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Update on Illinois Anti-Discrimination Law

A few days ago, I wrote about the new Illinois bill that added sexual orientation to their already existing anti-discrimination laws. That bill, signed by the governor last week, did not specifically include an exemption for churches. That lack of exemption has caused what can only be described as a full scale freakout in the right wing media. As I said the other day, being opposed to such a law is entirely reasonable, as a law prohibiting churches from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or religion is quite clearly unconstitutional. But that is exactly why I wasn't too…

The stuff of legend

This is turning up all over the place — at Brad DeLong's, Crooked Timber, and this pair is from Cosmic Variance — it's the most sublimely, awesomely, wickedly stupid example of fudging a curve ever. The two graphs below have exactly the same data points, and the only difference is the curve that was 'fit' to the distribution. Which one looks plausible to you? The one on the left looks sensible and simple, and looks like it was actually drawn with some consideration of the data. The one on the right … not so much. I have no idea how anyone could think that particular curve belongs in there.…

Kelly Hollowell and Kent Hovind

Kelly Hollowell, columnist for the WorldNutDaily and head of Science Ministries (there's two words that don't belong together), has come in for a good bit of bashing here at Dispatches. She's a virtual fountain of stupidity, whether she's writing about the founding fathers or evolution. But not only is she a young earth creationist (YEC), she's not even smart enough to avoid the mind-numbing stupidity of the good "doctor", Kent Hovind. She even reprints his Questions for Evolutionists on her webpage. Given the fact that Hovind's "doctorate" is a complete fraud not worth the paper it's…

Mostly Mute Monday: Lifting The Cosmic Veil (Synopsis)

“No matter how ‘normal’ people look, living ‘ordinary’ lives, everyone has a story to tell. And may be, just like you, everyone else is a misfit too.” -Sanhita Baruah Every century or so, possibly even more frequently, a supernova goes off somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy. While the explosion itself is only visible for a few months, the remnant sticks around for many thousands of years. Although it isn't always visible in the portion of the spectrum our eyes are sensitive to, X-rays, Ultraviolet light, infrared and radio observations bring them to life. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech, GALEX…

Weekend Diversion: Spook-tacular Science Pumpkins (Synopsis)

“It’s said that All Hallows’ Eve is one of the nights when the veil between the worlds is thin — and whether you believe in such things or not, those roaming spirits probably believe in you, or at least acknowledge your existence, considering that it used to be their own.” -Erin Morgenstern Alas, Halloween comes but once a year, giving all of us the opportunity to express ourselves in an unusual fashion. You're free to dress up, decorate, or otherwise meddle in the fictional, occult or fearsome however you desire. Have a listen to Laura Marling's bone-rattling song, Night Terror, while you…

Weekend Diversion: Aquarium Art (Synopsis)

“Life is life’s greatest gift. Guard the life of another creature as you would your own because it is your own. On life’s scale of values, the smallest is no less precious to the creature who owns it than the largest.” -Lloyd Biggle, Jr. And yet it's certainly something to consider how little attention we pay to the place which houses the vast majority of Earth's life: the oceans. Covering the majority of the planet's surface and containing the majority of our planet's biomass, the undersea realm is often forgotten in our day-to-day lives. Have a listen to Bill Evans as his trio plays their…

Mostly Mute Monday: Water On Mars (Synopsis)

“If I want water, I’ll have to make it from scratch. Fortunately, I know the recipe: Take hydrogen. Add oxygen. Burn.” -Andy Weir It wasn't merely one discovery that led to the announcement of liquid water on Mars, but a slew of pieces of evidence of a watery past, including dried-up riverbeds, sedimentary rock formations, martian spherules, frozen lakes and subsurface ice. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell/USGS, Mars Opportunity Rover. Couple that with the recurring slope lineae -- and the discovery that they grow and leave salt deposits behind -- and you've got a planet with not only liquid…

Dear Ben Carson: an open letter (Synopsis)

“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.” -Carl Sagan So, Ben Carson made a speech in 2011 that's making the rounds, for some pretty scary reasons. I'm particularly concerned with what he has…

Weekend Diversion: Obsession, for cats? (Synopsis)

“The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning.” -John Vaillant I can't fault you if you've given up entirely on the perfume/cologne industry. Despite was might be marketed as a way to induce an "obsession" among your love interest, reality often falls flat. Have a listen to Suede sing about the idea in their song, Obsessions, while you consider that an interesting behavior that was quite unintended has been seen. Image credit:…

Ask Ethan #104: What if we grew a fourth spatial dimension? (Synopsis)

“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition.” -Rod Serling Of course, despite our best theoretical hopes, we know only of four dimensions -- three space and one time -- that exist in our Universe. But what if there not only were a fourth spatial dimension, but it presented itself to us by growing from a microscopic, undetectable state, and then shrank back into one on an annual basis? Image credit: Paul Falstad’s 3-D Vector…

Throwback Thursday: Pakistan’s First Female Astrophysics Ph.D. (Synopsis)

“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.” –Joan of Arc In 2012, I had the honor and the privilege to learn about Mariam Sultana, the first woman in Pakistan to be awarded a Ph.D. degree in astrophysics. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to contact her and obtain permission for an exclusive interview, for which I solicited questions for her from all over the globe. Image credit: The Express Tribune with the International Herald Tribune, http://tribune.…

Throwback Thursday: The Fundamental Limits Of Knowledge (Synopsis)

“Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.” –Alan Guth If we trace the evolution of our Universe back in time, we can arrive at a time before there were organic molecules, rocky planets, heavy elements, galaxies, stars, or even neutral atoms. The farther back we go, the hotter the Universe gets, the higher in density and temperature, and more uniform. But at some point, this hot, dense, expanding state ceases to describe our Universe. Image credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Because…

Mostly Mute Monday: Inside The Carina Nebula (Synopsis)

“This method of viewing the heavens seems to throw them into a new kind of light. They are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden, which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different flourishing beds; and one advantage we may reap from it is, that we can, as it were, extend the range of our experience to an immense duration.” -William Herschel When a large molecular cloud of gas begins to collapse under its own gravity, whether spontaneously or triggered by a "nudge" in space, the runaway process leads to many new star clusters, which in turn lead to ionization, ultraviolet…

Ask Ethan #95: Could it all come crashing down? (Synopsis)

“Revolutions are something you see only in retrospect.” -Alan Greenspan If there's one thing you can be certain of when it comes to the fundamental, scientific truths of our Universe, it's this: someday, in the not too distant future, those truths will be superseded by more fundamental ones. And even those, quite likely, won't be the final truths, but just one step further along the line towards our understanding of reality. Image credit: Philosophy of Cosmology / University of Oxford, via http://philosophy-of-cosmology.ox.ac.uk/cosmos.html. Does this mean that we've necessarily got it all…

Have we just found the first stars in the Universe? (Synopsis)

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” -Vincent Van Gogh When we look out into the Universe, farther back to greater distances, we're also looking back in time, farther and farther into the past. If we could look back far enough, close enough to the Big Bang, we'd be able to see the very first stars ever formed in the Universe: stars formed from the Big Bang's leftover material itself. Image credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO). We'd never been able to find these before, but by looking at a starburst galaxy at extremely high…

Mostly Mute Monday: The Largest Eruption In The Known Universe (Synopsis)

“The world exploded into billions of atoms, and when it rearranged itself, it may have looked the same, but really, it was a Whole New World.” -Claire LaZebnik At the center of almost every galaxy is a supermassive black hole (SMBH); at the center of almost every cluster is a supermassive galaxy with some of the largest SMBHs in the Universe. And every once in a while, a galactocentric black hole will become active, emitting tremendous amounts of radiation out into the Universe as it devours matter. Image credit: NASA/CXC/Ohio U./B.McNamara, via http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/ms0735/…

The Science of the Local Group (Synopsis)

“We live in a world that has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.” -Lyndon B. Johnson When you think of our own cosmic backyard -- our planets, Sun, the nearby stars, and even the closest galaxies to us -- you probably don't think of them in the context of the entire Universe. But if you want to understand where we come from and how we got to be this way, perhaps you ought to. Image credit: J. W. Inman, of NGC 2543, via http://www.jwinman.com/starcharts/NGC%202543%20chart.htm. We could have been a single, isolated galaxy hanging out all by our lonesome…

Weekend Diversion: Reverse-Pointillist Art (Synopsis)

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” -Pablo Picasso When you think about representing something physical in an artistic medium, you usually think of starting with a blank canvas and adding to it. Such is the case with musicians, who start with silence and add to it, like Tony Trischka as he plays his remarkable composition, French Creek / Burning Springs. But every once in a while, you discover a new form of art, where subtraction -- or even destruction -- is the medium of communication. Image credit: Jihyun Park, working on a reverse-pointillist masterpiece, via http://…

Throwback Thursday: Past the Fingers of God (Synopsis)

“On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.” -Paul Ricoeur What you see is what you get, except when it isn't. We're all familiar with Hubble's law, or the notion that the Universe is expanding, and that the farther away you look, the faster you'll see that distant galaxy moving away from you. This relation would be exact, if only the rest of the objects in the Universe didn't exert gravitational forces on one another. Image credit: Cosmic Flows Project/University of Hawaii, via http://…

Throwback Thursday: What is the Sun made of? (Synopsis)

“The sun is a miasma Of incandescent plasma The sun’s not simply made out of gas No, no, no The sun is a quagmire It’s not made of fire Forget what you’ve been told in the past” -They Might Be Giants It's such a simple fact -- that the Sun is made out of hydrogen that fuses into helium, releasing energy by E=mc^2 -- that it's easy to forget that a century ago, we knew none of these things. Image credit: ESA and NASA,Acknowledgment: E. Olszewski (University of Arizona). Not that nuclear fusion was a thing, not that the Sun got its energy from E=mc^2, and not even that the Sun was made out…

Mostly Mute Monday: A final view from the Moon (Synopsis)

“Curiosity is the essence of human existence. ‘Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?’… I don’t know. I don’t have any answers to those questions. I don’t know what’s over there around the corner. But I want to find out.” -Eugene Cernan, last human on the Moon It's been nearly 43 years since humans have set foot on the Moon, and yet we've never forgotten what it looks like. Image credit: NASA / Apollo 17 / East view of station 1, via http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apollopanoramas/. Yet nothing that anyone can describe -- either about what it was like or…

Throwback Thursday: The Camera that changed the Universe (Synopsis)

“That I learned even as a three year-old that I see this world that is really a mess and I learned to say, ‘This is not me. I am not the one that is messed up. It is out there.’” -Story Musgrave It was 25 years ago this year that the Hubble Space Telescope first opened its eyes on the Universe. It wasn't as you might've expected, all that impressive. For one, there were flaws in the optics of the primary mirror, and for another, the camera we installed on it was, I hate to say it, pretty lame. Image credit: NASA, of the first Hubble servicing mission. But in 1993, a servicing mission was…

Weekend Diversion: The Eclipse of a Lifetime is Coming (Synopsis)

“Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.” -Simon Newcomb For most of us, news of a total solar eclipse -- even though they happen (on average) once every three years -- seems distant and remote, and far from the possibility of us enjoying it. Have a listen to the Cat Stevens classic, Moonshadow, while you consider how rare it is to have the Moon's shadow fall on us.For those of us in the United States, we haven't seen a total solar eclipse…

The Bittersweet Taste of Philae’s Limited Success (Synopsis)

“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.”  -Judith Thurman You'd think that landing on a comet for the first time, with all ten instruments functioning, and collecting more than two full Earth-days worth of data would be more than enough to sate the scientifically curious among us. Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA. But the sad reality is that despite the tremendous successes of Philae, we'll always be left to wonder what might have been if it had functioned optimally, and given us…

Messier Monday: The could-be-better cluster, M26 (Synopsis)

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.” -Neil Gaiman When you consider the short life of a star cluster -- from a collapsing molecular cloud to a nebula rich in gas and dust to a bright cluster of shining stars until the time it dissociates -- you might think that they'd all be the same, except for a few details like mass and density profile. But then how would you explain this object? Image credit: John C. Mirtle of http://www.astrofoto.ca/john/m026.htm. Here's a cluster, 89…

Messier Monday: The Eagle Nebula, M16 (Synopsis)

“The most amazing lesson in aerodynamics I ever had was the day I climbed a thermal in a glider at the same time as an eagle. I witnessed, close up, effortlessness and lightness combined with strength, precision and determination.” -Norman Foster It's called the "Eagle Nebula" because the shape of the nebula itself faintly resembles the silhouette of that hyper-intelligent and skilled bird-of-prey, but what lies inside is far more spectacular than any early skywatcher imagined. Image credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo, via http://www.deepskycolors.com/archivo/2008/06/07/messier-16-The-Eagle-Ne…

Preparing for Alien Life (Synopsis)

“Language… has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.” -Paul Tillich One of the biggest questions in all of science is that of just how ubiquitous -- or rare -- life in the Universe is. With the sole exception of Earth, all the worlds in our Solar System seem devoid of life. Or at least, their detection has eluded us so far. But what of all the other planets, star systems and galaxies in the Universe? Image credit: Robert Gendler of http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/Biography.html. We…

Ask Ethan #52: How long has the Universe been accelerating? (Synopsis)

“After all the ‘Universe’ is a hypothesis, like the atom, & must be allowed the freedom to have properties & to do things which would be contradictory & impossible for a finite material structure.” -Willem de Sitter Dark energy was one of the biggest surprises to come along in the past generation, from a scientific standpoint. It's only intuitive to think that the Universe -- with gravity fighting the initial expansion ever since the Big Bang -- and all the galaxies in it would continue to slow down over time. But with a significant positive amount of energy inherent to space…

The Stars Beyond (Synopsis)

When you look out at the Universe, it comes as no surprise that it's full of galaxies, each one with a dense, central collection of brilliant stars and an intricate structure all their own. They come in all sorts of structural varieties, with some in isolation, others in small groups, and still others in huge, massive clusters. An SDSS image of elliptical galaxy NGC474 (center) and spiral galaxy NGC470 (right). The bright galaxies we see are huge collections of billions of stars, with large intrinsic surface brightnesses. But surely there are components to these entities -- less dense…

What To Expect This Summer

Another blogger named Doug who comments frequently at In the Agora has summed up perfectly what to expect over the next few months: The left will cherry-pick all of the worst bits from the nominee's background such that I won't really be able to trust their assessment of whether this guy (or gal) is a loon or merely a person of sound jurisprudence with some poorly turned phrases in his or her opinions. By the same token, the right would loudly proclaim that a pro-life ham sandwich was the second coming of Blackstone, Marshall, Hand, and Holmes all rolled into one if it was nominated by…

Schiavo Autopsy Confirms Diagnosis

The autopsy done on Terri Schiavo has been released and to the surprise only of those who listened to the steady stream of nonsense coming from her family and amplified by the media, it confirmed exacly what Michael Schiavo, Judge Greer and the medical experts who examined her had said all along: Thogmartin said that Schiavo's brain was about half of its expected size when she died March 31 in a Pinellas Park hospice, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed. "The brain weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain...This damage was irreversible, and no amount of…

Jim Pinkoski Rides Again

PZ Myers has an amusing takedown of Jim Pinkoski, a creationist I've had a bit of fun with in the past. Pinkoski is a cartoonist, and for many years he played Robin to Ron Wyatt's Batman. Wyatt, some of you may remember, was the rather loony nurse anesthetist from Tennessee who claimed to have discovered Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, the real Mt. Sinai, the exact place where the Red Sea was parted, and many other things. He conned thousands of people into funding his adventures, always returning with breathtaking tales of intrigue and adventure but no actual evidence. Jim Pinkoski was…

Apollo 11's Landing Was 47 Years Ago Today (Synopsis)

“I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.” -Michael Collins Less than a decade after the first human was launched into space, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins journeyed from the Earth to the Moon. For the first time, human beings descended down to the lunar surface, opened the hatch, and walked outside. Humanity had departed Earth and set foot onto another world. Buzz Aldrin having just planted the first American flag on the surface of a world other than our own. Image credit: NASA/Apollo 11. While Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the…

Why doesn't our Universe have magnetic monopoles? (Synopsis)

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” -Jean-Luc Picard The laws of electromagnetism could have been incredibly different. Our Universe has two types of electric charge (positive and negative) and could have had two types of magnetic pole (north and south), but only the electric charges exist in our Universe. At a fundamental level, between electricity and magnetism, nature is not symmetric. The electric/magnetic symmetric version of Maxwell’s equations, where both electric and magnetic sources (and currents) exist. Image credit: Ed…

Why Does E=mc^2? (Synopsis)

"Science is global. Einstein's equation, E=mc^2, has to reach everywhere. Science is a beautiful gift to humanity, we should not distort it." -A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Over 100 years ago, Einstein shook up the physics world with a number of groundbreaking discoveries: special relativity, brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and his most famous equation, E = mc^2. This mass-energy equivalence underlies everything from antimatter to atomic bombs to the process that powers the Sun. The longer a photon's wavelength is, the lower in energy it is. But all photons, regardless of wavelength/energy,…

Which elements will never be made by our Sun? (Synopsis)

“There’s no god, it’s the elements that control this world and everything on it.” -Scott A. Butler From hydrogen through uranium and even beyond, the Universe gives us a huge variety of elements that can bond together in practically innumerable ways, creating all the matter we've ever observed in existence. Everything beyond helium in the periodic table way made inside of stars, but not all stars create elements equally. Artist’s impression of the red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris. Our Sun will become a more modest red giant, but a giant nonetheless. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user…

What are the odds of finding Earth 2.0? (Synopsis)

"The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so vast and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment." -Johannes Kepler, and the adopted saying of the Kepler mission The latest haul from NASA's Kepler mission indicates that, in it sample of some 150,000 stars, there are over 2,000 confirmed exoplanets, with approximately 40% of them rocky worlds. If we extrapolate this to our entire galaxy, we have about 60 billion habitable zone planets in our galaxy alone. The 21 Kepler planets discovered in the habitable…

Top 10 facts about the Big Bang (Synopsis)

"Gamow was fantastic in his ideas. He was right, he was wrong. More often wrong than right. Always interesting; … and when his idea was not wrong it was not only right, it was new." -Edward Teller There are few scientific idea more revered or more important than the Big Bang. For the vast majority of human history, we had nothing but wonder, stories, ideas and myths about where our Universe came from and how it got to be the way it is today. Thanks to the Big Bang -- and in particular, to the tremendous scientific achievements of the 20th century -- we now have bonafide scientific answers.…

Curiosity's First Visit To The Martian Dunes, In Visuals (Synopsis)

"Actually I think Art lies in both directions - the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing." -Peter Hammill When fine-and-coarse-grained sand is carried by the winds across uneven terrain, sand dunes form here on Earth. But on Mars, where the atmosphere is only 0.7% what it is here, the sand is made of different composition and the winds gust to up to 60 mph (100 kph), do sand dunes behave the same way? A close-up of the dunes from the Curiosity rover. Image credit: NASA…

What Is The Strongest Force In The Universe? (Synopsis)

"The world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong." -Swami Vivekananda But what does it truly mean to be strong? We have four fundamental forces in the Universe: the strong, electromagnetic, weak and gravitational forces. You might think that, by virtue of its name, the strong force is the strongest one. And you'd be right, from a particular point of view: at the smallest distance scales, 10^-16 meters and below, no other force can overpower it. Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey, of IC 1101, the largest known individual galaxy in the Universe. But under the…

Most Planets In The Universe Are Homeless (Synopsis)

“The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.” -Chuck Palahniuk The planets we know of -- in our own Solar System and beyond -- all have something in common that we routinely take for granted: the fact that they all orbit stars. But not only isn't this necessarily true of all planets, it might not be true for most planets. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. When we run simulations of planetary formation around stars, we find that a great many…

The Most Astounding Picture Of Stars Beyond Our Galaxy (Synopsis)

"We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden." -Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young When Charles Messier first began cataloguing nebulae, even globular clusters, just a few tens of thousands of light years distant, weren’t resolvable into individual stars. But thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we can see individual stars in other galaxies many millions of light years away. Image credit: NASA, ESA and T.M. Brown (STScI), of background galaxies seen through the disk of Andromeda. In a series of images taken from 2004-2007,…

The first detection of gravitational waves! (Synopsis)

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves." -David Reitze More than 100 years after Einstein's relativity came out, one of its last great predictions -- the existence of gravitational radiation -- has been directly experimentally confirmed! The LIGO collaboration has observed two ~30 solar mass black holes merging together, producing a slightly less massive final black hole as three sun's worth of mass was converted into energy via Einstein's E = mc^2. Image credit: R. Hurt – Caltech/JPL. This type of event, although quite serendipitous for the LIGO collaboration, is…

The Scientific Truth Everyone Should Be Thankful For On Thanksgiving (Synopsis)

“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” –George Bernard Shaw On this Thanksgiving day, we're supposed to express gratitude for all that we have in this world: for the friendships, families, and the bounty of good things that have come our way. We also give thanks for all the serendipity we've been lucky enough to encounter, including what the natural world gives us for free. Image credit: public…

Rumsfeld's Mount Misery

Wow. I'm not sure what to think about this. It's too easy to take the easy cheap shot on this, but it still gives me the creeps, mostly because of the connection to Frederick Douglass. And I just can't imagine why anyone would want to live in a place like this. Donald Rumsfeld's summer home on Chesapeake Bay is a place known to locals as Mount Misery. It was originally owned by a notorious slaveholder named Edward Covey, who was known as a "Negro breaker". Other slaveowners would send their slaves to him to have their will broken so they would be docile and submissive from that point on.…

Banning Partner Benefits in Kentucky

A Kentucky lawmaker is introducing a bill to prohibit public universities in the state from offering any sort of domestic partnership benefits. And he's got that standard issue vacuous reasoning: Rep. Stan Lee (R-Lexington) filed notice this week that he will introduce the override bill as soon as the legislature returns. Lee said the benefits would undermine marriage. "I submit that we are teaching children a very bad lesson about the value of marriage by doing this," he told The Courier-Journal. Well, obviously so. If our children see a gay person getting medical care, that will make them…

You have got to be kidding me

Come February, we are going to be privileged to see a brand new movie that stars Ben Stein and portrays Intelligent Design creationism as the cool rebel oppressed by the stodgy old Darwinist bullies. Did you know that "scientists are not allowed to even think thoughts that involve an intelligent creator"? I didn't either. I think a lot of scientists have thought about it and noticed that there is no evidence for such a hypothesis, and have therefore rejected it. This movie fits with the intelligent design strategy of declaring itself the victim of an unfair exclusion (which isn't true, of…

Non-Dorky Poll: Monkey Power!

This is the famous carving of the Three Wise Monkeys on the stable at the Nikko Tosho-gu: Looking at that suggests a possible question for a non-dorky poll, analogous to the dork classic "what superpower would you want?": If you could go through life either seeing no evil, hearing no evil, or speaking no evil, which would you pick? (It's non-dorky because it's a question of ethics and morals, and there's nothing dorky about ethics and morals...) It would sort of depend in the mechanism by which evil went unseen or unheard-- if it involved some sort of evil suppression field in your…

links for 2007-10-15

Friends, not policies, win elections - Physics World - physicsworld.com I am shocked-- shocked!-- to learn that voters don't always elect the candidate woth the best policies. (tags: politics physics stupid journals) C. Sample Citation and Introduction to Citing Blogs For those times when you want to use a LOLcat in a Science article... (via Neurophilosophy) (tags: blogs academia journals) Pure Pedantry : Crazy Useful Paper on Statistics Error bars, their use and misuse. (Months old, because I'm clearing some old stuff out of my RSS reader in advance of Big Changes) (tags: math science…

NFL Open Thread

I've been largely silent about the NFL for the past couple of weeks, mostly because I don't know what to make of anything that's happening. I only saw the first half of last week's Giants game, where it looked like they had reverted to their early-season form, but then they exploded in the second half, while I was in a meeting. I thought the Packers had the Bears beat, and they blew it, and I thought Dallas was dead on Monday, but somehow they came back. What does it all mean? Hell if I know. Anyway, in lieu of insightful commentary from me, consider this an open thread about everything…