Search Content

Displaying results 66401 - 66450 of 87947

Social Networks: What Are They Good For?

So, in a fit of procrastinatory behavior, I've spent a bunch of time over the last few days playing with Facebook. I have to say, I can understand how this would get to be addictive-- I'm inordinately amused by the fact that I can go to a web page and get a little message telling me that a division chief at NIST has removed a commercial jingle from his list of favorite music. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that information, but it amuses me. I'm still sort of wondering whether there's a point to this stuff beyond more efficient procrastination, though. I've got access to this...…

Fiero Francis Rizzuto, RIP

Legendary Yankee shortstop Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto died Tuesday at 89. I've never been a huge baseball fan, and Rizzuto's playing days ended well before I was born, but as an announcer and pitchman, he was an absolute fixture of my childhood. (Obligatory Celebrity Dead Pool: If famous people's deaths come in threes, who completes the set with Alpher and Rizzuto?) Rizzuto's best days as an announcer were probably also behind him when I used to hear him doing Yankee games-- by the 80's, he was mostly just charmingly addled, offering rambling anecdotes that he sometimes lost track of-- but he was…

Revenge of the Humorless Dorks

Via Backreaction, I find that there's a paper on the Arxiv titled "Hollywood Blockbusters: Unlimited Fun but Limited Science Literacy," whose authors feel that the best way to counter bad pop-culture science is with equations: (That's from a section discussing the bad physics in the ending of the first Spiderman movie. There are places where the math is thicker, but this gives a sense of the subject as well.) It's a fairly long paper (28 pages, single column), and analyzes seven silly movie scenes in some detail. I normally hate this sort of thing, as I think it needlessly contributes to the…

Tired of the LHC

There's a big long Dennis Overbye article about the Large Hadron Collider in the Times today. The paginated version runs to seven or eight pages on the web, and Overbye is a good writer, so you can be fairly sure it's exhaustive and detailed and interesting. I can't say that authoritatively, though, because I got about five paragraphs in, and gave up. I'm officially sick of rapturous articles about the LHC, which isn't going to turn on for several months yet, assuming everything goes smoothly. Yeah, yeah, it'll address the most fundamental questions in physics, it'll provide an unprecedented…

Call for Nominations: Non-Specific Item of the Year

I've solicited nominations for a bunch of "Year's Best" categories, with varying degrees of success. Best Pop Song was great (and has added a few songs to the list of things to check out the next time I hit iTunes), but I was hoping for more from the best physics results. Was it really that slow a year? Anyway, here's a request for some outside-the-box thinking: In your opinion, what was the best thing of 2006 that doesn't fall into one of the previous categories? This could be a cultural work ("Best DVD Release of 2006: Pinky and the Brain"), a physical thing ("Best dessert of 2006:…

Bookstore Conundrum

If you go into any big-box bookstore these days, you'll find a huge section of manga titles (that is, Japanese comic books), including dozens of different series, many of them running to a dozen or more volumes. This section is always impeccably organized, with all the series grouped neatly together, and the overall section alphabetical by series. Right next to that, there will be a considerably smaller section of "graphic novels" (that is, Western comic books). The shelving for this section always appears to have been done by poorly trained chimpanzees. They rarely even mange to have books…

Polling for Dummies

Because I'm a Bad Person, I no longer remember who pointed me to Halfway There's primer on polling, but it's really an excellent of the effects of sample size, and why it's legitimate to project results based on small numbers of interviews. Some important notes from the conclusion: Second, even a poll that is supposed to be within its estimated margin of error 95% of the time will be wrong and fall outside those bounds 5% of the time. That's one time in twenty. Therefore, whenever you see a political poll whose results seem way out of whack, it could be one of those flukes. Remember, polling…

(String Theory Backlash) Backlash

So, I recently finished The Trouble With Physics (initial comment here, full review forthcoming) and I read Not Even Wrong a little while ago (review here). I suppose I could dig up Lawrence Krauss's book, and go for the String Theory Backlash trifecta, but I could also hit myself in the head with a brick... My first inclination is to not read anything more about string theory for a good long while, but that seems a little unfair. Given that I've read a pair of anti-string books, the responsible thing to do would probably be to read something pro-string, to see how the other side views the…

Academic Links Dump

Articles have been piling up in my Bloglines feeds as I keep saying "Oh, that'll make a good blog post..." and then not getting around to actually writing anything. In an effort to clean things up a bit (in much the same way that I clean my desk off every September, whether it needs it or not), I'm just going to throw a bunch of them out here with mininal comments. This post is a collection of links from academic bloggers. The Dean Dad has absolutely been on fire for the last month. He's got good posts up on institutional inertia, strategic planning, measuring outcomes, and academic…

Where could we possibly find $4 million?

Hmmm. Estimates of the cost of the war in Iraq range from $4.4 to 7.1 billion per month. If I assume about $5 billion, it looks like we're throwing away about $7 million per hour in that effort; so it looks like a little bit more than a half-hours worth of bloody war costs us $4 million. So let's just stop for about 40 minutes, OK? What was the point of that calculation? The government is threatening to shut down the Arecibo Observatory unless they can cough up $4 million dollars for its operating budget for the next three years. Wow. The National Science Foundation, which has long funded…

New Rocky Planet

I have two labs on Tuesdays, which is even more exhausting than it sounds, so I went to be early last night. And woke up to find a whole new planet. You guys need to give me some warning about these things... Anyway, the planet in question orbits a red dwarf star a mere 20 light years from Earth, has a mass of roughly five times that of Earth and an estimated radius half again Earth's (which would mean a bit more than double the surface gravity, for those planning to set SF stories there). It orbits its star in about 84 days, which seems pretty short, but is much slower then the previously…

Guess the Movie Keywords: Mellencamp Edition

I'm sick and tired. Not metaphorically, literally. I had two labs today, and the cold I thought I had shaken back when classes started has come back with a vengeance, so I'm all congested and coughing. So here's something silly to pass the time, via Kate among others: The following are "plot keywords" from IMDB for some movies I really like. Guess the movie based on the keywords. Small Town, Alcoholism, High School, Redemption Repressed Homosexual, Small Town, Missouri Small Town, Quitting Job, Famous Song, Real Time Eccentric, Widower, Small Town, Garfield Assassination Eating Contest,…

Cold Fusion and Congress

The case of Purdue's Rusi Taleyarkhan, cleared by the university of charges of misconduct in a murky process, has taken another turn. Congress is getting involved, with the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee requesting more details from the university. On the one hand, I'm not enthusiastic about Congress getting into this (aren't there some drug-using professional athletes that they could investigate?), but then again, Purdue brought it on themselves with their ridiculously cryptic statements about the case. If they hadn't acted like they…

Slide Rule Update

A few days back, commenter igor eduardo kupfer compiled the log5 predictions for the first round, and tried to come up with a test of their validity. We didn't agree on anything, but for the sake of intellectual honesty, here's a breakdown of how those predictions fared, binned in 10% groups (so 0.5-0.6 collects those teams for which the winning probability was between 50-60%): 0.5-0.6: 2-2 0.6-0.7: 3-1 0.7-0.8: 4-1 0.8-0.9: 8-2 0.9-1.0: 9-0 (These records are approximate-- it's possible that I've misremembered a game here or there, but I've just come in from shovelling a foot of snow out of…

What About Tomb Raider?

The New York Times offers an article profiling Terence Tao, mostly focussing on his child prodigy background: Dr. Tao has drawn attention and curiosity throughout his life for his prodigious abilities. By age 2, he had learned to read. At 9, he attended college math classes. At 20, he finished his Ph.D. Now 31, he has grown from prodigy to one of the world's top mathematicians, tackling an unusually broad range of problems, including ones involving prime numbers and the compression of images. Last summer, he won a Fields Medal, often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur…

Breasts of all kinds are beautiful

Facebook has done a stupid thing: they've started deleting photos and accounts of breastfeeding women. Tara is leading the charge here on scienceblogs — this is a ridiculous and demeaning decision, reflecting a mindless prudery on the part of the facebook administrators. Give them hell. Alas, Tara succumbs to her own biases and cites my breast as an example of offensive photography. Nay, I say, we must regard every expanse of torso as equally lovely. I think I have a few more shots of the masculine mammary in question; to prove my point, if Facebook can't come to their senses, I may have to…

The counterintuitive nature of evolutionary biology

Here's an interesting essay on why people don't accept evolution: it's not simply a consequence of a conflict between religious teachings and the conclusion of science, but is also a conflict created by the nonintuitive way that evolution works — that a very small selective force operating over long periods of time can generate dramatic outcomes, often with no obvious, linear progression from one point to another. It's well-said, but not an entirely new idea (thermodynamics and information theory seem to often throw people for a loop, and creationists seem utterly baffled by genetic…

Fermilab Discovers... Something. Maybe.

The high-energy physics blogosphere (well, two blogs worth) is abuzz this morning with the news that the CDF collaboration has seen something in collisions producing multiple muons (a muon is sort of like an electron, only heavier). You can get more from Tommaso Dorigo and Peter Woit. What they're really seeing is not entirely clear. They see more of these collisions that produce multiple muons than they can explain with the Standard Model, but it's not clear what that means at this point. It could be some exotic particle, or it could just be a new and interesting background effect in their…

Thursday Baby Blogging 100908

SteelyKid had her two-month check-up in Monday (her two-month birthday was Tuesday), and checking in with the medical profession means we've got the opportunity for some baby science. And it's not science without graphs: That's SteelyKid's weight as a function of time. Like most babies, she dropped a bit immediately after birth, but shot right back up, and has now been growing at a pretty good clip for the last eight-and-a-half weeks. We don't have enough data points on her length to make a graph, but she's increased substantially there, too, growing by 2.75". To put these changes in…

links for 2008-10-06

The politics of girliness - Ultrabrown "Last night, Palin winked at the camera, scrunched up her nose and added a smiley timbre before thrusting any rhetorical daggers. In these moments she resembled an anime character. Kawaii ne!" (tags: US politics stupid gender society blogs) slacktivist: Connections "[W]hen I say that these baseless and illegitimate attacks "don't prove anything," that's not quite accurate. They don't prove anything about the person being attacked, but they do prove quite a bit about the people making the attacks. They prove the attackers to be capable of the level of…

The Liberal Media Hasten the Red Revolution

... at least, that's the only reason I can think of for ABC News to run a story on the effects of the financial crisis containing the following: "A lot of those people will have to sell their homes, they're going to cut back on the private jets and the vacations. They may even have to take their kids out of private school," said [Robert] Frank [of the Wall Street Journal]. "It's a total reworking of their lifestyle." He added that it's going to be no easy task. "It's going to be very hard psychologically for these people," Frank said. "I talked to one guy who had to give up his private jet…

links for 2008-09-14

Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator: Make Your Own Palin Baby Name "Chad Orzel, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be: Bush Gator Palin" (tags: politics US internet silly) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / A Chance to Show Off: the first line game "Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New Hampshire, I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge of town." (tags: books blogs games literature) Op-Ed Contributor - The Origins of the Universe - A Crash Course - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com Brian Greene explains what to expect from the…

Asking the Big Questions

The Science in the 21st Century meeting is being held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, which is in a really nice building in the middle of Waterloo. It's a building that was quite clearly designed with physicists in mind, as there are numerous little common spaces where people can sit around and argue, and there are chalkboards everywhere. Most of the chalkboards are covered with bits of physics-- matrices, field equations, little diagrams, etc. It really enhances the sense of being in a place where people are working on the Big Problems. And when I went for a walk outside…

Colbert, Atheists, and Hermaphrodites

Comedy Central is re-playing Friday's episodes of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, which includes Stephen Colbert's interview with Lori Lippman Brown of the Secular Coalition for America. It's interesting to see that she doesn't really fare any better than any of the religious nutjobs he's had on in his various interview segments, in more or less the same way: I doubt there's really any way to not look somewhat silly, given his whack-job act and good video editing, but it's always a little surprising just how unprepared a lot of his interview subjects are. You'd think they'd have some…

Science in the 21st Century

One week from today, barring anything catastrophic, I will be speaking at the Science in the 21st Century workshop at the Perimeter Institute. Sabine Hossenfelder has a nice run-down of the program at Backreaction, and it sounds really interesting. I have my talk more or less ready-- I started making slides a week or two ago, because I wasn't sure how long it would take, doing talk prep in between diaper changes and baby feedings. I had hoped to get a couple of colleagues to listen to it, but that's probably not going to happen, so I'll be working without much of a net (Kate's heard me run…

links for 2008-02-22

Scientists probe fireballs with X-rays - physicsworld.com "Theories put forward so far suggest that this "ball lightning" is either a moving electrical discharge or that it is some kind of self-contained object. Now, research from an Israeli group is making the latter seem more likely. " (tags: physics science news experiment) The 2008 Tournament of Books by ToB Staff - The Morning News "The tournament doesn't begin until Friday, March 7--we'll announce the judges and brackets a week or so before that--but we like to release the book list early so the audience can start its reading and…

links for 2008-01-17

Quantum Hoops We're still not sure whether they won or lost. (tags: basketball academia sports physics movies) slacktivist: King and Huck The difference between the religious language of Martin Luther King and Mike Huckabee. (tags: religion politics US society culture) Coping With the Crunch :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education A good summary of the physics funding problems created by the recent spending bill. (tags: physics economics politics news academia US) SF Signal: MIND MELD: Today's SF Authors Define Science Fiction (Part 2) The ever-popular…

DonorsChoose Accolades

I got a thank-you email yesterday from the head of DonorsChoose, which I will quote here. Because, well, you're the ones who coughed up the cash, not me: Thanks in great part to the attention you generated, we made Internet history! During the month of October, readers of more than a hundred blogs gave $420,000 to classroom projects on DonorsChoose.org, benefiting 75,000 students. To put that in perspective, it took four months for the hugely successful Facebook causes application--with millions of users--to generate that sum of donations across all causes. We would not have helped so many…

Tuesday Toddler Blogging

SteelyKid's second birthday is Saturday, so we're getting her a few things. Given the recent video I posted, one of her presents was really obvious: As you can tell, she's inherited her father's skillset. If the dunk picture doesn't convince you, this picture of her ace ball-handling ought to: Not even two, and she can dribble it off her foot, just like her old man. She's a prodigy, she is. The hoop and ball were a big hit-- we had to drage the ball along with us when we went out to dinner that night. The other big treat of the day was a visit from Grandma and Grandpa, who brought along…

Of Books in Neurobiology

Over the last few weeks, we the Neuro class have finished our last book and we began Time, Love, Memory by Jonathan Weiner. The theme of this book is experiments on behavior on fruit flies, drosophila. I'm beginning to see why fruit flies would be such a good choice. They are low maintainance and are offer much more statistic data potential. T. H. Morgan was known for his early work on fruit flies. From my understanding, he's the first one to use them as a model species. Seems much more economical than the classic mice or dogs. I also find it pretty cool that Seymour Benzer, a pioneer in…

In the Dark No More

As hinted last week, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has some new results conclusively showing that dark matter is a real, physical thing. This is big news, because the previous evidence for dark matter was all indirect, and based on inferring the mass distribution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies from looking at their motion. These results could indicate the presence of dark matter, or they could point to a flaw in our understanding of gravity at extremely long ranges. The new observation shows fairly conclusively that dark matter and ordinary matter are different things, by combining two…

The Good, the Bad, and the Mellow

The problem with the holiday season is that it just flies by so fast-- it seems like you've barely finished clearing away the Thanksgiving dishes, and then you find that you've already missed Mellowmas. Haven't heard of that one? Well, it's a new holiday invented by jefitoblog and Jason Hare, explained by jefito thusly: For the next twelve days, Jason and I will be having the mellowest listening party you ever did hear, and we're going to do it yuletide style, bringing you the finest seasonal cuts from artists such as Air Supply, Glenn Medeiros, REO Speedwagon, and more. Just when you think…

Oceans Warmed In Recent Decades

A new study came out in Nature a couple of weeks ago that assesses multiple records of ocean temperatures over the last couple of decades and finds that there is "a statistically significant linear warming trend for 1993-2008 of 0.64âWâm-2". The challenge the paper took on was one of assessing the uncertainties and inconsistencies in the various records. The paper is Lyman, J.L., et al. 2010. Robust warming of the global upper ocean. Nature 465 and Real Climate had an article about it here. Also in that issue of Nature is an article by Kevin Trenbreth [PDF] that discusses that paper and…

Still Rotting...

FYI, the thread highlighted here is still continuing, though one wonders if it might be losing utility! The following is offered only as a laugh, and truly no offense intended to the originator. At times, the distance between mind and keyboard can be dauntingly immense: The first forcing is unknown; the second forcing is also unknown; I fail to see where you have an unknown unknown. We suspect that something undefined going on: that we know. If we know that there must be something there, we know at least that. Something is known there. Knowledge is something we know, not something we…

Ni sa bula!

So I'm back from Fiji, actually for over a week now, and while I could get internet there but chose not to, I have yet to get internet here in our new home in Vancouver. Bloody Telus. I only arranged for it 3 months ago...I did get an iPhone though, so email and basic webbing is covered for a while. Anyway, glad to be home, tons to catch up on, hope the internets flowed along without me and all that. I hear the conspiritorial cat is well out of CRU's bag and the jig is up on the Global Warming hoax. I guess the Greenland ice sheet will be well refrozen by now, and the sea levels have…

The Energy Grid

Science Blogs has a new special blog on sustainable energy called The Energy Grid. It is a short term project, planned to run a few months, where each of the six contributors posts once per week on a subject introduced on Sunday. I am flattered to have been asked to contribute and you can read my first contribution posted today, here. It is headlined Sustainability will not come without reductions in consumption and here is a free sample: Our energy system faces security and environmental challenges because we have created a social and economic paradigm based on over-consumption and a non-…

Anti-green economics - Paul Krugman

It`s kind of nice to hear an expert in the field making the same observation I often have about the economic arguments that swirl around the climate policy debates. Specifically, opponents to mitigation policy have no trouble relying on the magic of the market and technology to rescue us from any possible difficulty climate change might visit upon us. This of course includes the loss of huge services nature provides us for free. You know, things like rain and sea food and forests. Yet, make a suggestion that CO2 emissions need to be forced lower and the Pollyanna`s instantly become the most…

Speak of the Devil...

...and he puts you on his mailing list! [Please note: Marc Morano is nowhere near as relevant as Beelzebub!! It is just a gimmick for a blog title.] So I poked fun at Marc Morano the other day, and though he thankfully did not pop up in my comments he must have read the post because the next day I started receiving his spam. The first email was approvingly quoting Pielke Jr, which I have no doubt thrills him. Roger's fear? Not that humanity is facing daunting challenges and may not act quickly enough, no what keeps Roger awake at night is James Hansen's belief that politicians should take…

A question of time

My first Common Lisp programming job was for Mercury Scheduling (no longer around) working on the back end of airline crew control software. The main focus was assisting crew controllers in scheduling personnel on flights. We had to satisfy literally hundreds of constraints from union regulations, government regulations to...what else?...oh yeah, the constraints of reality like not being in two places at once or starting a new shift 1000 miles away in an hour's time (computers are stupid, you have to tell them everything!). One thing I learned is just how complicated time can be when you…

Creationist Novel linked to Expelled! to be released shortly

The 'documentary' (or, actually, "stupidumentary") Expelled! No intelligence allowed ... bla bla bla ... coordinated with this release will be a novel called Fossil Hunter, by John Olson (obviously a made up name) ... bla bla bla ... which is about a scientist who is maligned and harassed by the rest of the scientific community because she questions evolutionary dogma. Never mind that. This is a link to a recently released review of a book from last year. You can go comment on the review, if you like! Here, you read about it, I'm going to take a nap: When Dr. James leads an expedition into…

Happy Intelligent Design Day!

We evolutionists had our big day on 12 February, when we celebrated the birthday of Charles Darwin. It seems only fair, then, that the Intelligent Design creationists should also have a special day, when we contemplate their special style of 'science'. I think today, the 15th of February, is an appropriate day. Today is John Frum Day. It's a holy day to Cargo Cultists, those Pacific islanders who believed that erecting symbolic runways and effigies of airplanes would summon a return of the cargo, the riches of America. The Intelligent Design creationists have also put up a simulacrum, the…

Obama Kills House Fly on One Try!!!!!

PETA has become the laughing stock of the Planet Earth when it called for a change in US government policy regarding the swatting of flies by the POTUS. From the PETA web site: Well, I guess it can't be said that President Obama wouldn't hurt a fly. The commander in chief was recently pestered by a fly during an interview. He swatted at the insect and killed the little guy instantly. Believe it or not, we've actually been contacted by multiple media outlets wanting to know PETA's official response to the executive insect execution. In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn't the Buddha, he'…

Is Tiller's Killer's Right Wing Christianity Relevant?

There is an interesting piece in Religion Dispatches pointing out that when the Muslim American killer of an army recruiter was being profiled in the press, his religion was identified as a key potentially motivating factor, but Scott Roeder's religious connections are not being touched on to nearly the same degree in the discourse regarding his murderous activity. On June 1, the New York Times ran a story, "Seeking Clues on Suspect in Shooting of Doctor," an investigation into a little known anti-abortion activist, Scott Roeder, who'd been arrested for gunning down Kansas abortion…

Math gender gap is not genetic

Or to put it more accurately, yet another study seems to show that girls learn from their teachers, parents, and peers that they are not supposed to be good at math. Sterotypes can be fulfilled. Pleas stop doing that, everyone. Here is some press on this story. University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers continue to find evidence that shows there is no innate difference in the math ability of males and females. "There is a persistent stereotype that girls and women are just not as good at math as boys and men," said UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde. "And the data we have…

Amazing Day for Science News!

Several very important events or finds are in the news this morning. I've already reported the discovery of an amazing new rodent. In addition, the Volcano at Yelllowstone Caldera seems to have unexpectedly erupted. Details here. Non one was hurt, but activities on the lake will be canceled for the remainder of .... the Holocene. Recent work in Evolutionary Theory, just published, seems to show that Darwin was Wrong about Everything. John Wilkins, who himself is walking proof that Evolution is Wrong (or, why would there still be gorillas?) has the details on this story. Chris Rowen…

Dozens of papers report MMR vaccine caused death

But almost no papers report retraction of the story following the coroner's verdict that the vaccine played no part in the death. On Tuesday the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro all reported that a coroner was hearing the case of a toddler who died after receiving the MMR vaccine, which the parents blamed for their loss. Toddler 'died after MMR jab' (Metro), 'Healthy' baby died after MMR jab (Independent), you know the headlines by now. On Thursday the coroner announced his verdict: the vaccine played no part in this child's death. So far, of the…

Some Science News

Genetic Tests of Athletic Prowess -- For Babies A new genetic test offers to predict the sports at which a baby will someday excel. But even if the science were sound -- it's not -- this might not be a good idea. The $150 test, offered by Colorado-based Atlas Sports Genetics, looks at ACTN3, a gene that codes for fast-twitch muscle fiber. Details here, and a related commentary here. Horrifying parasitic illness reaches all-time low from PhysOrg.com (AP) -- Cases of Guinea worm disease - a horrifying infection that culminates in worms coming out of a victim's skin - have reached an all-…

Coleman's New Strategy

The word on the street is that Colleman recount watchers have shifted strategy in order to increase an apparent lead over Al Franken. It seems that many of the Coleman people are challenging perfectly good Al Franken ballots in order to make the miniscule Coleman lead appear to grow, possibly allowing Coleman to have Yet another Victory Press Conference. According to Joe Bodell: ...a view from inside the recount operation shows just how the Coleman operation is working: not just challenging questionable ballots, but challenging ballots that are clearly Franken votes for the sake of…

Bjorn goes to The Holy Land Experience

One of the most amazing scenes in Bill Maher's Religulous is the scene from The Holy Land Experience, which is like Disney Land, but instead of fictional characters that are sometimes charming sometimes scary and that everybody goes nuts over, it's got ... well, fictional characters that are sometimes charming sometimes scary and that everybody goes nuts over. Maher interviews Jesus Christ, Son of God. Then, they show some film of Jesus being crucified and shit. Fine. But the strangest thing is the audience. They are in a theme park, there is an actor playing Jesus, and a bunch of actors…

Texas School Board Creationist Goes Wacko

... which should not be a huge surprise. Here are a few quotes from the recently published ... then hastily removed ... column of Cynthia Dunbar, who is a member of the Texas State Board of Education. Yes, she's one of the creationists: Can we truly even imagine an America under an Obama Administration? I sincerely believe that an Obama Administration would ultimately mean one thing...the end of America as we know her.... [some babbling about Obama not really being a citizen] ... I perceive it [terrorist attack on U.S. soil in first six months of Obama Presidency] will be a planned effort…