Wheat-dogg’s world
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So, our Sunday was to be spent moving our larger items of furniture with a borrowed pickup from our present abode to a new place in nearby New Albany, Indiana. While we were gone from apartment #2 getting stuff from apartment #1, a fire broke out in #2’s building.

We returned that afternoon to find workers crawling over the roof of the building, the Red Cross response team helping residents find hotel accommodations, and a bright yellow caution tape barring access to our part of the building. Our new apartment was now aflood in water and smelling strongly of wood smoke.

This after we had just got the cable and internet hooked up, and moved most of our kitchen stuff into the new kitchen, which now resembled a small wading pool.

Of the residents displaced by the fire, we got off easy, since we still can live in apartment #1 for another week and could store our undamaged stuff elsewhere in the complex. We lost a few small kitchen appliances and will have to launder some blankets. No biggie.

We will probably get a similar apartment to replace the one we lost. Everyone else affected, five other tenants, are holed up in a nearby hotel until the property management can figure out what to do with their residences.

You can read all about the fire here.

For lovers of the physical sciences — and isn’t that everyone? — the latest edition of the latest science blog carnival, Philosophia Naturalis, is at Nonoscience. Check it out.

Oh, and be prepared to travel to stake a claim.

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is the only satellite in our solar system with its own atmosphere. It may well be the only object in the solar system besides Earth with lakes, as this recent image from the Cassini space probe reveals.

The dark, smooth features are lakes of liquid methane and ethane, not water, though. The weather on Titan is just a tad chilly — -178 degrees Celsius or -288 degrees F –cold  enough for the two hydrocarbon gases to liquify.

Compare that image (taken with radar to penetrate Titan’s thick cloud cover) with this view of Lake Powell in Utah taken from orbit by the Space Shuttle astronauts:

We can see in the Lake Powell shot how the dark water contrasts sharply with the rough terrain, just as the methane/ethane lakes stand out from the rougher ground on Titan.

Scientists are especially curious about surface conditions on Titan, since it is believed that Titan’s atmosphere (methane rain, folks!) resembles the early atmosphere of Earth before photosynthesis “poisoned” the air with oxygen. In other words, Titan could be a large time capsule, providing clues to the conditions on the infant Earth.

And remember, before you buy any property off the internet, make sure you visit the site first, or at least talk to the natives. Good luck!

We knew it was bad here, but not this bad. An international survey of adults’ acceptance of evolution places the US near the bottom of the barrel, just above Turkey and far, far below Japan and most of Western Europe. It’s yet more evidence that the US of A is a pretty benighted, or at least confused, nation.

The survey, conducted by two US and one Japanese researchers in 2005, asked adults in 34 countries their responses to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” The responders were asked to state whether the statement was true or false, or to state they were not sure.

The results for the US group: true, 40%, not sure, 21%, and false, 39%. Only Muslim Turkey, with an acceptance rate of about 23%, scored lower than the States. Meanwhile, more than 75% of the participants in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Japan and the UK judged the survey statement as being true, and relatively few were fencesitters. Most of the other Western European countries were not far behind.

The US shared the bottom rankings with Bulgaria, Lithuania, Latvia, Cyprus and Turkey. I leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about that group.

The researchers were Jon D. Miller, Hannah Professor of Integrative Studies at Michigan State University, Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and Shinji Okamoto of Kobe University, Japan. They published their results in the Aug. 11 issue of Science. A summary of the article just came in today’s mail in my copy of NSTA Reports, a publication of the National Science Teachers Association.

So, if I have a MySpace page, it seems only natural that I join the Facebook crowd, too. And in just a short few days, I have concluded all on my own that Facebook is light years ahead of MySpace in terms of form and function.

Form: None of the MySpace DIY webpage formatting that creates graphic abominations. True, Facebook pages are boringly identical in layout, but you CAN READ THEM! SInce they are easily read and navigated, it seems to be a lot easier to find people and for them to find you in Facebook than MySpace.

Function: Aside from the clear navigational aids, I was most impressed by Facebook’s “import a blog” feature, which I immediately enabled on my page there. It’s not a particularly complex feature, so I wonder why MySpace can’t do it, too. Blogs have feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.), so you give Facebook your feed URL and you get to post in two places at once. Result: wider audience and more traffic to your site (perhaps).

That being said, I feel like somewhat of an interloper on both sites. The vast majority of Facebook and MySpace users are less than half my age! So I definitely stand out in those friends lists. (Actually, on MySpace, Sir Sean Connery is standing in for me. ) Then there is the fact that many of my students use either or both sites, which is probably kind of weird from both our perspectives. People tend to be remarkably frank on these sites, so I see a side of my students (and former students) that I don’t usually see at school. My own sites are kind of bare right now, so the sharing is a tad lopsided. Give me some time, kids!