Find out at the 9th edition of I and the Bird hosted by Thomasburg Walks:
This edition includes 28 posts from four continents posts describing bird identification, migration events, unlikely birding, lucky (and unlucky) birding, endangered birds, birds in recovery, and more.
If you weight 170 pounds you should note that 30.94 tall coffees from Starbucks will kill you!
Via KidneyNotes.
I thought I’d write at length about the Kansas Board of Education decision to abandon teaching science in public schools
…the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.
but on something like this PZ Myers is going to be far ahead of the curve:
Rewriting the definition of science seems a rather presumptuous thing for a school board to do, I think, especially when their new definition is something contrary to what working scientists and major scientific organizations say is science. As for removing the limitation to natural phenomena, what do they propose to add? Ghosts, intuition, divine revelation, telepathic communications from Venusians? It’s simply insane.
It is worth noting that:
The standards approved Tuesday are not binding on local school districts, and few have said they plan to revise their lesson plans.
To the extent that there are real science teachers in the schools and educated, thoughtful folks on the local school boards the state board may be simply ignored. On the other hand, the light may be turned out in some classrooms.
Sad.
Update: More from Steve Verdon.
Grand Rounds celebrates National Medical Staff Services Awareness Week, Carnival of Liberty XIX continues the battle against ignorance and the Carnival of the Capitalists covers economics, politcs, advice and more.
Read’m all. There out to be a post or two hidden in each.
One of the handy helpers that the internet has brought us is the ability to track airline flights via sites like Flight Arrivals and Flight View. No more arriving at the airport to find that the flight will be three hours late.*
New on this front is FlightAware. They claim
Founded in March of 2005, FlightAware is the first company to offer free flight tracking for both private and commercial air traffic in the United States. FlightAware’s proprietory flight arrival time algorithms combined with our powerful, intuitive, and reliable web-based interface yield the most capable and useful flight tracking application on the Internet.
I just gave this a quick test drive and it is pretty nifty with lots of info available. The registration was a pain but, then, that’s a good reason to have a pseudonymous email account. One downside of this service today is poor to non-existent international tracking.
As usual, your mileage may vary. Check’m out.
Via A Guy In New York.
*Though you need to check early because flights can be 45 minutes early as we found out a while back. We checked about an hour before arrival and found out the plane was landing in 12 minutes and it was going to be a 40 minute drive to the airport.