tqa | July 1, 2008
Charles Darwin was not the father of atheism - Telegraph
Decent article on Darwin and religion in yesterday's Telegraph.
(tags: religion Darwin atheism)
Science and maths exams are harder than arts subjects, say researchers | News crumb | EducationGuardian.co.uk
Kicking things off, we've got an entry in the "now tell me something I didn't know" subject area. (Yes, I'm a science snob, what can I say.)
(tags: education science)
Coalition troop deaths in Afghanistan surpass Iraq - CNN.com
This is two months in a row now. And it's not because things in Iraq have gotten that much better.…
tqa | July 1, 2008
It's a little bit loud at the new Authority Family residence right now. The guys in the picture are practicing right overhead at the moment. The dog's in the bathtub, and the cat just did a backflip.
As always, feel free to click the thumbnail above for the full size version. That picture was taken at one of last week's practices. 1/500th of a second at f/8 using a 180mm lens.
tqa | June 30, 2008
Dispatches from the Culture Wars: AFA's Search/Replace Function Works Perfectly
This has got to be one of the funniest screw-ups I've run into in a very long time. There's nothing like watching the American Family Association repeatedly call the fastest man in the world gay a homosexual - over and over and over again.
(tags: oops)
French soldier 'accidentally' shoots 17 spectators at military show - Telegraph
This is why you never, ever, ever, point any real firearm at anything that you are not willing to destroy. Assuming, of course, that the soldier in question actually managed to…
tqa | June 30, 2008
For a number of reasons, I've been gone from my own blog for most of the last couple of months. Moving had something to do with it, but I think the biggest reason was that after two years as part of the ScienceBlogs collective and something like a year or so on my own before that, I just plain needed a break.
I'm back, the batteries are recharged, and I've got absolutely no idea what you'll be seeing here over the coming weeks and months. I know I want to do some things differently, but I learned a while ago not to make promises - even to myself - about what I'm going to change. This time…
tqa | June 8, 2008
Senator John McCain, it appears, is not a fan of William Jennings Bryan. In a recent interview with USA Today, the Republican Party's nominee for President compared the three-time Democratic nominee for president from the turn of the last century to the Party's current nominee:
"I believe that people are interested very much in substance," McCain said. "If it was simply style, William Jennings Bryan would have been president." (Bryan, a noted orator, lost three presidential elections as the Democratic nominee in 1896, 1900 and 1908.)
It would be easy for me to dismiss McCain's dislike of…
tqa | May 14, 2008
The following quote is taken verbatim from the transcript of an interview that President Bush did with Politico.com yesterday. I'm presenting it without any further comment, because there really isn't a hell of a lot than can be said - and we're still stuck with the shallow little twit for the next 251 days:
Q Mr. President, you haven't been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, it really is. I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as -- to be in solidarity as…
tqa | May 5, 2008
Since the beginning of March, I've been putting in a lot of time at a part-time job. I needed to get out of the house a lot more than I had been, and a friend needed people for his smoothie cart business. It's not rocket science, but it's not all that bad a way to kill time while making a little bit of money. It's also given me some insights into various aspects of life that I hadn't spent much time thinking about.
One of the insights involves just how many people there are out there who are on diets that they absolutely don't understand.
I've lost count of the number of people who have…
tqa | May 5, 2008
You may have noticed a lack of new posts on this blog over the last few weeks. There are a few reasons for this, most of which involve being busy doing other things. I've been working a lot of hours at a part time job that doesn't allow for much online activity. We're also getting ready to relocate (again) - this time to Pensacola, Florida. Both of those factors will pretty much be done with by the middle of June. Until then, though, I'm not going to be able to blog as much as I'd like.
tqa | April 30, 2008
Back at the beginning of April, ATA airlines suddenly went out of business. With no prior warning, they filed for bankruptcy and suspended all flights. This decision was sparked by FedEx's still unexplained decision to drop ATA from the group of airlines that they use to fulfill their military charter contracts as of October 1st.
Before going belly-up, ATA did a lot of military charter business. So much, in fact, that the loss of the carrier means that troops are still facing delays of several days in coming home from the war zone. Apparently, FedEx has been unwilling to suck up the extra…
tqa | April 22, 2008
Senator Hillary Clinton has apparently decided to join John McCain in calling for a "gas tax" holiday for the summer. Their plan would suspend the 18.4 cent per gallon tax on gas (and the 24.4 cent tax on diesel fuel) from Memorial Day to Labor Day, giving consumers a temporary break from the high cost of fuel. If, that is, the companies that sell the fuel don't decide to raise their prices and erase the relief.
In a Presidential campaign season that's been marked by more than its fair share of stupid ideas, this one's still a standout. Nothing says "responsible leadership" (or, for that…
tqa | April 22, 2008
On Sunday, Chris Mooney and Randy Olsen both tried to make the case that Ben Stein's "Evolution Caused the Holocaust" movie was a success at the box office. Both of them have been rather spectacularly condemned for calling Expelled a success, but I'm not sure that they're entirely wrong. I just don't think that they took a hard enough look at some of the issues involved.
Let's start with the basic facts. Expelled hit theaters on Friday. It was aggressively marketed prior to release, and opened on 1,052 screens - the most ever for any documentary. On Sunday, estimates suggested that the…
tqa | April 17, 2008
Casey Luskin is currently in the middle of a multi-part "rebuttal" to Michael Shermer's review of Expelled. In the latest installment of his whine, Casey (again) brings up the case of Richard Sternberg. Sternberg, some of you might remember, orchestrated the publication of a pro-Intelligent Design paper near the end of his term as editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
As punishment for this heinous crime, Sternberg suffered the indignity of not getting fired from the unpaid editorship that he had quit months before the paper actually appeared. His punishment…
tqa | April 14, 2008
Bruce Chapman has an article up over at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints blog that is really a must read. There are several statements in there that would qualify as absurd even by DI standards (like the one where he talks about someone being "outranked" by other scientists), but one in particular is so totally off the top that I'm having problems thinking of an anti-evolutionist statement that tops it. (If you can think of one, feel free to cite it in the comments.)
The following quote is taken directly from Chapman's article. I'm going to place it below the fold to give you a…
tqa | April 7, 2008
The anticipation of reading is almost always wonderful, but the actual reading is often frustrating. You can spend hours enjoying the wonderful indecision of the bookstore before you walk away with the comforting weight of a new release hardcover in your hand. The book can sit on the coffee table for days, weeks, or months before you finally find the time to sit down with it. At some point, you finally find time some quiet evening to pick up the book, sit yourself down with a nice glass of the beverage of your choice, and open the cover. And by page six, you're wondering what on earth the…
tqa | April 3, 2008
This one probably isn't the hardest quiz I've come up with, but give it a shot anyway. Here's the question: how is the specific airplane in this picture connected to atmospheric science research?
Let's try something new this week: email your answer to me at dunford@scienceblogs.com instead of posting it in the comments. I'll announce the names of everyone to get the right answer on Monday.
tqa | April 1, 2008
Given that today really is April 1st, let me start by saying that although Behe is a fool, this post isn't a joke. Everything you're about to read is real. This is the third part of my post on the summary judgment decision in the California Creationist Case. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.
It would seem that Mike Behe has, once again, managed to shoot an own goal in the courtroom. The last time that he was an expert witness, during the Dover case, the judge quoted extensively from Behe's testimony, but not in a way that he particularly liked. Ultimately, it seems that he scored more…
tqa | April 1, 2008
(This is Part 2 of a three part post on Friday's summary judgment ruling in the ACSI v. Stearns creationism lawsuit. Part 1 is here; Part 3 will be up later today.)
If you read Judge Otero's ruling on the summary judgment motions in the California Creationist Case, you'll see that he discovered something that most of us already know: if you're looking for dubious argument tactics, you'll almost always find them when you're reading things written by professional creationists. In the case of the California lawsuit, the Christian schools are being represented by the law firm of Wendell Bird.…
tqa | April 1, 2008
On Friday, Judge James Otero of the Central District of California issued a ruling granting the University of California's request for partial summary judgment in the California Creationist Lawsuit. I've written about this case several times before now, but it's been a long time since the last update, so before I get into the details of the ruling, I'm going to quickly review the details of the case.
In 2005, a group of plaintiffs that includes the Association of Christian Schools International, Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murietta, and the parents of several students filed a…
tqa | March 31, 2008
Last week, SUNY Stony Brook neurosurgeon and anti-evolution mouthpiece Michael Egnor decided to keep driving on with his "you don't need to understand Darwinian evolution to understand antibiotic resistance" crusade. His post is - predictably enough - a mass of loosely connected logical fallacies. One of the most egregious of these is his attempt to assume one of the points that he wanted to argue:
First, two definitions:
Natural selection is selection in nature, presumably arising without intelligent agency. An example of natural selection would be the differential reproduction of…
tqa | March 30, 2008
One of several reasons that my posting frequency has been low lately is that my internet connection has been miserable. As in dial-up speed miserable. As in so slow that the online tools that measure connection speed have been showing me that I'm getting download speeds that I haven't had to experience since I upgraded to a 28.8k modem back in the mid-90s.
So I call Comcast. Yes, their tools also show a big connection speed problem. No, there's probably not anything I can do on my end to fix it. Yes, they can set up a service call to have the problem fixed. They'll be able to squeeze me in…