hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
March 5, 2007
Another day, another example of the moral bankruptcy of the James Dobson gang.
For those few of you not familiar with Dobson's particular brand of twisted faith-based logic, he's the head of Focus on the Family, a national organization devoted to holding back the tide of liberty, fraternity and…
March 4, 2007
Titled simply "Darwin's God," the feature in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine is a overview of theoretical musings -- you can't really call them full-fledges theories -- on why religion is so common among human societies. Not much in the way of new ideas, but a good survey of the current…
March 2, 2007
Tomorrow's lunar eclipse has got the moon on my brain, and I'm not the only one. Washinton Post columnist Charles Krauthammer gets it wrong so often that I rarely bother to even glace at his output, but today he touches on a topic that appeals more to intuition than intellect, one that doesn't lend…
March 2, 2007
Every now and then, a science story comes along that reminds me just how full of awe and wonder the real world is. This particular story is a few weeks old, but it didn't seem to generate a lot of attention when it came out, so I will.
Astronomers and physicists using the Cornell-managed Arecibo…
March 1, 2007
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and it was more that little appropriate that I might be reminded of that particular truism by a friend of mine who just happens to be a librarian. The lesson involves a variation on that most modern of phobias, the fear of radio waves, and it's a classic…
February 28, 2007
Jerry Fallwell. Can anyone compare to his particular brand of idiocy? He more than anyone else is the reason I blog. From the AP
Falwell says global warming is "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus" from evangelism to environmentalism. Falwell told his Baptist congregation in…
February 27, 2007
The good people at the Center for Biological Diversity have declared today "Polar Bear Day." It's not that big a stretch, since a bunch of science-types have declared 2007 the International Polar Year. So what the heck? Help save the polar bear. Incidentally, a little while back I was commissioned…
February 27, 2007
My least favorite story-that's-occupying-too-much-media-attention this week is the Al Sharpton-Strom Thurmond family-ties affair. As a former newspaper editor, I know all too well why the story of the uncovering of the connection between a prominent African-American civil-rights leader and famous…
February 26, 2007
This past weekend in the New Age capital of the New South (Asheville, N.C.), members of the Appalachian chapter of the American Society of Dowsers were scheduled to hold a quarterly meeting. I know this because the alternative weekly in these parts, the Mountain X Press, decided to devote a few…
February 22, 2007
Texas Gov. Rick Perry is having a bad week. The state House Public Health Committee just voted to rescind the governor's executive order requiring all pre-teen girls to be vaccinated against HPV and a county judge ruled against another executive order requiring the state to fast-track a review of…
February 16, 2007
After 28 years, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research institute is finally giving up the ghost, bringing an end to arguably the most respectable -- or the least embarrassing -- parapsychological research effort. Is this cause for celebration? I'm not sure, but I think Princeton is probably…
February 14, 2007
At the heart of the fuss over the departure of two members of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards' blogging team is a science story, specifically the controversy surrounding the "Plan B" birth control pill. This has been overlooked in favor of the larger political fallout and bears re-…
February 12, 2007
Absent anything original to add to the millions of words that have been written about Charles Darwin, on this Darwin Day I'm going to quote from one of his acolytes, Richard Dawkins. In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins runs with, rather than away from, the notion that a proper understanding of…
February 11, 2007
John Edwards' recent decision not to fire two bloggers from his staff after word got out that they didn't always use the most diplomatic language in during their pre-Edwards campaign days should give him a big boost among those the bloggers were hired to attract -- the so-called "netroots." Such…
February 9, 2007
First, you've got to hand it Richard Branson. Say what you want about his contradictory ways -- promoting wasteful extravagance while saving the planet from the products of those wasteful ways -- but his choice of brand name was brilliant. And it gives newspaper editors and bloggers an…
February 7, 2007
I'm talking about Alister McGrath, the author of the unbelievably weak polemic The Twilight of Atheism, who has resurfaced to take on his nemesis, Richard Dawkins. Jason does a good job dismantling McGrath's pathetic review of the Dawkins' The God Delusion, so all I'm going to do is posit that the…
February 6, 2007
Venerable New York Times reporter William K. Stevens resurfaces today in the paper's Science Times with a few words on the changing nature of the debate over the changing climate. The headline is only slightly misleading:
"On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty"
Technically, there…
January 31, 2007
It's almost enough to restore your faith in freedom, democracy and the American way (whatever that is). Today in The New York Times appear a couple of paragraphs the likes of which I was beginning to despair I would never read in a leading American newspaper:
The House Committee on Oversight and…
January 29, 2007
After Garry Trudeau swallowed the apocryphal story about Grand Canyon park rangers' inability to tell the truth about the age of their charge, one would do well to be skeptical about any future strips based on alleged true stories. Fortunately, yesterday's color Doonesbury is on safer ground. It…
January 26, 2007
A new poll in Canada has climate change at the top of the worry list for the first time, and it's rising fast. The Globe and Mail poll puts the share of Canadians who say the environment is the most critical issue facing the country at 26 per cent, up from 12 per cent in July, and 4 per cent one…
January 24, 2007
Here's what George W. Bush had to say about climate change in his penultimate state of the union address: "...and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change." That's it. A parathetical afterthought for the most pressing issue of modern times. I suppose we should be…
January 23, 2007
The lead story in today's Science section of the New York Times isn't really about science at all, but its opposite: superstition. The notion that we're hard-wired to believe in a god has received a lot of attention of late, but now we're told that we also might be genetically programmed to believe…
January 22, 2007
When word came earlier this month that Washington state school board is refusing to present An Inconvenient Truth, Laurie David's documentary on Al Gore's climate change slide show, to its high school students, criticism was fast and furious. The main problem was the decision was taken in response…
January 21, 2007
Of course, we'll never be absolutely certain about the causes and future trends of climate change. That's not the way science works. But according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we're getting pretty darn close to that magical 19-times-out-of-20 territory that passes for…
January 18, 2007
PZ Myers rarely writes anything I find objectionable, but today he is so bang on that I feel compelled to share it with those few readers of mine who might not be regular visitors to Pharygula.
PZ basically wants to give young students the benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming they can't…
January 17, 2007
Following up on a couple of posts back in which I trumpeted Gary Trudeau's inclusion in Doonesbury strip an apocryphal story about Grand Canyon park rangers and the age of the geological wonder they are entrusted with explaining to the public: We were duped. Skeptic magazine's Michael Shermer…
January 16, 2007
Today's must read, from the Washington Post: The U.S. government is cutting back on environmental science.
The government's ability to understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes of all kinds is in danger because of deep cuts facing many Earth satellite programs and major delays…
January 13, 2007
Gary Trudeau sticks it to the creationists in today's Doonesbury. The topic of the day is the sad fact that the U.S. National Parks Service sells in its Grand Canyon gift shop a book that offers a Biblical chronology for the world's creation, a fact that makes it very hard to explain how the canyon…
January 12, 2007
When former Redskins quarterback Heath Shuler managed to bump off incumbent congressman Charles Taylor in November, there was much rejoicing here in western North Carolina. Many Democrats kept their hopes modest, however, as Shuler got elected campaigning on "mountain values," a not so subtle code…