hrynyshyn
Posts by this author
January 12, 2007
Well, technically, not Seattle, but the exurbian outpost of Federal Way, Wash., where the "School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film." The film in question is Laurie David's An Inconvenient Truth, with which I am sure we're all familiar. First, I have to…
January 10, 2007
Just a pointer to yet another thoughtful rejoinder from the Real Climate group in the wake of media hysteria. This time it's all about whether El Nino or climate change is to blame for the ridiculously warm weather that recently dominated much of North America. As usual, the answer is: it's too…
January 9, 2007
On the wall behind Fox Mulder's desk in the basement of the X-File's version of the FBI headquarters in DC was a poster of a UFO photograph atop the phrase "I Want To Believe." Which pretty much sums up how a lot a people, scientists included, feel about the possibility of life on Mars. So it was…
January 6, 2007
This past week I spent the better part of three days in the company of Al Gore Jr. and his associates as part of The Climate Project, an effort to create a small army of climate change slide-show presenters across North America and beyond. If you've seen Laurie David's documentary, An Inconvenient…
January 2, 2007
Can one reject the single most important idea in biology and yet still embrace science? Ronald Numbers, a former Seventh-day Adventist turned historian of creationism, says lots of people do. John Wilkins jumped on the Salon interview with Numbers first. But here's my money quote:
Well, most people…
January 1, 2007
What a wonderful way to begin the new year, with a responsible call for action on climate change that embraces the uncertainties rather than yet another stubborn refusal to act because of them. The New York Times' ever-reliable Andrew Revkin writes this morning of a new collective voice of…
December 31, 2006
Going on four years back, a couple of Californians decided the secular/atheist/agnostic/skeptic community needed a catchy name in the same way the homosexual community purloined the term "gay" as part of its evolution toward mainstream acceptance. They came up with "bright," as in "I'm a bright"…
December 29, 2006
Every now and then someone with a substantial public platform says or writes something that transcends the stupid to the realm of the genuinely idiotic. Regular readers of the Island will know I am usually a little more respectful of those with whom I disagree, but I feel compelled to respond to…
December 27, 2006
"Fake Psychic Get's Girls." That's the subject line of my favorite piece of spam. Every now and then one slips by the email junk filters and I get a chuckle, and not just because of the punctuation error, either.
So amused was I the first time I got this particular piece of spam that I actually…
December 22, 2006
The advent of the release of an official government study warning that robots will soon be demanding their civil rights is a sure sign of the Christmas season. Senior editors and reporters are either at home with the family or spending too much time at the eggnog trough to bother with real…
December 21, 2006
I hope the answer is yes, in the sense that I don't want to see the even the mid-case scenarios come to pass. But this is a legitimate question, coming out of the American Geophysical Union meeting. Kevin Vranes says he senses a growing feeling that maybe climate scientists have gone a bit too far…
December 20, 2006
Carl Sagan died 10 years ago today, I''d rather celebrate his birth, but there's this Carl Sagan Memorial Blogathon going on and I can hardly resist making a mention.
With Sagan's passing, the world lost one of its leading champions of reason, but also one of its most eloquent describers of the…
December 19, 2006
The new head of the Episcopal Church is a trained marine biologist. The Episcopal Church is tearing itself apart. This is not a coincidence.
Katherine Jefferts-Schori used to study squid for a living. (Hey PZ, she's one of you!) But somewhere along the way, she succumbed to temptation and left her…
December 18, 2006
... one of your child's high school teachers told his class that "evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven." Even worse, what if that teacher went on to say:
"If you reject his gift of salvation, then you…
December 16, 2006
What with absurdly high levels of belief in astrology, sky fairies, homeopathy, and whatnot, it sometimes seems like the United States of America has the market cornered in superstitious nonsense. Far from it. The Chinese, for example, have their penchant for quack remedies concocted from rare…
December 14, 2006
From the annals of the weird and wonderful comes this tale of a pair of lucky dolphins:
The world's tallest man helped save two dolphins in China by reaching into their stomachs and pulling out harmful plastic they had swallowed, state media said Thursday. The dolphins got sick after eating plastic…
December 11, 2006
Sunday night's 60 Minutes wrapped up, as usual, with Andy Rooney's rambling commentary. He recently asked "what are we doing in Iraq" in a kind of Cronkite-esque moment, so I have made a point of watching him when I can, in hopes he might say something else with gravitas. Last night was almost such…
December 11, 2006
Mr. Hayden, my high school librarian, used to toss me out of his bailiwick every few days for "pontificating," and I'm still trying to make up for lost time. So when a local congregation of the Unitarian Universalists asked me to deliver the equivalent of a sermon the other day, I didn't hesitate…
December 9, 2006
One of the best things about the Science Blogs collective is that so little of what gets posted concerns the mundane and prosaic details of the authors' lives. We write substantial, serious stuff, posts that deal with public figures and weighty issues. No what-I-had-for-breakfast claptrap for us,…
November 28, 2006
This comes from Acephalous. I am happy to help: What is the speed of meme? People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how…
November 23, 2006
The good people at deSmogBlog have stumbled across exactly what's wrong with the public debate on climate change. IsCanadaReady.com is a compedium of non-scientific arguments that attempts to undermine confidence in anthropogenic global warming theory. But nowhere on the site is there any…
November 22, 2006
The good news is the world's technological powerhouses have finally agreed to get off their collective butts and start building ITER, the big fusion power experiment. The bad news is they're only planning on spending $12.8 billion on it. That's it?
I mean, come on. $12.8 paltry billion? The U.S.,…
November 21, 2006
Today's New York Times Science section includes coverage of a forum on the religion-science wars this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. Just about everybody who's anybody in this battle was there. My favorite quote comes from Steve Weinberg: "Anything that we…
November 20, 2006
I was talking yesterday with a friend of mine who works at the University of British Columbia's Fisheries Centre, which has long been at the forefront of research into the scope of the decline of fish species around the world. He said it's good to see so many scientists finally willing to take a…
November 18, 2006
I don't want to get all giddy over the Democratic victory and what it means for the planet. But this little snippet of news from today's WaPo is a good way to start your day off right.
Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) announced his intention to become the top Republican on the Senate Environment and…
November 14, 2006
Wired magazine's Gary Wolf tries to come to terms with what he calls the "New Atheists" by reviewing the latest Dawkins, Dennett and Harris books. (The God Delusion, Breaking the Spell and The End of Faith. and then interviewing the authors. There's some good stuff in his lengthy take on the…
November 10, 2006
For anyone wondering about the recent decline in frequency of posts to the Island of Doubt, I must report that things are only going to get worse. Yesterday, my wife, Mary, and I welcomed our first-born son into this world, and I doubt I'm going to have all that much free time to indulge in extra-…
November 5, 2006
Anyone who's spent even a modest amount of time and effort investigating the battle over the teaching of intelligent design creationism in the country's classrooms will recognize the argument that an understanding of evolution is essential to a decent science education, let alone a degree in…
October 26, 2006
So Iceland is back at it, joining Norway and Japan in the atavistic habit of killing whales. I find it interesting that this subject is so often framed as a scientific one, evidenced by the number of posts on the subject my fellow SciBloggers. Is there in fact a scientific argument against killing…