I hope you know that woman well because that is a deeply personal question.
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
I hope you know that woman well because that is a deeply personal question.
She is ex-military and a member of my church, so it shouldn't be a problem, plus her husband is a really nice guy, and her son is good friends with my grandson. I'm about twice her age, so she probably thinks I'm safe, .
I can't claim to know squat about bees and neonicotinoids, but that telegraph column is full of shit. The DDT stuff is boiler-plate anti-environmentalist lies (Deltoid used to debunk it when Lambert posted regularly). The columnists could be right on the bee stuff, but since we're dealing with professional liars I don't trust them and would suggest going elsewhere for information.
I don't know about the science of it, either, but I know that didn't come out of(PDF) nowhere last month, which is a pretty good clue that he's full of shit. So not only does he fail to even acknowledge the scope of the criticisms, but then he spends a bunch of words trying to paint the detractors as a bunch of silly, uninformed dolts who just think bees are cute because they're stripey.
Those kind of things are big indicators of that corporate tactic of trying to slap some kind of 'skeptical' filter on their propaganda, to make readers feel smarter than the detractors. That's exactly what they did with those HFCS commercials and with that big trend for a while where anyone who had a problem with big chemical was just afraid of the sciencey sounding chemicals because they were all just stupid. And it looks like what they're doing here, too.
Only the picture and the headline said bumblebees, TFA did not, so I suspect the bees were honeybees, not bumblebees, because of the number. Bumblebees do not have huge colonies like honeybees.
Maybe some truck drove off with their queen and their hive. How long would a bee live without their queen and hive? Not long, I suppose. I took this picture in Twin Falls, Idaho last Thursday. There were hundreds if not thousands of bees on the outside of the netting. It made us roll up our windows in what would otherwise have been wonderful weather to have them down.
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields
Another set of videos from smarter everyday, detailing helicopter flight. Did you know helicopters can barrel roll?
"Physics Series Intro - #1 Smarter Every Day 45 - YouTube"
That's cool, but what is way cooler is writing a computer algorithm that learns how to fly like that. Much smoother as well.
Okay, I read the Telegraph blog. This seems to me like an excellent example of Poe's law. The whole thing was misdirection, half-truths, and outright lies. As I was reading it, I honestly thought, "This has to be a parody piece," and I kept waiting for the punch line. But it never came. I was feeling pretty dumb after awhile, because I couldn't figure out what the joke was supposed to be.
And Dingfod's right; there's pretty-much no way those bees could have been bumblebees.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
They showed video on the local news and they certainly looked like bumble bees to me. They also said the deaths were due to a pesticide sprayed on the trees in the parking lot to kill aphids.
__________________ The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner
They showed video on the local news and they certainly looked like bumble bees to me. They also said the deaths were due to a pesticide sprayed on the trees in the parking lot to kill aphids.
I can confirm the soapy water thing totally works on aphids. They got on our potted plants one year. One application of water with dish soap got rid of them completely.
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Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant
That, of course, is playing off the old myth about how "Science can't explain how bees fly." In reality, of course, the laws of aerodynamics are perfectly consistent with flying bumblebees. Just remember to take scaling into effect and to keep track of the Reynolds number.
The persistent myth that "Science says that bumblebees can't fly" always bothered me, since it's such an inherently stupid thing to say. Kind of like the myth that scientists thought that heavier-than-air flight was physically impossible: birds fly; bats fly; insects fly -- all are heavier than air. Some scientists thought that heavier-than-air flight might forever be impractical (because before the invention of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine, no engine could produce the necessary power-to-weight ratio that would allow powered flight), but few if any ever said something so obviously stupid as "heavier than air flight is physically impossible."
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
The myth I hate is the one about only using 10% of your brain. PET scans pretty consistently show we use all our brains and people keep using it.
I also hate the prevalence of the idea that all cultures have a satan figure, but that's not science.
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"freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."
- Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Ed. v. Barnette
Re: Drive by science
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