Policy and Politics
tfk | February 21, 2010Jon Miller replies to my question about the difference in fundamentalist cultures in US vs. Europe that fundamentalism is so rare in Europe that it doesn't matter, and can't overwhelm long-standing traditions of hierarchal knowledge flows. Spain has a very conservative subculture within its Catholicism, which may influence the negative effect of religiosity on science literacy there. Netherlands have a small but vocal fundamentalist group which may explain the small negative effect there.
A panel attendee notes that when he visits his grandmother's church in Germany at Christmas, the priest…
tfk | February 21, 2010Who has two thumbs and met NOAA administrator, jetsetting ecologist, and hero to policy-loving scientists Jane Lubchenco?
This guy.
It wasn't a long conversation, but we did chat about the wonders of cephalopods, the importance of science education, and similarities between creationism and global warming denial. And now electrons from her hand are wending their way through the tubes to your computer. You're welcome.
tfk | February 20, 2010I'm getting ready for a session at AAAS where researchers will explore the results of the multi-national TIMSS study of science knowledge by 4th and 8th graders. They'll be comparing different US state results to draw lessons for improving science education, looking at Massachusetts and Minnesota's dramatic improvements on these tests from 2005 to 2007.
The room is fairly empty, and an audience member suggests that they'd get a better crowd at the science teachers' meetings in Philadelphia this summer. A session organizer replies, "The people who should be here, aren't."
A message in lots…
tfk | February 19, 2010By a 36-30 vote, the South Dakota legislature recently passed House Concurrent Resolution 1009, "Calling for balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools of South Dakota."
Fans of the creation/evolution struggle will recall that the US Supreme Court in 1987 struck down a "balanced time" law for creationism and evolution in Louisiana. In that case, the creationist alternative was so clearly religious in nature that the bill was found to violate the 1st amendment, and the bill's claim to be defending "academic freedom" was judged to be "a sham."
South Dakota's bill adopts a…
tfk | February 18, 2010Shorter Discovery Institute: Election Fundraising More Fun--and Constitutional--After Supreme Court Ruling:
Thanks to the Supreme Court, corruption is now more fun, and constitutional!
Meanwhile, real Americans hate the Supreme Court ruling in question.
tfk | February 17, 2010I'll be at the AAAS meetings in San Diego until Monday. Leave a comment or send an email if you'll be there and want to meet up.
tfk | February 17, 2010Martin Cothran, defender of Holocaust deniers and sometime friend to the eugenicists at the Disco. 'Tute, unleashes his inner Freudian psychoanalyst to determine that I have "logic envy." He seems to think his perverted logic is so big and beautiful that everyone else must want the same thing.
The nubbin of his argument is that he was not, when last we met, advancing a tu quoque argument about climate change. He does this by focusing on a line of argument I ignored as irrelevant, meanwhile admitting that he was using a tu quoque where I said he was. The relevant line is:
I simply pointed…
tfk | February 16, 2010Via ThinkProgress we learn that our old friend Chris Buttars has had a brainstorm about how to fix the state budget:
The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade. The notion quickly gained some traction among supporters who agreed with the Republicanâs assessment that many seniors frittered away their final year of high schoolâ¦
We last encountered Buttars when he tried to push creationism in Utah's schools under the moniker "divine design," and you may…
tfk | February 15, 2010Martin Cothran, enabler of racists and Holocaust deniers, doesn't like that I busted a bad argument of his. He made the trite "it's snowing so Al Gore is fat" line of argument, and I pointed out that an individual weather event doesn't actually tell you about long term trends. He retorts:
I wonder how many posts Josh has made cautioning those who equate weather and climate when discussing warm weather events.
It would but puerile to criticize this logic teacher for employing a tu quoque fallacy here, especially given Cothran's established love of ad hominem arguments and other logical…
tfk | February 13, 2010Oakland North tagged along with my fiancée and I as we knocked on doors to talk about gay marriage in Hayward a few weeks back. Just in time for Valentine's Day, they've posted a nice story about the current efforts to ensure marriage equality for all, featuring yours truly and my intended.
tfk | February 13, 2010Shorter Martin Cothran: Snow in 49 states:
Winter proves Al Gore is fat.
To quote science policy professor Roger Pielke, Jr. (not always a friend to conventional climate science):
What happens in the weather this week or next tells us absolutely nothing about the role of humans in influencing the climate system. It is unjustifiable to claim that a cold snap or heavy snow disproves or even casts doubts [on] predictions of long-term climate change. It is equally unjustifiable to say that a cold snap or heavy snow in any way offers empirical support for predictions of long-term climate change.…
tfk | February 11, 2010For whatever reason, last year's hearings in the Texas Board of Education attacking the basics of science education got less attention than this year's nonsense over social studies and history. The Washington Monthly did a great article on the process last month, and now the New York Times Magazine section has a long article about it.
Just as Don McLeroy urged his colleagues on the board to "stand up to experts" in the science hearings, he proposed a range of amendments to the social studies standards, what the Times calls "a single-handed display of archconservative political strong-arming…
tfk | February 11, 2010Steve Fuller (and fuller) writes to ID creationist Bill Dembski's blog about the question Do We Need God To Do Science?:
I debated the question with the historian Thomas Dixon, who basically holds that while we may have needed God to do science, we donât need the deity anymore. My own view is that if we mean by âscienceâ something more than simply the pursuit of instrumental knowledge, then that quest still doesnât make much sense without the relevant (Abrahamic) theological backdrop. I continue this line of argument in a new book, due out this summer.
The question's answer is "no." This…
tfk | February 10, 2010Start by installing a madman as president, then invade another country. Pretty soon, you get a soldier waterboarding his daughter:
An Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months has been restricted to his Washington military base after being accused of waterboarding his 4-year-old daughter because she refused to recite her ABCs.
(H/T BoingBoing).
The father apparently had a habit of wandering the neighborhood wearing kevlar and knocking on people's windows. His girlfriend says he has "an anger management problem." He performs helicopter maintenance in the Army, and spent 15 months in…
tfk | February 8, 2010In May, 2008 creationist bigot Martin Cothran complained at the Disco. 'Tute blog about John Derbyshire reviewing a shitty movie without having watched it:
That's right: Derbyshire reviews "Expelled" without actually having seen it. This is a man who has friends he has never met, and who can review movies he has never seen. It is perhaps fortuitous that Bill Buckley, the founder of National Review, recently passed from among us: this is a talent I am not sure he would have fully appreciated.
This ability to judge a movie without having to suffer the indignity of actually watching it surely…
tfk | February 8, 2010From Nature's news section, Philip Ball reports on research showing Dog bites man Morals don't come from God:
[In] a new paper by psychologists Ilkka Pyysiäinen of the University of Helsinki and Marc Hauser of Harvard University ⦠individuals presented with unfamiliar moral dilemmas show no difference in their responses if they have a religious background or not.
The study draws on tests of moral judgements using versions of the web-based Moral Sense Test ⦠These tests present dilemmas ranging from how to handle freeloaders at 'bring a dish' dinner parties to the justification of killing…
tfk | February 7, 2010A few weeks ago, televangelist Pat Robertson got in some righteous trouble for claiming that Haiti deserved its earthquake devastation because Haitians two hundred years ago "sw[ore] a pact with the devil."
Turns out, Robertson knows something about making deals with the devil:
Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, testifying in his war crimes trial in The Hague on Thursday, said that his government had awarded American televangelist Pat Robertson a gold mining concession in 1999 and that Robertson later offered to lobby the Bush administration on the government's behalf.
The revelations…
tfk | February 5, 2010This week put to rest a significant part of the anti-vaccine movement's claim to scientific legitimacy. A paper purporting to show a link between the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine and autism rates was retracted by The Lancet. The journal, which published the 1998 paper, based the decision on a finding by a British medical panel that one author (Andrew Wakefield) had violated certain human experimentation regulations and had misreported how the data was gathered. As Chris Mooney observes, this follows a string of other reviews of the paper which found its conclusions unwarranted by…
tfk | February 5, 2010Argument over cigarette led to Antioch slaying:
Police have arrested a suspect in the Antioch slaying of a man who was shot after he refused to give a cigarette to the alleged killer's friend, investigators said Friday.
Stagolee has nothing on him.
tfk | February 5, 2010Shorter Tom Tancredo at the Teabagger convention:
Things would be better if we elected Strom Thurmond president brought back Jim Crow.
No⦠really:
The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and "the cult of multiculturalism," asserting that Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."
The political activist group holds its first party convention in Nashville. The speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., told about 600 delegates in a Nashville, Tenn.,…