Media
pharyngula | May 30, 2007Salon has just published their report on Ken Ham's creation "museum", by author Gordy Slack, who has just released a book on the Dover trial. I haven't read the book, although it was on my list to pick up this summer. No more. This was an awful bit of dreck, and I don't think I could stomach reading a whole book written this way.
It's dead, credulous reporting. Slack simply blandly reports the contents of the "museum," and doesn't offer a single word of criticism, and doesn't even try to evaluate the accuracy of the claims. The protesters outside the gates are briefly mentioned, but otherwise…
pharyngula | May 29, 2007When ever I try to read about "framing" anymore, I start to twitch and suffer from hysterical blindness, which makes it really hard to blog. Fortunately, Greg Laden has a stronger constitution than I do (either that, or anthropologists have access to exotic drugs that help them overcome), so I'll just send everyone over there to read that. Don't tell me what it says, though: ir'll jost teigger the husertical twrches agian ind I'll hve to fo lie diwn for aquile. Eck. soasr neb vwiffffleop. Gorsnck.
clock | May 29, 2007Remember back in November, when everyone got excited about JoVe (the Journal of Visulized Experiments)?
Well, it is not alone in its niche any more. There is now another site similar to that: Lab Action.
Of course I homed in onto videos of scoring lobster aggression and Drosophila aggression, but there is quite a lot of other stuff there. It is pretty much like a YouTube for science so feel free to post your contributions.
pharyngula | May 23, 2007Sheril Kirshenbaum is guest-blogging at The Intersection while Chris Mooney is away, and she is bravely planning on discussing…dare I say it…framing. It's a subject that gives me the heebie-jeebies, the flibbertigibbits, and a bad case of the surly snarls, but let's see if maybe Sheril can give it a new perspective—maybe she can do a better job of framing framing.
clock | May 14, 2007The other day I was chatting with my brother (the smarter brother of Sherlock Holmes) on the phone, and he said something that may have some truth to it - I was predisposed, from early childhood, to understand and like the Web and the blogs. How? By reading and re-reading a million times the books about the adventures of The Three Investigators. Actually, only four of the early books in the series were tranlated into Serbo-Croatian, but I read them over and over. Later, here in the USA, I managed to find and read a few more in English.
What does that have to do with blogging? Well, back…
pharyngula | May 14, 2007John Horgan and George Johnson are going at it again on Bloggingheads. The most interesting part, I thought, was the discussion of EO Wilson's turn towards group selection; one of the themes of Gould's last book was the existence of levels of selection above the individual and the gene. Gould and Wilson had such a bitter antipathy towards each other that it is fascinating to see this sliver of convergence now.
For more Horgan, check out his recent article in Slate—it's a skeptical look at neurotheology. Persinger and Hamer, oh my — two guys whose real talent is the ability to prompt eye-…
clock | May 13, 2007Today's Obligatory Reading of the Day is this essay by Kagro X:
Have you ever read, seen, or heard a mainstream media account of some event in which you've been personally involved? Or in which you have developed, under whatever circumstances, some sort of expertise? Ninety-nine times out of hundred, people with that sort of personal or specialized knowledge of the events covered will come away with some sort of substantial complaint about the quality of the coverage...
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Why, though, should the general audience settle for "sufficient?" Or perhaps more to the point, why…
pharyngula | May 11, 2007Rupert Murdoch has openly admitted that global warming is a real problem.
At an event held this morning in midtown Manhattan and webcast to all News Corp. employees, Murdoch launched a company-wide plan to address climate change that includes not only a pledge to reduce the company's emissions (which has come to be expected at such biz-greening events) but also a vow to weave climate messaging into the content and programming of News Corp.'s many holdings.
Ironically, though, Murdoch still employs that ignorant junk science guy, Steve Milloy, as a Fox News columnist. Here's a suggestion to…
scientificactivist | May 9, 2007The conservative movement has been notoriously effective at co-opting language for its own benefit, either by turning the meaning of commonly used words upside down or by injecting new words and phrases into the national dialogue. The use of some loaded language in a recent New York Times article by Pam Belluck on Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick's new stem cell proposal demonstrates just how well these tactics have worked:
These states are all seeking ways to get around the Bush administration's restrictions on federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, which were imposed…
pharyngula | May 7, 2007I'm seeing some mixed signals on the series "A Brief History of Disbelief" — it's appearing in very few station's schedules right now, and it's tempting to suspect that it's being buried by the media, especially since right wing groups detest it:
That "A Brief History of Disbelief" might be controversial is unsurprising. Right-wing groups, such as the Concerned Women of America, are already ramping up opposition to Miller's program, which originally aired on the BBC in 2005. Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council deemed the work of the actor-director-author Miller to be "an evangelistic…
pharyngula | May 7, 2007I'm passing along a request for all you glamorous, photogenic marine biologists:
Are you a marine biologist? Do you want to be in a rock video?
Hello all, this is Toren Atkinson, science lover and lead singer for the Lovecraftian rock band, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. You may, at http://www.thickets.net/toren/darkestofthehillsidethickets.mp3 or http://www.myspace.com/darkestofthehillsidethickets listen to/download the mp3 for "A Marine Biologist," a fun little number about bathyscaphes, benthic trawlers, giant squid, etc.
I would like to create a music video for this track that…
pharyngula | May 7, 2007As a small tremor in a bit of a staff shakeup at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, James Lileks got the axe — he's been demoted from a guy with a regular column to a beat reporter. It's about time.
He's not a bad writer, in the sense that he does have his own recognizable voice, but yeesh, he's such a banal writer, the epitome of Minnesota mediocrity. Some of his online writings are cranky-grandpa interesting, the rantings of a deranged 9/11 wingnut, but his newspaper column … dull, dull, dull. You only need to read one column in your life about a guy who goes shopping at Target and watches TV…
clock | May 5, 2007Writing actual science posts takes a lot of time, research, thinking and energy. I assembled a large pile of papers I want to comment on and I actually started writing posts about a couple of them already, but Real Life interferes...and it is so much easier and quicker to post a short opinion-post or a linkfest.
Also, my mind has lately been mostly focused on Science Blogging, more Science Blogging, Open Science, Open Notebook Science, organizing the next Science Blogging Conference, Framing Science, Teaching Science and similar stuff I've been reading about a lot lately due to the…
pharyngula | May 4, 2007Tomorrow is 5 May, and I mentioned in myreview of A Brief History of Disbelief that this excellent documentary on atheism/agnosticism was supposed to be aired on PBS stations all across the country around this time. It's been hard to track down, though; I've looked in my local TV listings, and there's no mention. Readers have contacted their stations directly, and some have reported back that they will be seeing it, while others have found that their stations are not carrying it. It's very confusing.
Well, a reader found a grid listing all of the airdates and stations that will be showing A…
clock | May 3, 2007NPR has started a year-long series on climate called Climate Connections. The other day, they broadcast the first in a series of their educational segments, starting at the very beginning: the carbon atom. You can read the intro here and watch the video here but just listening to the audio in the car was absolutely fascinating (the video is close, but much shorter and not identical to the first quarter of the audio segment for which the podcast is at the "listen" button).
The science was very basic yet completely correct and the entire segment was so fun to listen to. It was fast and…
pharyngula | May 3, 2007The incompetence is stunning. Richard Dawkins makes the Time 100 list, and who do they commission to write up his profile?
Michael Fucking Behe.
That's not just stupid, it's a slap in the face. It would have been no problem to find a smart biologist, even one who might be critical of Dawkins' message, to write something that expressed some measure of respect from the editorial staff. But to dig up a pseudoscientific fraud whose sole claim to fame is that he has led the charge to corrupt American science education for over a decade is shameful.
I'm sure there's an editor at Time sniggering…
pharyngula | May 2, 2007Oh, I hate these difficult questions.
If you're a professor and you want to change the world, what do you do? In 1993--quit and become an activist. In 2007—start a blog.
Or so it seems. PZ Myers blogging at Pharyngula is probably doing more for evolution than PZ Myers publishing papers in scientific journals. Is that true PZ?
No.
Hmmm, I guess it wasn't so difficult after all!
Just to expand a little bit, though: it's definitely not true that I'm now doing a better job of increasing the scientific understanding of evolution. I'm not discovering anything new (well, except that I do have an…
pharyngula | April 26, 2007My little trip distracted me with the perfect timing to miss the amazing fair-use flare-up — I'm back just in time to catch the happy resolution. I guess I'll say something anyway, but I'll be brief.
The general question is whether blogs should be restrained from using figures and data published in scientific journals. My position is that we should use them — scientific information should be freely and widely disseminated, anything else is antithetical to the advancement of science. The only constraints I think are fair is that all material taken from a journal should be acknowledged and…
clock | April 26, 2007Excellent article by Jeff Jarvis: The obsolete interview (hat-tip: Anton). As I've been interviewed several times this year, I agree. The world is changing: media, just like science publishing (see below) and getting a job (see further below) will change....
angrytoxicologist | April 24, 2007 Possibly this should be the 'absolute failure of logic' edition. In the WaPo today (page A07), you'll find a story about how the FDA is going to be testing food additives from China for melamine. It's all fine and boring except for two crucial facts. Let's do the grading:
Melamine, a nitrogen-based compound used in products such as countertops, glues and fertilizers, was identified this month as the cause of fatal kidney failure in an unknown number of dogs and cats, leading to the recall of more than 100 brands of pet food.
Wow. Melamine's the cause? Looks like the press is getting carried…