hrynyshyn | January 12, 2007Well, technically, not Seattle, but the exurbian outpost of Federal Way, Wash., where the "School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film." The film in question is Laurie David's An Inconvenient Truth, with which I am sure we're all familiar. First, I have to declare a conflict of interest, being a member of Al Gore climate change troops. But really, what does this story say about how the Federal Way school board thinks of its students if those students can't be trusted to watch a movie about the science and social implications of climate change?
Apparently,…
hrynyshyn | January 10, 2007Just a pointer to yet another thoughtful rejoinder from the Real Climate group in the wake of media hysteria. This time it's all about whether El Nino or climate change is to blame for the ridiculously warm weather that recently dominated much of North America. As usual, the answer is: it's too complicated for simple answers. Among the many poignant observations:
...while El Nino typically does perturb the winter Northern Hemisphere jet stream in a way that favors anomalous warmth over much of the northern half of the U.S., the typical amplitude of the warming (see Figure below right) is…
hrynyshyn | January 9, 2007On the wall behind Fox Mulder's desk in the basement of the X-File's version of the FBI headquarters in DC was a poster of a UFO photograph atop the phrase "I Want To Believe." Which pretty much sums up how a lot a people, scientists included, feel about the possibility of life on Mars. So it was no surprise that among the first pieces of news to slip out of the recent American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle was a theory that we have already, in fact, discovered evidence of just that.
Now, I'm no organic chemist. I even struggled a little bit in the second half of organic chem back…
hrynyshyn | January 6, 2007This past week I spent the better part of three days in the company of Al Gore Jr. and his associates as part of The Climate Project, an effort to create a small army of climate change slide-show presenters across North America and beyond. If you've seen Laurie David's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, you've already seen a good portion of the show. But Al wants as many people as possible to see as much of possible of his entire presentation, and after almost 20 years of writing about climate change, I decided to help him do just that. Is this really a good idea?
It's a bit of a risk for…
hrynyshyn | January 2, 2007Can one reject the single most important idea in biology and yet still embrace science? Ronald Numbers, a former Seventh-day Adventist turned historian of creationism, says lots of people do. John Wilkins jumped on the Salon interview with Numbers first. But here's my money quote:
Well, most people who reject evolution do not see themselves as being anti-scientific in any way. They love science. They love what science has produced. It's allowed the conservative Christians to go on the airwaves, to fly to mission fields. They're not against science at all. But they don't believe evolution is…
hrynyshyn | January 1, 2007What a wonderful way to begin the new year, with a responsible call for action on climate change that embraces the uncertainties rather than yet another stubborn refusal to act because of them. The New York Times' ever-reliable Andrew Revkin writes this morning of a new collective voice of scientists who say we should do something more constructive than just scare people. About time.
Among them is Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research:
Dr. Hulme insists that it is best not to gloss over uncertainties. In fact, he and other experts say that uncertainty is one…
hrynyshyn | December 31, 2006Going on four years back, a couple of Californians decided the secular/atheist/agnostic/skeptic community needed a catchy name in the same way the homosexual community purloined the term "gay" as part of its evolution toward mainstream acceptance. They came up with "bright," as in "I'm a bright" and quickly won qualified endorsements from the likes of atheist/agnostic/skeptic luminaries Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. A website was thrown together, and a brief flurry of media attention from the few journalists who pay attention to such things followed. But after that, a whole not of…
hrynyshyn | December 29, 2006Every now and then someone with a substantial public platform says or writes something that transcends the stupid to the realm of the genuinely idiotic. Regular readers of the Island will know I am usually a little more respectful of those with whom I disagree, but I feel compelled to respond to Newsweek/Washington Post columnist Cal Thomas' latest offense to reason if only to provide some balance in the blogosphere. Also, it's not every day that every single phrase in a widely distributed, non-Ann Coulter column is so utterly wrong. Plus, the folks who syndicate Thomas describe him as "…
hrynyshyn | December 27, 2006"Fake Psychic Get's Girls." That's the subject line of my favorite piece of spam. Every now and then one slips by the email junk filters and I get a chuckle, and not just because of the punctuation error, either.
So amused was I the first time I got this particular piece of spam that I actually clicked on the link: http://www.elohistic.com/fakepsychic. It takes you to a not particularly professional web page that attempts to sell you what I strongly suspect is a tutorial on cold reading -- that is, pretending to adduce facts about a total stranger's personal life through some kind of…
hrynyshyn | December 22, 2006The advent of the release of an official government study warning that robots will soon be demanding their civil rights is a sure sign of the Christmas season. Senior editors and reporters are either at home with the family or spending too much time at the eggnog trough to bother with real journalism. But I managed to find a more serious angle to the story, thanks to the near-simultaneous discovery of a piece of research that suggests we mortals are probably already primed to give said machines the benefit of the doubt.
The study, commissioned by the UK government, puts the likelihood of the…
hrynyshyn | December 21, 2006I hope the answer is yes, in the sense that I don't want to see the even the mid-case scenarios come to pass. But this is a legitimate question, coming out of the American Geophysical Union meeting. Kevin Vranes says he senses a growing feeling that maybe climate scientists have gone a bit too far:
We tried for years - decades - to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder…
hrynyshyn | December 20, 2006Carl Sagan died 10 years ago today, I''d rather celebrate his birth, but there's this Carl Sagan Memorial Blogathon going on and I can hardly resist making a mention.
With Sagan's passing, the world lost one of its leading champions of reason, but also one of its most eloquent describers of the wonders of the universe. Anyone who hasn't had a chance to read his Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark, should get a copy now.
Here's a favorite quote from same:
"Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or…
hrynyshyn | December 19, 2006The new head of the Episcopal Church is a trained marine biologist. The Episcopal Church is tearing itself apart. This is not a coincidence.
Katherine Jefferts-Schori used to study squid for a living. (Hey PZ, she's one of you!) But somewhere along the way, she succumbed to temptation and left her scientific exploration in favor of a more spiritual journey. Last year, she became the new presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, which to those unfamiliar with American ways of worship, is what the Anglican Church calls itself in the U.S.
She is not your typical Protestant. She's the first woman…
hrynyshyn | December 18, 2006... one of your child's high school teachers told his class that "evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven." Even worse, what if that teacher went on to say:
"If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong.... He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he's saying, 'Please, accept me, believe.' If you reject that, you belong in hell."
Well, it's all on tape, thanks to…
hrynyshyn | December 16, 2006What with absurdly high levels of belief in astrology, sky fairies, homeopathy, and whatnot, it sometimes seems like the United States of America has the market cornered in superstitious nonsense. Far from it. The Chinese, for example, have their penchant for quack remedies concocted from rare species (the more endangered the better). Now we learn that the Japanese, not to be outdone by either of their geopolitical and economic rivals, appear to have recently acquired a bizarre belief in the power of blood types to determine one's destiny.
Here's the essential bits of a story by the New York…
hrynyshyn | December 14, 2006From the annals of the weird and wonderful comes this tale of a pair of lucky dolphins:
The world's tallest man helped save two dolphins in China by reaching into their stomachs and pulling out harmful plastic they had swallowed, state media said Thursday. The dolphins got sick after eating plastic from the edge of their pool at an aquarium in Liaoning province.
Veterinarians said they decided to call for help from Bao Xishun, a 7-foot-9-inch herdsman from Inner Mongolia, according to Chinese state media. Photos from the scene show Bao reaching his arm, which is more than one metre long,…
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2006Sunday night's 60 Minutes wrapped up, as usual, with Andy Rooney's rambling commentary. He recently asked "what are we doing in Iraq" in a kind of Cronkite-esque moment, so I have made a point of watching him when I can, in hopes he might say something else with gravitas. Last night was almost such a moment: he dissed atheists.
Apparently, among the many pieces of crap that viewers send him -- always unsolicited -- is a T-shirt warning that reading the Holy Bible can impair one's judgment. "Sent by an atheist I suppose. I don't know how many atheists there are in this country" was his…
hrynyshyn | December 11, 2006Mr. Hayden, my high school librarian, used to toss me out of his bailiwick every few days for "pontificating," and I'm still trying to make up for lost time. So when a local congregation of the Unitarian Universalists asked me to deliver the equivalent of a sermon the other day, I didn't hesitate to accept the invitation. Though I never thought anyone associated with an organized religion, even one as non-orthodox as the UUs, would ever ask me to take part in their service, I am not one to turn down a platform from which I can ... well, pontificate.
"What would you like me to talk about?" I…
hrynyshyn | December 9, 2006One of the best things about the Science Blogs collective is that so little of what gets posted concerns the mundane and prosaic details of the authors' lives. We write substantial, serious stuff, posts that deal with public figures and weighty issues. No what-I-had-for-breakfast claptrap for us, no siree.
So I didn't think twice when my wife and I set up a separate blog to detail, for the benefit of our friends and family, her pregnancy and the subsequent birth of our first child. Neither did I give any thought to the ethical implications of another incarnation of that blog, one dedicated to…
hrynyshyn | November 28, 2006This comes from Acephalous. I am happy to help: What is the speed of meme? People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it organic?
Most memes, I'd wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping…