tqa | April 13, 2007
Dr. Michael Egnor, creationist neurosurgeon and Discovery Institute blogger, has a problem. Either he hasn't figured out that we're way past April Fools Day, or he has just managed to produce what might just be the single dumbest anti-evolution argument that I have ever seen. We're talking about a demonstration of absolute, rock-bottom, Kent-Hovind-eat-your-heart-out, triple-distilled essence of pure stupid.
The argument today - and I warn anyone who knows anything at all about evolution to put down all food and drinks right now - is that if evolution was right, we should see some brain…
tqa | April 13, 2007
The big news here today is all about evolution - we've got the rhesus monkey genome and Tyrannosaurus rex protein sequences published. There's also some cool science policy stuff to look at - there's information on abstinence-only sex ed and more manatee material available. Finally, we've got an excellent - although sad and nearly tragic - example of how government policies can (if followed) help reduce injuries in certain situations.
More Monkey Business:
As I mentioned yesterday, the rhesus macaque genome was released yesterday. Carl Zimmer wrote an excellent blog post on the project,…
tqa | April 12, 2007
In what is undoubtedly one of the more spectacular cases of bad staff work in recent political history, Rudy Giuliani flunked the "Mr. Candidate, what's the going price for a gallon of milk?" pop quiz. (His estimates for the prices of milk and bread were substantially too low, but he was pretty close on the gallon of gas question.) Some bloggers - both conservative and liberal - and some mainstream media commentators have been wondering what the big deal is. Mr. Giuliani, they point out, probably doesn't buy his own milk, and even if he does his mind is probably on other things.
More than…
tqa | April 12, 2007
Senator Daniel Inouye,
Senator Daniel Akaka,
Senator Hillary Clinton,
Senator Charles Schumer,
Representative Eliot Engel,
Representative Neil Abercrombie,
I am the husband of a currently deployed Army officer stationed in Hawaii, and with a home of record in New York. I'm writing today for two reasons: to thank you for your support of emergency war funding legislation that included a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq and to ask you to take an additional step and require that any additional funding for the current conflict be paid for immediately, through a tax increase.
When my wife was…
tqa | April 12, 2007
I took a stroll over to the Campus Center here at UH Manoa a couple of hours ago, and was treated to an interesting sight. UH has been engaged in discussions with the Navy for a couple of years now about the possibility of getting Manoa designated as one of the Navy's University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC). There are a fair number of people on campus who are very much opposed to the idea, mostly because of concerns over the possibility of weapons research and/or classified research programs being conducted here. Personally, I'm not sure where I stand on the issue. I'm not a huge fan…
tqa | April 12, 2007
Today, let's start with a note about the title. Yesterday, I got an email from a reader (I'm not sure which of the two of you it was) who was wondering why the "Morning Roundup" appeared on his screen after he got home from work. I think Jimmy Buffett covered that one best when he said, "it's 5 O'clock somewhere." Scienceblogs is a New-York based operation, and to avoid massive confusion that's the time zone we all use when we post. I'm living six hours behind New York, which means that my morning news usually includes half the day's events.
In the quick roundup today, we've got some…
tqa | April 11, 2007
I wrote a little bit about this earlier today, but I was a little too angry at the time to write anything meaningful or coherent. I'm still pretty angry, but I'm going to take another swing at it anyway.
Last night, around this time, I wrote a little rant venting my frustration at the way that the White House has been using the military as political cover. I was pretty angry last night - so angry that I couldn't remember ever being angrier - and I said just that. I'm a scientist, and I pride myself on being a man of reason and rationality, but I've still got a sneaking suspicion that I…
tqa | April 11, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut passed away today at the age of 84.
As John Stewart put it at the start of the interview embedded below, he's the man who made adolescence bearable for a lot of us.
The best Vonnegut quote from the Daily Show interview is, "I do feel that evolution is being controlled by some sort of divine engineer. I can't help thinking that. And this engineer knows exactly what he or she is doing and why, and where evolution is headed. That's why we've got giraffes and hippopotami and the clap."
My favorite quote at the moment comes from a 2005 essay:
But I know now that there is not a…
tqa | April 11, 2007
The more you look for news, the more you find, I guess. It's another morning with a lot of interesting stuff happening.
In the quick roundup/commentary today, we've got John McCain's brains continuing to liquify and escape, a really embarrassing White House personnel problem (a new one), an unholy environmental alliance, a hell of a lot of really good blogging (mostly by other people), and a massively cool Google partnership that might just show us how to educate more Americans about global problems.
OK, Egor, Where did you hide McCain's brains?
John McCain just cant figure out when or…
tqa | April 11, 2007
In a just-called Pentagon press conference, Defense Secretary Gates just announced that tours of duty for all Army soldiers in Iraq are being extended from 12 to 15 months. Speaking as someone who has an immediate family member deployed, I would just like to take this brief opportunity to thank the Secretary of Defense for having the compassion and decency to allow CNN and Fox to break the news to me gently, as I strolled past a friggin television in the campus center. I'm sure that a television announcement to the American people is a much more compassionate method of breaking the news than…
tqa | April 11, 2007
I know what I feel, and I don't like it. I don't know what to say, and I don't like that, either.
I've been trying to write this post for two hours and three beers now, and I've spent most of that time staring at a blank white box on the screen. I've started to write things time after time, and I've deleted them time after time, and for all I know I'll throw out this attempt five minutes from now. Or maybe not. It's been another hour and another two beers and I don't seem to have managed to write anything else, but those few words are still staring back at me as I look into the screen.…
tqa | April 10, 2007
"You are entitled to your own opinions. You are not entitled to your own facts."
-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up to provide a way for leading scientists to sit down together, evaluate all of the available data on climate change, and present the public and policymakers with the best possible overview of the current state of the science. It exists to assess and present the facts. We need to know the facts. We need to know what has happened, what is happening, and what is likely to happen in the future. Without that knowledge,…
tqa | April 10, 2007
Today is another high blogging load kind of day, and like many high blogging load days it coincides nicely with a high workload day, so there's no way I'm going to be able to write about everything cool. So, I'm going to do what I did yesterday - talk about them all really briefly now, and then hit one or two of the best later on.
In the lineup today, we've got some real winners. One of my commenters highlighted a really stupid John McCain op-ed for me. That goes nicely with the White House's continuing demand that Congress stop messing around and bend to the Imperial Will already. The…
tqa | April 9, 2007
Bill Dembski says that "framing" is bad. Bill Dembski says that "framing" is bad. Good lord, I feel like I've been hit over the head with a two-ton block of solid irony. Dembski says that people shouldn't try to shape messages. My mind just can't wrap around that one.
It's like Charlie Manson complaining about a drop in local property values. It's like Dick Cheney complaining about politicians being mean to each other. It's like Keith Richards doing a drug abuse prevention commercial.
Un-freaking-real.
tqa | April 9, 2007
I just found the time to read the two different versions of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II's summary for policymakers, and I'm pissed as hell. I'd heard the reports about the epic battle between scientists and diplomats (the final score on that one was a 1-0 victory for the lions), but I wasn't prepared to believe that the report had been screwed with as badly as it was.
The language that's been used in most of the reports has been pretty mild - most commonly, the diplomats are accused of "diluting" or "watering down" the language used in the report.…
tqa | April 9, 2007
During a weekend that was marked by the release of another of the IPCC's summaries for policymakers, the hottest topic here at Scienceblogs was (still) the Nisbet/Mooney "Framing Science" paper. (It's also a bit of a water-cooler debate topic here at UH right now, and I suspect the same is going to be true at other universities.) This is, of course, not unexpected. It's a touchy topic among scientists, and has been for some time. One paper is not going to change that overnight.
Some good points have been raised by people on both sides of this debate, but there's also been a hell of a lot…
tqa | April 9, 2007
It's another one of those days - there's just too much out there to blog about, and not enough time to do the blogging. It's partly my fault this time, of course. I've got this bad habit of taking the weekend off from blogging, so there's a backlog that stretches back to Friday.
In the stack right now, there are multiple episodes of ignorant Egnor, DaveScot highlighting an absolutely superb paper, the Vice-President acting like he understands less about the Constitution than the President does, and the continuing "discussion" on flaming science (bit of a freudian slip just then, I meant to…
tqa | April 5, 2007
The latest issue of the journal Science includes a policy forum piece written by Sciencebloggers Chris Mooney (The Intersection) and Matt Nisbet (Framing Science). In the article, they argue that scientists do not, for the most part, use effective communications strategies when trying to defend science. Both Chris and Matt anticipate that this view is likely to be somewhat controversial, and that it is likely to spark a vigorous debate. I think that they are probably right about this, and not just because their article includes at least one paragraph that is likely to set PZ off faster than…
tqa | April 4, 2007
President Bush today continued his efforts to extort money from Congress by holding the American Military hostage. In a speech made to soldiers at Fort Irwin, California, Bush stayed on his basic message: give me the money with no strings attached or the troops are going to get hurt:
Just as the strategy is starting to make inroads, a narrow majority in the Congress passed legislation they knew all along I would not accept. Their bills impose an artificial deadline for withdrawal from Iraq. Their bills substitute the judgment of Washington politicians for the judgment of our military…
tqa | April 4, 2007
Creationist brain surgeon Michael Egnor has been busy over the last couple of days, posting first a "response" to Orac's challenge then a "response" to Mark ChuCarroll's repeated attempts to explain the concept of tautology to him. There have been several responses to these two posts over at various of the Scienceblogs already - PZ, Orac, Mark, and Kevin have all addressed one or both of Egnor's latest claims, and all of their responses are worth reading. I'm actually feeling a little left out right now - after all, Egnor still hasn't deigned to address the two specific examples I presented…