Venomous Dinosaur?

Apparently at least according to the authors of a paper that is about to come out. Based upon this blog post (here) it is hard to tell exactly they have some evidence but nothing certain. I obviously haven't read the paper yet so I can't really say for sure till I do that.

It could always be worse:

The difference between going to Grad school and going to work right out of school

So this may seem really random but where I am currently in both life and in location I really got to thinking about this today. At 23 years old I am in a unique position in life most of my really good friends from both high school and college have a job now but there is a good number, myself included, who decided to continue going to school and are now in grad school. I also am not quite in the position where I know a lot of people who are working and in grad school at the same time so I won't really be discussing that here. But tonight I was hanging out with a bunch of friends from high school we are all really close and it was good to finally see them all again. As I was leaving my one friend's house (yes he owns a house) he jokingly said to me something along the lines of it must me nice to have 3 weeks off but I guess you do kind of work for it. He has next week off and I told him well I can only imagine what it is like in your position.

So what is the point? Well once you get through your undergrad education your life very quickly evolves out of the large amounts of fun it was as an undergrad. I'm not saying life isn't fun but no matter what path you take you will be in working to be where you are. So for example there is no question my friends who have jobs work harder than me when you average it out. They will work 48-50 (5 day) weeks a year I however will get a month off from winter break and 3 months off for the summer. But what do you get for that? One of my friends is working but owns a house and has a kid, my fiance and I couldn't afford to do that if we pooled all of what we make a year, we would still make less than all of my friends except the ones who are teachers (which says something about our society). They tend to get up and are at work by 7-9 in the morning where as I tend not to get up that early but I will be up working on homework or something till 2.

So what should you do? Sometimes you don't have a choice. There are certain fields, and all of academia is included in that, in which you need at least some post-graduate education so you are stuck. But is it worth going to grad school right away or to enter the work force. That I cannot answer for you, and to be honest it took me time to answer it for myself. And that is just it if you can make enough to afford to own a house and have a kid at 23 then I say go for it but if you don't want to leave school right away and are willing to work hard in the academic world go for that too. In the end it comes down to the individual and nothing else!

Climate Change - "Those" e-mails and science censorship

Potholer54 continues refuting those people who cling to the recent e-mail hacking incident as evidence against global warming in his newest video and since I posted his last video (here) and greenman3610's last video (here) and after my post yesterday/earlier today (here) I figured I should pass it along as well:

Why we must tread carefully with climate refrom

So I just finished up my work for the semester and made it home yesterday so I might have some free time over the next few weeks to put some posts together, assuming I can come up with some topics.

This week wrapped up the Copenhagen climate conference in which only very little was accomplished. But I don't really want to discuss what happened there to be honest you will never get most of the developing countries to support something like that until you make it cheaper than just dumping the trash in the ocean, so to speak, and for this reason I think the US needs to take the lead in this attempt to clean up our actions. We have done this before when polluting of water was a major problem and now most countries realize it is wrong it just isn't something they can easily change. We need to set the example!

But, you might be saying that is not what you have as your title to this post. You would be correct and that is because of the economic problems we will face with a sudden drastic change in the way we produce power/drive/etc. The US transport and power industry is currently based on oil/gas and coal if we all of a sudden said no you can't use those any more because it is destroying the world well we will destroy our economy in the process it is currently too expensive to buy the alternative energy sources. I often think that many scientist forget about this cost and that is really too bad but I think most humans tend not to care as much about those who aren't us, so I don't think it is just a scientist thing but I know we do it and think that it should be easy to change things.

So what do I suggest we do, since it is one thing to say something is wrong but we should always be able to provide solutions to the problems we point out? Well we should start by funding alternative energy solutions. The current government subsidies go almost exclusively to oil/gas and coal. Why not scale back a little on that funding, thereby increasing cost and making it less desirable to the average person, and send that change towards alternative options. The strides that have been made in solar and tidal etc have been slowed by lack of money but yet they have occurred.

But the government shouldn't be the only one we as consumer's should demand cleaner resources etc. Vote with your wallet, drive less and walk more, turn off lights when you leave a room, (in honor of the massive snow storm on the east coast) shovel your own snow you don't need a snow blower, all of those things that we have been preached at to do we should. Yes it won't always be easy but it can be done but I do realize that you can never please everyone:

Comfort you are in trouble now

So I know that Michael Shermer tweeted this but I figured I would throw together a quick post on it. The story can be found here. But to summarize it real quickly it seems the evidence is pointing toward Ray Comfort stole a summary of Darwin's life from a professor at the University of Tennessee who is now thinking about legal action for obvious reasons. My favorite part of the article is this:

“I would like to engage him in intellectual combat, but it wouldn’t be fair,” Guffey says. “If he were to play by the rules of reason and logic, I would whoop his ass, but he’s not constrained by those rules, so it wouldn’t be fair to me.”

Yes, he is right that most creationists don't play by the same rules as us scientists but the part I am talking about is the "I would whoop his ass" part. I can see a lot of my professors saying things like that but not to a newspaper article for publication but to each his own.

Anyway this is an interesting development we will have to keep tabs on it to see what happens.

Smacking the Hack Attack

Write a paper of watch youtube videos and post a quick blog article? We will go with the second one.

Ok so yesterday I posted the video posted by potholer54 so today I was glad to see that greenman3610 decided to comment on the hacked e-mails as well. So I will let him take it from here:



So at least these two should help clear things up.

Those hacked e-mails

Ok still busy working on the end of the semester hopefully after the next two weeks I might be able to blog a little bit more.

Anyway I am sure you have all heard about those hacked e-mails from the climate change experts. Well the right here in the US has been holding up a couple as proof that it is just a conspiracy. So Potholer54 did some research and shows that well maybe they don't say what we have all been told they say.



Interesting eh?

Human's the social species.

So anyone who tells you that the final stretch of a semester in graduate school is easy, well that person is lying to you I should be working now but I am taking a break between projects so you get a blog post.

Tonight's post I actually got the idea from the 7/6c episode of Bones on TNT, and yes I am not making any money off of this. Anyway toward the end of the Episode Bones and Booth are talking about the human condition and about how we are in fact always alone as a species. I disagree with this as we will see in a few minutes but I also want to credit another source of the idea for this it is this post by a friend of mine's blog, the main blog can be found here. Toward the end of the post he says this:

Maybe I'm crazy for thinking everyone just wants you to step in line and shut up.

[...]

Meanwhile, I'm going to make this world better than the way it was when I was born. You can either stand up and follow me, or you can stay in line. Your call.

Now most of the rest of his post has nothing really to do with what I want to say here. They question I want to ask is why do humans seem to care so much about what other people think? Why do we care about fashion and other aspects that cause us to "fit in"?

This is where I want to refer back to the Bones episode. Yes each of us is our own person but we are shaped by those around us in fact we care more about their opinion than we do what we think of ourselves most of the time. When my friend argues that he wants people to follow him he is, probably unknowingly, saying that he does not want to be alone. None of us do! We are a social species we evolved that necessity. When we were evolving and living in the wild we did not have the physical ability to defend for ourselves we are very vulnerable. Look at yourself in the mirror sometime you don't have any killer claws, no extremely sharp teeth and for our size we are extremely weak.

So what does all this have to do with fashion? Well if in the wild everyone was moving out to a new location to look for food you would probably follow because everyone else was going not knowing that you are really going to use them as a form of protection. So the extension to fashion is that since everyone else is doing it we don't want to be left out from what the masses are doing in order to allow for "protection" of ourselves, after all we wouldn't want to be "eaten".

So next time someone tells you that each person is an individual think long and hard. Do you think the way you think because it just popped in there or did what people say/teach you cause you to think the way you did. All of our experiences change the way we think and our actions. And every person is effected by everyone they meet whether it is for good or for bad.

Please feel free to rip me a new one for my blindless conjecture, yes I have no supporting evidence and normally I am big on this but I will admit that I am just making conjecture here, or you can agree with me. I welcome all.

Books yay Books!

So while my normal saturday's revolve around college football today was a little different. I started out helping teach a class for Super Saturday's at Texas Tech but then I spent about 3 hours at the Lubbock Friends of the Library book sale. When I first heard about it I figured there would be a few books for a relativly low price. What I found was the entire basement of the Lubbock Library, at 1306 9th Street, full of books in which most hardcovers were $1 and soft covers $.50. This started yesterday for members and today for nonmembers. I recommend this because all of the books are donated, there are a ton, and all of the money goes to the Friends of the Library who sponser great things through the year like helping to improve literacy and numerous other activities. I enjoyed it as you can see here but as with all book stores/sales there are some things you wonder about. So if you are in Lubbock, TX I recommend checking it out tomorrow although I don't know how many books will be left. Their next event is February 13 and 14 when they are putting the books they have left on sale at 1/2 price.

A down an dirty news coverage can be found here.

Obama shouldn’t be silencing opposition

I want to start by apologizing for not posting recently studying and writing has been getting in the way of that, I should be studying now but I don't want to so I'm not.

This post won't be about science like normal and while I said don't want to talk about politics in here well sometime you can't escape it. I came across this story while reading the paper this morning. Now maybe I am a masochist but whatever it I always read the opinion portion of the paper and that is when I came across this. So I read the headline and decided to go ahead and read it.

The article started to annoy me right from the start:

Among the many volatile threads common in the current administration, there is one that is especially troubling. That is the repetition of the attacks our president and his media representatives have repeatedly made against any voice that dares counter his own.

We saw this when they set up a White House Web site for citizens to report any suspicious or contrary information about health insurance during the summer. We saw it when they unleashed havoc on Fox News for daring to criticize President Barack Obama. And we saw it when the administration decided to let loose another attack. This time it battled Edmunds.com over its criticism of the cash for clunkers program.

Ok the White House did not set up a way to report people who were lying, and there were plenty of lies, during the summer they just wanted to know about misconceptions about the health debate so they could correct them in speeches etc. Next how did they unleash "havoc on Fox News"? All they did was refuse to be interviewed by Fox News I would too if they were calling me these type of things:



But you know what I'll give you a chance lets see how you summarize the Obama vs Edmunds argument:

To sum up the squabble quickly, Edmunds claims the administration failed to deliver the facts about each “clunker,” costing taxpayers $24,000, and although it boosted third-quarter sales, the fourth quarter, which is traditionally the worst season for car dealerships, will report abysmal numbers at best.

This administration reports, in contrast, the excitement of an inventive vehicle program drew in purchases that previously would not have happened. What they fail to say is this is highly unlikely for those who did not qualify, which is a greater percentage than one would initially think and during the CFC program, prices on vehicles actually rose.

Really that is it they disagree on what is going to happen in the future? And how is this silencing the opposition? Last time I checked we were allowed to say what we want and we were allowed to disagree in none of the things that you quoted did the Obama administration stop anyone from saying anything. You can speak your mind and guess what he is a citizen of the U.S. so he can...speak his mind too heaven forbid it disagrees with what you think.

I will let you read the rest of the article if you want but he pretty much goes on to say that Obama is wrong and that he doesn't let us use free speech but there is one last thing I want to discuss from the article:

The First Amendment states American citizens have liberty in the areas of the free exercise of religion, of speech, of the press, of assembly and to redress grievances before government. This is a statement that ought to take primacy in the lives of our leaders.

Guess what Obama is an American citizen and has the right to say what he thinks as well but even more so find me one instance where Obama has stopped any of these. Where the Tea party protesters allowed to protest? Yup. Are people still allowed to practice whatever religion they want? Sure. Do people call Obama a Nazi/Hitler? Yup. Has it ever been stopped? Nope. So you and he disagree on political issues, what did I expect living in West Texas, but that doesn't mean that you are being oppressed in what you can do/say.