April 24, 2008
Linux is more than grandma-ready. Linux is by far the preferred operating system for most grandmas.
The other day graduates of my UMN degree program presentations of their work. One of the students had borrowed a laptop from the UMN unit she worked for to give an on screen presentation. She…
April 23, 2008
But plans for the Institute for Creation Research Masters Degree in Creationistic Biology for High School Teachers is out of Texas.
Members of the Academic Excellence and Research Committee and the Participation and Success Committee voted unanimously to approve the recommendation of Raymund…
April 23, 2008
Never mind why this joke exists. It just does. And I thought I'd share it:
How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
The very choice of patritypical hyper macho sexual imagery in reference to what one might do with a light bulb exposes a deeply held and hegemonic bias objectifying…
April 23, 2008
The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) has, some time ago, filed for approval to run a masters degree program in life science education. The purpose of the degree is to train educators to present biology in a way that is consistent with Christian Biblical beliefs, as opposed to actual…
April 23, 2008
A bill designed to make it easier to introduce creationism into public school classrooms has passed in the Florida Senate by a 21 to 17 vote margin. The bill was proposed by Senator Ronda Storms, Republican, and is modeled after a template provided by the Discovery Institute.
Storms filed the…
April 23, 2008
Despite the fact that the producers of Expelled! have the most nefarious of motives in mind, and that we can expect more from them (we are waiting for the other shoe to drop), it is interesting to note how many conversations this documentary about Intelligent Design Creationism has sparked.…
April 23, 2008
Evolving in Kansas provides a lie-fighting fact revealing review of Expelled!'s showing in Iowa.
The film debuted at the Varsity Theater in Ames, Iowa on Friday night (April 18). Ames is important because it is the home of Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, the pro-ID astronomer, who lost his tenure bid at…
April 22, 2008
Now that Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed, the movie, exists, we wait not so quietly for the other shoe to drop. I'll tell you in a moment what that other shoe is going to look like and where it is going to drop. First I want to make a couple of topically linked but otherwise discombobulated…
April 22, 2008
Matching donations/memberships for the National Center for Science Education... still 75 bucks left as of this writing!
Check it out.
What a great idea!
April 22, 2008
Chris Mooney has made an "appeal to authority" (Randy Olson) in asserting that Expelled is a success by Hollywood standards, and this may be correct. PZ Myers and his comet tail may have increased that success as per Mooney's Framing TOE, but the reverse is also true: the science blogging share…
April 21, 2008
Happy Earth Day, Earth! Do you recognize any of these locations?
A:
B:
C:
D:
April 21, 2008
The democratic party is polling tomorrow in Pennsylvania. The conventional wisdom says that there is a number of percentage points reflecting Clinton's expected win above which this would truly count as a win for her, and below which it could be perceived as a victory for Obama. If Obama "wins"…
April 21, 2008
Watching wolves, moose -- and heat -- on Michigan island from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- Ignoring our observation plane circling above the frozen Lake Superior wilderness, the eight gray wolves seemed as harmless as your beloved pooch cavorting with its pals in the yard. Trotting along Siskiwit Bay,…
April 21, 2008
[hat tip]
OK we have room for one engineer joke:
A mathmatician, a physicist, and an engineer were all given a red rubber ball and told to find the volume.
The mathmatician carefully measured the diameter and evaluated a triple integral.
The physicist filled a beaker with water, put the ball in…
April 20, 2008
.... Be a cog in the wheel. Trust us, you'll be happier ....
April 20, 2008
Chris Mooney, who every day seems to transmogrify more and more into a creationist apologist, makes the case that Expelled! is a box office success. He seems almost giddy about it in his post on the topic. I'm sure Chris will be blaming PZ Myers, me, the rest of us people for part of this. But…
April 20, 2008
I have to confess that I really like Sim City. I have not touched it since I started blogging .... but I have many fond memories of firing all the hospital workers and unleashing tornadoes on wealthy neighborhoods, or using the terraforming tools to build landscape with a barely hidden but rich…
April 20, 2008
... I'm talking about the "office suite" known as Microsoft Works. I'm not suggesting that Microsoft works.
Increasingly, more an more people don't know what Microsoft Works is because it has fallen into increasing obscurity. It is a kind of office suite that has a word processor, spread sheet…
April 20, 2008
Steve Mirsky does a little Darwin Quote Mining reversal exercise in a recent post called "Never You Mine: Ben Stein's Selective Quoting of Darwin:"
One of the many egregious moments in the new Ben Stein anti-evolution film "Expelled" is the truncation of a quote from Charles Darwin so that it…
April 20, 2008
AT&T is making the claim that the Internet will reach its full capacity limit by 2010.
... Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-…
April 20, 2008
Not many people know this, but PZ Myers, when he was a little kid, made an appearance on Mr. Science (actually, PZ mentions this often in public lectures as a reason he got into science, but I've never noticed him say anything about this on his blog). This was the first episode ever made, but it…
April 20, 2008
Apparently there are only about 75 known individuals over 110 years of age.
Edna was born on April 20th, 1893 *.
In that year, US Marines invaded Hawaii and overthrew the Hawaiian Queen. Thomas Edison was just finishing off construction of the first movie studio. President of the United States…
April 20, 2008
Louisiana State Senate Bill 561 is an "academic freedom" bill intended to push discussion of creationism, global warming denialism, and so on into state public schools. This is the latest in a long series of efforts of right wing fundamentalist christians to indoctrinate public school students in…
April 19, 2008
[Hat Tip: Some Anonymous Guy]
April 19, 2008
That was the lyre bird. This is the liar bird:
April 19, 2008
Just show them this video. Or better yet, act it out with a shill.
