Carnivalia, and an open thread

NYTimes on bloggers:

Bloggers are a mostly young, racially diverse group of people who have never been published anywhere else and who most often use cyberspace to talk about their personal lives, according to a report on blogging released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project...

I think that leave you 0 for 4. I'm not sure though, are you racially diverse?

Swedish, Norwegian, German, English, Scots, Irish, Dutch, and whatever else the family line might have picked up in a few centuries in the New World. Is mongrel North European diverse?

PZ: Have you seen Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest yet? Marine biology HEAAAAVEN.

Bizarro is Sacrilicious today.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/bizarro.asp

(Am I racist to point it out?)

Y'all might want to head over and nuke the ABC news survey on telepathy, because some things are just too ridiculous!

There is something I've wanted to ask since Pharyngula moved to Science Blogs. Is there a way of accessing the complete blogroll, or the complete list of godless quotes, as there was in your old site? If there is, I have too dumb to find it. They used to make good procrastination material...

Good question. I've got to fix the "about" page here, and I was going to put links to those there. Maybe that's something I should take care of this weekend.

PZ, do you remember the episode with the creationist biology TA At Florida Atlantic University a couple years ago? I'm re-hashing that over at the refuge.

http://scienceblogs.com/bushwells/2006/07/the_floridiocy_files_section_…

As far as how things turned out, I wrote an uncharacteristically diplomatic e-mail to the department chair (which I'll be posting soon) and the reply I received seemed to indicate that similar concerns had been raised and that they were looking into it. (It didn't seem like token placation.) As best as my girlfriend and I could determine, he left the program at the end of the academic year, but as I just learned there's more to the story.

Kind of an amusing coincidence that almost two years later we both wound up under the same "roof," although my discovery of Pharyngula was less happenstance and lay in my girlfriend's having attended Morris for one term. (Too cold for a Florida girl up there.)

I've been reading creationist literature again. A bad habit, I know, but Taking Back Astronomy is more interesting than most. The author, Dr. Jason Lisle, has a real degree in astrophysics and a fake job as researcher for Answers in Genesis and planetarium director for the Creation Museum. How did he get so far off the track from reality? He says his "truth" comes from his biblical worldview, which permits him to see astronomical data as evidence for young-earth creationism. I do believe he's completely serious and sincere.

See my post with quotes and comments here.

Apikoros, the really sad thing about that ABC News poll on telepathy is that it was motivated by a story on a study being done at the University of Manchester to try to detect telepathy. The "twist" in this case is that the testing apparatus involves virtual reality.

I thought this issue had been laid to rest some 30 or 40 years ago. It occurs to me, though, that if this is not just a fluke and interest in ESP is seeing some kind of resurgence, this might actually be a good thing. It might signal a shift away from fundamentalism and toward more "new agey" types of spiritualism, which are more easily refuted. On the other hand, it's probably just the result of some flaky Brit academics not being able to think of anything more useful to do with their time.

Bloggers are a mostly young, racially diverse group of people who have never been published anywhere else and who most often use cyberspace to talk about their personal lives, according to a report on blogging released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project...

Well, that profile fits the personal bloggers far better than the political ones. The political bloggers are mostly middle-aged, educated whites who have been published offline.

Given how throughly ESP has been searched for and ruled out by careful examiniation of the evidence, I'd say the research is a funding scam. The new methods are designed to reduce the possibility of information passing between subjects in mundane ways, and previous experiments have already used much simpler methods to find that there's no effect beyond chance when interpersonal communication is minimized.

If actual positive findings had resulted from previous experiments, it would make sense to go further to eliminiate a possible positive bias. Since the results were nothing but negative, there's no purpose to this experiment.

Apikoros, the really sad thing about that ABC News poll on telepathy is that it was motivated by a story on a study being done at the University of Manchester to try to detect telepathy. The "twist" in this case is that the testing apparatus involves virtual reality.

I saw that. I agree with Caledonian that various forms of ESP have been thoroughly enough disproven already. I would be concerned that the researchers might let the high tech nature of their experimental method blind them to possible flaws in the procedure and possible methods of cheating.

Arrested Bush dissenters eye courts

People arrested for trying to burst Bubble Boy's bubble are making their way into the courts. The recent erosion of liberty in this country is alarming.

Who on ScienceBlogs or other pro-evolution sites would be interested in a fabulous new ribozyme structure?

Tertiary Contacts Distant from the Active Site Prime a Ribozyme for Catalysis
Monika Martick & William G. Scott
Cell 126, 1-12, now on-line

This structure gives insight into the catalytic activity of a ribozyme, which of course has ramifications ofr understanding of the RNA World, etc.