Politics
oracknows | July 20, 2009Screening for disease, especially cancer, is a real bitch.
I was reminded of this by the publication of a study in BMJ the very day of the Science-Based Medicine Conference a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, between The Amaz!ng Meeting and other activities, I was too busy to give this study the attention it deserved last Monday. Given the media coverage of the study, which in essence tried to paint mammography screening for breast cancer as being either useless or doing more harm than good, I thought it was imperative for me still to write about it. Better late than never, and I was…
emjohnson | July 19, 2009A gay couple kiss in front of the Salt Lake City Mormon Temple / David Daniels
For the second time gay activists and allies held a kiss-in at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. The action held this morning was to protest the arrest of two gay men two weeks ago who showed "inappropriate" public affection on LDS Church property.
According to The Advocate:
Aune, 28, and Jones, 25, told the newspaper that they were walking back to their nearby home in the evening when they crossed the plaza holding hands, then stopped to kiss on the cheek. Several security guards arrived and told the couple…
drorzel | July 19, 2009The New York Times has a habit of publishing these loathsome little profile articles that either belie the paper's liberal reputation, or are a stealthy attempt to bring about the Red Revolution by stoking class hatred. These generally take the form of profile stories about wealthy suburbanites in Westchester County or Connecticut, who have more money than taste, and whose sense of entitlement can be detected from distant stars through its gravitational pull on the sun.
These typically turn up in the Style section or the Magazine, but today's made the front page of the print edition: Before…
grrlscientist | July 19, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, terrorism, Marcus Brigstocke, streaming video
In this video, Marcus Brigstocke rants about religion. Not for the faint-hearted! And I agree with everything he says, too. So there. [Audio from 'The Now Show', Radio 4, Saturday 21 July 2007. Pictures compiled, animated and sequenced by Alien8ted] [7:21]
grrlscientist | July 19, 2009tags: religion, afterlife, humor, satire, Edward Current, streaming video
In this video, Edward Current shares his thoughts on god and the afterlife. He writes, "Frankly, one reason I've remained a die-hard Christian is to cover my behind in the afterlife. But I recently realized I need to worship ALL gods that might possibly exist." [3:26]
jstemwedel | July 17, 2009As promised, in this post I consider the treatment of the science-religion culture wars in Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. If you're just tuning in, you may want to pause to read my review of the book, or to peruse my thoughts on issues the book raised about what the American public wants and about whether old or new media give the American public what it needs.
In the interests of truth in advertising, let me state at the outset that this post will not involve anything like a detailed rehash of "Crackergate", nor a…
drorzel | July 17, 2009I've been really surprised at the number of people writing about Unscientific America who are confused by the discussion of the Pluto incident (Mad Mike is the latest, but it's not hard to find more). For those who haven't read the book, the first chapter opens with a description of the public reaction to the decision by the IAU to demote Pluto from a "planet" to a "dwarf planet."
I didn't think the point of this was all that difficult to figure out, but it seems to have created a great deal of confusion. Some of this is probably disingenuous, but a number of people seem to be genuinely…
pharyngula | July 17, 2009Some epidemiologist ought to investigate this. There is a building on C Street in Washington DC which houses the offices of a fervent evangelical Christian contingent of conservative politicians, who are all, of course, paragons of probity. Except…something funny has been going on. Three of them have been publicly humiliated for their inability to keep their pecker in their pants.
Leisha Pickering said in the lawsuit filed this week that her husband and the woman dated in college, reconnected and began having an affair while he was in Congress and living in a building where several Christian…
grrlscientist | July 17, 2009tags: TEDTalks, skin color, skin pigmentation, melanin, folate, humans, UV radiation, Vitamin D, evolution, streaming video
Nina Jablonski says that differing skin colors are simply our bodies' adaptation to varied climates and levels of UV exposure. Charles Darwin disagreed with this theory, but she explains, that's because he did not have access to NASA. [14:48]
pontiff | July 16, 2009A fellow quantum computing researcher of mine recently joined FriendFeed. Along with another researcher we got involved in a discussion about a paper concerning a certain recent claimed "disproof of Bell's theorem." (arXiv:0904.4259. What it means to "disprove a theorem" like Bell's theorem is, however a subject for another comment section on a different blog.) But, and here is the interesting thing, this colleague then made a trip to China. And FriendFeed, apparently, is blocked by the great firewall of China, so he had to email us his comments to continue the conversation. Which got me…
pharyngula | July 16, 2009Francis Collins will be stepping down from his role at the BioLogos Foundation, as part of the process of becoming the head of the NIH.
This is only a minimal step, however, and it really doesn't address any of my objections to the guy. The foundation and its web site will still be going on, and you know that once he finishes his tenure at NIH, he'll just step back into it. I'm more concerned about whether he'll be injecting religion into his politics on the job.
pharyngula | July 16, 2009Several people have notified me that this ugly mug is appearing in the ads on this site:
Yep, Ben Stein is hawking "free" credit reports on my site. Only…they aren't free. They aren't useful. And Ben Stein is being an exploitive douchebag.
A few points are worth noting here. First, the score itself is not very useful to consumers. What's useful is the report -- if there's an error on the report, then the consumer can try to rectify it. Secondly, and much more importantly, if you want a free credit report, there's only one place to go: annualcreditreport.com. That's the place where the big…
ejohnson | July 16, 2009
On Wednesday, an article by Amanda Carpenter in the Washington Times riled ScienceBlogger Jessica Palmer and others for its sensational claims and misrepresentation of facts. The article accuses presidential science advisor John Holdren of advocating extreme population control methods like mass sterilization and forced abortions, policies which Holdren discussed in a 1977 ecoscience textbook of which he was third author. But Holdren never expressed an opinion on such practices, and as Jessica explains, "there is a big difference between describing a conclusion made by others, and drawing a…
gregladen | July 16, 2009However bad you thought it was, it is much much much worse than you ever imagined. Watch this:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
emjohnson | July 16, 2009With huge profits reported this week from two bailed-out institutions, Sacramento-based real estate investor Reggie Lal is euphoric:
JPMorgan Chase & Co. posted a 36 percent jump in second-quarter profit Thursday, easily surpassing analysts' expectations, as strength in investment banking offset higher credit losses. JPMorgan, the second big bank to report stronger earnings this week after Goldman Sachs Group Inc., earned $2.72 billion, up from $2 billion a year earlier. Revenues soared 39 percent to $25.62 billion.
Results were driven by record investment banking fees and revenue in its…
drorzel | July 16, 2009The most unfortunate thing about the furor over Unscientific America is that the vast majority of the shouting concerns a relatively small portion of the actual argument of the book. Far too much attention is being spent on the question of whether Chris and Sheril are fair to Myers and Dawkins, and not nearly enough is spent on the (to my mind more important) sections about political and media culture. Which is a shame, because unlike most bloggers, they make some fairly concrete suggestions about what ought to be done to address the problems they describe.
In particular, they make a fairly…
aardvarchaeology | July 16, 2009In the West we shake our heads, and very rightly so in my opinion, at sharia, Islamic law rooted in the culture of 7th century AD Arabia. This is the body of thought that leads to judicial stonings and mutilations to this day.
The legislative assemblies of Ireland and Lithuania, each just a short boat ride from Swedish shores, have recently shown that the mindset they cultivate is certainly not that of AD 700. They are aiming for Old Testament times, 700 BC or earlier.
In Ireland, blasphemous speech is now illegal. "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will…
grrlscientist | July 16, 2009tags: Obama, billion dollar war machine, ONN, Onion News Network, satire, humor, funny, streaming video
This is a streaming video reveals that Obama Axed the Pentagon's Plan To Build Billion Dollar Tank In the Shape Of a Dragon [2:05]