jlynch
Posts by this author
January 21, 2007
I was wondering what posts of mine over the past year have received the most hits; What do people link to and what do the comment on? The "top twenty" posts are given below the fold and it is interesting to note that they can be characterized into three major categories: "anti-science" [1, 3, 4, 5…
January 20, 2007
1912 - Birth of Konrad Emil Bloch, German biochemist, Nobel laureate
1926 - Death of Camillo Golgi, Italian physician, Nobel laureate
January 18, 2007
The Dismantled Ship
In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay,
On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor'd near the shore,
An old, dismasted, gray and batter'd ship, disabled, done,
After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul'd up at last and
hawser'd tight,
Lies rusting, mouldering.
Walt Whitman…
January 18, 2007
I'm looking for the source of a quote, attributed by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (p. 31) to Thomas Jefferson. Dawkins writes:
Thomas Jefferson - better read - was of a similar opinion: 'The Christian God is a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.'
I cannot…
January 17, 2007
PZ provides a link to a review of The God Delusion by theoretical cosmologist Steven Weinberg and approvingly provides two quotes. I want to alter part of one of them a little:
Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of [evolutionary biology] are only to be expressed by experts, not mere […
January 17, 2007
A day or so back, I posted on an AP article which declared that "skull found in a cave in Romania includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago." The original research article is now online. Let's look at the…
January 17, 2007
[Photo: Michael Price, 2007]
My ex-student Mike Price has a nice article up at Geotimes about Jerome, a once-booming mining town in Arizona that was described as "the wickedest town in the West". It now has a population of 350.
January 16, 2007
Bush apparently is disappointed that Saddam Hussein's execution "looked like it was kind of a revenge killing." How it was any less vengeful than the 152 executions he signed off on while governor of Texas is a mystery to me.
January 15, 2007
Bora is pleased to announce that The Open Laboratory is now available for purchase as an e-book or dead tree. Relive the finest moments of science blogging in the comfort of your armchair. Thrill, as yours truly expounds on Darwin and Marx without the aid of a safety net (or spell-checker). 336…
January 15, 2007
AP is reporting that a "skull found in a cave in Romania includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago." A paper to appear in Tuesday's PNAS (and not online yet) will argue that the ~40,000 year old skull…
January 15, 2007
Gorgeous image, courtesy of APOD
Any readers got good McNaught photos to share?
January 15, 2007
American Pronghorn
Antilocapra americana
(Click for larger source image)
January 14, 2007
I wonder whether Rupert Murdock's head exploded after seeing this on Fox last night during the Eagles/Saints game. And where's that right-wing blog rage on this corruption of our children during primetime?
January 13, 2007
Today in 1978, the logician Kurt Gödel died in Princeton, New Jersey. Gödel, of course, is remembered for his incompleteness theorems but also took the ontological proof for the existence of God serious enough to express his own version of it in modal logic.
Strangely, Richard Dawkins does not…
January 12, 2007
Apparently a YEC named "Frosty" trumps the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences every time.
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher,"…
January 12, 2007
Rob Crowther over at the Discovery Institute seems to be a little upset and is accusing evolutionists of arrogance. Commenting on this post by Steve Reuland over at the Panda's Thumb, Crowther opines:
You seldom see this kind of arrogance outside of academia. And you would never see scientists…
January 12, 2007
Ah, the start of another semester. That exciting time of the year when you meet new students, make new goals, and invariably curse at the copy machine as it refuses to churn out syllabi for you. Such is mid-January in academia.
Or rather it will be on Tuesday. That's when it all kicks off here at…
January 12, 2007
The Moment
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the…
January 11, 2007
A fossil skull discovered in 1952 offers support for the hypothesis that Upper Paleolithic Eurasians descended from a population that emigrated from sub-Saharan Africa in the Late Pleistocene. In tomorrow's Science, Fred Grine and co-workers describe a South African skull dated to 36.2 ± 3.3…
January 11, 2007
As mentioned earlier, it's National De-Lurker Week. PZ "exposed" himself and has 420 comments, Orac has 122, Dave & Greta have 56, Janet has 46, Tara has
21, Afarensis has 16, Bora has 10, and I have ... 4 .... yes, 4 ... as in less than 5 and more than 3.
Come on people, throw me a bone -…
January 11, 2007
Earlier on today, I noticed the following by Dembski:
If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn't get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to…
January 10, 2007
A few days back, I noted that January 5th 2006 marked my first post on Scienceblogs. And indeed it did. But I forgot that it was actually a back-dated post from my old blog. It was today - January 11th - one year ago that Sb launched with fifteen intrepid bloggers - Janet, Tara , Afarensis, Dave…
January 10, 2007
Janet notes that it is National Delurking Week 2007. So, if you read this blog but have never commented, give a shout out and let us know who you are and where you're from. This is particularly true for those of you who read via RSS (which probably could stand for Real Silent Syndication).
January 9, 2007
Dembski himself once defined intelligence as "the power and facility to choose between options - this coincides with the Latin etymology of 'intelligence,' namely, 'to choose between'". What happens if you use this definition to argue, on Dembski's own blog, that the theory of evolution "postulates…
January 9, 2007
Otocinclus batmani
O. batmani is a new species of loricariid catfish native to the Rio Pure in Colombia and two creeks draining into the Rio Amazonas near Iquitos in Peru. The specific name ("batmani") is in honor of Batman and is due to the bat-like black markings in the tail (source).
Ref:…
January 9, 2007
Unfortunately, there was no "Monday Mammal" yesterday and there will be none this week - I am unfortunately too busy to put together a decent post what with catching up after SICB.
However, as an update to last week's post on the mystery mammal from Borneo, you could do much worse than check out…
January 8, 2007
Bora has announced the contents for the soon-to-be published anthology of science-related blog writings, and and my post on Edward T. Oakes' treatment of Darwin and Marx has made the cut. I want to thank the readers of the post for making some suggestions/comments that I subsequently incorporated…