Archives for May, 2011
For the price of a cup of coffee, you could send this skeptic to a conference…
Posted by Greg Laden on May 11, 2011 Surly Amy has been (successfully) raising money to help defray conference costs for women interested in attending The Amazing Meeting. Moments ago, Emma Cating, Megan Wells, and Amy Peters, who has applied among many others to obtain this funding, were awarded the first Surly Women Thinking Free TAM Grants. There are more women in need…
An interesting conversation in the offing
Posted by Greg Laden on May 11, 2011 Did I use ‘offing’ correctly? Strange word. Anyway, Mike Haubrich has pulled off another coup at Atheist Talk Radio. He has arranged for a conversation to happen, live, between Desiree Schell and yours truly. This will be in early June (details forthcoming). We’ll be talking about multiple strategies for effecting change, especially with reference to…
Go send Bora a happy birthday wish.
Posted by Greg Laden on May 11, 2011 It’s Bora’s birthday. He’s here and here. Well, he’s everywhere, but those are two places he be.
But wait, there’s more ….
Posted by Greg Laden on May 10, 2011 “We should not have published the altered picture” Meaning, what exactly? Oh never mind. Have a look at this:
“Where’s Hillary-Gate” as a cautionary tale for religious accommodation
Posted by Greg Laden on May 10, 2011 You’ve all seen the photograph. Here’s a closeup: On the right is a bunch of people in the Sitch Room at the White House watching in-house coverage of the Navy Seals taking out O-b-L. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Counter Intel Adviser Audrey Tomason are, notably, the only women in the room. There are…
The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living
Posted by Greg Laden on May 10, 2011 A lot of paleolithic diet and exercise books, many how to be a hunter-gatherer guides for the suburbanites, and numerous biologically-based-sounding self-help volumes based mainly on woo have been produced since The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living was published in 1989. To my knowledge, none of the…
Disturbing behavior
Posted by Greg Laden on May 10, 2011 UC Davis Prof Steps Down from Chair-ship over his own misogynist treatment of grad students: A while back …a department chair in the veterinary school at the University of California at Davis had polled a class on what grade he should give to a student who had to miss some quizzes because she had given…
Matata Sana! Stop the “Kill the Gays” Law Now!
Posted by Greg Laden on May 10, 2011 Uganda is about to pass a law that will ensure the execution of gay people, people suspected of being gay, or people who may have something to do with someone who is possibly gay. This law stems from political activism by American based conservatives based in Washington DC and is made possible by US and…
Good news from the evolution-creationism front
Posted by Greg Laden on May 9, 2011 Florida Senate Bill 1854 would have required a so-called “thorough presentation and critical analysis of the scientific theory of evolution” which is code word in US state legislatures these days for “taught along side Intelligent Design Creationism as an alternative to established scientific reckoning of the nature and history of life on earth.” Whe the…
A History of childbirth and Misconceptions about Life Expectancy
Posted by Greg Laden on May 8, 2011 We explore the changing ways that medicine and culture have treated pregnancy and childbirth. We’ll talk with doctor and medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein, about her book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth From the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank. And on another edition of Everything You Know is Sort Of Wrong,…
When is a bird a real turkey?
Posted by Greg Laden on May 7, 2011 This post at 10,000 Birds, an item I accidentally bumped into on the Internet while looking for something else, and an unusual sighting moments ago, converge. And, its a nice distracting convergence which I need right now because as I sit here one week before fishing opener, looking at the glassy surface of Hunters Bay,…
$25 tiny computer!
Posted by Greg Laden on May 7, 2011 The games developer David Braben and some colleagues [developed] something called Raspberry Pi. It’s a whole computer on a tiny circuit board – not much more than an ARM processor, a USB port, and an HDMI connection. They plugged a keyboard into one end, and hooked the other into a TV they had brought with…
Universal remotes, evolution, sex, and sight
Posted by Greg Laden on May 6, 2011 So Amanda had this TV. It had a remote. The remote sucked. It was broken. Then I moved in and with me came a universal remote. Lucky Amanda. I programmed the universal remote (a Radioshack 5 in 1) to handle the TV as well as a DVD player and a stereo. The remote handled everything.…
CSI Adds to Executive Council
Posted by Greg Laden on May 5, 2011 This will be of interest to many of you:
To the Moon
Posted by Greg Laden on May 5, 2011 May 5th, 1961. Freedom 7. The United States took its first small step on its journey to the moon… Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Do you hear the nervousness in his voice? I think the whole thing got a bit more causal, but not necessarily much safer, later…
May Fifth
Posted by Greg Laden on May 5, 2011 May 5th. The Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo falls on the fifth this year. Auspicious? No. Calendric. But the fifth of May is a day on which interesting things tend to have happened. For Mexico, this is the day on which the Mexican army defeated the French army at Puebla in 1862. Strangely, the holiday…
Life is a carnival … death of a carnival.
Posted by Greg Laden on May 4, 2011 Is the age of the blog carnival at an end? A few months back, several individuals concerned with plant blogging put a fair amount of effort into reviving and updating the Berry Go Round plant carnival. The next edition of that carnival, by the way, is coming up, so you should submit a post on…
A multiplicity of strategies is better than infighting when addressing creationism and related problems
Posted by Greg Laden on May 4, 2011 I have always thought, naively and probably incorrectly, that what defined Accommodationist is what they think, not how they argue. At the same time, I have always thought that what defined a “New Atheist” is how we argued, and not what we think.
First Full Length Interactive Book for the iPad
Posted by Greg Laden on May 3, 2011 Al Gore’s voice comes out of it.
We are tired of blacks, negrahs, muslims, and hispanics calling us racist
Posted by Greg Laden on May 2, 2011 Tea party clarifies its position on race and racism. Not current, but increasingly relevant:
The vaccination does make the baby cry, so why do it?
Posted by Greg Laden on May 2, 2011 It seems like every time I take Huxley (now 18 months old) to the doctor, the following things happen: 1) Somebody says “Well, he won’t need to get stuck with any needles for a long while now …. his next scheduled immunization is [insert phrase indicating 'a long time into the future']“; and 2) Huxley…
Japan Nuclear Disaster Update 22: When does the disaster end and the cleanup begin?
Posted by Analiese Miller and Greg Laden on May 2, 2011 Worker exposure to high levels of nuclera radiation and the distribution of radioactive materials about the landscape and in possibly unexpected places are the stories of the week at Fukushima. Also, officials are wondering, how have the potential effects of a tsunami at Fukushima (and, apparently, it is possible to have a tsunami here) changed…
President: 9/11 mastermind bin Laden killed in US special ops raid
Posted by Greg Laden on May 1, 2011 President Obama spoke at 10:36 CT. He gave a quick review of 9/11 and of ten years of work by military and counter-terrorism professionals, citing accomplishments as well as failure to catch Osama bin Laden. President Obama made capture/killing of bin Laden top CIA priority. In August, they picked up a lead that then took…
Falsehood: “If this was the Stone Age, I’d be dead by now”
Posted by Greg Laden on May 1, 2011 It is generally thought that life expectancy in the past was less that it is today for our species as a whole and in the case of industrialized countries in particular. However, this belief counts as a falsehood not because it is untrue (it is, in fact, true) but because many people get this idea…
Mayday Parade in Minneapolis
Posted by Greg Laden on May 1, 2011 Good morning. Today is “Mayday Day” in Minneapolis. Mayday is a holiday widely celebrated by the community of South Minneapolis. People from North, Northeast and Southeast are welcome, but I’m not sure they know about it. People from “soutwest” Minneapolis ARE from South Minneapolis and they need to learn that using the term “Soutwest Minneapolis”…
, which is now available for the 
