Bits and Pieces
jlynch | February 18, 2007H. Allen Orr responds to Dennett's response to Orr's review of Dawkins' The God Delusion and basically captures my position on TGD:
Daniel Dennett's main complaint about my review is that I held Dawkins's book to too high a standard. The God Delusion was, he says, a popular work and, as such, one can't expect it to grapple seriously with religious thought. There are two things wrong with this objection. The first is that the mere fact that a book is intended for a broad audience doesn't mean its author can ignore the best thinking on a subject. Indeed it's precisely the task of the…
jlynch | February 11, 2007Those wild and crazy guys over at SCQ have come up with the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique, an organization of which I am proud to be a member. Maybe the physique bit is a stretch, but what the heck. Members are:
not opposed to alcohol.
fond of IPCC reports (especially the pictures).
mostly in agreement with the "truth."
into badges.
grieving for the slow and miserable death of the Hubble Space Telescope.
possibly possessed of supernatural powers.
not in the business of total world domination
committed to the constant and diligent presentation of…
jlynch | February 9, 2007
I have fond memories of watching PBS's Mystery Masterpiece Theatre in the mid to late 90's ... i.e. when the shows they broadcast were actually interesting. Some of the best shows were those that formed the three miniseries, "House of Cards", "To Play the King" and "The Final Cut" all featuring Ian Richardson as the truly evil Sir Francis Urquhart (whose trademark riposte to any slur against others forms the title of this post). It is thus sad to note that Richardson died today at the age of 72.
jlynch | February 6, 2007PZ has been dealing with the idiocy that is Scott Adams of Dilbert "fame". (The last word is in scare quotes because, frankly, I don't find Dilbert funny. At all. Never have. Never will.) And what is worse, PZ's had to deal with the apparent apostles of Adams who seem to think that a cartoonist like Adams either has something important to say
on science (not the case) or is being humorous (yeah, right). In any case, someone called "Bronze Dog" has wonderfully parodied Adams stupidity.
The full strip is here.
Update: Dagnabbit. PZ had posted this already! Beaten by the squidmeister.
jlynch | January 31, 2007
The more astute among you will have noticed that I have been awol more-or-less for the past week. I have a major deadline to hit on Friday and once that is done (and I have rested) I will resume my usual posting.
For the moment, check out four books that I am currently reviewing for various print journals:
jlynch | January 21, 2007I was wondering what posts of mine over the past year have received the most hits; What do people link to and what do the comment on? The "top twenty" posts are given below the fold and it is interesting to note that they can be characterized into three major categories: "anti-science" [1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 20] or posts about religion, atheism and/or Dawkins [7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18]. This really boils down to issues relating to science and religion, with only two other topics (the
backscatter x-ray being used at airports ["airport porn"] and a strange beastie in Maine) cracking…
jlynch | January 17, 2007
[Photo: Michael Price, 2007]
My ex-student Mike Price has a nice article up at Geotimes about Jerome, a once-booming mining town in Arizona that was described as "the wickedest town in the West". It now has a population of 350.
jlynch | January 14, 2007
I wonder whether Rupert Murdock's head exploded after seeing this on Fox last night during the Eagles/Saints game. And where's that right-wing blog rage on this corruption of our children during primetime?
jlynch | January 11, 2007As mentioned earlier, it's National De-Lurker Week. PZ "exposed" himself and has 420 comments, Orac has 122, Dave & Greta have 56, Janet has 46, Tara has
21, Afarensis has 16, Bora has 10, and I have ... 4 .... yes, 4 ... as in less than 5 and more than 3.
Come on people, throw me a bone - wander over here and say "hi".
(Fixed embarrassing error in basic counting due to long day with little sleep the night before)
jlynch | January 10, 2007A few days back, I noted that January 5th 2006 marked my first post on Scienceblogs. And indeed it did. But I forgot that it was actually a back-dated post from my old blog. It was today - January 11th - one year ago that Sb launched with fifteen intrepid bloggers - Janet, Tara , Afarensis, Dave & Greta, Tim, Ed, RPM, Razib, Chris, GrrlScientist, Kevin, PZ, Chad, and myself - boldly going where no bloggers went before.
For those of you who wish to feel nostalgic, the Wayback Machine has the front page from January 12th 2006 online. Oh, how far we have come!
jlynch | January 10, 2007Janet notes that it is National Delurking Week 2007. So, if you read this blog but have never commented, give a shout out and let us know who you are and where you're from. This is particularly true for those of you who read via RSS (which probably could stand for Real Silent Syndication).
jlynch | January 8, 2007Bora has announced the contents for the soon-to-be published anthology of science-related blog writings, and and my post on Edward T. Oakes' treatment of Darwin and Marx has made the cut. I want to thank the readers of the post for making some suggestions/comments that I subsequently incorporated into the final version which
I mailed to Bora just a few hours ago.
(The entry actually started life as a minor part of an unfinished paper on YEC misuse of intellectual history that I began in 1998 . It subsequently appeared in a set of talks I gave between 1999 and 2001 at various venues around…
jlynch | January 5, 2007A year ago (at this exact time - 7:15 EST) I started here at Scienceblogs with a post on "Lawyers and Evolution". After over 600 posts and 2000+ comments, I'm still having fun. Thanks to all my readers over the past year.
(All going well, I'll be in a bar in Phoenix with PZ, Grrl Scientist and our readers as this posts)
jlynch | December 30, 2006This is kind of cool - pool shots in slow motion with thermal imaging.
(Seen on fark.com)
jlynch | December 29, 2006An AP-AOL News poll has revealed that Bush is both the greatest "villain" and "hero" of 2006.
When asked to name the past year's biggest villain, Bush was far and away the #1 choice, commanding 25% of the vote, distantly trailed by Osama Bin Laden (8%), Saddam Hussein (6%), President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran (5%), North Korean leader Kim Jong II (2%) and Donald Rumsfeld (2%). Satan only took in 1% of the vote ...
On the flipside, Bush also claimed the top spot when Americans were asked to name the year's biggest hero, but with only a trifling 13% of the vote. The troops in Iraq came in…
jlynch | December 29, 2006I've noted before that the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) will be meeting in Phoenix next week and also that PZ, Grrl Scientist, and I will be participating in a media workshop on blogging. We've decided that this might also be a nice opportunity for Scienceblogs readers to get together,
so here's what we're proposing:
Friday January 5th @ 6:00pm. Meetup at a wateringhole near the conference (Hyatt Regency). Wander over to PZ's announcement, holler if you can attend, and suggest a place.
Saturday January 6th @ 5:30pm. Phoenix-area skeptic Jim Lippard has kindly…
jlynch | December 26, 2006At the risk of restarting the arguments of last month (and,
oh, what fun they were!), I will note that Richard Dawkins writes:
Congratulations to P Z Myers on this brilliant piece of satire. It applies not just to Allen Orr's review in NYRB, but to all those many reviews of TGD that complain of my lack of reading in theology. My own stock reply ("How many learned books of fairyology and hobgoblinology have you read?") is far less witty.
Far less witty indeed. And also somewhat problematic.
I want to stress here that I am not going to discuss the truth of the claim that The God Delusion may…