In Jewish and Christian tradition, Moses wrote the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Recent evidence shows that multiple writers had a hand in composing the text of the Torah and the other books of the Hebrew Bible and of the New Testament are also thought to be composites.
Global warming is bad but at least we have a chance to control it. Simple life hundreds of millions of years ago had to just go with the flow so when global glaciation put a chill on things back then, the only way even simple life in the form of photosynthetic algae could have survived was in a narrow body of water with characteristics similar to today's Red Sea, according to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters.
The U.S. military has its own judicial system. If you commit an infraction, you are charged under the Uniform Court of Military Justice. This keeps the military from becoming a political football. The four other professions also have their own internal monitoring system. For example, even if you do not commit a criminal act as an attorney, you can still be disbarred for conduct outside their rules.
I read with interest and some amusement (on the mouse joke) the
piece written here by Sascha Vongehr. I find his arguments wrong and decided to answer him in the comments thread of his post, but my answer got a bit too long and I did not want to hijack a nice discussion that was developing there; plus I found out that what I was writing could be suitable for this blog in its own right. So below I explain what I criticize about his arguments.
Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 10th is Squid Day.
It's the happiest day of the year here at Squid A Day! To celebrate (or perhaps it was just a coincidence) I attended Litquake's
New Writers Workshop to get some tips on publishing my squid racing novel. The writers, agents, and publishers on the panels were very generous with their time and their advice; I came away with pages of useful notes.
RETRACTION: I have decided to retract three blogs (Deriving … 4/5, 5/5, 6/5+1). I was unable to figure out a reasonable statement concerning gauge symmetry. When the blogs were initially written, I focused on the field equations, mainly the Gauss-like law, and ignored the force equations entirely. Finding a solution that works with the the field and force equations were not looked for. A consistent proposal should do all three things (fields, forces, and solutions) with grace. I have concluded it is not possible to achieve these goals with the Lagrangian as written, hence the retraction.
A particular kind of sugar molecule had a big impact on human evolution and may have directed the evolutionary emergence of our ancestors, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the first evidence of a link between cell surface sugars, Darwinian sexual selection, and immune function in the context of human origins
Arctic Ice October 2011Ice extent, as measured down to 15% concentration, was only slightly above 2007 levels at the end of this year's melt season. The ice is now about as thin as in 2007,
or thinner, and the age of remaining ice continues to decline. [edit: inserted missing clause - bolded.]
The summer sea ice melt season has ended in the Arctic. Arctic sea ice extent reached its low for the year, the second lowest in the satellite record, on September 9. The minimum extent was only slightly above 2007, the record low year, even though weather conditions this year were not as conducive to ice loss as in 2007. Both the Northwest Passage and the Northern Sea Route were open for a period during September.
Just supposing, what if you landed on a planet a lot like Earth and, bereft of modern technology, had to try and rebuild something that looks like home? You could survive, sure, a little trial and error would get you food and shelter. Creating fire can be a little more challenging but it is just a learning curve.
There are logistical aspects to rebuilding all of civilization, of course. One person can't build a skyscraper (and why would you, since there would be no one else to live in it?) but what about something small, like a toaster?
Cooperation has been/still is a major factor in the success of the human species, and in many others as well. Altruism and fairness are thought to play an important role in the development of cooperation. But when in a human life do these traits develop? For quite some time, it was thought that they developed fairly late in ontogeny.
Lately, however, there has been some incipient research into the moral and prosocial behaviors of young children. A new study investigated the sense of fairness and tendency to be altruistic in 15-month-old infants.
