tqa | February 27, 2007
Jake Young just drew my attention to one of the most wonderful signs of Bronx revitalization I've heard of in years - a beaver is making its home on the banks of the Bronx River near the Bronx Zoo. This is absolutely fantastic news - more so than I think Jake, who is a fairly recent arrival to NYC, realizes.
I grew up in the Bronx, not all that far from the Bronx River. In fact, the river ran through French Charlie's Park, where my brothers and I played little league baseball. Back then, the thought of a beaver - or almost any other mammal - making a home in the Bronx River would have been…
tqa | February 26, 2007
Yesterday, a brief review of Conservapedia appeared on one of New Scientist's blogs. The review quoted two Sciencebloggers as well as the Schlafly responsible for the Hellerian, if not Orwellian, trainwreck of a website), and has sparked a second round of posts here. A sane reader (presuming, of course, that we have one) might wonder why we are so obsessed with a right-wing lunatic website that is, at first, second, third, and fourth glance indistinguishable from a parody of right-wing lunacy. The reason that a website like this should spark concern as much as laughter is simple: this…
tqa | February 26, 2007
Over the last couple of days, Dr. Michael Egnor, an anti-evolution neurosurgeon who recently signed on to the Discovery Institute's list of "scientists" who doubt evolution, has created quite a stir here at Scienceblogs. Quite a few Sciencebloggers have already weighed in on his specific arguments, with PZ and Orac leading the charge. They've already dealt with the basics of his information theory arguments, so I'm going to focus mostly on his basic appeal to complexity - and in particular on his analogy between Shakespeare and life.
In a recent comment on Pharyngula, Egnor writes:…
tqa | February 26, 2007
Amanda Adams of OMB Watch was kind enough to draw my attention to a post by Paul Sherman over at the blog of the Center for Competitive Politics. It appears that Mr. Sherman liked neither the tone nor the substance of my last post on astroturf disclosure legislation. He was appalled by some of the things I said about the fine folks at American Target Advertising, citing my post as an example of how "proponents of disclosure...can be downright nasty to those who disagree with them." The tone of my response to Fitzgibbons and the ATA folks, and the tone of the remainder of this response to Mr…
tqa | February 22, 2007
Over the last few days, I've had a lot of conversations with scientists about what scientists can do to help change the way that the American public views science. The phrase, "what can I do?" has come up more than once in these conversations, but every time it has I've discovered that I was actually being asked a slightly different question: "what can I do that won't take up much time or cause me much inconvenience."
It's a frustrating question, but a fair one. Scientists, like most other academics, tend to be overworked and underpaid - particularly in the university setting. Most of the…
tqa | February 21, 2007Quite a few of the others here at Scienceblogs have already taken a few minutes to poke fun at the new radical right attempt at creating an encyclopedia - Conservapedia. (See, for example, here, here, here, here, and here for just a few.) I sort of feel bad about joining in, in a way - the site is so pathetic that it's almost more sad than funny - but the key word there is "almost." Conservapedia is worthless as an intellectual resource, but it's a fantastic repository of accidental humor. There's enough there that if I ever find myself at a loss for a source of stupidity to blog about, I…
tqa | February 20, 2007PZ has a brief post up commenting on an article on the Lippard Blog about a "dog" target that is routinely shot by DEA agents training for raids. Both link to an article that provides a list of numerous cases where police have killed pets. I think my take on the situation is a bit different from either of theirs, probably because of my past EMS experience.
At the start, I want to be clear that I am in no way shape or form endorsing the routine slaughter of pets. I am also not endorsing or excusing the examples of violence against animals that were given in the reason.com article. There is no…
tqa | February 20, 2007Earlier today, I got an email from a gentlemanlawyer named Mark Fitzgibbons. Mr. Fitzgibbons had apparently just read one of my posts about the "astroturf lobbying" bill. (It's encouraging to note that Mr. Fitzgibbons, who claims to be very concerned with the effect of this legislation on blogging, does such a good job of keeping up to date with what blogs are saying about the legislation.)
Since I wrote the original two posts on the topic, the senate (unfortunately) removed the language from their version of the bill. GrassrootsFreedom.com, which is the organization that sent out the…
tqa | February 17, 2007It isn't possible to adequately describe what a long military deployment is like for those left behind, but I'm going to try anyway. I'm going to try, even though I know that my own experience and my own views aren't necessarily going to reflect what others in similar situations are going through. I'm going to try, even though I've tried three times before now, and chickened out before clicking on the publish button every time. I'm going to try, in my own inadequate way, to describe something I've only recently come to realize - the degree to which my own feelings about the war affect the way…
tqa | February 16, 2007According to media reports, the anti-impotence drug Viagra was recently used in the UK to save the life of a premature infant. Yes, you did read that right. This case was apparently an instance where necessity and desperation were the mothers of invention, and it shows us just why it is so important for doctors to learn the basics of human physiology, instead of just "cookbook" medicine. It also shows the scientific method at work, in a real-life situation.
The problem was this: the baby, Lewis Goodfellow, was born extraordinarily prematurely, after only 24 weeks of gestation, and weighed in…
tqa | February 16, 2007I was watching M*A*S*H a few days back and saw this scene. For some reason, I can't quite get it out of my mind.
Frank: Well, everybody knows war is hell.
BJ: Remember, you heard it here last.
Hawkeye: War isn't hell. War is war and hell is hell, and of the two war is a lot worse.
Fr. Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Simple, father. Tell me, who goes to hell?
Fr. Mulchay: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in hell. But war is chock full of them. Little kids, cripples, old ladies, in fact, except for a few of the brass almost everybody involved is…
tqa | February 14, 2007But seriously, folks, watch the video. Franken does the best job of explaining what government is for that I've seen in a long, long time.
tqa | February 14, 2007Presidential hopeful John Edwards just released his plan for ending the Iraq war, making him the second of the major Democratic candidates to announce a proposed solution to our involvement in the conflict (Barack Obama sponsored a bill, S.433, last month that is in the Senate.) Looking at the two, I think Obama's proposal is by far the more reasonable (and realistic). It's certainly the more nuanced, and the one that provides the most flexibility to deal with changing circumstances.
Let's look at the two proposals. Edwards proposes:
Cap funding for the troops in Iraq at 100,000 troops to…
tqa | February 12, 2007As you may know, today is the 198th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Birthday wishes have been posted on a number of blogs, as an assortment of scientists and scientific enthusiasts mark the occasion. For my own little tribute to Mr. Darwin, I'm going to talk about why he is the subject of such admiration from scientists when others who were involved in the discovery of the history of life are not.
The admiration for Darwin has little to do with what the Discovery Institute calls, "The Deification of Charles Darwin." This is not a case of where we, "celebrate the birth of [our]…
tqa | February 8, 2007In an article made available today on the New England Journal of Medicine's website, University of Chicago researchers report on the results of a study that assessed how the moral beliefs of physicians affect their advice to patients. There is good news and bad news in this study. The good news is that most physicians believe that they have an ethical obligation to inform their patients of all possible courses of action, including those that they believe are morally objectionable. The bad news is that there is a substantial minority who do not think that they need to tell the patient about…
tqa | February 8, 2007PZ Myers reports (and the report is confirmed on both CNN's and Richard Dawkins' websites) that tonights episode (Thursday, 8 Feb, 8pm Eastern) of Paula Zahn Now will revisit the story of the atheists, and replace the uninformed panel discussion with an interview of Richard Dawkins. As much as I'd love to think that this is due to my call for a boycott (and the dozen or two responses that it's already accumulated), the real credit for this one goes to others. In particular, credit is do to PZ for spreading the news - his post on the original story was widely linked to, and widely read - and…
tqa | February 7, 2007Update: It appears that CNN will be re-airing the story at 8 pm Eastern tonight (Thursday, 8 Feb). The original panel will be replaced by an interview with Richard Dawkins.
A recent CNN story on atheism has sparked a great deal of outrage from the online atheist community. The story, which was broadcast on the January 31st edition of Paula Zahn Now (transcript) (video) detailed the plight of two families of atheists who say they were ostracized from their communities as the result of their beliefs - in one case, just for having identified themselves as atheists, and in another for objecting…
tqa | February 6, 2007Representative Dave Weldon (R-FL) recently issued a press release that has been getting a little bit of play at a couple of blogs on the political right. In the press release, Weldon accuses Democrats of taking money from NASA to fund other projects, including AIDS relief for Africa:
"The raid on NASA's budget has begun in earnest. The cuts announced today by House Democrat leaders, if approved by Congress, would be nearly $400 million less than NASA's current budget," said Weldon.
"Clearly, the new Democrat leadership in the House isn't interested in space exploration. Their omnibus proposal…
tqa | February 5, 2007A couple of years ago, when I was just starting on my graduate career, I decided to investigate the possibility of studying a feral population of rock wallabies that lives in one of the valleys above Honolulu. I (finally) wound up deciding that these animals weren't the best group to use to study the questions I was interested in, but along the way I had a hell of a lot of fun hiking in this valley, picking up wallaby droppings for use in genetic work (John Wilkins took some fairly incriminating pictures of me as a result).
Like many things that are involved in actually doing science, the…
tqa | February 5, 2007Looking through the few months worth of posts here, it occurs to me that I haven't done a lot with one of the first categories I set up - the "An Incomplete Autobiography" one. I'm going to try and start to use it a little more - it's the place where I'm going to put the various little stories about how I got to be who (and where) I am today. It should surprise nobody who knows me to discover that a lot of these stories are going to involve me looking dumb, and almost all are going to be a bit on the strange side.
In part, that's because the strange stories are really the only ones worth…