tqa | January 7, 2008
I haven't been blogging much over the last couple of weeks, for a variety of reasons. But it's a new year, a couple of side products that were sucking away my will to live have been wrapped up, and the kids are heading out the door and back to school. It's definitely a good time to get back into the swing of things.
tqa | December 28, 2007
The Democratic Congressional "leadership" apparently thought that they could get the defense bill passed and signed into law if they caved in and gave President Bush everything he asked for. As it turns out, they were wrong. The smirking sub-simian and his Merry Band of Machiavellian Men just announced that they have decided to veto the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2008.
For those of you who don't remember this bill, it's the annual big money package that funds the military. It's one of the bills that the administration threatened to veto if Congress tried to actually…
tqa | December 17, 2007
One of the first pieces of legislation on the United States Senate's agenda for today will be the revision of the FISA wiretapping bill. The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is planning to move forward a bill that would retroactively grant immunity to the telecommunications companies who allegedly assisted the government by illegally handing over the phone records of millions of Americans. The "get out of jail free" provision in question is favored by the White House and Republicans, but opposed by many Democrats.
In bringing the bill to the floor, Reid is disregarding longstanding…
tqa | December 16, 2007
When Richard Dawkins and Bill O'Reilly are on the same side of an issue, it's a surprise. When it's an issue that involves religion in the public sphere, it's quite possibly a sign that the apocalypse is drawing nigh. Nevertheless, that seems to be the case at the moment.
Bill O'Reilly's views on the Christmas season are well known. He thinks that the phrase "happy holidays" was cooked up by "secular progressives" in an attempt to wage some kind of "war on Christmas", and that all good Americans should fight back by saying "Merry Christmas" as loudly as possible. Most recently, he's…
tqa | December 12, 2007
Terry Pratchett just announced that he's been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's. He's at least somewhat upbeat, though:
PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell. I know it's a very human thing to say "Is there anything I can do", but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.
I'll resist that "very…
tqa | December 11, 2007
I took two years of German not all that long ago, but I can't really say I learned the language. I can pick out words here and there, make it to the bathroom, and say "I'm sorry, but my German is terrible". That last bit was the one that came most in handy when I was there for a couple of days last year.
Fortunately, I've got some incentive to improve my language skills. There's a good chance that we'll be moving out there in a couple of years, which wasn't a bad incentive, but hasn't been enough to get me off my butt yet. Fortunately, I've just been given another incentive: there's now a…
tqa | December 11, 2007
Last night, in Oslo, Al Gore delivered a simple, powerful message. It's a familiar message to anyone who has watched him speak since 2000, or watched his movie, or read his books. It's simply a call for nothing more or less than the need for all of us to accept responsibility for the effects of our actions:
So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the…
tqa | December 10, 2007
Why - and when - do bridges fail? How and why does veterinary usage of some medications pose a risk to humans? How important is it to be absolutely certain that global warming is causing an increase in hurricane strength before taking action on the issue? How important is space exploration? How much money should we spend on science education? Do we need to re-examine the way the federal government handles its many science research agencies?
All of those questions - and many, many others that involve science - have the potential to shape the future of the United States for better or worse…
tqa | December 7, 2007
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated eleven years, four months, and one day before I was born, but I miss him. There are issues today where his voice is needed even more than it was needed in 1960. But Kennedy is dead and buried, but the issues of religion he had to confront are not. And his voice needs to be heard, because Kennedy was firm in his stand, he was eloquent in the way he expressed it, and he was right.
Yesterday, Mitt Romney gave a speech on religion that many have compared to Kennedy's. And it's not an entirely unreasonable comparison. Like Kennedy, Romney gave his…
tqa | December 6, 2007
Poor Rob Crowther seems to be having a bad week. First, his big Iowa press conference turned out to be a total non-event. Then, it turned out that some of the people who did mention the press conference didn't quite manage to spin it the way he was hoping for. The Ames Tribune, in particular, seems to have sparked his ire. His response to them is well worth the read - the first sentence, in particular, is quite simply one of the most (unintentionally, of course) funny things I've seen in a long time:
The Ames Tribune editorial today tries to make out that Discovery Institute is more…
tqa | December 6, 2007
With all of the renewed fuss the Discovery Institute is trying to stir up over the Gonzalez tenure thing, this seems like a really good time to talk about the role of money in the tenure process. I'm not going to do this because the money issue is one that the Discovery folks are frantically trying to distract attention from (they are) or because Gonzalez's inability to land external funds means that he'd be a very weak candidate for tenure even if he wasn't involved in ID (it does). I'm going to look at the role of money in the process because it's hugely important, for more reasons than…
tqa | December 3, 2007
The Discovery Institute is currently making hay (again) over Iowa State's decision to deny tenure to Discovery Institute Fellow Guillermo Gonzalez. They've held a press conference and issued a press release claiming to have proof that Intelligent Design was "the" issue that resulted in Gonzalez not receiving tenure. I've read the release, and I'm unconvinced.
For starters, their release relies heavily on fragmentary quotes taken from emails that they obtained through an open records inquiry. Given the notorious track record of the entire anti-evolution movement when it comes to quoting…
tqa | November 29, 2007
Apparently, the Virginia Republican Party has been getting nostalgic for the good old days at the end of the Cold War. You remember those days, right? Ronald Reagan was saying things like, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" and "we begin bombing in five minutes" . Ollie North was sitting in front of Congress and claiming to have the memory of a repeatedly concussed goldfish. And the Republicans looked likely to hold onto the White House forever. Given present circumstances, it's easy to see why the Virginia GOP might be getting a wee bit nostalgic. Unfortunately, in their enthusiasm to…
tqa | November 27, 2007
I haven't always had as much concern about copyright infringement as I do now, but I've always considered it to be a given that copyright infringement involves taking something that doesn't belong to you without paying the owner. Taking something that doesn't belong to you without paying the owner is, at least under any system of ethics that I'm familiar with, theft. Not "something like theft". It is theft.
I was surprised (and a little disappointed) to find that a handful of people over at Pharyngula don't seem to understand that view. There's a discussion going on over there right now in…
tqa | November 26, 2007
One of the joys of procrastination is that sometimes if you wait long enough, someone else really will take care of things. I mention that because Ed Brayton just did a good job dismantling Casey Luskin's latest whine about how big bad Judge Jones was such a nasty judicial activist for daring to issue a ruling in the Dover, PA Intelligent Design case that addressed the question of whether or not ID is good science. I was planning a long and detailed post on the same thing, but now all that I have to do is highlight one point that Ed didn't make in his post.
As Ed points out, there were a…
tqa | November 25, 2007
Verse one of Chapter 11 of the Letter of Paul to the Hebrews reads (in the King James translation of the Bible): "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." I mention this not because it is Sunday, or because I intend to offer a sermon, but because when I hear the word "faith," the definition that comes into my mind first is "the evidence of things not seen." By that definition, I have a very hard time thinking of science as requiring faith. If anything, "science" is the exact opposite of "faith". The body of knowledge that we call "science" consists of…
tqa | November 14, 2007
You wouldn't necessarily know it from looking at most major American news sources, but there's a massive tropical cyclone in the Bay of Bengal right now, and it's heading right for one of the most vulnerable areas on the planet. If the most recent storm track predictions are accurate, the eye of the storm will most likely make landfall somewhere between Calcutta and the mouth of the main channel of the Ganges. Currently, the most optimistic forecasts suggest that the wind speeds at landfall will be in the neighborhood of 115 knots (132 mph) - and there's some data suggesting that it could be…
tqa | November 12, 2007
Two unions representing professions involved in the entertainment industry are on strike right now - Broadway stagehands in New York, and writers for both big- and little-screen productions nationwide. These strikes - especially the writers' one - have stirred up some discussion about online writing in general (and blogging in particular), and how non-traditional writers might benefit from unionization. From fellow Scienceblogger Chris Mooney:
Meanwhile, on to bloggers, who are entirely dismissed as workers ... because blogging is somehow supposed to be fun or a hobby. Well, guess what:…
tqa | November 12, 2007
The fine folks at the Discovery Institute aren't happy with tomorrow's PBS documentary on the Dover Intelligent Design case, and they're doing their best to make sure that everyone knows just how unhappy they are. They've been frantically tossing articles up on their Media Complaints Division Blog trying to make sure that their version of reality gets some exposure. I'm not going to bother going through all of their complaints right now. Most of their new material consists of a rehashing of discredited arguments from when the ruling came out. There's one post that caught my eye, though,…
tqa | November 9, 2007
I was just watching the Today Show a couple of minutes ago. They're getting ready to set up the Christmas Tree, and someone from the Center was just talking about their new, environmentally-friendly approach to the tree. Apparently, this year they used a handsaw to trim up the base instead of a power saw. They're also going to be stringing the tree with power-saving LED lighting instead of the usual bulbs. And they were discussing all of this right next to the 84-foot high tree that they cut down to use as a holiday decoration.