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Lars Vilks attacked again

Like last time, I expect this news will set off another fusillade of dissenting opinions, but too bad. Extremists have vandalized Lars Vilks home, trying to set it on fire (original article in Swedish here). In an undoubtably futile attempt to forestall what I expect will be common objections to this story here, I know that there are political ramifications to the cartoons of Mohammed. I know that many of them were motivated by racism and xenophobia. In this instance, though, I don't care. Vilks drew a sketch. His enemies set his house on fire. I would encourage Muslims to respond in kind,…

Nevado del Huila

I've been following these rumblings for the last few months, but it looks like Colombia's Nevado del Huila is ramping into a new cycle of eruptions. Huila lives in the shadow of its more famous brethren Nevado del Ruiz and Galeras, both of which have had recent and tragic eruptions. Huila is not believed to have been active since the 1500s, but little research has been done on Huila (or any Colombian volcano beyond the aforementioned duo), so it might have had some fits and spasms in the last 500 years.  Reports from INGEOMINAS, the Colombian Geological Survey, say that Huila has been…

Candy from strangers

Thanks to BoingBoing for this example of the importance of skepticism: A gang of thieves in Istanbul, Turkey have reportedly been dressing like doctors and distributing sedatives door to door, telling residents the medicine was related to a test for high blood pressure. Once the victims dosed, the thieves would rob them. As part of the police investigation, officers attempted the same trick but used placebos. Apparently 86 out of 100 people who answered the door took the pill right away. Police then attempted to explain why that was a bad idea. From Reuters: Turkish police in other provinces…

Doomed to repeat it

Shorter Ginni Thomas in WaPo: Wife of Justice Thomas starts group for 'citizen activists': Caesar's wife was a pussy. Actual spokeswoman for Mrs. Thomas, who recently started a teabagging group using corporate funds as permitted by her husband's vote on Citizens United: "She did not give up her First Amendment rights when her husband became a Supreme Court judge." Words fail. Sure, she didn't give up her right to speak freely, but that doesn't mean she should profiteer using her husband's decisions. Any corporation donating to her group which doesn't think it's buying access to Justice…

Denier v. Denier

It's true that there's a lot of overlap between creationists and global warming deniers. Lots of creationists have been conditioned to reject claims of scientific consensus, and so throw in with the deniers. However, the global warming deniers know that creationism is bad science, and that linking themselves to it would just be embarrassing, which leads to the possibility of internecine warfare, as creationists try to glom onto global warming denial and global warming deniers try desperately to shake them loose. To whit, this slide from a presentation by global warming denier Richard Lindzen…

Merry Kitzmas

To celebrate the 4th anniversary of ID creationism's defeat in Dover, PA, the Disco. 'Tute is making things up. Having, it seems, nothing new to say on the subject, they've reposted an ill-argued and factually inaccurate essay by philosopher of the mind Thomas Nagel, prefacing it by claiming: Editor's Note: Dec. 20 was the 4th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover decision banning the mention of intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania classrooms. Except no. The Kitzmiller decision didn't ban the mention of ID in Dover's schools. It blocks the school board from requiring science teachers…

Northeastern Protestants & Catholics accept evolution

On a lark I decided to see how Catholics & Protestants broke down in regards to evolution by American region in the GSS. Specifically, I clustered the Census Divisions to create the categories of: Northeast = New England + Mid Atlantic Midwest = E & W North Central South = S Atlantic + E South Central + W South Central West = Mountain + Pacific I limited the data to non-Hispanic whites for the question "evolved," which was asked in 2006 and 2008, so recently. Results below the fold for this question.... Protestant Catholic No Religion…

Chimpanzee & human speciation

Thomas Mailund on Doubts about complex speciation between humans and chimpanzees: Two patterns from large-scale DNA sequence data have been put forward as evidence that speciation between humans and chimpanzees was complex, involving hybridization and strong selection. First, divergence between humans and chimpanzees varies considerably across the autosomes. Second, divergence between humans and chimpanzees (but not gorillas) is markedly lower on the X chromosome. Here, we describe how simple speciation and neutral molecular evolution explain both patterns. In particular, the wide range in…

The evolution of God

Nicholas Wade is moderately skeptical of Robert Wright's new book, The Evolution of God: Robert Wright's new book, "The Evolution of God," has a provocative title. But it's a disappointment from the Darwinian perspective. He doesn't mean real evolution, just the development of ideas about God. He argues that our morality has improved over the centuries and that maybe the hand of the deity can be discerned in that progression, if one looks hard enough. But he leaves fuzzy the matter of whether he thinks a deity is there for real. There's a moral order in history, he says, which "makes it…

Bad charities

There's always someone ready to take advantage of another's misfortune, often while wearing a pious expression on their faces. Here are two bad charities: Sean Hannity claims to support our troops, endorsing a charity called Freedom Alliance that supposedly pays tuition for the children of fallen soldiers. What they don't tell you is that 'overhead' sucks up at least 80-90% of the donations. Hannity will be riding a nice limousine to accept a community service award… Scenar Health is one of those companies that markets a Radio Shack gadget called a Self Controlled Energo Neuro Adaptive…

Dystopia as dashed dreams?

I watched Clockwork Orange a few months ago. More recently I've been reading some economic history, as well as the utopian visions of early 19th century reformers. From these two vantage points I've come to the conclusion that the whole genre of "dystopia" is really about lowered expectations. Modern Western man after the Great Divergence actually lives in what would be a utopia to anyone in the 19th century; after all obesity related illnesses are a major problem for the underclasses in Western societies! Future dystopias in reality simply resemble the social structure and quality of…

Is Free Speech part of the White Power Structure?

The Audacious Epigone looks closely at the opinions regarding the banning of unpopular speech which I posted on earlier. I limited the sample to whites, because after all, who cares what coloreds think? No seriously, I was trying to get population substructure out of the way (this is why Barack Hussein Obama won the most religious in the South, and the least religious outside of the South). In any case, it seems that whites are the most robust supporters of free speech. If you think about it closely this makes sense, as speech and power are intimately connected, and whites have a long…

Conor Clarke interviews Robert Shiller

Over at The Atlantic. Shiller is the author of Irrational Exuberance, The Subprime Solution and Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global. As I've noted before, Shiller's specific arguments about the causal sequences behind manias and crashes leave a lot to be desired, but it seems entirely correct that he bet on the right horse when it comes to behavioral economics and the importance cognitive biases outside of the bounds of rationality in a market. The same phenomenon can be described from a different angle, such as Benoit Mandelbrot's The…

Star Hustler → Star Gazer

I used to watch Jack Horkheimer's show when I was a kid back in the '80s. In fact, sometimes I would stay up late just to catch it. Today I found this out on Wikipedia: Question: Why did you change the name of the show from 'JACK HORKHEIMER : STAR HUSTLER' TO 'JACK HORKHEIMER : STAR GAZER' ? Answer: The name was changed due to our presence on the internet. When people, especially children, were accessing our Star Hustler site by using a search engine, STAR HUSTLER was not the HUSTLER they got to link to...so, after some upset folks wrote to us calling attention to the situation we realized…

That Bergman-Myers debate

Well. It was a strange event. Kittywhumpus and Greg Laden have good detailed breakdowns of the debate, so you can always read those for the audience perspective. As for me, I've learned that you can never prepare for a debate. I tried. I had a focus — the topic, chosen by Bergman, was "Should Intelligent Design be taught in the schools" — and what I prepared for my side was a set of arguments on that point. I used my own experience teaching biology to lay down a few principles: to teach a subject as science, you need an explanatory mechanism or theory that provides a conceptual framework for…

Quick Critique: Dembski and Marks in IEEE Journal

As lots of you have heard, William Dembski and Robert Marks just had href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isYear=2009&isnumber=5208652&Submit32=View+Contents">a paper published in an IEEE journal. In the last couple of days, I've received about 30 copies of the paper in my email with requests to analyze it. My biggest criticism of the paper is how utterly dull it is. It's obvious how they got it published - they removed anything that's really interesting from it. It's a rehash of the stuff they've written before, stripped of any content that directly hints at the…

Binary Heaps

One of the most neglected data structures in the CS repertoire is the heap. Unfortunately, the jargon is overloaded, so "heap" can mean two different things - but there is a connection, which I'll explain in a little while. In many programming languages, when you can dynamically create objects in memory, the space from which you allocate the memory to create them is called the heap. That is not what I'm talking about. What I am talking about is an extremely simple but powerful structure that is used for maintaining a collection of values from which you want to be able to quickly remove the…

Abstract Real Numbers: Fields

When I learned abstract algebra, we very nearly skipped over rings. Basically, we spent a ton of time talking about groups; then we talked about rings pretty much as a stepping stone to fields. Since then, I've learned more about rings, in the context of category theory. I'm going to follow the order in which I learned things, and move on to fields. From fields, I'll jump back a bit into some category theory, and look at the category theoretic views of the structures of abstract algebra. My reasoning is that I find that you need to acquire some understanding of what the basic objects and…

Basics: Proof by Contradiction

I haven't written a basics post in a while, because for the most part, that well has run dry, but once in a while, one still pops up. I got an email recently asking about proofs by contradiction and counterexamples, and I thought that would be a great subject for a post. The email was really someone trying to get me to do their homework for them, which I'm not going to do - but I can explain the ideas, and the relationships and differences between them. Proof by contradiction, also known as "reductio ad absurdum", is one of the most beautiful proof techniques in math. In my experience,…

More on Social Security

Looking at the comments from a previous post about social security, I wanted to address a couple of other points, and then provide some more evidence about the ridiculousness of the Social Security 'crisis.' First, as I'll discuss below, Social Security will not collapse. There is no serious evidence to support that scenario (please, take a deep breath; I'll get to that). If you want to privatize social security, cut benefits, or change the eligibilty rules (one-third of Social Security payouts do not go to the elderly, but to widows, orphans, and the disabled), you have to make those…

Fundies and Limited Deities

So I hear, via the Panda's Thumb, that Uncommon Descent has a new poster. And he's off to a rollicking good start, with a post explaining why Christians who accept the fact of evolution are incoherent and deluded. (As usual, I don't link to UD, due to their rampant dishonesty in silently altering or removing links.) I am, perhaps, not the best person to respond to his claim, given that I'm not a Christian. But his argument is so inconsistent, and so typical of a type of argument that constantly occurs in fundamentalist gibberings that it doesn't take a Christian theistic evolutionist to…

Incarceration and the Cult of Hovind

Remember the old joke that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged? By way of Ed Brayton, I came across this post by Kent Hovind about his time in jail. Both the post and some of the responses are fascinating (in a 'car wreck' sort of way) because they illuminate the authoritarian mind so well. Hovind has reached an epiphany of sorts about the criminal justice system: At lunch last week, one of the inmates said, "If I could, I would bomb the Christian Coalition. They are the reason we are here." I was shocked by his statement! I love the Christian Coalition, but I understand the…

Why brown people are midgets

I'm 5 feet 8 inches tall. 1.73 meters. In the United States that's somewhat on the short side, most of the charts suggest I'm around the 30th percentile for white men. Of course, I'm not white. In any case, though I'm on the short side for the typical American male, I'm a giant in my family. My father is 5 feet 4 inches. My mother is around 5 feet now. They're possibly shorter than they were due to age, but they would have been short in the United States no matter what. As I was growing up, and surpassed my parents in my mid-teens, I assumed that their relative lack of height was a…

Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World

When I was a child in Bangladesh one of my "charming" activities would be to give the local banana seller some unsolicited advice. As he walked down the street carrying his banana-bunch I would shout down from the balcony and tell him which cultivars my family preferred, and that he better get with the program if he wanted our business. What he had on offer was similar to the Cavendish which you encounter in American supermarkets; my family tended to prefer a smaller, sweeter, variety which was often seeded. Despite all the problems (e.g., pathogen load) associated with living in an…

Brad Pitt + Angelina Jolie = saving the world one baby at a time?

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are classic "beautiful people." By now you know they are going to have a baby. What sort of child will this be? Handbag.com offers you a projection:   Not half bad. Certainly more traditionally beautiful than the Brit Rock look-alike produced by Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck. Why are Brad Pit and Angelina Jolie so beautiful? Neither of them were raised in dire circumstances, but likely they have a "genetic leg up." In any given population there will be a genetic load, a number of deleterious alleles which decrease average population fitness from the…

Modes of religion

I've been blogging a lot about "religion" recently, but I haven't reallly spelled out what I mean by religion. The answer is many things. Religion, or religious belief and practice, are a suite of behaviors and concepts which explore a multi-dimensional space. This space is inhabited by a wide range of combinations of traits, some more common than others. One of the problems addressing this topic is that everyone has a different perception of the subject, a perception shaped by their own cognitive and social biases. Here are a few of the axes which I believe religion explores: 1) The…

The gay gene & other considerations

Jonah over at The Frontal Cortex has some commentary up on the gay sheep story. A reader pointed out that this controversy started off with some wild claims made by PETA. Nevertheless (more at Andrew Sullivan's), no matter the details of the claim, there are a few points I'd like to pick up on.... Jonah says: So here's my hypothesis: if you select against homosexuality in a biological community, you will also be selecting against our instinct for solidarity. The same genes that give rise to gayness might also give rise to cooperation. When scientists create a population of all heterosexual…

The history of evolutionary genetics

The first chapter of Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies gives a quick sketch of the arc of the field that the book covers via exposition of topical and current issues. Michael R. Dietrich focuses on the series of controversies which serve as "hinges of history." I have addressed the controversy between the biometricians & Mendelians before, below are the "highlights" over a longer period based on the outline constructed by Dietrich in his chapter, From Mendel to molecules: A brief history of evolutionary genetics. 1860s Genesis Charles Darwin brings forth an evolutionary…

Beware Compulsive Centrists and ISlate-esque Contrarians Bearing False Equivalencies

The NY Times' Matt Bai writes a predictable article about the Gifford shooting: Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin's infamous "cross hairs" map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords's, with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman's apparently liberal constituents declared her "dead to…

The Scientist Shortage: It's a Demand-Side, Not Supply-Side Problem

By way of Seeing the Forest, we note that at Miller-McCune, Beryl Lieff Benderly has a must-read story about the supposed shortage of scientists in the U.S. A while ago, I described the supposed shortage of scientists as a problem of incentives: As long as financial 'engineering' is more lucrative than actual engineering (and other disciplines)--both in terms of pre- and post-tax salary--and has better job security, many students, particularly when too many graduate with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt, will choose to do something other than science. And consider defending…

Parrots International Position Statement on Proposed Addition of 14 Parrot Species to the US Endangered Species List

tags: US endangered species list, parrots, aviculture, captive breeding, position statement, Parrots International, politics NOTE: This position statement just came to my attention. I wish I had learned about it on 10 August, since I would have shared it immediately on that day. August 10, 2009 Public Comments Processing Attn: FWS-R9-IA-2009-0016 Division of Policy and Directives Management U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service 4401 N. Fairfax Drive Suite 222; Arlington, VA 22203 As president of Parrots International I am forwarding the official position statement of Parrots International in…

Universal health coverage genie gets out of the bottle

I don't ordinarily write about health care reform here, partly because it isn't my expertise, partly because other interests come first, partly because others do it much better. But I have been thinking a good deal about what needs to be done for our public health infrastructure and that necessarily brings health care reform into the picture, whether I want it there or not. My view of it is primarily as a consumer. I pay ridiculous health insurance premiums and still feel underinsured. But I also see it from the provider's point of view, where the current system, while lucrative for some, is…

The best summary of H5N1 to date

This week The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published three articles on the evolving story of the influenza A/H5N1 panzootic that has the potential to become a human pandemic. Two are rather meager case series, one from Turkey and one from Indonesia. It is an extraordinary indication of the paucity of information that these papers could get published in one of the world's premier medical journals, a fact duly noted by Canadian Press's Helen Branswell. The two papers have some moderately interesting information, none of it startling for those who follow this issue. But the Commentary…

A cautionary tale about cytokine storm

Here's a cautionary tale. Many readers know that H5N1 infection is capable of causing a sudden over activity of the immune system, manifested in a so-called cytokine storm. Over active immune systems have been implicated in many other diseases, as well, although the type of "over activity" isn't the same. Autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus erythematosus are caused by the body making antibodies to its own tissues. As in cytokine storm, an immune system that normally functions to protect us, makes us sick. To damp down the inappropriate activity, drugs like steroids are…

Protein modeling and the Siamese cat

"By night all cats are gray"  - Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote   I've always liked Siamese cats.   Students do, too.  "Why Siamese cats wear masks" is always a favorite story in genetics class.  So, when I opened my January copy of The Science Teacher, I was thrilled to see an article on Siamese cat colors and proteins AND molecular genetics (1). In the article, the authors (Todd and Kenyon) provide some background information on the enzymatic activity of tyrosinase and compare it to the catechol oxidase that causes fruit to brown, especially apples.  Tyrosinase catalyzes the first step of a…

Using protein blast and searching for Elvis, part I.

In which we search for Elvis, using blastp, and find out how old we would have to be to see Elvis in a Las Vegas club. Introduction Once you're acquainted with proteins, amino acids, and the kinds of bonds that hold proteins together, we can talk about using this information to evaluate the similarity between protein sequences. We can easily imagine that if two protein sequences are identical, then those proteins would have the same kind of activity. But what about proteins that are similar in some regions, and not others, or proteins that only share some of the same amino acids in similar…

The Lancet's terrible dilemma

I like the British medical journal, The Lancet. I like it a lot. I read it, subscribed to it and I've published there. More than once. So I sympathize with their terrible dilemma: Physicians from around the world urged the publisher of The Lancet medical journal to cut its links to weapons sales, calling on the editors to find another publisher if Reed Elsevier refused to stop hosting arms fairs. The doctors made their appeal in the latest edition of The Lancet, released Friday. Editors at The Lancet responded by backing the doctors, calling the situation "bizarre and untenable." They wrote…

Once more on the vaccine question

There's hopeful news about the possibility of an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine and a weird story from Canada about "preliminary results" saying that you are more at risk from swine flu if you get the seasonal flu vaccine. With flu, anything is possible, but that is more than a little counterintuitive and strikes me as unlikely. Nowhere else has reported a similar experience. Since we don't know the methods or the data or the limitations or much of anything else that could allow us to consider how much to weigh this as evidence I won't say any more about it. While we do write about vaccines here…

Swine flu: WHO and its pandemic phases

The World Health Organization (WHO) is not the world's health department or the world's doctor. It is an intergovernmental agency that is part of the United Nations (UN). The UN, despite what hard right wingnuts might think, is not a world government. The international system is technically anarchic, meaning that there is no governing body above nationally sovereign states. For the most part, WHO has no powers beyond those granted it by its member nations (for more background, see our five part series over at the old site here, here, here, here, here). It is only within the last few years…

Palin comparison, IX: the Politician

This is another in our Daily Dose of Sarah Palin, because even if John McCain didn't think it was that important to learn a lot about the person who might be the next President should some medical event befall the 72 year old cancer survivor should he be elected, most people want more information. Previous installments here. Today we discuss Sarah Palin's true nature. Let's be very clear about what Sarah Palin is. Whatever else bad she is -- and there's a lot of bad there -- she's mainly a politician and an exceptionally talented one. Very slick. As Sam Goldwyn once said, "If you can fake…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 25 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples: Despite its appearing to be a simple question to answer, there has been no consensus as to whether or not the alignments of ancient Greek temples…

The design of everything that flows and moves

An interesting paper came out about nine months ago about a proposed new universal law of biology, so I blogged about it on January 17, 2006 and updated on February 20, 2006. Now this is some cool science! Biology does not have laws. Natural Selection is a Principle. Evolution is a Theory. But the closest biology comes to having a law is scaling, yet there are so many exceptions to the rule, how lawful really is it? Now, a paper came out claiming a new law: Unified Physics Theory Explains Animals' Running, Flying And Swimming, and it is mighty interesting: The researchers show that so-…

Twelve Traps to Avoid

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of George Lakoff's new book Thinking Points. You can read more here or download a PDF of the first chapter here. You have heard many of these ideas before, including repeatedly on my blog, but it is nice to see them all stated succintly and collected in one place: 1. The Issue Trap We hear it said all the time: Progressives won't unite behind any set of ideas. We all have different ideas and care about different issues. The truth is that progressives do agree at the level of values and that there is a real basis for progressive unity. Progressive…

Pledge Of Allegiance

A few days ago, my son told me that one of his teachers (he is in 8th grade), after decorating the whole school with American flags, announced that they will be reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. I was not aware at the time that this is a new State Law, snuck under the radar during the summer. But it is. It was enacted on July, 12th 2006, as a change in general powers and duties of the state concerning the educational system. You can see the history of how the statute was changed here and the final version of the bill here (PDF). The press only noted this the other day.…

VIP synchronizes mammalian circadian pacemaker neurons

No other aspect of behavioral biology is as well understood at the molecular level as the mechanism that generates and sustains circadian rhythms. If you are following science in general, or this blog in particular, you are probably familiar with the names of circadian clock genes like per, tim, clk, frq, wc, cry, Bmal, kai, toc, doubletime, rev-erb etc. The deep and detailed knowledge of the genes involved in circadian clock function has one unintended side-effect, especially for people outside the field. If one does not stop and think for a second, it is easy to fall under the impression…

Thinking about abortion

I am pro-abortion. Not in the sense that I think abortions are good. I don't. In the sense that I am pro-surgery for medical conditions that can be surgically treated, or pro-pharmaceuticals for medical conditions that can be treated with drugs. I consider an unwanted fertilization to be a medical condition with significant consequences that can be treated. Now that I have gotten that out of the way I hope I can be free to state some ambivalence later about some other matters related to the anti-abortion movement. But no ambivalence about a woman's ability to get an abortion. Roe v. Wade was…

Study: New method of mapping HIV transmission risk may be more efficient way to prevent infection

Ideally, everyone should be tested for HIV and in fact, federal guidelines introduced in 2006 recommend routine HIV screening for all patients. In reality, however, only about half of U.S. adults have ever been tested for HIV and about half of the 50,000 new infections that happen every year in the U.S. are transmitted by people who are unaware of their HIV status. Such statistics recently led a group of researchers to ask if there’s a more efficient way to go about curbing the HIV epidemic. “We strongly support the concept of universal testing and treatment to limit or control the spread of…

Succession, Human and Wild

This week's project is getting the material up for my garden plants and herb CSA - I'm hoping to be able to offer a wide variety of plants from annual vegetables (my tomato list alone is insane) to unusual edibles, native plants, flowers and herbs. My garden obsession is making me a little nuts right now, since there are still 3 feet of snow on the ground and its about 12 degrees right now - nuts enough that I came up with this: my secret garden that can be planting in plain sight without anyone...not the neighbors, not the zoning board, knowing that it all (shhhhh!) delicious food plants! I…

31 Books - The Resilient Gardener

There are a lot of gardening books out there, and whenever anyone asks me for my favorite ones, I find myself struggling to make a list. There are three rules about garden books to remember. 1. All garden books are local to one degree or another, unless they are very general. That is, all garden books are fundamentally about the experience of gardeners in particular places and in particular circumstances. Beyond basic books, the best garden books are by authors who remember this and try and connect what they have done with others, while also acknowledging the limits of their experience…

I Am Really PZ Myers!

It was a busy weekend here - figuring out whether we were moving, my sister was visting, other friends were visiting, we hit the local County Fair, worked in the garden, you know, life. So until just now, I hadn't paid any attention to the empty meanderings about science blogs in the Times Magazine. But I did have to read it eventually - Monday comes eventually to all of us - and lo and behold, I got me an awesome dig from the Times - Virginia Heffernan attacks all science bloggers for being part of the "religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd." Now that's kind of funny, because I wasn't aware…