Media
signout | March 1, 2007I know about 50 people who should enter this contest, wherein mere mortals submit t-shirt designs with a "science is culture" theme and win fabulous prizes.
You know who you are. Get cracking.
pharyngula | February 27, 2007Many people have noticed the ad for the ghastly Jesus documentary at the top of the pages here. I'm not thrilled, as you might guess—I think this is almost certainly a load of pseudoscientific fluff. Since it is so prominently promenaded across the pages, I'm now feeling obligated to watch the silly thing, so the ad has won them one viewer, at the cost of personal pain to me.
Since I am taking on the sins of our advertiser, however, I will suggest to you readers that you can consider yourselves redeemed and should feel no compulsion to watch it yourselves. If you want to, you may, of course……
pharyngula | February 25, 2007In response to this crazy attempt to smear Mitt Romney with the sins of his fathers literally, a few people are disqualifying themselves from future runs for the presidency with similar confessions. I have to admit there's a skeleton in my family tree, too: apparently, one of my ancestors was hanged as a witch in 17th century Massachusetts.
No one will be surprised at that, I suppose. Especially since if your family can trace its roots in this country back almost 400 years, you might well be related to her, too.
pharyngula | February 23, 2007Greg Laden reminds me that today's Science Friday will feature Ed Humes and Randy Olson talking about educating people about evolution—tune in!
clock | February 23, 2007Evolution works according to a very small set of simple rules. If a) there is variation in a trait in a population and b) that variation is heritable and c) one variant is better adapted to the current local environment, then d) the best adapted trait will increase in the proportion within the population in the next generation. Once you understand this simple algorithm (perhaps, for fuller understanding, learn some basics of the ways genotype maps onto phenotype via development), everything about the living world is explainable without magic.
John McCain works according to a very small set…
pharyngula | February 21, 2007A reader pointed me to this German documentary (with English subtitles) on evolution and creationism—it has a nice 10 minute primer on mechanisms and evidence for evolution (with evo-devo, especially of fruit flies and zebrafish, prominently mentioned, appropriately enough for the country of Christiane Nusslein-Volhard).
There's also a segment on creationism that is a bit lacking in nuance—they are all lumped together as young earth creationists—which is the kind of opening creationists use to disavow association with those other kooks, while glossing over the foolishness they do believe.…
pharyngula | February 19, 2007Somebody shoot me now. The Washington Post tallies up congressional votes, and in an astounding display of technological mastery, allows you to sort and display them by the congressperson's astrological sign. If you've ever wondered whether Scorpios were more likely to vote for highway appropriations than are Virgos, now you can find out.
I really want to know what the conversations the editors or publishers had about this decision were like. I'm thinking they were getting worried about how idiotic and cowardly the press has been looking lately, so someone decided to do something bold and…
pharyngula | February 17, 2007One of the subjects I mentioned at the Thursday Flock of Dodos discussion was that an obstacle to getting the public excited about science is the state of science writing. It's a very formal style in which the passive voice is encouraged, caution and tentative statements are demanded, adverbs are frowned upon and adjectives are treated with suspicion, and all the passion is wrung out in favor of dry recitations of data. Now that actually has a good purpose: it makes it easy to get to the meat of the article for people who are already familiar with the subject and may not need any pizazz to…
revere | February 15, 2007If you hanker after the good old days when things were simpler, times when we knew who are enemies were, you still have a home. It's the folks at Accuracy in Media, a conservative group dedicated to the principle that no amount of disinformation is too patriotic. They are now exercised about the "media reform movement," described as an insidious attempt to muzzle conservatives by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine, a doctrine designed to "force conservative media to incorporate 'progressive' views into shows like the O'Reilly Factor on cable news and the Rush Limbaugh program on radio." Who's…
pharyngula | February 11, 2007Here's a site full of interesting noises: freesound. You can search for anything, and it will return Creative Commons licensed sound samples; if you want the sound of a phone ringing, or wind chimes, or throatsinging, or thunderstorms, or someone being tortured, or a good laser death ray, there it is. I started looking for more organic things, like whale songs, crickets chirping, frogs croaking, bird songs, etc., and it's amazing—all kinds of stuff turns up.
One creepy thing, though, if you have squeaky mattress. You'll also discover that people are recording what their neighbors are doing…
pharyngula | February 9, 2007I am deeply amused. I'm no fan of "faith & religion" sections of newspapers—axe them and expand the funny pages, I say—but here's one editor with smarts who gets the thumbs up from me. He gets lots of complaints that those dang non-Christians are being over-represented on the religion page; some of them are typical bigotry of the dominant delusion:
A couple of critics wanted to know why we were wasting ink on these "false" beliefs when Christ is the only path to salvation. Another caller said he was tired of having "that Islam religion … shoved in my face."
Now here's what I like: the…
pharyngula | February 8, 2007The big, important news is, of course, the death of a gold-digging addlepated model (I'm sorry that she's dead, but really…it's not something worth flogging over and over on the news), so the feature on atheism that CNN was going to show has been bumped to Friday.
Unless somebody in programming gets a yen for accordion music, I think.
clock | February 4, 2007About two days ago, about 120 local bloggers (their e-mail addresses probably taken from the local - and now obsolete - Triangle Bloggers MeetUp.org page) got an e-Vite to this:
You are cordially invited to attend to the NBC 17 Triangle Blogger Community Ascertainment.
What: NBC 17 holds community ascertainments once a month in our viewing area. A community ascertainment is a casual meeting with representatives from the community and NBC 17. They are also referred to as Listening Tours.
We would like to invite you to our groundbreaking Blogger Ascertainment. We recognize the…
clock | February 2, 2007Some politicians fear blogs. They must have something to hide, dontcha think?
Other politicians love blogs and run their own. Unsurprisingly, they are beloved by their constituencies.
clock | February 1, 2007A tale of two candidate's video distribution strategies:
These examples highlight an interesting problem for candidates: while YouTube offers tools to manage posting comments, you cannot control what content your page links to. In going to "where the people are," you leave yourself open to direct commentary from the people. Counter-commentary may be located directly beside your stumping. Contrast this to Brightcove's promise of control, an interface that does not link directly to intertextual documents. Additionally, even when you find commentary on Brightcove, it is coming from established…
purepedantry | January 29, 2007Jeffrey Toobin, writing in the New Yorker, has an excellent article on Google's plan to scan all the books they can get their hands on into digital:
The legal assertion at the core of Google's business plan is its purported right to scan millions of copyrighted books without payment to or permission from the copyright owners. Approximately twenty per cent of all books are in the public domain; these include books that were never copyrighted, like government publications, and works whose copyrights have expired, like "Moby-Dick." Google has simply copied such books and made them available on…
scientificactivist | January 4, 2007The "liberal media" is at it again, and by "liberal" I don't mean it in the political sense. No, I'm talking about the media relying on liberal (sloppy) oversight/editorial practices.
After CNN slipped up Monday by broadcasting a graphic with the question "Where's Obama?" overlaid on a photo of Osama bin Laden, Yahoo News followed suit yesterday by including the caption "Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida" under a photo of Senator Barack Obama. Corey Anderson broke the story and Greg Sargent has more.
Here it is:
If there is any confusion lingering still, let me state definitively here that…
scientificactivist | December 29, 2006The Scientific Activist received a shout out yesterday in the latest issue of the Ventura County Reporter in Sandra Sorenson's article stressing the continued importance of blogs and how they likely contributed to Time Magazine's recent Person of the Year announcement:
However you view Time Magazine's decision to name every somewhat cognizant citizen "Person of the Year" a cop-out, flattering the deadline-burdened staff got something right: There is increasingly active dialog between the average citizen and the mainstream media. And it isn't always amicable....
But what of the blog, that…
pharyngula | December 29, 2006Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he's a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he's written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole 'nother column…
clock | December 19, 2006Is Internet going to change the way politicians campaign and the way they are perceived? Check this video, the first in a series of "webisodes" filmed behind the scenes with John Edwards:
Doesn't that completely change your perceptions?
Update: Sorry, forgot the links. You can find this video on YouTube, DU and OAC blog.