jlynch | December 15, 2006When you are old and grey and full of sleep,And nodding by the fire, take down this book,And slowly read, and dream of the soft lookYour eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,And loved your beauty with love false or true,But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fledAnd paced upon the mountains overheadAnd hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
W.B. Yeats, from The Rose (1893)
jlynch | December 14, 2006Afarensis has previously mentioned the recent death of Peter Boyle.
And now, my fellow scientists and neurosurgeon...I must ask you to ...suspend belief. For up until now, you have seen the Creature perform the simple mechanics of motor activity. That this Creature was an inanimate blob, which I endowed with the secret of life -- yes!...in all honesty -- that showed some measure of skill on my part. But for what you are about to see next...we must enter -- quietly -- into the realm of genius. I say this modestly, only because I am, myself, as in awe of the gifts I possess as if I were…
jlynch | December 14, 2006 Edward T. Oakes may be a good teacher of theology at St. Mary of the Lake, but he is a lousy historian of Darwinism. Witness the following statement from his review of Richard Weikart's work, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany:
Spencer might well have been the first to coin the phrase "survival of the fittest." But Darwin enthusiastically adopted it in the 6th edition of his Origin of Species as a substitute term for "natural selection." Nor did he ever demur when other advocates of evolution's social application came pleading their case. Karl Marx…
jlynch | December 13, 2006
Today is the anniversary of the death, in 1873, of the Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist, Louis Agassiz (born in 1807) whom I've mentioned before. It is fair to say that Agassiz was the last intellectually respectable creationist in America. A vehement anti-evolutionist and polygenist, Agassiz none-the-less left modern science with a theory of glaciation. He was influential in the formation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) & the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard (home of Gould, Mayr,…
jlynch | December 13, 2006Today I managed to finish my grading ... well, most of it. I still have my upper-division Darwin & Design course to take care of. Despite nursing a bad cold, yesterday I attended our Honors Commencement (only 29 graduates walked this semester, none of them working with me on theses ... I've five coming up in the spring). The last extended family members leave town tomorrow and as soon as I finish with the ASU Commencement today (I've the honor of bearing the college banner), I'm home free. Probably home to bed is more like it, but there you have it.
Boring post, I know.
jlynch | December 13, 2006
AP is reporting that the Yangtze River dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer) is "effectively extinct" following a 20 million year existence on this planet. A six week search yielded no sightings, down from thirteen sightings in 1997. It is believed that overfishing and sub-aquatic sonar pollution led to the extinction and that the species is the first cetacean to be rendered extinct by human action.
jlynch | December 13, 2006The flacks over at the Discovery Institute are spending an inordinate amount of time on their latest press release aimed at somehow undermining Judge Jones' opinion in Kitzmiller v Dover. This is particularly interesting giving the DI claim that they felt that the case should not have gone to trial in the first place. Having lost in the courts (as they have in the scientific arena), they are aiming to win the only way they possible can - by persuading the public that "activist judges" and "evil Darwinists" are plotting to brainwash the students.
Tim Sandefur steps into the breach and takes on…
jlynch | December 12, 2006The Discovery Institute's trademarked brand of science-by-press-release continues. In this press release, John West (a political scientist) claims that "[t]he key section of the widely-noted court decision on intelligent design issued a year ago on December 20 was copied nearly verbatim from a document written by ACLU lawyers" (the document being the findings of fact proposed by the ACLU). Tim Sandefur (a lawyer) notes that such documents "are proposed findings which a judge, if he or she agrees, then incorporates as his or her own findings. Both the school district and the plaintiffs filed…
jlynch | December 11, 2006
Photo of this weekend's night launch of Space Shuttle Discovery. [Source: National Geographic]
jlynch | December 11, 2006Karmen and Razib have both taken the Belief-O-Matic quiz. So here's what I got:
1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Theravada Buddhism (93%)
3. Secular Humanism (90%)
4. Liberal Quakers (90%)
Relatively accurate if you ask me. If I was a believer, I'd probably be a UUist. I'm ethically Buddhist (or at least I try to be) and that squares with Theravadism rather than Mahayana Buddhism.
The quiz is a little flawed in that it mixes atheism, agnosticism, and "don't care"-ism together and really thus only distinguishes between pre-determined religious positions. Still, it was interesting to…
jlynch | December 10, 2006ASU will introduce Dennis Erickson as its new football coach during a press conference on Monday.
jlynch | December 10, 2006As PZ notes, some of us ScienceBloggers will be at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting which occurs this time around in Phoenix. PZ, GrrlScientist and I will be the talking heads at the Media Worskshop on Thursday January 4th:
Media Workshop: Hey, Wanna Read My Blog?
Blogs are online "diaries" that are growing in popularity. Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media…
jlynch | December 9, 2006Chad made me take the Brutally Honest Personality Test:
Crackpot - INTJ33% Extraversion, 60% Intuition, 93% Thinking, 56% Judging
People hate you.
Paris Hilton hates Nicole Richie. Lex Luther hates Superman. Garfield hates Mondays. But none these even rates against the insurmountable hate, people have for you.
I mean, you're pretty damn clever and you know it. You love to flaunt your potential. Heard the word "arrogant" lately? How about "jerk?" Or perhaps they only say that behind your back.
That's right. I know I can say this cause you're not going to cry. You're not exactly the most…
jlynch | December 8, 2006I have family in town for the next few days so I don't know whether I'll be posting much if at all. To keep you amused, check out Orac's wonderful Friday Dose of Woo which this week deals with 9/11 Conspiracies. Example:
The hologram theory says that south tower (WTC2) was not hit by a large Boeing 767-200 (flight UA175) but by a small USAF cruise missile or drone with a large holographic cloak around it that made it look like a flight UA175, i.e. a flying deception.
The comments section is already hotting up and should be a doozy for the rest of the weekend. Enjoy!
jlynch | December 8, 2006Way back in 1994, the Internet was a much much smaller place. Only three years old, the World Wide Web really hadn't expanded much beyond academia. I have distinct memories of using NCSA Mosaic in 1993 and there wasn't much to see. Trust me. (Hell, I remember gopher, WAIS, Archie & Veronica ...)
In March 1994 (two months after I arrived in the US), the following were the Top 10 linked sites among the 5738 that were available. How different this is from what todays Top 10 list would look like.
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/…
jlynch | December 7, 2006Regular readers will know that ASU are looking for a new football coach after the firing of Dirk Koetter. Thursday morning the word was that there were six possible candidates: Norm Chow, Dennis Erickson, Steve Mariucci, Mike Martz, Mike Price and Mike Riley, with Chow being a "very strong candidate". By midnight, the Arizona Republic was reporting that a decision was on the verge of being made and that Price, Erickson and Riley were the top candidates, with Price being the front runner - this despite the fact that neither Idaho (Erickson) nor UTEP (Price) have been contacted by ASU to begin…
jlynch | December 7, 2006
Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day
Calmly we walk through this April's day,Metropolitan poetry here and there,In the park sit pauper and rentier,The screaming children, the motor-carFugitive about us, running away,Between the worker and the millionaireNumber provides all distances,It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,Many great dears are taken away,What will become of you and me(This is the school in which we learn...)Besides the photo and the memory?(...that time is the fire in which we burn.)
(This is the school in which we learn...)What is the self amid this blaze?What am I now that I…
jlynch | December 6, 2006In the past I have commented on the case of the Tripoli Six - medical workers wrongly accused of deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998. As Revere and Janet note, a paper [pdf] just published in Nature has demonstrated that the most likely route of infection was poor hospital hygeine, probably before any of the health care workers were in Libya.
Please see Revere and Janet's posts for things you can do to make sure that the workers are not executed for a crime they did not commit.
jlynch | December 6, 2006NASA today announced that it had evidence that water may have flowed on Mars as recently as the past five years. Images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor do not directly show water, but instead show recent changes in surface features that are consistent with water flow. More here, here and over at NASA.