jlynch | January 19, 2009No doubt the boy in the bubble thinks heâs done a heckuva job. From here:
Toronto Star: âBush was an unmitigated disaster, failing on the big issues from the invasion of Iraq to global warming, Hurricane Katrina and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.â
Daily Mail: âHe leaves the world facing its biggest crisis since the Depression, the Middle East in flames and U.S. standing at an all-time low.â
Daily Record: âAmerica is now hated in many parts of the world. Bush leaves a legacy of wars and the world economy in meltdown. He has been dismissed as a buffoon and a war-monger, a…
jlynch | January 17, 2009Frankly, it takes talent to suck this bad:
President Bush will leave office as one of the most unpopular departing presidents in history, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll showing Mr. Bush's final approval rating at 22 percent.
Seventy-three percent say they disapprove of the way Mr. Bush has handled his job as president over the last eight years.
Mr. Bush's final approval rating is the lowest final rating for an outgoing president since Gallup began asking about presidential approval more than 70 years ago.
Only 6 percent of Democrats approve of the job he has done as…
jlynch | January 17, 2009
A scientist, testing a formula on Univac recently, was amazed to see the computing system stop, then automatically type the reproof: “You’re trying to divide by zero.” A quick check proved that Univac, as always, was right.
Click to image to read more. 1956 good times.
jlynch | January 16, 2009Let's face it: When George W. Bush claims he's "kept us safe," it's kind of like the babysitter who lets the toddler wander into traffic the first hour she's on the job, then herds all the remaining kids into the basement and locks them in to compensate. So when the parents get home, she says: "See, I kept them all safe after the toddler got run over." (source)
jlynch | January 16, 2009Apparently the Department of Defense’s claim this week that “61, in all, former Guantánamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight” is purely imaginary. States Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University:
They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there. They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally…
jlynch | January 16, 2009Arizona Republicans have proposed that education - from kindergarten through university - should be the first thing to get the chop in a proposed budget. They are looking to cut $1.5 billion from education over the next 18 months with the K-12 system being hit for nearly $1 billion of that. I agree with our Board of Regents that the proposed $500,000 cut to the universities would be “cataclysmic in the depth and breadth of devastation they will cause to our higher-education system in Arizona.” Even a short-term cut in funding will have serious implications for the competitiveness of Arizona.…
jlynch | January 16, 2009It is always cute when the anti-evolutionists (in all their guises) try to do history; witness here, for example. Veteran observers are not surprised to find them trying to warp history (see here, here, here & here for that). Nowhere is this warping more evident than in how DI-hacks such as John West & Richard Weikart have promulgated a meme linking Darwin to Haeckel to Nazism. This has been clearly dealt with by a number of historians (see references herein and read Robert Richards’ latest book on Haeckel). Equally as resilient is the idea (also held by West & Weikart) that…
jlynch | January 16, 2009David Klinghoffer is promising to deliver some revisionism over at the Discovery Institute:
Starting tomorrow, I would like to devote a couple posts to the thesis that Communism has deeper Darwinian roots than many of us realize. That, in fact, even though Marx had already begun sketching the outlines of his ideas before Darwin published the Origin of Species — the Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848, the Origin in 1859 — he is fairly called a Darwinist. That, finally, the men who translated Marxism into practical political terms in the form of Soviet terror were evolutionary thinkers, just…
jlynch | January 15, 2009
There are sizable numbers of Neotropical cormorants (Phalacrocorax olivaceus) that hang around the lakes near where I live here in Tempe. As I drove home this evening a flight of about ten of them were moving from one of the lakes westwards to another nearby lake. That sparked the posting of a poem.
Children imitating cormorants
Children imitating cormorants are even more wonderful than cormorants.
Kobayashi Issa / translated by Robert Hass
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jlynch | January 15, 2009An interesting looking paper has just appeared online by John Beatty and Eric Cyr Desjardins that looks at the importance of history in determining form. The abstract reads:
In “Spandrels,” Gould and Lewontin criticized what they took to be an all-too-common conviction, namely, that adaptation to current environments determines organic form. They stressed instead the importance of history. In this paper, we elaborate upon their concerns by appealing to other writings in which those issues are treated in greater detail. Gould and Lewontin’s combined emphasis on history was three-fold. First,…
jlynch | January 15, 2009
Solargraphy is the art of using long-exposure pinhole cameras to record the path of the sun across the sky. The above example (click through for enlarged version over at APOD) is a six month exposure taken in Bristol, UK. Here are instructions to do it yourself - no processing required beyond use of a scanner after exposure.
jlynch | January 14, 2009Physioprof may be declared illegal in South Carolina and subject to fines up to $5000 and up to five years imprisonment. Details here. And you can thank this guy.
jlynch | January 14, 2009
As I’ve mentioned before, I spent a good part of my graduate years working on specimens in the collections of the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Some readers may have read of the museum through the essay “Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive O!” in Stephen Jay Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack. Gould was a fan of the museum and he felt it represented the majesty of the old-style Victorian museum. This story would therefore have brought Gould much sadness. Following closure in 2007 due to the collapse of a staircase, plans to renovate the museum are now on hold and it appears the future of the…
jlynch | January 14, 2009Minimum number of laws that Bush signing statements have exempted his administration from following: 1,069
Portion of Baghdad residents in 2007 who had a family member or friend wounded or killed since 2003: 3/4
Portion of all U.S. income gains during the Bush Administration that have gone to the top 1 percent of earners: 3/4
Estimated amount Bush-era policies will cost the U.S. in new debt and accrued obligations: $10,350,000,000,000
Harper’s has more.
jlynch | January 14, 2009Been busy here. Classes start on Tuesday so there has been a lot of administrivia to do with that. It’s also a mad scramble to get some projects finished before next week.
My buddie PalMD has come out from under the feet of the Hoofnagles and has shiny new premises (“White Coat Underground”) all of his own here at Scienceblogs. Wander over and say “hi”!
“High caffeine consumption could be linked to a greater tendency to hallucinate.” What? Who said that? I’ll be under the table. With my coffee [link].
Another shoutout to Zooborns bringer of much good cheer and much beloved by my daughter.…
jlynch | January 12, 2009For the second year running, you - yes, YOU, laddie! - have made the BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America. A slip from last year’s #9 slot, but an appearance none the less:
43. You
Charges: You think it’s your patriotic duty to spend money you don’t have on crap you don’t need. You think Hillary lost because of sexism, when it’s actually because she’s just a bad liar. You think Iraq is better off now than before we invaded, and don’t understand why they’re so ungrateful. You think Tim Russert was a great journalist. You’re hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of…
jlynch | January 12, 2009It’s the week before teaching starts again and I’m staring at a “to do” list that somehow managed to increase in size over the winter break. That’s never good, especially when that list includes a few book reviews and a short article. I had hoped that the coming semester would be a relatively quiet one, but that looks unlikely. Teaching-wise, I have my usual seminar course and my lecture course on Origins, Evolution & Creation, so there shouldn’t be a huge amount of preparation involved there. It’s the other stuff - particularly talks and conferences - that are going to be time-consuming…