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When Hippies Punch Back

I'm a little late to this, but Susie Madrak asked Obama advisor David Axelrod a very important question: Madrak asked, "I'm a blogger, and I don't know if you know this term, but are you familiar with the term hippie-punching?" There was about a 15-second pause. "Go ahead," said Axelrod. She continued. "Liberals and bloggers feel like we're the girl you take under the bleachers but won't be seen with in the light of day." She mentioned a series of incidents where the White House distances themselves from their base, and wondered how that helps Democrats regain enthusiasm from those same…

No Need for Decryption

Is it possible to perform operations on encrypted data, while keeping it secure from all prying eyes (or circuits), even if that data is stored remotely, in the "cloud?" Will our end result still be encrypted, and when we decode it with our private decryption key, will our result be correct? To put it another way, could we allow sensitive data - say private medical information - to be monitored on-line and feel completely secure in the knowledge that no one can access it without our express permission? Can we use a cloud service to store our encrypted data and perform a search on that data…

My picks from ScienceDaily

New Orleans Termites Dodge Katrina Bullet: Tales of survival have been trickling out of New Orleans ever since Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005. But few have focused on what might be considered the city's most tenacious residents--its subterranean termites. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) entomologists recently confirmed what many termite researchers and city officials were hoping against. Despite the high waters, winds and other havoc unleashed by Katrina over a year ago, the invasive Formosan subterranean termite is persisting in New Orleans. Wetlands Curb Hog Hormones In Waste…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Shoulder Ligament A Linchpin In The Evolution Of Flight: Brown and Harvard scientists have learned that a single ligament at the shoulder joint stabilizes the wings of birds during flight. In an advanced online publication of Nature, they explain how this tough bit of tissue evolved to become a linchpin for today's fliers. Internal Compass Of Immune Cell Discovered: Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine have discovered how neutrophils -- specialized white blood cells that play key roles in inflammation and in the body's immune defense against…

Flawed Study - Why the Congressional Hearing?

Updated Below I had thought that with the Democrats takeover of Congress, weâd be done with Congressional hearings convened so anti-regulatory groups like the US Chamber of Commerce would have a platform to present unscientific studies that purport to show the enormous damage done by federal regulatory policy. Sadly, I was wrong. Last week, the Chamber released the results of a "survey" of the costs to small business of compliance with the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act of 2002, known widely as Sarbanes-Oxley or SOX. The Chamber tried to find small businesses…

Occupational Health News Roundup

If you only read one article on the issue of occupational health and safety this week, make it Ray Ring's "Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields," published last week in High Country News. "The core of the story can be classified as straightforward investigative coup," editor John Mecklin explains in an accompanying piece . "In six months of amassing documents, scouring lawsuits and prodding databases, Ring was able to map out the general scope of a little-noticed reality: Since the start of the second Bush presidency, as skyrocketing energy prices drove a wild increase in oil and…

Graham Lawton Was Wrong

There. How's the taste of your own medicine? Yup, there was an editorial meeting. Coturnix, coturnix, @coturnix, BoraZ, Bora Zivkovic and @borazivkovic were there. I was there, too, and I could have said something, but I decided to remain silent as the traffic of this blog, which - cha-chink - means more money, is more important than accuracy. Very few readers will read your article. But everyone will see the cover. Very few people will read this post to the end, especially the links on the bottom that really contain the meat of the argument. But everyone will see this post title in their…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Frogs Are Being Eaten To Extinction, Experts Say: The global trade in frog legs for human consumption is threatening their extinction, according to a new study by an international team including University of Adelaide researchers. 'Hobbit' Skull Study Finds Hobbit Is Not Human: In a an analysis of the size, shape and asymmetry of the cranium of Homo floresiensis, Karen Baab, Ph.D., a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Scienes at Stony Brook University, and colleagues conclude that the fossil, found in Indonesia in 2003 and known as the "Hobbit," is not human. New Imaging Method Lets…

Iran swiftly sentences two HIV scientists - perhaps we can exert pressure.

Like we did with the Tripoli Six.... From Declan Butler, reproduced here in its entirety, as it is important: Iran has summarily tried two of the nation's HIV researchers with communicating with an "enemy government," in a half-day trial that started and ended on 31 December in Tehran's Revolutionary Court. There will be no further court hearings, and a verdict is expected within days. The brothers, Arash and Kamiar Alaei, who have achieved international acclaim for their progressive HIV-prevention programme, have been held in Tehran's notorious Evin prison since their arrest last June (see…

Friday Fun: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence

I love Wikipedia. I probably use it every day. It's become an indispensable part of the modern information landscape. But. A few months ago, I was doing a session in our lab with a bunch of high school students. When I do these sessions I try and illuminate how the modern information landscape is a bit more complicated than they think -- I try and instill a little doubt and humbleness into their mostly quite confident attitudes. I talk about Facebook and privacy and Wikipedia and a whole bunch of things. Anyways, I'm talking about Wikipedia and demoing how easy it is to randomly change…

National Academies Press celebrates first year of free PDFs

Yesterday, that National Academies Press celebrated its first year of offering free PDFs of many of its reports. NAP reported in an anniversary email that website visitors have downloaded over 1.3 million PDF versions of books -- and that over the next year NAP will be adding more books (new and old alike) to the list of free downloads. Among the most downloaded so far are: The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health Relieving Pain America: A Blueprint for Transforming Prevention, Care, Education, and Research To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System The reports on…

I’ve not found much of interest to write about tonight, and story submissions have been a dry hole lately

Not me you silly - that's a quote from WUWT. And as if in answer to his desperation, along comes The effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas becomes ever more marginal with greater concentration, a deeply stupid post. It starts with a nod towards pretending to have a clue: According to well understood physical parameters, the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas diminishes logarithmically with increasing concentration... This inconvenient [sic] fact is well understood in the climate science community... ...because not even WUWT readers are going to fall for the idea that it's a surprise…

ID Picks up An Endorsement!

The last six months have been hard ones for ID folks. First, there was the big Dover decision. Then came several new transitional forms (see here and here, for example). The evolution of complex biochemical systems gets less mysterious every day. Likewise for the evolution of of cooperative behavior. Nick Matzke's brilliant annotated bibliography on the evolution of the immune system was posted, showing once more that the Michael Behe's of the world are just making it up when they say that scientists can't explain the evolution of “irreducibly complex” systems. Meanwhile, there is…

Skeptics' Circle 57: The Zebra Spilled its Plastinia on Bemis

Dear skeptical Reader, welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 57nd Skeptics' Circle blog carnival! I used to blog at Salto sobrius, and now Aard offers the same salad of archaeology, skepticism, books, music and general psychedelic whimsy. We've got some really good stuff on the carnival this time. CLEAR THINKING Steve at NeuroLogica leads the reader through a number of insights into how our minds work, all important to "cognitive hygiene" and skeptical thinking. Factician at Conspiracy Factory asks himself, why do smart people say such stupid things? RELIGION Angry Professor at A Gentlemen's…

Books for the Spring 2008 semester

The Fall semester is winding down — this is the last week of classes — so it's time to start thinking about the Spring term. Ugh. I don't want to. This term has been driving me sufficiently insane as it is. But anyway, if you're a student thinking about all the money you'll have to be spending on textbooks, here's a list of what you'll need to get if you're taking my courses. Feel free to order them from some other source than the university bookstore. I don't get a penny from the U bookstore, but I have to confess, the links below do tie into affiliate programs that give me a few pennies in…

Technology Query: Making Animation?

The book-in-production will be released eight months from tomorrow, which means that I'm thinking of ways to promote it on-line. One obvious possibility would be some sort of YouTube video type thing, showing a conversation with the dog about physics. This runs into problems, though, given that the dog is, well, a dog, and thus doesn't take direction very well. It'd be really difficult to get the right sort of video of her. One solution to this would be to get some really basic video of me talking to her as a frame for the conversation, and do some sort of animation to fill in the rest. So,…

Invasive Species vs. Disturbance Specialists

Solenopsis invicta - invasive or just disturbed? Prevailing wisdom holds that imported fire ants marched across the southern United States on the virtue of their fierce nature and superior competitive ability.  The fire ant conquest of the south reads like a tale of bravery and intrigue, but according to Walt Tschinkel and Josh King it is also not true.   They have a must-read study in PNAS this week detailing a tight set of field experiments that turns the conventional wisdom upside-down. King and Tschinkel disturbed various patches of native Florida pine forest by mowing or plowing,…

Horribly Cold Lasers

Well, my Thanksgiving posting break lasted longer than I thought. Real life is a more fun place than the internet though, and I hope you were having lots of fun and food and were not on the internet to notice my absence. Among the things I did this Thanksgiving was watch Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for the first time. It is, as you know, a thing of surpassing brilliance. It warrants a few posts about its unique self-financed studio-conglomerate-free creation, because that model would probably work well in other arenas of creativity, not the least of which is science. That I'll save for…

Backyard Nuclear Reactors

There's been an article in the Guardian that's been circulating around various science blogs recently. There's a proposal to make what small autonomous nuclear reactors, install them underground, and let them power local areas. Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb. The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they…

Nuclear Conversation, Coming Up Friday, Webcast

From an Eco Politics listserv I see mention of an upcoming debate about Nuclear Energy: "Cradle to Grave: New Nukes and Old Radioactive Waste" It is a Live Webcast Debate being held on the 27th. The link is here, but you can't see anything until the webcast. More details below the fold... MEDIA ADVISORY FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CAN NUCLEAR POWER BE THE SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE AND FUTURE ENERGY DEMAND? ***Live Webcast Debate*** FORMER GREENPEACE ACTIVIST TURNED NUCLEAR INDUSTRY SPOKESMAN TO DEBATE LEADING "VOICES OF REASON" AGAINST A PROPOSED NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE Burlington, VT - After…

Happenings in the Quantum World: Nov 13, 2007

Grad school opportunities, postdoc opportunities, interference experiments, more D-wave, and sabbatical at the Blackberry hole Pawel Wocjan writes that he has positions open for graduate students in quantum computing: Ph.D. Position in Quantum Computing & Quantum Information with Dr. Pawel Wocjan, School of EECS, University of Central Florida (UCF), Orlando, in sunny Florida I am accepting applications for a Ph.D. position in Quantum Computing and Quantum Information starting in Fall 2008. You can learn more about my research and the research in quantum information science at UCF by…

The Future is Non-Profit Science and Enviro Journalism

On last week's announcement that CNN is shifting the focus and form of its science coverage, I am going to be posting what is a very different interpretation than the predictable laments from various bloggers. But, for now, the CNN announcement also directs attention towards what I believe is the future of science and environmental journalism. As I wrote last February and have discussed at various venues: The future will be online, in film, and/or multi-media, merging reporting with synthesis, analysis, personal narrative, and opinion. The goals will be to inform but also to persuade and to…

Mmmm...chocolate! (Flavinol, actually)

They media is often full of hype about "health foods". True "health food", to quote Michael Pollan, probably means, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.'' That being said, chemical compounds isolated from natural substances (foods included) are an important line of medical research and can lead to insights on the health effects of food, and on drug development. The latest issue of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, has a lovely little article about the cardiac effects of chocolate---and who doesn't care about chocolate? Reading a scientific article is often a…

Is publishing really doomed by oversupply of writing?

Until the digital age, content was scarce. It wasn't scarce because people didn't create it; it was scarce because it required an investment to distribute it. That's no longer true. Anybody with an Internet connection can make anything they write (or snap or video or sing) available to anybody else with an Internet connection. For just about free. That's just one reason -- among many -- why the amount of content choices available to everybody has mushroomed in the past 15 years. When the supply of something goes up faster than demand, the price of the something drops. Or, put another way,…

One more chance to vote for real science

Regular CogDaily readers know that I don't usually harp relentlessly on a single issue. Believe me, I'd much rather be talking about things like this, but it's not very often that I get a chance to make an impact in the blogosphere. Thanks to a link from Fark (via BoingBoing) it looks like today might just be that chance. If you voted in the Weblog Awards Best Science Blog Contest yesterday when I first posted about it, you can now vote again. If you didn't get a chance to vote because the site was down, it looks like it's up again. I'll post the poll below as well for your convenience. This…

The shape of HIV denial

What motivates someone to deny that a disease -- one which kills millions of people -- exists? Why would someone claim that the scientifically-established cause of that disease is actually the product of a vast conspiracy? Why would anyone believe them? This is a question for psychologists, but also for epidemiologists and public health professionals who must deal with the implications of those beliefs. Tara Smith and Steven Novella have written an excellent, exceptionally readable article in PLOS Medicine which describes the shape and scale of the problem of HIV denial. They point to a…

Scientists and Journalists, Redux

Well, this has become quite a hot topic, hasn't it? Carl Zimmer thinks I'm too sanguine about this sometimes troubled (although other times quite healthy) relationship between the media and scientists. As he puts it: "I think, first off, that Chris is a bit off-base. He's not feeling the genuine pain being expressed in the comments to Tara's post. These are people who have had lousy experiences with reporters. You don't have to be a prima donna to come out of the journalistic process feeling queasy." Sure, that's true. And I want to emphasize: Misquotation is bad bad bad, and that's why I…

Our cause is good, so our tactics don't need to be?

Earlier this week, I related a situation I found alarming in which a scientist and his children were targeted for harassment because he dared to express the view that research with animals plays an important role in answering scientific questions that matter to scientists and to the public. I was not alone in decrying these tactics. At least one animal rights group also condemned them. Given that the post was pretty clearly directed at the question of tactics, I am frankly puzzled by this comment from Douglas Watts: When I see mainstream "science" commit itself to a program which phases…

Burnham answers questions about Lancet study

The Washington Post has hosted a on-line discussion with Gilbert Burnham. Some snippets: "One last point that is hard for many people to understand. The number of people or households interviewed and the number of clusters used does NOT depend on the population of the country. At a certain point, taking more samples from more clusters does not increase the validity of the answer--and we calculated those levels before the survey." "Keeping bias out of sampling is a huge challenge, and we spend much of our time before a survey thinking about this. People living close together are more likely…

APS Day 3

I am exhausted. Today was a very long conference filled day followed by a very long baseball game at Fenway Park. My labmate, who is a bit of a baseball freak, in a moment of sheer brilliance, bought us STANDING ROOM ONLY tickets for the game. And so we stood. For >3 hours. My feet hurt. At least the Red Sox won. Plus it was pretty cool to see Fenway Park. Figure 1: The view from our standing-room only area. So here's the tweet rundown from today. I think everything is pretty self-explanatory, so I'll go easy on the commentary. Also, have I mentioned I'm tired? We'll start with the end…

The E-Word

Pursuant to a discussion here regarding the use of the word "evolution" in various scholarly contexts, consider the article in PLoS: Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools. In spite of the…

AGU Day 4: Jim Hansen and Goreticipation

No need for coffee this morning, as the energy in the 8 a.m. session on communicating science (particularly global warming science) has a palpable stimulating effect all its own. The star of the loaded panel was certainly Dr. Jim Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Columbia University Earth Institute. After all, he's the national poster boy (or punching bag, depending where you stand) on the subject of federal interference in climate science. "I speak today as myself and not as a spokesman for NASA," Hansen opened to clapping and a few chuckles. The implication, not…

Simple answers to simple questions: Professional academic publishers edition

Afarensis asks Dembski on Open Access: Is He Hypocritcal, Stupid, or Both? Both. This is the simple answer to that simple question. The broader issue of open access is not so simple. While Dembski's understanding of the issue is both hypocritical and stupid, the issue of whether commercial science publishers are hypocritical and stupid remains to be seen. Evidence for hypocrisy is fairly easy to identify. Scientists give those publishers their research, typically signing over copyright for that work to the publisher. In many cases those scientists also pay page charges to those same…

Wuzza?

Everyone seems to be talking about Nicholas Carr's recent article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (see here, here, and here) and I'm not one to buck the trend, although there is one aspect of Carr's piece that I find a bit frustrating. It is way too long! I would probably fare better with the print version but for me the online version is damn-near unreadable after a few paragraphs. Admittedly, as someone who writes super-long posts in a relatively small font (I'm working on it), I recognize the plank in my own eye, but I think there may be more involved here than Google scrambling our brains.…

What is it like to be a baby?

My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section is now online. This piece was inspired by my brand new beautiful nephew, Jude Lehrer - may this blog post increase your Google presence! What is it like to be a baby? For centuries, this question would have seemed absurd: behind that adorable facade was a mostly empty head. A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason. Rene Descartes argued that the young child was entirely bound by sensation, hopelessly trapped in the confusing rush of the here and now. A…

Starting the "Anyway" Project - AKA Whole Life Redesign

It hasn't escaped my notice that today is November 1, and I'm supposed to be starting the Whole-Life Redesign Project. In fact, I am starting it - I'm taking the opportunity created by my kids being out of the house to move all the food storage around and clean under things and get rid of things (hmmm...should there still be baby cereal in the back of my food storage, given that the baby turned 5 on Friday...ummm....) and otherwise make a giant mess in my house in the general hope of making it better afterwards. What I haven't done is sit down and write out the parameters of how this project…

From the dentist's chair, remembering how they cried wolf

"Snazzy safety glasses," I said to the dental hygienist who was just about to ask me to open wide.   Something about the pink rims caught my eye and led me to a remark that showed my age: "I remember when dentists didn't wear gloves, or masks, or eye protection." I not only recall the bare hands of my dentist circa 1970-1980, I also remember the hullabaloo from dentists when new federal regulations were proposed in 1989 requiring them to provide such protection for their hygienists.   At the time, the term "AIDS' was less than 10 years old, and exposure to HIV in the U.S. was considered a…

The Epidemic: Typhoid at Cornell

In the United States, we tend to take our clean drinking water for granted. Even though there are periodic concerns which bubble up about pharmaceuticals or other chemicals in our water supply, we typically believe--with good reason--that we have little to fear when it comes to contamination from microbes. Our drinking water, while far from perfect, is heads and shoulders above what it once was--something many of us forget or have never realized. There have been notable breakdowns, such as the 1993 outbreak of Cryptosporidium in Milwaukee that sickened over 400,000 individuals, but these days…

How to Feed 4 On a Food Stamp Budget

From the Philadelphia Daily News (the same paper which recently brought a Pulitzer Prize to Philadelphia for amazing investigative reporting by Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman): HOW WELL can a family of four eat on just $68.88 a week? For more than 38 million Americans, it's more than a matter of conjecture...To find out how well you can eat on food stamps, we asked two chefs and a magazine food editor to plan seven days of meals for a family of four using that budget: $68.88. I like best the solutions proposed by Jose Garces, who went 66 cents over budget, and explains his solutions thus:…

When Ben Stein Says This, Things Are Getting Bad

You're probably more familiar with Ben Stein as a movie actor, but, believe it or not, he's actually a moderately conservative economist--one definitely in the neo-liberal mold. So I was shocked by his last NY Times column: he sounded like a shrill librul. First, he laments CEO salaries: When I was a lad, the chief executive of a major public company was paid about 30 or 40 times what a line worker was paid. Now the multiple is about 180. What did they do in the executive suite to become so great? Upon what meat do they feed? Why, as we are being killed by foreign competition, do we need to…

Walking and chewing gum at the same time

Nature Climate Change has wandered into political science with a study from Stanford University. Seth Werfel's examination of the "crowding-out" effect — the idea that humans have a tough time pursuing more than one strategy to solve a problem — is worth considering, even if its finding aren't exactly earth-shattering. The problem is laid out right off the top and requires no further explanation: Household actions and government policies are both necessary to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, household behaviour may crowd out public support for government action by creating the…

Drinking Age?

Yup, I've been hearing about this Amethyst Initiative about lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18 and wondered if I should blog about it from my perspective. Then I saw that Jake wrote a good post about it (and also see his older post on the topic and good comments by his readers) and decided to chime in. I grew up in a country with no drinking age laws at all. When I was very young, perhaps as young as five, one of my regular chores was to go to the corner shop to buy things like bread, milk, yoghurt or whatever else was needed. Sometimes that meant I would get some beer or wine or…

Brad's Drink: Exhilarating, Invigorating, Aids Digestion

I just had an ice cold Pepsi this afternoon. It was 35+C (ok, in the mid-nineties), I had just come back from a long hot walk through the kidfest day at the Artfest and I just had to have it. It was so refreshing, and cool, and invigorating. Why it was exhilarating. Don't know about the "Aids Digestion" bit - 'course it was Diet... not the same, eh? It will, probably, be the only pepsi I have this month. So, us physical science bloggers can be like total sluts, what with Pepsico having bought a blog on scienceblogs.com and many of the other bloggers quitting or suspending operations. Not.…

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson [Library of Babel]

Seveneves is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book-- 700-something "pages" in electronic form-- and contains yet another bid for "best first paragraph ever": The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero. The rest of the book involves what follows on from that. Namely, the destruction of basically all life on Earth. I should say up front that this was, on the whole, a very enjoyable book. In a lot of ways, it's what I…

Want to boycott stuff? There's an app for that.

Vote with your wallet. Tired of the Koch Brothers ruining everything for everybody? Prefer to buy products from companies that contribute to Sandy relief? Do you just want to know which major megacorporation produced the item you are considering putting in your shopping cart? Wouldn't it be nice to have an app that allowed you to scan the product's bar codes and quickly determine which evile empire you are supporting, or avoiding supporting, with your purchasing decision. Well, there is, and it is called Buycott. Click here to see iOS version From the app developers: How Buycott works -…

June Pieces Of My Mind #1

Despite the chaos of our kitchen renovation, I have managed to build myself a little reading nest. Gotta love German. Try saying it out loud: "Die Beobachtung ferner Quasare, das holografische Prinzip und der Quantenschaum der Raumzeit". Resolutely put away my phone in order to read a book instead. Then remembered that the book is in the phone. Ever wonder what the scarf-wearing Somali girls are going to do with their lives? Judging from two of Jr's classmates in junior high, they're going to be software engineers. The question of archaeology's practical usefulness should be treated as an…

Bad Idea of the Day: Halal Pharmaceuticals

One of the more amusing aspects of 'You are only criticizing Islam because you are RACIST AGAINST MIDDLE-EASTERNERS!!!!' is the fact that most Muslims do not live in the Middle-East. They live in Asia. Case in point: Indonesia, where about >87% of the population is Muslim.  12.7% of all Muslims live in Indonesia (Iraq? 1.2%). So naturally, like Christians in the US try to pass legislation to make Christianity The Law (for everyone, whether you are Christian or not), Muslims in Indonesia try to pass legislation to make Islam The Law (for everyone, whether you are Muslim or not). And,…

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union [Library of Babel]

There are lots of other books in the booklog queue, but this one is due back at the library today, so it gets bumped to the front of the list. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's probably the most widely discussed of the books waiting to be logged... In case you've been hiding out in a cave that no book reviews can penetrate, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is Michael Chabon's new novel about a Jewish homeland in Alaska. In this alternate history, the founding of Israel went catastrophically wrong, and the Zionists were driven into the sea by Arab armies. Lacking a home in the Holy Land, a…

Atheists and Mormons

Believe it or not, yesterday's post started as an honest question. I phrased it provocatively because this is, after all, the Internet, but I wasn't just poking atheists with sticks. This actually started quite a while ago, during one of the previous rounds of squabbling over Dawkins and his ilk, when I started a sentence something like: "What I'd like to see is less 'Religion is Stupid' and more..." and couldn't finish it. I couldn't come up with a good example of something positive to put in place of the "..." Which was really annoying. After all, I've got a pretty solid idea of what I'd…

Atheists as other: The most disdained group in America?

A three year old study has resurfaced on the blogosphere with this recent mention on the daily atheist. The study (cited below) is here, and the older commentary is here. Since this is still utterly relevant, I thought I'd make it the subject of a post. I don't think there is anything in it that is not absolutely current. I guess, I have to be honest with my 14 year old daughter. No, Julia, you are never going to be president. Or even mayor. Because as far as I can tell you are an atheist. If you took up some religion and made it look like you were sincere, then maybe. Otherwise,…