Home add your blog Archives Search Contact RSS FEED

This site is an rss/xml news reader containing our favorite feeds. All articles are the copyrighted material of the blogs that wrote them.

Tarbosaurus Takes Japan for Lunch

post from Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) on 24 July 2008 07:06:06 PM. © Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

tags: dinosaurs, Tarbosaurus bataar, paleontology, fossils, Tyrannosaurs rex

The newly unveiled fossil skeleton of the juvenile Tarbosaurus in its protective jacket.

Discovered in 2006, a near-perfect complete skeleton of a juvenile Tarbosaurus find was made available for public viewing for the first time today by the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Science in Okayama, western Japan. This fossil was originally unearthed from a chunk of sandstone in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia by a team of Mongolian and Japanese researchers. The fossil of the young dinosaur is roughly 70 million years old (from the late Cretaceous period) and is the first time that this species has been found "totally intact".

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/grrlscientist/~3/345039485/tarbosauru
s_takes_japan_for_lu.php

Digg this

Comic Con, Day 1: Doctor Who panel

post from Bad Astronomy on 24 July 2008 05:00:00 PM. © Bad Astronomy

Another day, another fab time with my fellow 105 geeks.I had breakfast with a few of the Hive Overmind folks from Discover — which was very cool, they are uber-fans themselves — we headed over to the con. We got in a few minutes at a[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/24/comic-con-day-1-doctor-
who-panel/

Digg this

What it's like to be me

post from Pharyngula on 24 July 2008 04:07:12 PM. © Pharyngula

video details and more

P.S. All you happy Minnesotans should be pleased to hear that Roy will be in Minneapolis on 1-4 September. I'll be sure to put up details as they become available.

Read the comments on this post...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/344897231/what_its_like
_to_be_me.php

Digg this

Wilson's Plover

post from Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) on 24 July 2008 03:59:59 PM. © Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

tags: Wilson's Plover, Charadrius wilsonia, birds, nature, Image of the Day

Wilson's Plover, Charadrius wilsonia, at Bolivar Flats, Texas.

Image: Joseph Kennedy, 19 July 2008 [larger view].

Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/750s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400.

Read the comments on this post...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/grrlscientist/~3/344898000/wilsons_pl
over.php

Digg this

The Great Desecration

post from Pharyngula on 24 July 2008 03:00:24 PM. © Pharyngula

It is finished.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/344848952/the_great_des
ecration.php

Digg this

Brotherton on Crichton

post from Bad Astronomy on 24 July 2008 03:00:00 PM. © Bad Astronomy

I have issues with Michael Crichton. When I was a kid I loved The Andromeda Strain, and thought it was a cool movie. It wasn’t until much later, after seeing Jurassic Park, I think it was, that I became aware of the clear antiscience —[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/24/brotherton-on-crichton/

Digg this

Numeric Pareidolia and God in Π

post from Good Math, Bad Math on 24 July 2008 01:33:31 PM. © Good Math, Bad Math

There's one kind of semi-mathematical crackpottery that people frequently send to me, but which i generally don't write about. Given my background, I call it gematria - but it covers a much wider range than what's really technically meant by that term. Another good name for it would be numeric pareidolia. It's been a long time since I've written about this kind of stuff, and someone just sent me a pretty typical example, so what the hell. It revolves around a mess that he put together as an image, which is pretty much a classic example of obsessive silliness.

The general idea of this kind of silliness is finding some kind of numericpattern, and convincing yourself that there's some deep, profound truth behind that pattern. There are a couple of typical kinds of this: number/letter correspondence (classical gematria, which uses the fact that the hebrew characters are used both as letters and numbers, so a word can be interepreted as a number, and vice versa), distance coding (like the infamous "torah codes",where you find words "hidden" in a text by picking out characters accordingto some pattern and using them to form words), and simple numeric patterning (where you take numbers - generally some sort of constant - and findsome sort of pattern supposedly hidden in its digits). Todays crackpotteryis the third kind - it's written by a guy who believes that there are mystic secrets encoded into π and the square root of two that were put there by God, and that the existence of those patterns are proof of the existence of God.

This little bundle of rubbish - like all of the kinds of things I describedabove - are examples of pareidolia involving numbers. AsI've written about before, we humans are amazingly good at finding patterns. We'vegot a strong natural talent for looking at things, and finding structures andpatterns. That ability serves us well in many of our ordinary endeavors. Theproblem with it is that there are apparent patterns in lots of things. In fact, ifyou look at things mathematically, the odds of any text or constant notcontaining interesting patterns is effectively nil. If you're willing to considerall sorts of patterns, then you can find patterns in absolutely everything. The question that you need to ask is whether or not the pattern is simple the result of our ability to find patterns in noise, or whether it's something deliberate.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/scienceblogs/CyKN/~3/344780759/numeric_pareidolia_
and_god_in.php

Digg this

BioBarCamp is full

Read The Full Article:
http://science.easternblot.net/?p=755

Digg this

DIY Electric Golf Trolley

I made this golf trolley about four years back as a winter project. I was beginning to find that carrying my golf bag for 18 holes was a bit tough on my back and knees. I bought the motor/gearbox and 2 back wheels for about £90 from Standel Dawman, a comp

Read The Full Article:
http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/6416/DIY-Electric-Golf-Trolley?from_rss=1

Digg this

Creationists can’t take the heat

I’m at ComiCon for the next few days, and I don’t know how often I’ll be able to report to the blog. I do have some other posts ready to go, so these oughta keep you sated until I can talk more about the geekorama.As a follow up to the[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/07/24/creationists-cant-take-
the-heat/

Digg this