jlynch
Posts by this author
February 28, 2006
The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is partnering with Carnegie Museum of Natural History in a first-of-its-kind program that will educate medical students on the evolutionary history of humans and animals. By learning the origins of human disease, such as back pain and cancer - which…
February 28, 2006
Busy, busy here. Lectures to prepare, theses to read, grading to be done. Will be back later, but for the moment, feast your eyes on "Microsoft redesigns iPod packaging" ... so true, so true.
February 26, 2006
News from Answers in Genesis, Henry Morris, the godfather of American young earth creationism and founder of the Institute for Creation Research died last night at the age of 87. Like him or loath him, Morris' influence on American anti-evolutionism was huge. See here for more details.
February 25, 2006
You Passed 8th Grade Math
Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!
Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?
Well, PZ and Grrrlscientist were doing it. And I only want to be one of the cool kids in 8th grade.
February 25, 2006
When I was growing up in Ireland, the Olympics were something worth watching; amateur athletes not getting monetary compensation, giving it their all, and happy to do so because it was the Olympics. Perhaps a major factor was the fact that Irish athletes were often outside shots to win, and when…
February 23, 2006
Given the fact that Henry Thoby Prinsep has appeared twice on these pages over the past few days, and that Nick referred to him as a "footnote in history with a weird name" (I'm not picking on you Nick!), it only seems right that I share some information on him.
Prinsep (1792 - 1878) was a civil…
February 23, 2006
My post on the Darwin photo was picked up by Nick at the Panda's Thumb. Yesterday, I contacted Kevin Repp, Curator of Modern European Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke and I received this reply today:
Many thanks for your query. As it turns out, the photo in question is indeed of Mr. Princep.…
February 21, 2006
This is just too funny for words. This weekend, Boingboing ran a story about a woman who lost her camera while on holiday, and of a Canadian family that found it, but refuses to return it because doing so would upset their son. Cory received this letter:
Hello doctorow,
I am sure that you must have…
February 21, 2006
Janet has some useful advice to students following the New York Times piece on emails from students to professors that a bunch of Sb'ers have already commented on. My favorite has to be,"How U doin?" is generally too informal an opening for an email to your professor.
Yup. And "dude" isn't the best…
February 21, 2006
Above is not (see comments) a picture of Charles Darwin, taken obviously in his later years. He commented that "I like this photograph much better than any other which has been taken of me." The original is in the Beinecke Library at Yale.
February 20, 2006
Grrlscientist has a review up of Ruse's book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (2005), so I thought I'd copy a review I wrote that appeared in Nature Cell Biology (Dec 2005 issue).
As an undergraduate in Ireland in the mid-80's I ran across a copy of Ashley Montagu's book Science and Creationism.…
February 20, 2006
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is this nations premier scientific body and was founded in the 19th century to promote science (along the model of its British counterpart). Ironically, one of its early supporters was the great creationist Louis Agassiz - whom many have…
February 19, 2006
Rob Skipper is a philosopher and historian of biology whom I had the pleasure of spending some time with last year at the Dibner Institute Seminar at Woods Hole. So, I note that he and his group at the University of Cincinatti have a new blog, hpb etc. Drop by and say hello!
February 17, 2006
Earlier on today I posted the following which seems to have disappeared from the page:
After spending yesterday evening preparing for classes by watching the ICR video Thousands ... Not Billions and the ID flick The Privileged Planet, I awake to read this. Randy Olson, following an MFA in…
February 17, 2006
Quailtard: farm-raised quail released for the hunters to fire at. As in: "Look, the mere fact that we're even talking about how the vice president drives up with his rich friends in cars to shoot farm-raised wingless quailtards is letting the quail know 'how' we're hunting them" (Rob Corrdry, The…
February 15, 2006
Dan Ely is a physiologist who supported the Ohio lesson plan that was defeated yesterday. In this skreed, the DI tries to make out that Ely - who testified in Kansas - has been unfairly represented as a creationist. Let's look at the Kansas transcript, shall we?
Q: Welcome to Kansas. I have a few…
February 15, 2006
I like Firefox and have been using it since it was a very early beta. However, of late I've noticed that it is really hogging memory. Turns out, it's a "feature" (see this Slashdot article). More importantly, you can fix the "feature" but page loading will take a little hit.
February 14, 2006
The Ohio state school board has just voted (11-4) to eliminate a lesson plan and
science standards that opened the door to teaching ID. See here and here. Panda's Thumb alread has a thread open.
February 13, 2006
Over at Slashdot, there is a story discussing readers' first computers. The first computer I owned was a ZX-81 with an 8k ROM, 1k RAM and a Z80A cpu (more specs here). I learned to program in BASIC and assembly on it and stored programs on audio tape. That was 1982. In 1984, I got a Commodore 64 -…
February 13, 2006
As promised yesterday here [PDF, 1.2M] is the text of a talk I gave in 2002 to celebrate Darwin Day.
February 12, 2006
Assassin spiders - 2mm long arachnids with elongated jaws (and necks) that were once globally distributed but are now only found in Australia, South Africa and Madagascar. In the latter, nine new species have been recently found by California Academy of Sciences researchers, Charles Griswold and…
February 12, 2006
From the Autobiography:
Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of these, the most important have been - the love of science - unbounded patience in long…
February 12, 2006
I have just been notified that the Spring edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review will feature articles on evolution and ID by Niles Eldredge, Michael Ruse, Thomas Eisner, Robert M. Sapolsky and David Quammen. To celebrate Darwin Day, the Review has put Eldredge's essay online.
February 12, 2006
One of the more "enlightened" aspects of politics here in Arizona are voter initatives, wherein the public gets to petition to put stuff on the ballot. In the windup for the November elections, the streets are already crawling with petitioners wanting to get the necessary quota of signatures to…
February 12, 2006
I was going to post the text of a talk ("The Myths of Darwinism") that I gave to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix in February 2002. But I can't find a scanned copy. I should be able to post it tomorrow, though. So, in place of that, I give you ...
"There is grandeur in this view of life,…
February 11, 2006
Went and bought some new fish for my tank today - a sun catfish (Horabagrus brachysoma) and a lace catfish (Synodontis sp.). I admit to having a certain liking for catfish species. These two will join my peppered corys (Corydoras paleatus) and common plec (Hypostomus punctatus) at the bottom of the…
February 9, 2006
As PZ notes, George Deutsch has finally come out from under his rock. Avowedly uncontrite for lying in his vita he has the following to say:
Mr. Deutsch said he resigned of his own volition because he was unhappy with the negative publicity he and NASA were receiving in the news media. "I was just…
February 7, 2006
So Deutsch has resigned. Best summation comes from Jim Hansen: "He's only a bit player. The problem is much broader and much deeper and it goes across agencies. That's what I'm really concerned about."
February 7, 2006
It gets better. Apparently George "It's a theory" Deutsch did not graduate from Texas A&M after all and withdrew from there in June '04 without a degree. Apparently, the qualifications to become a Presidential appointee (and thus official censor) to NASA are, umm, nil. More importantly, it…