Rachel Maddow says good riddance to Bush’s good-bye

Rachel Maddow says good riddance to Bush's good-bye, starting things off with a few staggering statistics regarding Bush's legacy. I'm wondering whether there a live audience to this deplorable confabulation by George W. Bush.  If so, where they required to remove their shoes before entering the room? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32-cZnvyU_k[/youtube] Click here…

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What in the world is going on? Check the World Clock.

This fellow claims to have lots of important statistics displayed on a big real-time dashboard.   Assuming his data to be accurate (I don't have any reason to dispute it), it's especially interesting to hit the "Now" button to reset this "World Clock," then to watch the numbers grow from zero.  …

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What is music worth?

A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album "In Rainbows" as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all. As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical…

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Texas Education Agency Science Expert Fired for Indirectly dissing Intelligent Design

In brief: Chris Comer, director of science curriculum, was pushed out after she sent an e-mail promoting a local talk by the author of "Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design". Comer merely sent a notice about the talk as an "FYI." The School board tried to claim that…

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The Making of the Fittest

I’ve just read a good book about genetics. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B. Carroll. There is much food for thought in this book. One reviewer called it “A Primer of Evolutionary Theory for Beginners”, and this is accurate. One doesn’t need to know chemistry or physics to follow his reasoning, because he teaches the most necessary pieces.

Basically, this book examines what has turned up in studying the genomes of various species over the last couple of decades, as well as tracing genes from generation to generation in the same family line. It starts with a simple introduction to what DNA is, how it works, and how we know this. Then it gradually leads one to understand how genes transform from one generation to the next, and how this leads to speciation.

Basically, ever-present radiation, random chemistry, and aggressive biology cause frequent single-letter changes in DNA. Also RNA copy-and-paste errors regularly drop or duplicate entire gene sequences. After this see Darwin for how some mutations are explicitly preserved, some are inevitably removed, and most simply languish in or become fossil genes because there is no preference one way or the other. Carroll covers all this in many examples.

Carroll presents the simple probability and large numbers theory to illustrate the surprising speed at which populations can change, and then shows functioning (or no longer functioning) genes that have in fact visibly changed populations so rapidly.

This book gives plenty …

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