gregladen | May 2, 2008Vaccine denialism and related issues is something that I took a great interest in many years ago with the publication of Laruie Garret's "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance," a book which presaged a great deal of later popular and more technical literature on diseases. My interested was piqued in connection with an interest in so called "emerging diseases" that came from my work at that time in emerging disease land (the northeastern Congo forest). (Yes, these are all linked in various ways. But my interest in writing about these issues has been dampened…
gregladen | May 1, 2008A Missouri House Committee has just approved for consideration of the House an Academic Freedom Bill drafted with the aid of the Discovery Institute.
The bill has a nice twist to it in that it prohibits the consideration of any boundary or difference between religion and non-religion in regards to what to teach or how to teach it. In other words, the bill requires that state agencies, school administrators, and teachers ignore the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America in deference to state law. Therefore, challenges to this…
gregladen | May 1, 2008May Day is the day that we traditionally get our military hardware out and parade it around Moscow and Havana. It is also International Worker's Day and International Labor Day. As with all holidays, there are spooky ancient origins as well. May Day is the half way point between Solstice and Equinox, so it is a good day for a blood sacrifice, ritual sex, or repainting the temple. Whatever suits your particular "world view."
For instance, in America, it is the day the President of the United States pretends to fly a Fighter Jet on to an Aircraft Carrier where he declaires:
Mission…
gregladen | April 29, 2008
This is a photograph of a male orangutan attempting to spear a fish.
It is believed that this male has seen fish spearing by local fish spearing men. This is on Kaja Island, in Borneo. Quite a few of the apes in this area are "rehabilitated" having been earlier rescued from human possession. It is often among these rehabilitated apes that we see remarkable behavior of this kind.
This method never worked out for this guy, but reports are that he later figured out how to use spearing to poach fish already caught on lines. This photo is actually published in the book Thinkers of the…
gregladen | April 29, 2008Expelled!, the so called documentary, has a web site on MySpace. Recently they ran a poll asking if Intelligent Design should be taught in schools or not. The results of that poll overwhelming indicate "no" ... with 420 thousand "nay" votes and fewer than one thousand in favor of violating the tenets of the Constitution of the United States of America.
So The Expelled! web site meisters removed the poll.
Of coruse, they are not that smart, so they kinda screwed it up. You will be interested to know that the poll is still located here.
I'm getting tired of this unpatriotic crap.
gregladen | April 29, 2008Home schooling is probably a really good idea for a lot of people, but only for a certain (unknown) percentage of people who actually do it. And, among those who do manage to home school, I would guess that the effectiveness of home schooling varies from pretty good to dismal because homeschoolers are doing it for the wrong reasons, in some cases for just plain bad reasons, and/or they really don't know what they are doing.
I have yet to meet a teacher who would claim that they are generally happy with what shows up at their classroom door from Home Schooling Land ... even though most…
gregladen | April 29, 2008The Florida House yesterday voted to require teachers to criticize evolution when teaching the subject in Florida public schools. The house version of the bill will now, most likely, travel back to the Senate (where a similar bill, was recently passed). Governor Charlie Crist is not talking about whether or not he will sign the bill.
"What this bill does is tell the teacher, go ahead and teach the theory of evolution and make sure your students have a complete view of that theory and they know that it is only a theory, it is not gospel law," said Rep. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla. "There's no…
gregladen | April 29, 2008
Second commandment: Try not to be a moron.
(FYI: observed instances of speciation)
Hat Tip: TUIBG and Julia
gregladen | April 28, 2008Food webs --- the network of trophic (eating) interaction among the many species sharing a habitat or biome -- is a much studied aspect of ecology. Food web and other similar phenomena such as dispersal syndromes are epiphenomena of evolution, resulting from the negotiation of competitive and cooperative interactions among many individuals. Indeed, the food web is the gross-level movement of energy within the ebb and flow of entropy and life-based energy capture. This flow of energy is fundamental to all life systems.
The delicacy or vulnerability of a particular habitat ... the potential…
gregladen | April 28, 2008Darwin did a LOT of stuff. It is amazing how often one can trace some basic bit of modern scientific knowledge to an observation or experiment Darwin while travelling on the Beagle, later on in his bathtub, or in his back yard. The NYT has a nice piece on one example of this.
IN 1860, while studying primroses in the garden of Down House, his home in Kent, England, Charles Darwin noticed something odd about their blooms.
While all the flowers had both male and female parts -- anthers and pistils -- in some the anthers were prominent and in others the pistils were longer. So he experimented…
gregladen | April 28, 2008It is always nice when an extinct animal shows up and announces that rumors of its extinction were exaggerated. In this case, we have the dwarf cloud rat just discovered by an international research team.
Lawrence Heaney, team leader and curator at the Chicago-based Field Museum of Natural History, said the rare dwarf cloud rat was last seen by British scientists some 112 years ago.
He said the rat was dead when the team found it in a canopy of a large tree whose branches were covered by thick moss, orchids and ferns at a national park in Mount Pulag in northern Luzon, the Philippine Daily…
gregladen | April 28, 2008... is expected to reach Cat-4 status before making landfall somewhere. Watch The Intersection for details.
gregladen | April 28, 2008This is described in UDreamOfJanie:
Ronda R. Storms is a Florida sate senator (Republican) who has spearheaded efforts against Planned Parenthood, against her local LGBTA community, and so on, is now linked to the Discovery Institute in regards to her latest project, the Florida "Academic Freedom" bill.
In regards to Academic Freedom, Storms ...
...took the age-old ethical high-road known as 'Lying for Jesus'. She insists that this bill is about the freedom to inquire about all `scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding biological and chemical evolution…
gregladen | April 28, 2008And by this, I mean really, really big...
This was sent to me by my colleague Christian Reinboth in Germany. This video was created by Mike (Metafis), a retired PC support guy, who has also been kind enough to comment below.
.... It shows a massive zoom (315 times) into the famous Mandelbrot set. The astonishing thing is this (and I am quoting the filmmakers): You would need a monitor 2^316 times the size of a normal one to view the whole of the first frame by the time you get to the last frame. That's approx 2^176 times the size of the known universe.
Here it is:
gregladen | April 27, 2008With all this talk about Expelled!, the creationist movie, I thought it was about time to resurrect the review I wrote many moons ago of Flock of Dodos by Randy Olson, along with some updated information.
Flock of Dodos is a much better film than Expelled!, and explores the same issue, with somewhat different conclusions. So, for instance, if you are going to use one of them in a school or church to explain the ID/Evolution controversy, I recommend Flock.
(That's a picture of Randy with some big birds at the Tribeca Film Festival.) Plus, since its been out a bit longer, Flock of Dodos is…
gregladen | April 27, 2008This page is designed for teachers, pastors, youth leaders and organizations to provide useful tools and resources to promote the ideas surrounding this highly anticipated film.
You can get Expelled! movie clips to show in your life science class. This site has many movies designed for Christian teachers to use in the classroom... The developers of the side have
... made showing movie clips fast and convenient for anyone to use. It's as simple as a click of a button. Also, we custom edit clips to better illustrate specific points. For instance, we might delete a portion of a scene, combine…