Search Content

Displaying results 51601 - 51650 of 87947

Alito and "Judicial Activism"

Jacob Sollum has an interesting article at Reason about the different concerns of the Republicans and Democrats when it comes to Judge Alito's track record. First, he points out how the phrase "judicial activism" has now been borrowed by the Democrats, who use it just as absurdly as the Republicans have been doing for decades: Once you realize activist has become a bipartisan epithet for judges who reach conclusions different from one's own, the label makes sense, although it's not very informative. Since one man's judicial activism is another's sound interpretation, poopyhead would do just…

Volokh on "ACLU Derangement Syndrome"

Eugene Volokh has an interesting, and quite accurate, post about what he calls "ACLU derangement syndrome". This notion follows on the heels of "Bush derangement syndrome", "Clinton derangement syndrome" and "NRA derangement syndrome. The idea is that some subjects prompt such anger in some people that they are incapable of thinking rationally about that subject. There are some who are so fanatically opposed to President Bush that they will accept any criticism of him no matter how nutty, and this was also true of many on the right regarding Bill Clinton - the very mention of their names sent…

Volokh on "ACLU Derangement Syndrome"

Eugene Volokh has an interesting, and quite accurate, post about what he calls "ACLU derangement syndrome". This notion follows on the heels of "Bush derangement syndrome", "Clinton derangement syndrome" and "NRA derangement syndrome. The idea is that some subjects prompt such anger in some people that they are incapable of thinking rationally about that subject. There are some who are so fanatically opposed to President Bush that they will accept any criticism of him no matter how nutty, and this was also true of many on the right regarding Bill Clinton - the very mention of their names sent…

Will there be a lot of hurricanes in 2013?

Probably. The Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University makes annual predictions of hurricane season activity, and they released one of these predictions today. This particular group has a good track record, although I would worry that they tenaciously hold to the idea that global warming is not a factor in hurricane development despite the fact that some of the factors (a disrupted ENSO and high SST) that are most affected in the Atlantic by global warming actually drive their predictions. Still, their predictions seem to be based on good empirical data and are probably…

Should the Flying Spaghetti Monster Rear his Awesome Noo-Noo?

Matt Lowry, whom I hope to be seeing in a couple of weeks, has written an article on his blog and republished on the JREF web site, called Is It Time To Call Creationists’ Bluff And Push For “Teaching All Views”? The idea is this. There has been a recent change in strategy among creationists (which, I'm sorry, but I may have started a few years back for which I apologize). Instead of pushing creationism per se, they push "academic freedom" which doubles as a way to repress the teaching about climate change, evolution, and other inconvenient science, and a way to introduce whatever other "…

Sins of Our Fathers by Shawn Otto

JW, protagonist, is a flawed hero. He is not exactly an anti-hero because he is not a bad guy, though one does become annoyed at where he places his values. As his character unfolds in the first several chapters of Shawn Otto's novel, Sins of Our Fathers, we like him, we are worried about him, we wonder what he is thinking, we sit on the edge of our proverbial seats as he takes risk after risk and we are sitting thusly because we learn that he does not have a rational concept of risk. We learn that his inner confusion about life arises from two main sources: the dramatic difference between…

Into the bush

... Continued ... Obsession can be a good thing. And I'm not talking about some dumb-ass perfume. The Augrabies Ultra. 250 kilometers over five days. My field buddy was doing that every year. Stuck in the field without a gym for three weeks was going to be tough, but I worked out two ways to stay in shape. First, every time we were in a city with a gym, Lynne got me into the gym, and my field crew usually came along as well. Lynne knew all the gyms and all the people who worked in all the gyms, and generally had the ability to make things happen. This mainly occurred in the city of…

Evolution of resistance--bacteria win again

Resistance to antibiotics has been a concern of scientists almost since their widespread use began. In a 1945 interview with the New York Times, Alexander Fleming himself warned that the misuse of penicillin could lead to selection of resistant forms of bacteria, and indeed, he’d already derived such strains in the lab by varying doses of penicillin the bacteria were subjected to. A short 5 years later, several hospitals had reported that a majority of their Staph isolates were, as predicted, resistant to penicillin. This decline in effectiveness has led to a search for new sources and kinds…

Expelled: not even released, and already a flop

Those wacky fellas behind the movie Expelled are at it again. First, we have an interview with Ben Stein. You can tell that the interviewer has drunk deep of the Discovery Institute spring. Cybercast News Service: There is a segment in the film, where it's made clear that intelligent design can open up new areas of inquiry that could improve the human condition. One involves a neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor, and another scientist, Jon Wells, who indicate that given how the cells are put together, with eye toward intelligent design, and with the idea that animal cells have tiny turbines - or if…

Taking Property Rights Seriously: The Case of Climate Change

Via a VV comment at ATTP I discover How a professional climate change denier discovered the lies and decided to fight for really long headlines which is fair enough, but via that I discover the far more interesting Taking Property Rights Seriously: The Case of Climate Change by Jonathan H. Adler1, a friend of said reformed denier. This is interesting for two reasons: the arguments it puts forwards, and FME4 itself. Here's its abstract: The dominant approach to environmental policy endorsed by conservative and libertarian policy thinkers, so-called "free market environmentalism" (FME), is…

Links for 2012-06-20

In which we look at failures of academic collegiality, the allocation of resources in the liberal arts, teaching as a big grey area, advice for new teachers, common misconceptions about education, an ambitious plan to reform jury duty, and a former member of Fred Phelps's hateful Westboro Baptist Church. ------------ Confessions of a Community College Dean: Collegiality In traditional higher ed, there is neither a meaningful bottom line for most individuals, nor a credible threat of exit. There’s an institutional bottom line, in the sense of a budget that has to be met, but the consequences…

Will there be mud, marijuana, and Free Love, too?

There's going to be a meeting this summer in Altenberg of a small subset of evolutionary biologists to discuss the next step in the evolution of evolutionary biology, which this article describes as a "Woodstock of evolution", populated with scientific "rock stars". All I can say is "bleh." This meeting sounds like it will be wonderfully entertaining, but get real: it will not settle or even define much of anything. These are interesting times in biology, with a lot of argument at a high level about levels of selection and evo-devo and modes of speciation and self-organisation and etc., etc…

A Delusional List Of Alleged Atheist Delusions

At various times over the last few years I have declared ID to be dead. One of my reasons for saying that is the complete intellectual collapse of Uncommon Descent (UD). When William Dembski started the blog, it was intended as an outpost for serious commentary on intelligent design and related topics. Not for them the standard creationist pyrotechnics, which had made anti-evolutionism a laughingstock among educated people. No, UD was going to show the world that anti-evolutionism did not have to be the domain of crazed religious demagogues, but could instead be defended rationally by…

Legal Precedents for the Gull Lake Teachers' Lawsuit

If the Gull Lake teachers do file a lawsuit claiming that it is a violation of their rights if they are not allowed to teach creationist or other anti-evolution material in their science classes, there are three primary legal precedents for such a suit. All of them have found against the teacher's assertion of a right to teach such material and all were summarily dismissed and the dismissal upheld on appeal. I have transcribed the rulings in two of those cases on the MCFS website and will provide a link to the third (which is already available on the TalkOrigins Archive site), along with a…

Kuznicki on Homophobia

Jason Kuznicki has a fascinating exchange with a blogger by the name of Chris Byrne. Along the way, he points out the often irrational nature of anti-gay bigotry with examples from his own life. I think Jason misinterprets Byrne to some degree. He was not arguing that homophobia does not exist, only that not everyone who disagrees with homosexuality or considers it wrong is motivated by homophobia. On that question, I would agree with Byrne, but I think there is more detail required to get to the root of that question. The first thing that needs to be said is that there are many different…

Keith Olbermann Hammers Dobson

In the aftermath of the intentional controversy over Spongebob pushing the obviously un-Christian idea of tolerance for others, Focus on the Family has been in full damage control mode. Naturally, their strategy was to attack the media for its horribly unfair portrayal of his words. Ironically, their claim is essentially this: "We weren't attacking Spongebob, we were attacking tolerance." Yes, they actually think that makes their position better. As part of their "blame the media" campaign, they put up email generators on their webpage to send emails to some of the prominent media people who…

Religious Freedom for Me, But Not for Thee?

The Worldnutdaily has an article up entitled Wiccans Meeting on Air Force Base. Now this would hardly seem to be newsworthy. There are over a million people in the US military, any logical person would assume that at least a small percentage of them are Wiccan or belong to any number of other smaller minority religions. One would also think that given the Constitutional guarantee of free exercise of religion, they might even have the right to meet together to practice their religion just as every other religious faith does. But for some prominent religious right groups, well, that kind of…

Horrible Science Reporting in the Mainstream Media

Here is a perfect example of why you should never accept at face value how the work of scientists is reported in the non-scientific media. They almost always get it wrong. Look at this report in the Associated Press on the new Pierolapithecus catalaunicus find and compare it to the report in Nature, a scientific magazine who has qualified writers on staff. It begins with the very first sentence: A nearly 13 million-year-old ape discovered in Spain is the last probable common ancestor to all living humans and great apes, a research team says in Friday's issue of Science magazine. No, that's…

Sullivan on Torture and Abuse

My views on this issue are still in flux, so I'm just going to present a link to this article by Andrew Sullivan without much comment. He documents that the concerns about abuse and torture by our government in the war on terrorism go much deeper than a few complaints by anti-war journalists. Thousands of pages of documents have been made public through the Freedom of Information Act, including memos and reports from internal military commissions, FBI interrogators and much more. And those documents paint a fairly disturbing picture, one that fills me with ambivalence. I frankly don't think…

Maryland's Anti-Gay Governor

Via Jason Kuznicki, a story I missed: the governor of Maryland, Robert Ehrlich, has vetoed a bill that would have given gay couples the legal right to be treated as a relative in medical situations. As the Washington Post reports: Modeled after laws in California, Hawaii and other states, the legislation would have granted nearly a dozen rights to unmarried partners who register with the state. Among those: the right to be treated as an immediate family member during hospital visits, to make health care decisions for incapacitated partners and to have private visits in nursing homes. And as…

Black Holes Won't Incinerate You, After All

“You wait for a gem in an endless sea of blah.” -Lawrence Grossman On the one hand, we have General Relativity, our theory of space, time, and gravity. Image credit: Wikimedia commons user Johnstone; Earth from NASA's Galileo mission. It describes the Universe on both large and small scales perfectly, from the hot Big Bang to our cold accelerating expansion, from vast superclusters of galaxies down to the interiors of black holes. Image credit: NASA, ESA, M. Postman (STScI), and the CLASH Team. But General Relativity doesn't tell us everything. It doesn't tell us, for example, about…

Bunnies Made of Cheese: The Book

I'm checking a last few things and putting papers into an envelope when the dog wakes up from her nap. "Hey," she says, stretching, "What're you doing?" "I'm getting ready to mail this," I say. "What is it?" "Several copies of a book contract that I just signed." "It's a book about me, right?" she says, wagging her tail hopefully. "Because I'm the best." "Well, sort of. It's a popular science book, based on our conversations about physics." "That's a good idea, too." "Well, some people obviously think so, because they're going to pay me to write it." "How much are you getting?" "Well..." I…

Walter Mosley

Noted author Walter Mosley spoke on campus last night, and a spot opened up at the last minute for the dinner beforehand, so I got to spend an hour or so listening to him talk off-the-cuff in a small group. He's a very charming guy, and had a lot of interesting things to say about writing, politics, literature, and other subjects. Miscellaneous comments, in no particular order: Asked about working with Hollywood (a couple of movies have been made of his books, and three more are in the works), he said "As long as you don't go in expecting to make money, it's fun." Really, that strikes me as…

The Problem of Prognostication

Some time back, I offered the right to pick a post topic to anyone who managed to name one of the Physics Nobel laureates for 2006. Tom Renbarger won, and picked his topic: OK, with Midnight Madness on the horizon, I've decided to request a sort of season preview of two (trying to press my advantage since I got two names) of the following three conferences: A-10, plus one of the Big East or ACC. Or, if you get on a roll, all three. If you're pressed for time, the A-10 would suffice, and maybe something about Maryland. :-) I'm going to try to do all three leagues (though I know basically…

Ask a ScienceBlogger: Science Fiction Promotes Science?

The Corporate Masters have decreed a new question Ask a ScienceBlogger question, and this one's right up my alley: What do you see as science fiction's role in promoting science, if any? If you look over in the left sidebar, you'll see a href="http://scienceblogs.com/principles/sf/">SF category, which is all about, well, science fiction stuff. I read a lot of SF, regularly attend Boskone (a Boston-based convention), and we scheduled our big Japan trip to coincide with the Worldcon in Yokohama. So, yeah, this is a question I can spend a little time on... The short version of the answer is…

The Verizon Saga

Back when we bought the house, Kate's parents were having miserable problems with their cable Internet service-- at peak times, the real bit rate went down so far that it was impossible to get anywhere-- so we opted for DSL service. Five years later, we still have DSL, and even the same modem. When we had the garage remodeled, we had the contractor install a phone jack near the front windows, with the idea being to move my computer downstairs to free up a bedroom to become a nursery for FutureBaby. The contractor put in the jack, and we dragged the computer downstairs, hooked everything up,…

Long Author Lists and Books Not Written

Back when I was in grad school, and paper copies of journals were delivered to the lab by a happy mailman riding a brontosaurus, I used to play a little game when the new copy of Physical Review Letters arrived: I would flip through the papers in the high energy and nuclear physics sections, and see if I could find one where the author list included at least one surname for every letter of the alphabet. There wasn't one every week, but it wasn't that hard (particularly with large numbers of physicists from China, where family names beginning with "X" are more common). Every so often, somebody…

Biology Will Never Be the Same Again: Scott Lanyon

The best of last June Note: Since writing this post a year ago, at the time of Scott's talk, I learned something interesting that I think it is OK to share with you. Prior to the talk, Scott has received an injury, which was causing him considerable pain during the talk itself. He left from the podium directly to seek medical attention. In addition, his power point slides and notes were destroyed somehow, so he gave the talk cold. And you could not tell. It was an excellent talk. The Evolution 2008 conference started out today with a special program for K-12 teachers (mainly life…

Pagel on Darwin

Mark Pagel, evolutionary theorist extraordinaire, has published an Insight piece in Nature on Natural selection 150 years on. Pagel, well known for myriad projects in natural selecition theory and adaptation, and for developing with Harvey the widely used statistical phylogenetic method (and for being a reader of my thesis) wishes Charles Darwin a happy 200th birthday, and assesses this question: How has Darwin's theory of Natural Selection fared over the last 150 years, and what needs to be done to bring this theoretical approach to bear as we increasingly examine complex systems,…

Why should academics be expected to be silent?

Grrr. This story pisses me off beyond all reason. It's a trumped up contretemps generated by one of our local Minnesota Republican hacks, griping about a UM faculty member using her campus email. A University of Minnesota professor has come under fire for sending a message using her university e-mail account to help comedian Al Franken with his likely U.S. Senate candidacy. Sally Kenney, director of the Center on Women and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, sent an e-mail last week from a "umn.edu" address to an undisclosed number of…

I-35: God's Personal Highway

And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness. The unclean will not journey on it; it will be for those who walk in that Way; wicked fools will not go about on it." -Isaiah 35:8 So, I'm having dinner over at Lynn Fellman Studios with Lynn, Genie Scott of NCSE who is in town for a conference, and a variety of friends and colleagues including the recently decorated Randy Moore. And I bring up the idea that I 35 ... the main north-south interstate through the Twin Cities, the one with the recent bridge collapse, is seen by some crazy religious people as a special "god's…

The seductive siren of soft tissue preservation: Ancient dinosaur flesh wasn't ancient. Or dinosaur flesh.

An ugly fact killing a beautiful hypothesis I'm not mentioning any names, and don't ask me any details. In fact, don't repeat this story. Some years ago, when I was a mere graduate student, a fellow student working in an unnamed country in Africa discovered a very very old stone artifact. To this day, this bit of chipped stone debris, representing the activities of an ancient very pre-human hominid, is one of the oldest well dated, in situ objects of its kind known. The stone had some yeck on it, and for giggles, this stone got passed on to a physicist who had invented a new way of…

The Vacuity of ID

Proponents of intelligent design make a large number of arguments regarding the inadequacies of evolution, and the shortcomings of current scientific practice. All of these arguments are wrong. That, however, is not the end of the problems besetting ID. There is also the fact that there really is no theory of intelligent design. For all their nattering about how ID has the makings of a scientific revolution, they are stuck nonetheless with a “theory” that actually asserts very little. There is ultimately nothing more to their argument than the claim that at some point in natural history,…

Nef

Nef. The bane of my existence for some time now. I dont talk much about my research here, but its safe to say I consider myself an inventor who works in virology. People say "Damn. Its so hard to do ___. I wish there was an easier way..." and Im like "... I can do that." Gimme a plasmid, a primer (just need one), a paperclip, and a package of 'Fruit Stripe' gum, and I can make your retroviral dreams come true. I make stuff, and then pass it off to other people to like, do research with it. So I made myself a couple new toys. I then have to characterize my toys so other researchers know how…

REPOST: Frankenstein Viruses

This is a repost from the old ERV. A retrotransposed ERV :P Its Halloween time, and we just got a BRAND NEW FRANKENSTEIN ERV! To prime you all for that post, heres a repost on an OLD FRANKENSTEIN ERV! Remember, ERVs are junk. These are not zombie viruses. Scientists are not taking totally functional but silenced DNA or totally functional specially created by The Designer but coopted by evolution and doing stuff with it. There are ERV families-- take all the ones that are related and still have a gag or a env, figure out what their common ancestor looks like, and then do experiments with…

Another Round on Thermodynamics

Every once in a while the ID folks get into their heads to set-up an actual academic journal. You know, a place where they can lay out all that cutting-edge research kept out of the real journals by dogmatic Darwinian stormtroopers. These journals invariably founder on their inability to find any scientists willing to write for them. Remember Proceedings in Complexity, Information and Design? It's been moribund since November 2005. Or how about Origins and Design? That one went belly-up around the turn of the century. The latest representative of the genre is Anti-Matters. It bills…

The Creation Museum 5: The Last Adam

We now come to what one helpful museum employee described to me as “the climax of the museum.” The previous exhibits took us through the first four of the seven C's (Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion). Now, with one further fifteen minute movie, we would get the final three (Christ, Cross, Consummation). The film was entitled The Last Adam, which is a reference to 1 Corinthians 15:45: And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Short review: Where's Mel Gibson when you need him? After the build-up of the previous…

The Social Construction of Gravity

One of the more annoying points of contention back in the days of the Sokal hoax and the "Science Wars" was an argument over social construction. This is, loosely speaking, the idea that our understanding of the world is not strictly rational and objective, but is heavily influenced by interactions with other people, and the culture in which we live. The idea originally arose in literary academia, but expanded to be applied to basically everything, including science. At bottom, this is probably the best and most useful idea to come out of whatever collective "-ism" you want to use to refer…

Playground Physics

The playground outside SteedlyKid's day care, amazingly in this litigious age, has a merry-go-round, a rotating disc with a really good bearing. The kids can really get the thing flying, which is kind of terrifying at times. But on the bright side, it's an excellent venue for the physics of angular momentum: In the embedded video, SteelyKid runs in and starts the merry-go-round spinning, then jumps aboard and goes around one full rotation before moving to the center for a few rotations, and then starting to move back out. This isn't exactly what I was hoping for-- amazingly, a four-and-two-…

Real Scientists Have Families, Too

I was re-reading bits of James Gleick's Feynman biography, and ran across a bit near the end (page 397 of my hardcover from 1992) talking about his relationship with his children, talking about how ordinary he seemed at home.I particularly liked the sentence "Belatedly it dawned on them that not all their friends could look up their fathers in the encyclopedia." It occurred to me that that would be a good line for an obituary. This is not due to any particularly morbid cast of mind on my part, but lingering blowback from the kerfuffle over the New York Times obituary for Yvonne Brill a couple…

Math From a Biblical Worldview?

A few weeks ago I spent a day at the Virginia Home Educators Convention in Richmond. These are the religious home schoolers we are talking about, meaning creationism was very well-represented indeed. Ken Ham gave several keynote talks. Yay! I never got around to doing a proper write-up of the conference, but I do want to tell you about one of the talks I attended. It was called “Math From a Biblical Worldview?” Indeed, it was when I saw this talk advertised in the program that I knew I had to attend. The speaker was Katherine Loop, author of a number of math education resources for home…

PNAS: Nicole Leuke, Science Teacher

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Nicole Leuke, a science teacher in Alberta.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I am a High School Science and math teacher. I teach primarily physics and general sciences (grades 10,11,12). I have been teaching…

Projectile Motion, Uncertainty, and a Question of Ethics

We no longer do what is possibly my favorite lab in the intro mechanics class. We've switched to the Matter and Interactions curriculum, and thus no longer spend a bunch of time on projectile motion, meaning there's no longer room for the "target shooting" lab. It's called that because the culmination of the lab used to be firing small plastic balls across the room and predicting where they would land. In order to make the prediction, of course, you need to know the velocity of the balls leaving the launcher, and making that measurement was the real meat of the lab. The way I used to do it,…

College Turning Points

Over at EphBlog, Stephen O'Grady has a post giving advice to the entering class at Williams. A bunch of this stuff is school-specific stuff that will only make sense to another member of the Cult of the Purple Cow, but there's some good general advice in there as well. I particularly liked his story about the professor who saved his college career: Looking back, it's borderline shocking that I recovered as much as I did academically, given how horrifying my grades were that first year. And, it must be said, my first semester as a sophomore. But while I accept full responsibility for getting…

What Linus Could Teach Congress

What Congress set out to do, was to come up with ethics reform legislation that would show that they are addressing the concerns of the public, in the wake of numerous scandals.  Reportedly, though, both parties were reluctant to put limits or their interactions with lobbyists.  Instead, they are going to settle for a rather anemic rule change that requires lawmakers to acknowledge the pork-barrel earmarks they sponsor. href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401674.html"> href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/…

Biodyl, Franck's Pharmacy, and Florida Polo Horse Deaths: Guaranteed It's the Decimal Point

Last weekend, 21 Venezuelan polo horses collapsed and died at the US Open championship match at the International Polo Club Palm Beach in Wellington, Florida (AP, CNN). The deaths have now been associated with injection of a veterinary mineral supplement produced by a compounding pharmacy in Ocala, Florida. Located in central Florida about 45 min south of the University of Florida, Ocala is well-known for its density of equestrian farms and training centers. Precisely how this supplement killed the animals is not yet known but I can guarantee that it was a calculation error involving an…

Race-based vitamins: no, it's not The Onion (Updated)

[Posted originally on 19 July but updated to include more information on BiDil] DrugMonkey alerted me to this gem at Light-skinned-ed Girl on a company called GenSpec Labs who are marketing, African American-, Hispanic-, and Caucasian-focused vitamin supplements. Seriously. I thought this was a link to The Onion. The GenSpec promotion is a completely asinine and repulsive marketing exploitation of a concept that, surprisingly, often has some pretty good science behind it. But it's also very typical of the dietary supplement industry to take a little science and come up with some snake oil…

Acute mountain sickness in the exit row?

Have you ever wondered how well-pressurized airlines keep the cabin of the average commercial flight? I have. So, in my gadget days, I once took my altimeter on a flight and learned that on my particular flight the cabin was pressurized to the equivalent of an altitude of 7200 ft (2195 m) above sea level. At the time, I was living at about 8000 ft (2438 m) so I never gave thought to the fact that a prolonged flight might produce symptoms of acute mountain sickness in otherwise unacclimatized individuals predisposed to the disorder. Now, in research supported by Boeing and published in last…

Why do people overbid in auctions?

The art of auctioning is an ancient one. The concept of competitively bidding for goods has lasted from Roman times, when spoils of war were divvied up around a planted spear, to the 21st century, when the spoils of the loft are sold through eBay. But despite society's familiarity with the concept, people who take part in auctions still behave in a strange way - they tend to overbid, offering more money than what they actually think an object is worth. Some economists have suggested that people overbid because they are averse to risk. They would rather make spend more money to be sure of a…

Cuckoos mimic hawks to fool small birds

Cuckoos are some of nature's most familiar conmen. Several species of this large family are murderous slackers, who shun their own parental responsibilities by deceiving other birds into caring for their chicks. In the process, they destroy the eggs of the unwitting adopted family to ensure that their own chick gets undivided attention. But this is not the only way that cuckoos fool other birds - they also mimic hawks. The resemblance between cuckoos and hawks (particularly sparrowhawks) has been noted for millennia. Both birds have long bodies, wings and tails and their paler, striped…