1+ hour ago  (154+ words) Why Evolution Is True. .. also this video. This isn't the bear species on the California state flag, which is the California grizzly bear (Ursus arctos californicus); that was native to this area but was hunted to extinction in the early…...

23+ hour, 39+ min ago  (1156+ words) For nearly 80 years, mathematicians have studied a deceptively simple question: if you place'nn'points in the plane, how many pairs of points can be exactly distance'1'apart? The "distance 1" thing confused me, and Wikipedia explains it a different way: A problem…...

2+ day, 58+ min ago  (136+ words) Birding in the Upper Midwest Trumpeter Swan (Cygnus buccinator) on a nest: Great Horned Owlet (Bubo virginianus) in a nest: Common Loon (Gavia immer): Common, medium to small birds. Rarer small birds that were new (a. k. a. "lifers) for me. Kirtland's Warbler…...

2+ day, 22+ hour ago  (458+ words) Luana sent me this tweet, which I'd missed, announcing the founding of a new scientific journal that exists to critique articles in other journals (with the original author given the right of reply). Click on the screenshot if you want…...

5+ day, 36+ min ago  (226+ words) A family "portrait" (minus Papa) on the "veranda" of the nest box. I have not seen another since this one in 2023. The oldest Red-headed woodpecker on record was banded in 1926 in Michigan and lived to be at least 9 years, 11 months…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago  (211+ words) A reader sent me this "paper" and asked me if I really wrote it. It is not only garbage, but, in parts, complete gibberish. I'll use this space to assert that NO, THIS IS A FAKE." The "Journal of Evolutionary…...

2+ week, 2+ hour ago  (488+ words) My co-authors and I just released the largest survey of physicists ever done. In conjunction with the American Physical Society we got more than 1600 replies to our Big Mysteries Survey. On the fine tuning argument the most popular answer" was…...

4+ week, 36+ min ago  (1048+ words) Dawkins appears to conflate intelligent "thinking" with "consciousness", and I'm not sure I agree. But, using the program Claude, he sees whether it passes the Turing test for consciousness, which he defines this way: Dawkins clearly concludes that Claude is…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago  (510+ words) Bill Maher's "New Rules" segment from the week before last is about AI, its history, its dangers, and its errors." Maher doesn't think too much of it, for, after all, AI can't cure cancer." I think he gives these bots…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago  (118+ words) Jim Batterson sent this link and added a few words: In particular item #14 talks about their egress and being carried to the Navy recovery ship by helicopter. "After the crew are safe on board the ship, I think that the…...