Idiocy
sastyk | August 2, 2010It was a busy weekend here - figuring out whether we were moving, my sister was visting, other friends were visiting, we hit the local County Fair, worked in the garden, you know, life. So until just now, I hadn't paid any attention to the empty meanderings about science blogs in the Times Magazine. But I did have to read it eventually - Monday comes eventually to all of us - and lo and behold, I got me an awesome dig from the Times - Virginia Heffernan attacks all science bloggers for being part of the "religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd."
Now that's kind of funny, because I wasn't aware…
laelaps | July 7, 2010Important Update: The time has come to close things up here. I will no longer be blogging for ScienceBlogs.com. I am not sure where Laelaps will end up - perhaps back on Wordpress, perhaps elsewhere - but you can be sure that I will keep on writing about saber-toothed cats, whales that walked, early humans, and other cool bits of paleontology. With any luck, I will be able to confirm my plans in a few days. Keep your eyes on my author website or follow me on Twitter to find out where I'll be headed next. This is not farewell - just a brief break in transmission.
By now you have probably heard…
drorzel | June 23, 2010I don't remember who pointed me at this transcript of Deepak Chopra interviewing Michio Kaku, but if I remember who it was, I fully intend to hate them.
DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now?
MK: In principle. What we're talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the Milky Way Galaxy. Now when the Big Bang took place we think that most of the matter probably was vibrating in unison.
DC: So it was already correlated?
MK: It was already correlated. We call this coherence or correlation. As the universe expanded, we're still correlated, we'…
grrlscientist | January 16, 2010tags: religion, IDiots, satire, parody, comedy, humor, fucking hilarious, Hitler, DOWNFALL, streaming video
The so-called Discovery Institute is a pretentious über-Christian disguise for creationism and an ultra-Conservative social agenda called The Wedge Strategy. So-called Intelligent Design theory is plagiarized from William Paley's long-refuted Blind Watchmaker argument, and is merely creationism in a not-so-cunning disguise.
Having neither facts nor logic at their disposal, the polemicists of the so-called Discovery Institute have been forced to resort to lies and subterfuge. One of…
laelaps | September 20, 2008For all the talk of the rise of Rutgers football being a "Cinderella story," the course of the present season is making many boosters eat their words. The first two games were disasters, particularly the second against the University of North Carolina (the score was 44 to 12, ouch). As the team prepares to face off against Navy today (with John McCain watching, no less), many people are starting to wonder if the near-flawless 2006 season was more of a fluke than a "triumphant return."
The team's recent lackluster performances only serve to underscore the bloated football program here at…
laelaps | April 13, 2008It has sometimes been said that the leaders of creationist ministries and advocates of intelligent design are charismatic, charming people who know how to play to the crowd. I don't believe it. Creationists are often just as loud, judgmental, and terse as the stereotype of evolutionary scientists that is so often hauled out to admonish students of nature for not being skilled enough at communicating their ideas effectively. Recently the Calvinist pastor R.C. Sproul interviewed Ben Stein about Expelled, and the result is the antithesis of stimulating discourse;
(Note: The video did not load…
laelaps | March 28, 2008I thought the whole "digital pet" craze was over, but apparently it's just mutated in some disturbing ways. According to CNN, a game launched in Britain called "Miss Bimbo" is causing quite a bit of controversy. Perhaps meant to be satire of the "glamorous" lifestyles of female media stars, the game instructs players to find rich boyfriends for their characters to leech funds from, blow their money on breast implants for their avatars, and throw a few crumbs to their "bimbos" to strike that balance between emaciated and dead.
Oddly enough, the #1 consumers of the game are young girls aged 7…
laelaps | February 13, 2008Intelligent design has to be one of the most boring concepts I've ever had the displeasure to be acquainted with. When I first heard about it I thought it was nuts, but at least it was interesting. Two years later I've tired of hearing shrill arguments about how "Big Science" and the "Darwinian orthodoxy" are persecuting the poor creationists, killing puppies, making Jesus cry, etc. Indeed, William Paley argued for design much more eloquently and coherently in Natural Theology, a book that if often referenced but has seldom been read (especially by the intelligent design camp. Paley's book is…
laelaps | February 7, 2008Even though they'll never admit it, I imagine the creationists allied with the Disco institute are hurting pretty bad right now. Other bloggers have already covered the carnage so I'll just put up some links rather than write up a summary of what's already been said, but the beating ID has received over the past few days has been nearly painful to watch;
Casey Luskin stole the BPR3 icon and is now crying discrimination by evil Darwinistas even though he clearly didn't pay attention to the requirements of using the icon. I smell a bit of a fake-out (Luskin creating a trap for himself by…
laelaps | January 30, 2008Over at Wired, Thomas Hayden kicks off his brief piece "Why Things Suck: Science" with the following nugget (what it's a nugget of, I'll leave up to you);
Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life -- science doesn't handle those issues well at all. But that's cool. We have art and religion for that stuff.
It doesn't get better from there, and Jake from Pure Pedantry has a near line-for-line takedown of Hayden's ramblings. If you're a fan of pop-evolutionary psychology (i.e. we're just a bunch of hunter gatherers trapped within technologies and cultures we created, hence all our social woes…
laelaps | January 16, 2008The creationist propaganda piece Expelled has been in the pipe for a while now, but it seems to be more and more apparent that the people behind it are scrambling to prevent the film from being a direct-to-video style flop. Originally slated for Darwin Day (February 12), the film has been pushed back to April (I would assume the delay stems from a desire to include more about the Gonzalez tenure-denial kerfuffle), and it looks like the filmmakers are trying to "recruit" as many people as possible to see the film when it opens by throwing money at schools. According to a recent post up at the…
laelaps | November 6, 2007Back when I was a blogging greenhorn, right about this time last year, an evangelical YEC thought he had come up with an intellectual coup de grâce to make me see "the light"; "Antony Flew believes in a god, so there." (Ok, so I'm paraphrasing just a bit) Chalk it up to ignorance, but I had never even heard of Antony Flew, and saying that he believed in a deity had about as much effect on me as saying "Charlie Parker thought the sky was purple" (and given his problems with drug addiction, maybe he sometimes did). Still, over and over again Christian apologists have invoked Flew's name and I…
laelaps | November 1, 2007Yesterday may have been Halloween, but today I learned of a real horror story; the BBC is going to cut "a third of its 180 production staff, including 10 out of 35 producers, nine of 17 assistant producers, 23 of 33 researchers and 11 of 37 production manager jobs," from the Natural History Unit according to the Financial Times. The cuts are a result of the BBC attempting to make back about $4.5 billion due to a bad license-fee settlement, an estimated 2,500 job cuts resulting from the need to recoup the funds. As Julia has noted, this is especially shocking given the popularity, success, and…
laelaps | October 31, 2007Looks like I've got an editorial war on my hands. Yesterday I announced that my refutation of Brad Pironciak's "Social Darwinism" piece was printed in the college newspaper, The Daily Targum, and now I've received an editorial reply from English major Justin Fruhling. I don't have time to respond in full to his comments right now (you can read his piece here), but Fruhling's main complaint is that I didn't take "The Darwin Awards" or falling standardized test scores into account. Entirely missing the main point of my argument (intelligence is not wholly determined by inheritance and we should…
laelaps | October 29, 2007A little more than a week ago, scientist James Watson made a complete idiot of himself with some despicable and racist comments about the intelligence of white people and black people, and Greg Laden justifiably kicked his arse over the ill-founded statements. I was certainly surprised, then, to visit the official Rutgers University newspaper (The Daily Targum) website and see an opinion article by a freshman named Brad Pironciak who apparently has no idea what natural selection is, his piece being an idiotic espousal of Social Darwinism (although he didn't use the phrase that pays, "survival…
laelaps | October 26, 2007Actually, I don't believe in "spooks," ESP, alien abductions, or much of the other paranormal rot that crops up so often this time of year, but apparently 24% of 1,013 polled adults do. While I take issue with surveys asking a relatively insignificant amount of people their opinion and then projecting those numbers on the whole of the population, I have run into many people who have some, erm, interesting ideas about rather ordinary phenomena. I've been told that cats can detect human souls, that saber-tooth cats were aquatic predators and bit their prey sideways, that there are living…