tqa | February 10, 2009If you're following the ongoing discussion Tim Sandefur and I are having on whether or not the federal government should fund science at all, there's a new article you should really go read. Stanford Professor Steve Quake has a guest column up at Olivia Judson's blog that talks about the way we currently fund science and makes some suggestions about how things can be improved.
tqa | February 10, 2009Tonight, instead of playing around with the front page and the news items at Conservapedia, I clicked their "random page" link. The first click brought me to their entry for The Thrawn Trilogy - a series of Star Wars novels. This particular entry was entirely plagiarized from this Star Wars wiki, with one minor exception - they left out three words.
tqa | February 10, 2009
Tim Sandefur and I don't agree about the proper role of government when it comes to funding scientific research. He fairly strongly believes that there are many reasons why it's wrong for the government to fund scientific research. Tim's provided a number of reasons to support his belief, and I agreed to use my blog as a platform to make my own case for the involvement of government in science.
In the abstract, many of the reasons that the government should not be involved in funding research sound fairly compelling. Unfortunately, those arguments were made on the internet. At the end of…
tqa | February 9, 2009...but here's a new(ish) Conservapedia howler for you. This one comes from their news page entry for Super Bowl Sunday:
An overweight and over-the-hill Bruce Springsteen is performing songs from the 1980s at the Super Bowl halftime. Wonder why? He supports the liberal agenda hook, line and sinker. But he hasn't yet performed his "Born in the U.S.A." ... perhaps Obama types wouldn't like that one???
Andy Schlafly, this tinfoil hat's for you.
tqa | February 9, 2009Timothy Sandefur and I recently wound up arguing the pros and cons of government funding for basic scientific research. We've decided to take our discussion from email to our blogs.
Tim is a libertarian, and it's safe to say that he's not the world's largest fan of government funding for most things, including science. He just posted a detailed explanation of his position at his blog Freespace. I'll be posting a response here sometime tomorrow.
If you're convinced that it's obviously good to have the government fund scientific research, I'd suggest that you go read Tim's post.
tqa | February 8, 2009
There is little doubt that if there is any one person serving in the United States Senate who can be identified as anti-science, it is Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe. He's called global warming a "hoax", tried to pass a novelist off as a climate-change expert at a Senate hearing, and referred to the work of the IPCC as a "corruption of science". He had Senate committee staffers issue a press release blasting Tom Brokaw's objectivity on the climate change issue. We're talking about a sitting Senator who has been such a consistent and vocal opponent of science that the president of the…
tqa | February 8, 2009The walking collection of pathetically cruel hominids known as Westboro Baptist staged a protest at a high school recently. This particular high school attracted their attention because last year it elected a gay male student as "prom king/queen". The students responded with a counter-protest:
The student body protest, as organized by Jake Davidson, a pupil and
representative, was a peaceful affair with the Phelps clan confined
mainly to the north side of the street and the student body
counter-protest to the south with a slew of over a dozen police
officers between them.
Shawnee students…
tqa | February 7, 2009A series of articles just published in The Sunday Times reports that it appears likely that Andrew Wakefield falsified much of the data that was used in the 1998 Lancet article that first identified the MMR vaccine as a potential cause of autism. If the charges leveled by the paper are remotely accurate, Wakefield is guilty of homicide - perhaps not legally, but certainly morally. If previous claims made by the paper are accurate, Wakefield may have acted for financial gain.
If even a fraction of the accusations leveled by The Times are true, Wakefield engaged in absolutely outrageous…
tqa | February 7, 2009A bit later than promised, here's the clip from last night's Rachel Maddow show where she so accurately described the current Republican strategy when it comes to the stimulus bill.
Here's the high point:
Republicans may not like it but the way to create jobs fast is through spending. It matters when you're wrong. A whopping proportion of the Republican rhetoric about stimulus is wrong - total economic bull puckey. It's time to take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information.
The video's below the fold. You really should watch it.
*/
Visit msnbc.com…
tqa | February 6, 2009
Unfortunately, it's Rachel Maddow. I say unfortunately not because I dislike Rachel (I don't), but because it would be really, really, really nice if the making sense thing was coming from one of our elected officials. I'll slap the clip up on this blog, with some of the juicier quotes, as soon as it's available (probably tomorrow morning).
tqa | February 6, 2009I'm about to say something that I very rarely say: good for Harry Reid. Every now and then he does something that threatens to threaten his well-earned reputation for spinelessness. Today seems to be one of those days. Apparently, he's informed Olympia Snowe that if she wants to see cuts on the spending side of the stimulus, she better be prepared to trim some of the "tax relief" side, too.
tqa | February 6, 2009TPM has a list of stimulus cuts that a group of senators led by Democrat Ben Nelson and Republican Susan Collins have proposed. The cuts are at 77.9 billion and growing, and include a great deal of the science-related spending. On the chopping block:
750 million - half the proposed increase - of funding for NASA exploration
1.4 billion - from the NSF line. That's the entire proposed increase
427 million - 1/3 of the proposal - from NOAA
218 million - almost 40% - from NIST
1 billion - 38% - from the DOE Energy Efficiency/Renewable Energy line
100 million - from the DOE office of science line…
tqa | February 6, 2009
We're pretty familiar with hotspot volcanoes on earth. A rising plume of magma reaches to the crust, creating a volcano. The magma plumes can that cause the hotspots stay in the same spot for tens of millions of years, but plate tectonics works to keep the crust moving above the plume. The result is a series of volcanoes, with a small number of active volcanoes over the hotspot, at the end of a line of extinct volcanoes that trace the plate's movement.
The Hawaiian Islands are the classic example of this process on earth.
In this Google Earth view, the Big Island of Hawaii (at the…
tqa | February 5, 2009When people arrive at this blog via the google, it's usually because they're searching for a combination of words that doesn't produce a lot of hits. Often, it's a series of words that looks suspiciously like things that have to do with some sort of homework assignment.
Earlier tonight, someone punched "Compare and contrast between peace and War" into google.ca. The fourth item on the results list was a post from early 2007 that probably didn't help our searching student much. (Unless, of course, they were looking for an exposition of former President George W. Bush's flaws.)
It's unlikely…
tqa | February 5, 2009
Representative Tom Coburn (R-OK) has submitted the following amendment to the stimulus bill:
None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available under this act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, arts center, or highway beautification project, including renovation, remodeling, construction, salaries, furniture, zero-gravity chairs, big-screen televisions, beautification, rotating pastel lights, and dry heat saunas.
This is not a good amendment, even if we completely…
tqa | February 5, 2009
...because it's been more than 10 days since their "hit man" sent me the warning.
I'd forgotten how amusing a good email scam can be, because the filter in my gmail account has gotten pretty good at figuring out what's spam and what's not. I was reminded a few minutes ago when I went in and looked at a dormant email account of mine that I hadn't opened for a few months:
fromjohnkiki014 Gazeta.pl <johnkiki014@gazeta.pl>todateMon, Jun 23, 2008 at 7:54 AMsubjectSOMEONE YOU CALL YOUR FRIEND, WANTS YOU DEAD.mailed-bygazeta.pl
I felt very sorry and bad for you, that your life is going to…
tqa | February 4, 2009
Ed Yong has a nice article up about a new fossil find. This one is megafauna that probably wouldn't be very charismatic up close - a fifty foot, two thousand pound + snake.
Over at Wired Science, there's an article about some fossilized traces that represent the earliest evidence of multicellular life yet found - a chemical that's produced only by sponges that's turned up in 635 million year old rocks.
tqa | February 3, 2009
An article published tonight in the journal PLoS ONE is forcing scientists to rethink everything they thought they knew about whale evolution.
OK. That's not actually true. But I've got a bet going that "someone" is going to use the phrase "rethink everything" in their story about this find, so better safe than sorry. Plus, it's a way cooler lede than "new whale fossil discovery matches predictions beautifully", even if the mundane description is the one that's just the tiniest bit more accurate.
Seriously, though, a multinational team of authors led by University of Michigan rock star…
tqa | February 3, 2009
It occurs to me that I should add a caveat to yesterday's post about the politics and pomposity of referring to yourself as "Doctor". There is in fact at least one set of circumstances that can make referring to yourself as "Dr." pompous to the point of being hysterically funny: when your "doctorate" comes out of a crackerjack box, but you then proceed to use the "Dr." title at absolutely every possible opportunity, including your listing in the local phone book.
The image comes from a now out-of-date Pensacola phone book. The cropping and blurring are deliberate, and intended to…
tqa | February 2, 2009
What's more pompous: an accomplished professional woman who went back to school and earned a doctorate at age 55, or a newspaper setting itself up as the arbiter of who should be allowed to use that title?
The LA Times apparently thinks that the person who earned the degree is the pompous one, but that's not really much of a surprise, since they're the ones claiming the mantle of arbiter of faith and morals in this case. Apparently, they don't think people should use the title "Doctor" unless they're MDs. In support of their position, they trotted out a number of dubious quotes from…