jlynch
Posts by this author
April 21, 2006
I'm glad it's Friday - it's been a busy week. It was the penultimate week of classes, so there were loose ends to tie-up. My three thesis students defended (and passed). I had planning meetings regarding the next year or two of my teaching and scholarship, and also talked about Hume to the oldest…
April 18, 2006
Despite being a reserved leader, I have my sheep-like qualities. One of which is, like most sheep, I am talentless when it comes to Photoshop, Gimp and the like. As my Sb sibs have all done this to some degree, I though I might give this a shot ... the Stranger Fruit banner competition. All very…
April 16, 2006
The Week in Review section of the New York Times had a piece on evangelicals in this country in which it details the tension between tradiationalist, centrists and modernists (available online here). The article appears to be prompted by the latest Pew Forum National Survey of Religion and Politcs…
April 16, 2006
An op-ed in the Orlando Centenial takes umbrage at the suggestion of Business for Diplomatic Action Inc., in their "World Citizens Guide", that Americans travelling abroad should not talk too much about American pride. They respond:
To be American is to be bold and outspoken. And that bravado is no…
April 15, 2006
Since GrrlScientist made me:
Apparently, I'm not a sheep after all. Actually, the results are strangely accurate.
April 14, 2006
OK, somehow, I've managed to screw up my templates so that comments no longer appear. Hold tight. I'll get the Seed gurus to bale me out.
[un-fubared. --admin]
April 14, 2006
News from Louisville is that the YEC geologist, Kurt Wise, has taken Dembski's position at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as director of its Center for Theology and Science. Wise is currently at Bryan College (Dayton, Tn). Predictably a SBTS representative hews to the party line:
"With…
April 12, 2006
I haven't catfish blogged in a while, so this is worthwhile. Another article in today's Nature is of interest. In this one, the authors describe the ability of the eel catfish, Channallabes apus to forage onland. Importantly, they note that the species' "capacity to bend its head down towards the…
April 12, 2006
From UC Berkeley:
New fossils discovered in the Afar desert of eastern Ethiopia are a missing link between our ape-man ancestors some 3.5 million years ago and more primitive hominids a million years older, according to an international team led by the University of California, Berkeley, and Los…
April 11, 2006
I've been more that a little quiet the past ten days. It's nearing the end of the semester here at ASU (only 3 weeks to go), and I have been furiously working with my honors thesis students to get their manuscripts ready for defense. But they are out the door now and will be defended next week. Two…
April 11, 2006
Cornell Biology Department to offer course on intelligent design. Two-month schedule starts with lecture on "Great Breakthroughs in Intelligent Design Research," followed by 59.5 days of lunch. Comments here.
April 10, 2006
A just-published paper in PLoS Biology has thrown some light on the relationship between placental mammals. The authors used retroposed elements, and by scanning more than 160,000 chromosomal loci and selecting from only phylogenetically informative retroposons, they recovered 28 clear, independent…
April 10, 2006
One of the annoying things about being on the (relatively) west coast is that those to the east usually get first dibs on anything that appears. So, while PZ has posted this already, I'm going to go ahead and do it anyways.
It's been a busy week or two here, and will be getting busier. I have…
April 9, 2006
On June 1st 2005, Bill Dembski started as director of the Center for Science and Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. On April 9th 2006, it was announced that he was leaving the position to "work closer to his home in Waco, Texas, where he has maintained a residence while commuting to…
April 8, 2006
Since GrrlScientists asked:
You Belong in Dublin
Friendly and down to earth, you want to enjoy Europe without snobbery or pretensions.
You're the perfect person to go wild on a pub crawl... or enjoy a quiet bike ride through the old part of town.
What European City Do You Belong In?…
April 6, 2006
"Scooter" Libby was told by Cheney that Bush "specifically had authorized" him to "disclose certain information" from the classified National Intelligence Estimate to Judith Miller (source). Will the Democrats finally develop a backbone and go after the administration? Don't hold your breath.
April 5, 2006
Longtime readers may remember the April Fool's prank played on me by some students last year, wherein I got "pinked" and "badgered". The culprits were never apprehended.
This year, I returned from class to find my office "possified," that is wallpapered with
(see below the fold for one corner of…
April 3, 2006
Access Research Network (ARN) maintain a blog related to "ID-related" literature. The site has amassed a total of nine posts since October 2004, thus proving that the ID perspective can prompt a veritable torrent of papers. Their latest posting is, believe it or not, a notice of Well's Rivista…
April 2, 2006
On Wednesday, at two minutes and three seconds after one in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. Celebrate as you see fit. With cowbell. More cowbell.
HT to Burt H.
April 1, 2006
A sheep ... a smart, somewhat evil, non-metrosexual sheep.
I am 5% Idiot.
I am not annoying at all. In fact most people come to me for advice. Of course they annoy the hell out of me. But what can I do? I am smarter than most people.
Take theIdiot Test@ FualiDotCom
I am 45% Evil Genius.
I want…
April 1, 2006
I seem to have annoyed someone by the moniker of 'dlamming', apparently a graduate student who is interested in yeast. While searching through my junk trackbacks, I discovered his response to my post on the mathematician William Hart (see here), whom he feels is more than adequately qualified to…
March 31, 2006
I've been quiet the past week for a number of reasons. While course & talk preparation and more general bits & pieces have kept me busy, a huge part of my spare time (such as it is) has been given away to activities related to hiring a new lecturer here at the College. That has meant…
March 26, 2006
Jonathan Wells wrote a paper a while back that proposed a "ID-derived" explanation for cancer. I've written about that before (here, here , here, here, and here) as have others. Thus, this is of interest:
In a study published online today in Nature Genetics, Carlo Maley, Ph.D., a researcher at The…
March 26, 2006
Since GrrlScientist asked; a mere 6.25% - ten time less than her and five times less than Janet. Confused? Don't be.
March 24, 2006
The DI is crowing that their next update to the "Dissent from Darwinism" list will feature 600 PhD's. They highlight a letter sent by William Hart, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (they omit the visiting piece, I wonder why?). In any case,…
March 23, 2006
Like PZ, I too received a copy of What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty [amaz] a few weeks back. Also like PZ, I was taken with Ian McEwan's entry (see PZ's post for that). I also liked this comment from Seth Lloyd:
Unlike mathematical…
March 23, 2006
I recently finished a biography of Ludwig WIttgenstein and came away thinking that, while the man was probably brilliant, he was not by any means a person who was easy to know. That aside, I started to read his first work, Tractus Logio-Philosophicus (1921/2), and immediately realized I was way…
March 23, 2006
The South Carolina schools system is in a worse state than I ever expected. Carol Crooks, of Greer SC, opines:
The theory of evolution does not and cannot explain so much about the universe that we know. For instance, when and how did water evolve? How does it happen that gravity can hold us to the…