Greg Laden's Blog

Are you sure the earth is round?

If you had to persuade a medieval peasant that the world was round, how would you do it? Why do you believe the world is round? And what does the American public in general think?

Obama: At least as radical as a Puritan

Melanie Phillips, who is a British journalist that strikes me as more than just a little bit wacky and possibly even mildly deranged, published an item in The Spectator today, drawing on some articles by a Stanley Kurtz that appeared in the National Review Online.

Apparently Kurtz's project is to unearth what are purportedly the most outré, leftist "radical" scribblings he can find and attempt to somehow attribute them to Barack Obama by hook or by crook and by any means necessary, as we used to say back in the Hashbury, man.

Brain Activation during Hypothesis Generation

The scientific process is composed of generating hypotheses and testing those hypotheses through experiment. Yet we don't know a whole lot about how about hypothesis generation happens on the level of the brain.

Brain immediately recognizes transplanted hand

When David Savage was 19 years old, his right hand was crushed in a metal-stamping machine and subsequently amputated at the wrist by doctors. Afterwards, Savage was fitted a mechanical cable-hook prosthesis, which he wore until December, 2006, when he became the third American recipient of a hand transplant from a cadaver donor...

Bill Ayers Is A Good Person

Since Barack Obama doesn't know him well, and since I've clearly endorsed Barack Obama for president, I'd like to take a quick moment to make a distinction between my own view of Bill Ayers and Senator Obama's. Senator Obama is of course running for the highest elected office in the United States, so political reality necessitates that he strongly condemn Ayers' actions during the late 1960s and early 1970s (and he has). I, on the other hand, feel that Ayers is being demonized unfairly. If I were trying to win the presidency, I probably wouldn't say that. But most of America is still stuck in the violence-numb state of slumber that Ayers and the Weathermen were protesting with their bombs. It's crucially important to tell or remind people that the Weather Underground bombings never killed anyone except Weather Underground activists (by accident)....

McCain Funded by Domestic Terrorists!

John Martin, a Navy veteran who recently returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan and the co-founder of the group Republicans for Obama, points out that the Republicans have more than their fair share of connections to former Weather Underground member William Ayers...