Jon Rosenberg at Scenes From A Multiverse is picking at scabs (click for complete version):
This… is totes uncalled for! Atheists are level-headed, fair, well-adjusted individuals, and none of them would ever get cranky because a favorite whipping boy turned respectable.
Good thing he hasn’t, then…
Actually, and it’s stupid that I even have to say this yet it’ll be news
So, what is it?
I’ve had this experiment in the back of my head for a while now, and tried it last night. What you’re seeing here is Sirius, otherwise known as the Dog Star or the Dog’s Nose, and the brightest star in the sky. As a quick aside, for some reason many people think Polaris, or the North Star, is supposed to be the brightest, which would be handy but is far from the
… but it’s better if you find it on your own.
North Carolina doesn’t really see ‘winter’ as many people imagine it – honestly, it’s pretty boring – but we do get cold spells from time to time, and went through one a few days back, after some heavy rains. Things that had collected water were frozen over, and in some cases nearly solid, so I took the
Infinity is this curious concept, wide open for misinterpretation, but even in its refined sense, it often suffers from one of the biggest problems of philosophy: we believe that since we’ve put a lot of effort into it, it must be important.
To explain the most misunderstood aspect of it, I’m going to steal brazenly from an article in Science ’82, a now-defunct magazine
For some unknown reason, I have a desire to capture sunrise on Tycho, the prominent rayed crater on the moon. Since it’s unlikely I’ll be able to afford a trip there anytime soon, I’ve been pursuing this remotely, but what it means is capturing a particular phase of the moon at just the right time. Shown above, we have the moon from yesterday evening and tonight,
I got out the camera to chase a particular subject, which disappeared on me, so while the strobe was still charged I decided not to waste that electricity and went looking for something else to photograph. Yeah, I really do think that way sometimes, though if I do find another subject, I’ll fire off a lot more frames (and flashes) than if I simply discharged the capacitor
With this entry I thee wed tie with 2011 for number of posts made in a year, and everything past this will be bonus content. Or something. It’s nonsense, really – I just vowed to try and do more posts, vaguely motivated by those who can apparently do seven a day (not looking in Jerry Coyne’s direction when I say this, no no.) But
Just playing around the other evening while the holiday lights are up, trying a bunch of experiments. The raindrop on the lights was a subtle touch – while I’d like to do some shots against a nice layer of snow, that’s always an iffy thing at this latitude. I may annoy about half of the people in the country with this, but I was shooting in just a t-shirt (or is
It is that season, and despite watching virtually no television at all, I still peripherally see many of the advertisements that spring up in vast numbers this time of year. One type in particular goes beyond annoying into the realm of criminally reprehensible, and if you think I’m being overly dramatic, read on.
No buildup here: I’m talking about diamonds. It still isn’t
When you spend all spring and summer tracking the praying mantids that have hatched and taken up residence locally, naturally you want to see the whole cycle, and that means the production of the egg sac as well. Of course, they’re not inclined to do this for an audience, so a bit of luck is involved, luck that I did not have this year. I watched one particular female
