Politics
gregladen | October 26, 2009I love the fact that the tide is turning on Fox. (That might not be the best analogy.) In any event, this is a great example, from Rachel Maddow, of how life is more complex than much of our discourse allows for. And she does it with Walter Cronkite, and all the others on her side.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
emjohnson | October 26, 2009In a new understanding of the term power grab, researchers have shown that the supporters of a political candidate literally have their power taken from them after they lose an election. In a new study by Steven J. Stanton and colleagues in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, researchers asked 163 Republican and Democratic voters (57 of whom were men) to provide saliva samples both before and after the 2008 election between John McCain and Barack Obama. What the researchers determined was that Republican men showed significant reductions in testosterone after they learned that their candidate…
gregladen | October 26, 2009You must watch this. You. Simply. Must. Watch. This.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
oracknows | October 26, 2009I had meant to address this topic last week, but the whole Suzanne Somers thing bubbled up and overwhelmed my blogging attention. Regular readers of this blog probably realize that I tend to live and die as a blogger by the maxim that if some is good more must be better. So I clobbered the topic with three posts in rapid succession. Now that that's out of the way, I can address topics that readers have been bugging me about sending to me.
At or near the top of the list has to be a biased and poorly framed article that appeared in The Atlantic this month. I tell ya, I've been a subscriber to…
grrlscientist | October 26, 2009tags: Project Kaisei, Oceanography, North Pacific Gyre, North Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic, pollution, environment, streaming video
Underwater videographer, underwater photographer, and author, Annie Crawley joined Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Project Kaisei aboard the New Horizon on a 3 week long expedition to the North Pacific Gyre. They collected data to help find a solution to the "Plastic Vortex" forming in our Ocean.
revere | October 25, 2009Al Franken may have made his name as a comedian on Saturday Night Live, but as a Senator (D-MN) he's a force to reckon with. In this clip from hearings this week he nails a witness from the right wing Hudson Institute pimping for the health care industry. Her claim? That health care reform would lead to more bankruptcies. He makes his point and thanks the witness, but she tries to score with a question of her own. Bad move. It turns out Franken knows the answer:
Smart, serious, prepared. Live from Washington, DC. It's not Saturday Night Live!
Addendum, 1 pm EST: Just had to take my son-in-…
grrlscientist | October 25, 2009tags: intelligent design, scientific process, science classroom, rational thinking, AtheistBusCA, streaming video
Kenneth Miller provides a brief explanation as to why "intelligent design" is not admissible in a science classroom.
pharyngula | October 24, 2009What a useful way to look at it: Vatican, Inc is hoping to improve their bottom line by acquiring a competitor, Church of England, Ltd. About 600 Anglican middle-managers are in talks with the Catholic Church to rip up their theological roots (which, it turns out, aren't all that important) and rejoin the old establishment. This could get interesting, since many of those Anglican priests are married; will Catholicism suddenly change course and allow a privileged subset of their priests enjoy sex?
One has to wonder why so many Anglicans are suddenly jumping ship. It might be because Pope…
grrlscientist | October 23, 2009tags: Project Kaisei, Oceanography, North Pacific Gyre, North Pacific Garbage Patch, plastic, pollution, environment, streaming video
Project Kaisei's 2009 Expedition. Footage from the Kaisei, one of two research vessels Project Kaisei sent to the North Pacific Gyre in August, 2009 to study the extent of the marine debris problem in the gyre, the impact it may be having on marine life and the food chain, and to find ways to catch and recover some of the debris for a larger clean-up effort.
drorzel | October 23, 2009You sometimes hear people say that it's good to make a splash when embarking on a new media project. David Sloan Wilson has apparently taken this to heart, and tucks himself into a tight ball as he leaps off the high board into the ScienceBlogs pool:
Thinking of science as a religion that worships truth as it god enables me to praise its virtues and criticize its shortcomings at the same time. In my previous blogs, I have played the role of scientific reformer for two major issues. The first is the "new atheism" movement spearheaded by the so-called four horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Daniel…
grrlscientist | October 23, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part eight (the last part) of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
Learn more about the film and purchase the DVD.
grrlscientist | October 22, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part seven of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
emjohnson | October 22, 2009I am tremendously excited to have David Sloan Wilson as a member of ScienceBlogs, and having had a small role in his decision is extremely gratifying. However, I take serious issue with the thesis of his first entry that bears the subtitle "Science as a Religion that Worships Truth as its God." This sat uncomfortably with me when I first saw it and it's been a persistent irritation ever since.
A light went off when I read one of the comments on his inaugural post. It was buried down the list (#54 to be precise), was only two sentences long, and would easily have been overlooked if I didn…
pharyngula | October 22, 2009It's very nice of Obama to have occasionally acknowledged the existence of freethinkers in his speeches, but it doesn't mean much when his administration endorses blasphemy laws.
The public and private curtailment on religious criticism threatens religious and secular speakers alike. However, the fear is that, when speech becomes sacrilegious, only the religious will have true free speech. It is a danger that has become all the more real after the decision of the Obama administration to join in the effort to craft a new faith-based speech standard. It is now up to Congress and the public to…
grrlscientist | October 22, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part six of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
grrlscientist | October 21, 2009tags: FLOW, For the Love of Water, pollution, bottled water, film trailer, streaming video
Part five of Irena Salina's award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century: The World Water Crisis.
razib | October 21, 2009I stumbled onto a fascinating working paper today (via the sagacious Andrew Gelman), All Together Now: Putting Congress, State Legislatures, and Individuals in a Common Ideological Space. It uses the NPAT survey of political opinions to construct an ideological scale (as opposed to self-reports). This is a wide ranging piece of proto-scholarship, with a lot of ideas and results, but one thing that struck me are the probability density distributions on page 13 & 14. The title says it all, but the charts are reproduced below....
Stupid people tend to be politically moderate. Probably also…
jrosenhouse | October 21, 2009I'm sure we all remember the book Unscientific America, by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. I found the book to be very disappointing, for reasons I explained in my epic, three-part review (Part One, Part Two, Part Three.) In short, I felt the book was superficial in its analysis of the problem and, as as result, offered solutions that were unlikely to be effective (and were highly impractical to boot.)
I had mentally moved on to other things, but then Jerry Coyne published a hostile review of the book in Science. I read the review when it was published, noted that it raised some of…
emjohnson | October 21, 2009In a shocking reversal after denying climate science for decades, a spokesperson for the US Chamber of Commerce (the world's largest business advocacy group) announced yesterday that they have reversed their historical stance on the issue of global climate change.
According to the press release carried by The New York Times, Reuters, CNBC, the Washington Post and FOXNews:
WASHINGTON, D.C.-The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is throwing its weight behind strong climate legislation, a spokesman for Chamber President Tom J. Donahue announced today at the National Press Club.
"We believe that strong…
ddobbs | October 21, 2009
Nurses and doctors have won a victory in their battle for their "right" to infect patients with easily prevented pandemic influenza.
Judge Halts Flu Vaccine Mandate For Health Workers
via pandemicchronicle.com
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker