tqa | November 21, 2006As many of the other Sciencebloggers have already mentioned, Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute is up to his usual stupidity. In this particular instance, he's attempting, in a typically inept fashion, to fisk Carl Zimmer's recent article in National Geographic. So far, I haven't chimed in, mostly because everyone else has done such a good job that there wasn't much to add.
Today, though, Karmen pointed out a passage that I'd somehow missed the first time I read Luskin's piece. In the first part of his "rebuttal," Luskin wrote:
The article called evolution a "simple" process. In our…
tqa | November 17, 2006Over at the ARN blog, Denyse O'Leary has a four-part article up attacking the peer-review system. Rob Crowther, of the Discovery Institute's
Media Complaints Division, has chimed in with his own post on the topic. There's a great deal of humor in watching anti-evolutionists try to dismiss peer review as not worth the effort anyway. It bears an amazing resemblance to this really cute old fable about a fox, but I'll be kind and pretend that there is actually something more to the O'Leary and Crowther rants than good old sour grapes.
Their major complaint about peer review is, of course, that…
tqa | November 16, 2006Via Bitch, PhD and Pharyngula, we find this video of a Tuesday night "incident" in the UCLA library. According to the campus paper, the incident is "under investigation." After watching the video, which shows a student repeatedly being tasered for failing to obey officers orders to "get up" (after having already been tased), I really hope that the investigation is being conducted by the local DA.
tqa | November 16, 2006As some of you have already seen at Pharyngula, Dispatches, and the Lippard Blog, a New Jersey public high school teacher was caught on tape teaching religion instead of history. One of the audio recordings is available online. The quality is poor, but a with a little bit of equalizer work it is mostly understandable. The material that is on it is absolutely and completely outrageous. Things were said that don't belong within ten city blocks of a public school classroom, and it's a damn shame that the worst than can be done to the teacher is terminating his employment. Some of the things said…
tqa | November 15, 2006The fieldwork I did earlier this month left me behind at work, so I haven't been able to post much over the last week or so. I'll be able to get back to regular posts soon. In the meantime, here's a picture I took during a little break from my fieldwork.
For those who might be interested in such things, the picture is a 2 second exposure at F3.5 taken using an 18mm lens and a Pentax *istD dSLR camera.
tqa | November 7, 2006When someone you love is deployed, you do your best to put your fears out of your mind. You take things as they come, you do what needs to be done, and you very quickly get good at not thinking too much about other things. Most of the time you can keep most of your mind away from things like IEDs, and ambushes, and sectarian violence. With daily phone contact and email, it can be easy to think of the deployment as nothing more than a long, long business trip. You can keep that up for day after day, as the long deployment slowly - glacially - moves along. You can keep that up for day after day…
tqa | November 2, 2006If you're looking for an update to this blog, you'll have to wait until Monday. I'm off to the Big Island for a few days of fieldwork. I'll be observing flies in their natural habitat over in Volcanoes National Park.
tqa | October 31, 2006Staffers for Virginia Senator George Allen attacked a blogger today at a campaign event, and are now trying to lie their way out of it. Here's their version of the events:
As the Senator was trying to exit the room with a campaign staffer, the Democrat activist, identified as Mike Stark, pushed the Allen staffer. Later, volunteers restrained him and asked to leave the building when he approached the Senator a second time, asking inappropriate questions.
Reality, as seen in the CNN footage available on the Think Progress website, paints a slightly different picture of events:
If you watch the…
tqa | October 30, 2006Here are a few articles that I would have loved to have blogged about today - if I only had the time. In no particular order:
Via Afarensis, we learn that the American Museum of Natural History in New York now has the authority to grant PhDs. If nothing else, that would probably look pretty cool on a diploma.
Time Magazine has a letter written by a US Marine Corps officer up on its website. The letter has been authenticated, and the sentiments expressed in it match up fairly well with what I've been hearing from people I know who have come back from sandbox tours. That one is a must-read.…
tqa | October 30, 2006It's no secret that the current administration is not a big fan of the Endangered Species Act. Since Bush took office, only 56 species have been added to the list (for comparison, during both the Clinton and G.H.W. Bush administrations, an average of about 60 species were added every year). If cases where the listing was the result of a lawsuit settlement are excluded, that number goes down quite a bit - I know for a fact that the recent listing of 12 species of Hawaiian flies was forced as the result of a lawsuit.
In today's Washington Post, we find out about one of the reasons for the drop…
tqa | October 27, 2006It's Friday. Time to throw iTunes into random play, and see what comes up. This week, there isn't much of a theme going.
Artist
Song
1.
REM
Losing My Religion
2.
Jimmy Buffett
The Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful
3.
Josh Joplin Group
Camera One
4.
Black 47
Like a Rolling Stone
5.
Porno for Pyros
Pets
6.
Bruce Springsteen
Pay Me My Money Down
7.
Billy Joel
Piano Man
8.
Bob Dylan
Mr. Tambourine Man
9.
Weezer
Buddy Holly
10.
Will Smith
Switch
tqa | October 24, 2006The Cheerful Oncologist just tossed up a post on one of the Laws of Medicine. Sitting here, on my third beer of the night, I can't help but wonder if he knows how lucky he is to be working in an area of medicine that is stable enough to have laws. Back in my younger days, a decade or so ago, I put in a couple of years as an EMT. Emergency Medical Services has no laws, and while there are things that we might call "rules," they're more like guidelines.
Since I'm writing up this particular trip down memory lane in response to a post from an MD, it seems only appropriate to start with Guideline…
tqa | October 23, 2006This weekend, an issue that came up in a post by Kevin Beck over at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge really got me thinking. Kevin was amusing himself by shredding one of the denizens at Stop the ACLU, who was complaining about a Florida court decision that permitted a minor to bypass the state's parental notification law, and obtain an abortion without informing her parents. The post got me thinking about parental consent and notification laws in general, and my own views. I have to admit that this is an issue that really makes me uncomfortable.
Personally, I think that abortion is a…
tqa | October 19, 2006Rick Santorum's political base has been shrinking rapidly. His approval numbers are in the sewer, and he's down by double-digits in the polls. Santorum's campaign skills, however, are well respected. He knows how to motivate his base, and how to get people to the polls. Just the other day, he demonstrated exactly why he's such a highly regarded campaigner, coming out with an innovative new method for motivating the -ing insane demographic. All you need to do there is show that you are one of them.
tqa | October 16, 2006If you watched the news at all yesterday, you probably know that we had a little bit of a shake-up out here yesterday morning. I live on the island of Oahu, which is a fair distance from the epicenter of the quake, so the shaking wasn't too bad. It was strong enough to rattle the windows, knock down a couple of poorly hung pictures, and totally freak out the kids and dog, but no real damage occurred. It was also strong enough to shut down the power grid, so we spent most of the wet, rainy day inside with no power. Things are back to normal now, and I'll have a couple of more earthquake-…
tqa | October 14, 2006My post on the Lancet article has attracted a fair amount of comment, both in the comments here and on other blogs. On the whole, those who have addressed my criticisms have disagreed with them. I've read the criticisms and re-read both the new and the 2004 Iraqi death toll studies a couple of more times. Between the two, I've become convinced that some (but not all) of my earlier concerns were unjustified.
In this post, I'm going to try to respond to most of the substantive criticisms (and a few of the other comments). I'll let you know where my views have changed, and I'll try to clarify…
tqa | October 13, 2006If you've been reading this blog for a while, you're probably familiar with the ongoing series of posts I've been using to get readers and commenters to help me improve my teaching skills. If you're new here, welcome, and if you scroll back over the last month or so you'll see most of those posts. Last week, I was somewhat upset that 20-25% of my students were unable to correctly answer a quiz question when I had basically given them the answer five minutes before the quiz. This week, I gave another quiz on a different topic. There were, again, some distressing results - but this time it's…
tqa | October 12, 2006Update: 14 October.
I just posted another entry on the topic, responding to some of the comments on this post. My conclusions have changed a bit as the result of some of those comments.
As many of you probably know, a study published today in the journal Lancet estimates that just over 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war there. Tim Lambert, Mike the Mad Biologist, and Mark Chu-Carroll have weighed in on the study already (in Tim's case several times), and they think that the estimate and methods were pretty good. Ordinarily, I'd be reluctant to disagree with them, but in this case…
tqa | October 6, 2006Over at Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Sandy thanks me for, "unintentionally starting a public teaching journal." That was a very nice way to describe what's been going on here in the comment threads for the posts where I've talked about what I'm inflicting upon the hapless undergrads I've been assigned. It feels a lot more like being the subject of a pathology lecture. Still, I did volunteer for this, and the comments are helping - I hope.
In my last post on teaching, I vented a bit about the results of the most recent quiz I gave. In particular, I was annoyed that 25% of the…
tqa | October 6, 2006It's been a few weeks since I've done a Friday Random Ten, but I got up early and felt like listening to a little music today. As per the rules of the game, I selected my entire iTunes library and went to the Party Shuffle to see what the randomizer wants me to listen to. Today, it's a heavy dose from the political wing of my library. With both Arlo Guthrie and Leonard Cohen in the mix, it's also not the quickest playlist ever. (I was thinking about pulling the Arlo track as seasonally unsuitable, but what the hell - with Christmas decorations going up, I probably just blinked at the wrong…