A handy app for your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad

If you often find you read articles on the Richard Dawkins’ Foundation web site, watch videos or listen to audio on the site you might find the iPhone app useful. And it’s only NZ$1.19.

It provides access to all that useful material direct from your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. With it you will be able to read articles, watch videos or listen to interviews while filling in time at the dentist’s waiting room.

For those who don’;t normally look at that site – why not try it. it’s not a Richard Dawkins fan site. More a collection of material of interest to people interest in science, reason and atheism.

The screen shots below give an idea of the material the app makes available.

See: Richard Dawkins for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad on the iTunes App Store.

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Check out your ancestors

Here’s a handy little resource of anyone interested in evolutionary science – The Timetree of life.  It enables you to find the last common ancestor of two species. Or, as the website describes it:

“TimeTree is a public knowledge-base for information on the evolutionary timescale of life. A search utility allows exploration of the thousands of divergence times among organisms in the published literature. A tree-based (hierarchical) system is used to identify all published molecular time estimates bearing on the divergence of two chosen taxa, such as species, compute summary statistics, and present the results. Names of two taxa to be compared are entered in the search window and the results are presented on a separate page.”

You can try it out at the search page. Just enter two names and click on search. This is the summary of what I got for humans and onions. Yes, we diverged 1408 million years ago.

Get your climate change science on the run

Somebody said that “lies are half way around the world before truth gets its boots on.” An underestimate, I would say.

With the current hysterical attack on climate science and climate scientists this is so true. It takes time to marshal the evidence needed to counter some of the claims being made. And most likely the perpetrator has moved on, in a Gish gallop, to a new issue and avoids facing up to the facts about the old one.

The internet is a great resource for people checking out some of the wild claims being made – providing you use reliable websites. One reliable site is Skeptical science, which has a byline of “Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism.” This site provides the actual scientific facts relevant to most claims made by climate change sceptics and deniers.

Now they have produced an application for the iPhone and ipod Touch. This will bring the much needed scientific information about climate change to your mobile device. Just imagine being able to check out a speaker during a lecture or debate – maybe even obtain the information of a sensible question.

Here’s a description of how to use the application taken from Skeptical Science now an iPhone app. at Skeptical science:

PZ needs an iPod

For all those who know and love PZ Myers and his blog Pharyngula. He’s put his name in for the chance to win a prize of an iPod (see I’d really like to win an iPod Touch). Go there and help him by clicking on the link.

Really, he just trying to piss off that creationist Eric Hovind who is offering the iPod as a prize for the most click throughs to his post: Creation Minute is an exciting series hosted by Eric Hovind that explores the creation worldview using cutting-edge visual effects and digital technology. Each episode challenges the evolution theory and gives evidence of the Bible’s historical and scientific accuracy.

Hovind is of course trying to publicise his creationist site. But just imagine – Pharyngula gets so many hits it’s quite likely that most click throughs will come from there. And Hovind will be obliged to pass on the iPod (loaded with creationist videos) to Myers! That will hurt! – But as Myers points out  Hovind’s morals are such that he is unlikely to fulfil his undertaking in this case.

You never know, in all the confusion precipitated by Myers winning the most click throughs, and Hovind’s refusal to countenance handing over the prize to him, he might just hand it over to someone else like me without thinking. So click on the link above – but also go on the Pharyngula and click there too.

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