jlynch
Posts by this author
December 18, 2006
Professor Emeritus Peter Irons (Political Science, UC San Diego):
"It seems to me the height of hypocrisy for the Discovery Institute to accuse Judge Jones of copying 90 percent of one section of his opinion (just 16 percent of its total length) from the proposed findings of fact by the plaintiff's…
December 18, 2006
Aurora observed near Des Moines, Iowa, 12/14/06
[source: apod]
December 17, 2006
The votes are in and congratulations are due to Orac over at Respectful Insolence (Best Medical/Health Issues Blog) and PZ at Pharyngula (Best Science Blog) for winning their respective categories.
And Daily Kos beat out LGF for Best Blog Overall. Hah!
December 17, 2006
I have a student currently working on conservative reactions to the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling. As part of the preparations, I'm having him read Larry Arnhart's Darwinian Conservatism [amaz] and John West's response, Darwin's Conservatives [amaz]. Over at his blog, Arnhart has made the following…
December 16, 2006
Well, I laughed.
Not so sure that the final copy will feature the line, but what the heck.
(source)
December 16, 2006
Via Steve Reuland:
Of the 383 pieces of legislation that were signed into law during the two-year 109th Congress, more than one-quarter dealt with naming or renaming federal buildings and structures -- primarily post offices -- after various Americans.
December 16, 2006
The AP is reporting a further clampdown by the Bush administration on governmental science - in this case, within the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists:
The new requirements state that the USGS's communications office…
December 16, 2006
We are assembling our eldritch army and will prevail
[Click for dancing goodness]
December 16, 2006
A few days back I posted a picture of the recent shuttle launch. Here's another view:
This is a four minute time exposure of the exhaust plume along Discovery's path against the background of the starry sky. As APOD notes:
At the upper left, the end of the drifting plume is punctuated by Alnitak…
December 15, 2006
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,And nodding by the fire, take down this book,And slowly read, and dream of the soft lookYour eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,And loved your beauty with love false or true,But one man loved the pilgrim…
December 14, 2006
If you are of a certain age, you remember this one ...
December 14, 2006
Afarensis has previously mentioned the recent death of Peter Boyle.
And now, my fellow scientists and neurosurgeon...I must ask you to ...suspend belief. For up until now, you have seen the Creature perform the simple mechanics of motor activity. That this Creature was an inanimate blob, which I…
December 14, 2006
Edward T. Oakes may be a good teacher of theology at St. Mary of the Lake, but he is a lousy historian of Darwinism. Witness the following statement from his review of Richard Weikart's work, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany:
Spencer might well have been…
December 13, 2006
Today is the anniversary of the death, in 1873, of the Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist, Louis Agassiz (born in 1807) whom I've mentioned before. It is fair to say that Agassiz was the last intellectually respectable creationist in America. A vehement anti-evolutionist and polygenist,…
December 13, 2006
Today I managed to finish my grading ... well, most of it. I still have my upper-division Darwin & Design course to take care of. Despite nursing a bad cold, yesterday I attended our Honors Commencement (only 29 graduates walked this semester, none of them working with me on theses ... I've…
December 13, 2006
AP is reporting that the Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) is "effectively extinct" following a 20 million year existence on this planet. A six week search yielded no sightings, down from thirteen sightings in 1997. It is believed that overfishing and sub-aquatic sonar pollution led to…
December 13, 2006
The flacks over at the Discovery Institute are spending an inordinate amount of time on their latest press release aimed at somehow undermining Judge Jones' opinion in Kitzmiller v Dover. This is particularly interesting giving the DI claim that they felt that the case should not have gone to trial…
December 12, 2006
The Discovery Institute's trademarked brand of science-by-press-release continues. In this press release, John West (a political scientist) claims that "[t]he key section of the widely-noted court decision on intelligent design issued a year ago on December 20 was copied nearly verbatim from a…
December 11, 2006
Photo of this weekend's night launch of Space Shuttle Discovery. [Source: National Geographic]
December 11, 2006
Karmen and Razib have both taken the Belief-O-Matic quiz. So here's what I got:
1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Theravada Buddhism (93%)
3. Secular Humanism (90%)
4. Liberal Quakers (90%)
Relatively accurate if you ask me. If I was a believer, I'd probably be a UUist. I'm ethically…
December 10, 2006
ASU will introduce Dennis Erickson as its new football coach during a press conference on Monday.
December 10, 2006
As PZ notes, some of us ScienceBloggers will be at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting which occurs this time around in Phoenix. PZ, GrrlScientist and I will be the talking heads at the Media Worskshop on Thursday January 4th:
Media Workshop: Hey, Wanna Read My Blog?…
December 9, 2006
Chad made me take the Brutally Honest Personality Test:
Crackpot - INTJ33% Extraversion, 60% Intuition, 93% Thinking, 56% Judging
People hate you.
Paris Hilton hates Nicole Richie. Lex Luther hates Superman. Garfield hates Mondays. But none these even rates against the insurmountable hate,…
December 8, 2006
I have family in town for the next few days so I don't know whether I'll be posting much if at all. To keep you amused, check out Orac's wonderful Friday Dose of Woo which this week deals with 9/11 Conspiracies. Example:
The hologram theory says that south tower (WTC2) was not hit by a large Boeing…
December 8, 2006
Way back in 1994, the Internet was a much much smaller place. Only three years old, the World Wide Web really hadn't expanded much beyond academia. I have distinct memories of using NCSA Mosaic in 1993 and there wasn't much to see. Trust me. (Hell, I remember gopher, WAIS, Archie & Veronica…
December 7, 2006
Regular readers will know that ASU are looking for a new football coach after the firing of Dirk Koetter. Thursday morning the word was that there were six possible candidates: Norm Chow, Dennis Erickson, Steve Mariucci, Mike Martz, Mike Price and Mike Riley, with Chow being a "very strong…
December 7, 2006
Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day
Calmly we walk through this April's day,Metropolitan poetry here and there,In the park sit pauper and rentier,The screaming children, the motor-carFugitive about us, running away,Between the worker and the millionaireNumber provides all distances,It is…
December 6, 2006
In the past I have commented on the case of the Tripoli Six - medical workers wrongly accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998. As Revere and Janet note, a paper [pdf] just published in Nature has demonstrated that the most…
December 6, 2006
NASA today announced that it had evidence that water may have flowed on Mars as recently as the past five years. Images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor do not directly show water, but instead show recent changes in surface features that are consistent with water flow. More here, here and over at…