Links for 2011-02-06

  • "Science education: We should support it. Especially elementary school science. Nearly every rocket scientist got interested in it before they were 10. Everybody who's a physician, who makes vaccines, who wants to find the cure for cancer. Everybody who wants to do any medical good for humankind got the passion for that before he or she was 10. So we want to excite a new generation of kids--every generation--about the passion, beauty and joy--the PB&J--of science. These anti-evolution people are frustrating in two ways. The first way is, almost certainly they know better. Those people really do believe in flu shots. They really do understand that when you find fossil bones of ancient dinosaurs, you are looking at deep time, not just 5000 years. And secondly, and much more importantly, having raised a generation of kids who don't understand science is bad for everyone."
  • "For the last time, Dad, I don't have object permanence!"
  • "The most interesting thing about the man who plays the Most Interesting Man in the World, in those TV ads for Dos Equis beer, is that he is interesting, too, perhaps even superlatively so. His name is Jonathan Goldsmith. He's the one who says, in a Spanishy accent, at the end of each spot, "I don't always drink beer, but when I do I prefer Dos Equis." [...]
    Goldsmith is not this man. Still, he has more in common with him than you do. A montage of highlights from the real life of Jonathan Goldsmith might include [...] footage of him rescuing a stranded climber on Mt. Whitney, saving a drowning girl in Malibu, sailing the high seas with his friend Fernando Lamas (the inspiration for his Interesting persona and, according to Goldsmith, "the greatest swordsman who ever lived in Hollywood"), and starting a successful network marketing business ("I was a hustler, a very good hustler"), which, for a while, anyway, enabled him to flee Hollywood for an estate in the Sierras.
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Even though I've taken on the 'nym of a fictional computer in a 35-year-old British science fiction series whose key traits were an arrogant and condescending manner and the ability to tap into every computer of the galactic federation any time he wanted to, in reality I am just one person.
The Herschel Space Observatory's large telescope and state-of-the-art infrared detectors have provided the first confirmed finding of oxygen molecules in space. The molecules were discovered in the Orion star-forming complex.
Or, perhaps more politely, 'National interest' halts arms corruption inquiry.
There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. - Oliver Goldsmith

The Bill Nye story was fascinating - especially the comments people had written. I'm a teacher in the UK and the teaching of evolution isn't really a controversial topic at all

Ian