Latest Issue of Science Magazine: Plant Genomes!

As everyone knows, plants are cool. I deal with plants almost every day of my life. I eat them, talk to them, and gently caress them. The new issue of Science magazine focuses on plants, including plant evolution and biotechnology.

This interactive Plant Genomes feature is really interesting. It covers plant genomes, insights, GM crops, and future directions in plant research. It is very educational and includes lots of nice pictures, animations, and videos.

Ubuntu 8.04 officially released Thursday April 24! (fixed the broken link)

New features include:
GNOME 2.22
Linux kernel 2.6.24
Mozilla Firefox 3 (beta)

And a bunch of other stuff that I'm sure I have no use for.

Download it here!

I started using GNU/Linux back sometime when I was in undergrad... a long time ago to be sure. I started with Red Hat linux, and then Fedora Core when that became the free version of Red Hat's operating system. Lately I've been using Ubuntu, starting I believe with 6.04 and then upgrading with each new release.

For a while I was using my "old" computer as my linux box, an ASUS A7V133 with an Athlon 1200 and 256 Mb of RAM. Initially I had it running with a 9 Gig SCSI drive, but then I put in a larger 40 G Seagate ATA100 drive to replace the SCSI. Currently I'm using my "new" or "good" computer in a dual boot configuration, with Win XP and Unbuntu. This system is pretty old too, an ASUS A7N8X with an AthlonXP 2500+, 2 Gig of dual channel DDR400 RAM, an 80 Gig hard drive, and a GeForce 7600GT 256 Mb AGP8X video card. I recently upgraded the RAM from 512 Mb and the video card from a Radeon 9500 Pro. The video card got fried one day, completely out of the blue. That was a sad day.

I was very hesitant at first to use dual boot on my main system, I was worried about screwing up the boot sector and all that messy stuff. It ended up being very easy to dual boot with Unbuntu. It's easy if you have Windows installed first and then use the Ubuntu live CD to make a new partition. The installation automatically configures GRUB to work with Windows. It's probably equally easy to dual boot with any linux distro and Windows, but I only have experience doing it with Ubuntu. I encourage anyone and everyone to give it a try. Running Ubuntu off the live CD doesn't do it justice at all. It's much more fun when you can start playing around with the customizations and special effects that dont' come on the live CD. Using Beryl or Compiz windows manager with a slick icon set and custom login screen is very entertaining.

Incoming transmission from the Galactic Overlord... I mean PZ.

Eat brains and visit Expelled

For those of you who just got back from your vacation on Mars, Expelled is an upcoming "documentary" on "darwinism". I wish my keyboard had some punctuation marks scarier than just scare-quotes to write that preceeding sentence, but it will have to suffice. More correctly, Expelled is a propaganda piece by the Intelligent Design Creationists promoting absurd and tiresome views about evolutionary science and scientists. Visiting the link above will take you to the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) site devoted to debunking the claims made in the film. Premptive debunking is my new favorite pursuit.

The site features reviews of the film by the scientists who actually appear in the film... and they are 'less than glowing'. Some of these scientists include Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and Michael Shermer.

After a long hiatus, uraniblog is active!

Why uraniblog?

One of my very first internet aliases (perhaps even a BBS alias) was uraniborg. Hence, uraniblog the blog.

Uraniborg was the name of the observatory operated by Tycho Brahe, the famous and quarrelsome 16th century astronomer. Frankly, he was a bit of a jerk, and he lost part of his nose in a dueling match. He also held to a geocentric view of the solar system. However, he made excellent and comprehensive observations including valuable data on the orbits of the planets. He was joined by Johannes Kepler who, after Tycho's death, developed his laws of planetary motion and ushered in the heliocentric model of the solar system. Kepler's successful model of the solar system was due in large part to the excellent observational data recorded by Tycho.

I love a good heliocentric model... three cheers for Kepler and Brahe!

This is not a blog.

Thank you.