jlynch | February 7, 2008I was going to blog this later today, but now I see Tim over at Deltoid has beaten me to it, so I’ll post this without much comment. (Shakes fist in impotent fury at those damned Australians!) Like Tim, I received a heads-up from John Mashey regarding an online talk by Naomi Oreskes titled "The American Denial of Global Warming." It’s an hour long presentation that discusses the "history of the global warming disinformation campaign, led by corporate-funded policy operatives and ideologically-driven scientists, who employed the ’tobacco strategy’ to manipulate public opinion to create an…
jlynch | February 7, 2008
Yesterday was a good day, though a long one. I was in my office from nine in the morning meeting with students constantly (talking about upcoming papers) until I began teaching at 12:15. My classes were discussing the Book of Job and really seemed to get it, and by that I mean be able to tease it apart and figure out what was going on, and what the assumptions and goals of the authors were. Seminars are so much fun when the students come ready to talk, argue and discuss! After classes I had a five minute break (literally my first break for the day, not even enough time to grab a coffee)…
jlynch | February 7, 2008Births
1677 - Jacques Cassini, French astronomer
1807 - Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, English sculptor and naturalist
1834 - Dmitri Mendeleev, Russian chemist
1930 - James Deetz, American anthropologist
Deaths
1856 - Agostino Bassi, Italian entomologist
1957 - Walther Bothe, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1957 - John von Neumann, Hungarian-born mathematician and physicist
1975 - Robert Robinson, British chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | February 7, 2008
Since the whining has already started, it is worth reminding ourselves that Guillermo Gonzalez’s publication record at Iowa State University wasn’t as impressive as the Discovery Institute want us to think it was. He was not a "stellar astronomer" while at ISU - i.e. where it counted to getting tenure at ISU. Three first-author papers just aren’t going to cut it.
jlynch | February 6, 2008Births
1870 - Alfred Adler, Austrian psychologist
1905 - Ulf von Euler, Swedish physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1736 - Stephen Gray, English astronomer and scientist
1897 - Galileo Ferraris, Italian physicist
1960 - Igor Kurchatov, Russian physicist
jlynch | February 6, 2008
A mother Minke whale and her year-old calf are dragged on board a Japanese whaling ship after being harpooned in Antarctic waters. The picture was taken from an Australian customs vessel tracking the whalers to gather evidence for possible legal action to stop the annual slaughter. [Photo: AFP]
jlynch | February 6, 2008Over at The Panda’s Thumb there is a highly informative guest post by Dan Brooks detailing a pro-ID conference he was invited to in June of last year. After the conference, Brooks and others received an email "stating that the ID people considered the conference a private meeting,and did not want any of us to discuss it, blog it, or publish anything about it. They said they had no intention of posting anything from the conference on the Discovery Institute’s web site (the entire proceedings were recorded). They claimed they would have some announcement at the time of the publication of the…
jlynch | February 6, 2008Readers may have seen the minor brouhaha over at bpr3.org about Casey Luskin (DI-flack extraordinaire) using the BPR3 icon on a post without registering with ResearchBlogging.org. When this was pointed out to Luskin, he then registered with the site, a move that lead to much discussion. Now Dave Munger - the administrator of ResearchBlogging.org - has announced that Luskin’s registration will be denied. I’m not going to take a stance on this, but want to highlight a comment by Andrea Bottaro:
[L]et Luskin use the bpr3 logo, but add the general requirement that anyone using it should allow…
jlynch | February 6, 2008James Hrynyshyn highlights an editorial in Nature that offers luke-warm support for Science Debate 2008. Frankly, the criticisms are paltry and misconceived.
Well meant though it may be, the idea of Tim Russert or some other journalist-interrogator looking Republican hopeful John McCain in the eye and asking "What balance will you seek in federal science funding between major-programme project research and investigator-initiated basic-research grants?" is somewhat fantastical. It is also slightly disturbing.
But who is advocating "Tim Russert or some other journalist-interrogator" asking…
jlynch | February 6, 2008
This coming Sunday I will be giving a public lecture for the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix. All are welcome, whether humanist or not. Details are:
Was There A Darwinian Revolution?
HomeTown Buffet, 1312 N. Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale
February 10th, 2008 9:00 am
[There is breakfast at 9, the talk will begin at 10]
As usual, I will probably post the slides here after the talk.
jlynch | February 6, 2008Births
1744 - Pierre-Joseph Desault, French anatomist and surgeon
1853 - Ignacij KlemenÄiÄ, Slovenian physicist
1892 - William Parry Murphy, American physician and Nobel Prize laureate
1913 - Mary Leakey, British anthropologist
Deaths
1617 - Prospero Alpini, Italian scientist
1833 - Pierre André Latreille, French entomologist
1950 - Georges Imbert, Alsatian chemist
1991 - Salvador Luria, Italian-born biologist and Nobel Prize laureate
1998 - Haroun Tazieff, French vulcanologist and geologist
2002 - Max Perutz, Austrian-born molecular biologist and Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | February 5, 2008Births
1795 - Wilhelm Karl Ritter von Haidinger, Austrian mineralogist
1910 - Charles Leblond, Canadian cell biologist
1914 - Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, British physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate
1915 - Robert Hofstadter, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1790 - William Cullen, Scottish physician and chemist
1977 - Oskar Klein, Swedish physicist
1992 - Miguel Rolando Covian, Brazilian physiologist
jlynch | February 4, 2008Why to not engage in scientific peer review:
We have often received feedback in the form of questions on the lines of, 'If creation is scientific, then why don't you publish in peer-reviewed secular journals?' Andrew Kulikovsky answers this common question in detail. He points out the advantage of peer review but then documents its many shortcomings in practice, including rejecting top research while admitting fraud, as well as an all-to-common role in protecting the ruling paradigm. So it is folly for anticreationists to hide behind it instead of dealing with the arguments. This is why, to…
jlynch | February 4, 2008
Exciting news from the Science Debate 2008 camp. Sheril & Chris have just announced that the National Academies are joining the efforts to get a debate on science policy on the cards for the upcoming election. Amazing to think that this all started a mere two months ago!
jlynch | February 3, 2008Events
1936 - Radium E becomes the first radioactive element to be made synthetically.
Births
1725 - Dru Drury, English entomologist
1778 - A. P. de Candolle, Swiss botanist
1846 - Nikolay Umov, Russian physicist
1875 - Ludwig Prandtl, German physicist
1896 - Friedrich Hund, German physicist
1906 - Clyde Tombaugh, American astronomer
Deaths
1615 - Giovanni Battista della Porta, Italian physicist
1928 - Hendrik Lorentz, Dutch physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1974 - Satyendra Nath Bose, Indian physicist
1987 - Carl Rogers, American psychologist
jlynch | February 2, 2008Births
1754 - George Crabbe, English naturalist
1817 - Achille Ernest Oscar Joseph Delesse, French geologist
1821 - Elizabeth Blackwell, American physician
1912 - Jacques Soustelle, French anthropologist
1920 - Henry Heimlich, American physician
Deaths
1862 - Jean-Baptiste Biot, French physicist
1929 - Agner Krarup Erlang, Danish scientist
2005 - Ernst Mayr, German-born evolutionary biologist
jlynch | February 2, 2008
Saw my first Ferruginous hawk (Buteo regalis) yesterday. While this is not a picture of the one I saw, it is more on less identical. Interestingly, I spotted the hawk was being mobbed by some very irate birds as I was driving home from the store and was able to pull over and get a good look for over a minute. I hadn’t realized that we had them here in the ’burbs, but am fairly confident of the identification.
[source]
jlynch | February 2, 2008The Beloit College Class of 2011 Mindset list has been released. It features aspects of the worldview of 18 year-olds in the fall of 2007, i.e. those born in 1989. Some things that make me feel old:
What Berlin wall?
They never "rolled down" a car window.
They have grown up with bottled water.
Russia has always had a multi-party political system.
Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
MTV has never featured music videos.
The space program has never really caught their attention except in disasters.
The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were…