5:36 am

I used this clip in the promotional video for my Good Evening, Godless Sodomites mix.
Check it here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MsPaawNTJs