Politics
purepedantry | March 27, 2008Scientists and Engineers for America is hold a workshop on May 10th to train scientists to run for public office. The workshop features Congressman and former physicist Vern Ehlers.
Here is the registration page. It isn't open yet, but if you are interested you should get on the list.
I myself am probably unelectable for at least four reasons:
1) I have written far too many offensive things on this blog already. I can't wait until all this stuff gets dredged up at an interview or something.
2) Libertarian = doubts the utility of government on principle = not electable in this country
3) I…
drorzel | March 27, 2008The Dean Dad posted an interesting article about "national service" programs yesterday. He's against them, for class reasons:
The message that national service programs send strikes me as dangerous. The implication seems to be that rich kids can just jump right into higher ed and start moving up the ladder, but the rest of us have to do our time first. It's a sort of penance for not having wealthy parents. I know our society worships money, but there should be some kind of limits. It implicitly defines higher education as a purely private good, which I reject out of hand. (This isn't just the…
drorzel | March 27, 2008David Horowitz is an idiot.
Granted, anyone with any sense has known this for a good while now, but now we can prove it with SCIENCE!!! Well, political science-- Inside Higher Ed reports on a study of student political views that finds that liberal faculty make no real difference:
One of the key arguments made by David Horowitz and his supporters in recent years is that a left-wing orientation among faculty members results in a lack of curricular balance, which in turn leads to students being indoctrinated rather than educated. [...]
A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political…
pharyngula | March 27, 2008Scientist and Engineers for America is running a workshop to encourage more scientists to be politically active. The focus is on telling you how to run for office, which seems like an excellent idea to me. Get out there and acquire some power, people!
pharyngula | March 26, 2008Blanch, you delicate souls, blanch. Somebody else finally gets it.
I'd like to suggest a very simple strategy for American liberals: Get mean. Stop policing the language and start using it to hurt our enemies. American liberals are so busy purging their speech of any words that might offend anyone that they have no notion of using language to cause some salutary pain.
I wish I knew where Americans got this idea that being a liberal meant being Mr and Mrs Milquetoast.
evolvingthoughts | March 25, 2008
Okay, so it's the Wilkins Ice Shelf, but it's even more important than news about me. The 6000 square mile (15,540 km2) ice shelf named for Sir Hubert Wilkins, the famous Australian Antarctic explorer (and very possibly some kind of relation), is breaking off due to global warming. This is the single largest such break up observed so far.
jrosenhouse | March 25, 2008The Olympics are coming, and with them a new opportunity for the holier than thou amongst us to urge boycotts in the service of political agendas. Anne Applebaum of Slate gets the party started with this essay. She doesn't actually call for a boycott, but she seems awfully sympathetic to those who are calling for one:
No wonder, then, that everyone who hates or fears China, whether in Burma, Darfur, Tibet, or Beijing, is calling for a boycott. And the Chinese government and the IOC are terrified that they will succeed. No one involved in the preparations for this year's Olympics really…
gregladen | March 25, 2008Yesterday it was announced that 4000 American Soldiers had been killed, in total, in Iraq. I am not sure if this counts contract soldiers (such as Blackwater; Added: See notes below. It does not.), and I do not know if it includes American deaths since the very beginning of Iraq involvement or since the current invasion (though I think the latter). It does not matter too much, as the number 4000 is a fairly arbitrary thing ... if we used a numbering system other than base-10, some other number would feel like a milestone. But this does give us an order of magnitude of the sense of the…
pharyngula | March 25, 2008Last night, I attended a talk by Sherman Alexie, who was hilarious and at times, biting. One of the curious things he noted, though, was that he had said something about the disastrous conduct of the wasteful war in Iraq, and despite this being an audience of collegiate liberals, no one applauded. He noted that this is his common experience — it used to be that voicing your objections to an unjust war got clapped, but nowadays, it's old hat. Even people who once supported the war are backing away from it (although it's rare for them to plainly say "I was wrong"), and the futility of the war…
drorzel | March 25, 2008EurekAlert provides the latest dispatch from the class war, the the form of a release headlined " Family wealth may explain differences in test scores in school-age children":
The researchers found a marked disparity in family wealth between Black and White families with young children, with White families owning more than 10 times as many assets as Black families. The study found that family wealth had a stronger association with cognitive achievement of school-aged children than that of preschoolers, and a stronger association with school-aged children's math than with their reading scores…
mixingmemory | March 24, 2008It would be a horrible cliché to begin a post about the reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory with a Proust quote, so instead I'll begin with something only slightly less cliché: beginning something about memory by talking about my own experience. You see, I'm southern, as anyone who's ever heard me pronounce the words "pen" and "pin" exactly the same, or refer to any soft drink as a "coke," can attest. In the south, it's not uncommon to find people sitting around a grill, or a kitchen table, or pretty much anything you can sit around, participating in what might be described as…
evolvingthoughts | March 24, 2008
This is a nice review in New Scientist, obviously "framed" more in sorrow and confusion than in anger, which ends with
Throughout the entire experience, Maggie and I couldn't help feeling that the polarised audience in the theater was a sort of microcosm of America, and let me tell you - it's a scary place. I also couldn't help thinking that the intelligent design folks aren't being silenced, so much as they're being silent. Because when it comes to actually explaining anything, they've got nothing to say.
revere | March 24, 2008The other day, as I was bemoaning the tanking of the dollar versus the Euro (yes, my European friends are not crying in their beer over it; I'm glad for them. Now they can visit), I mentioned that it wasn't just the dollar that had taken a bath since GWB but also the US reputation as a force for Good in the world. Now the BBC World Service has put some numbers on this in a survey of 26,000 people from 25 different countries:
As the United States government prepares to send a further 21,500 troops to Iraq, the survey reveals that three in four (73%) disapprove of how the US government has…
clock | March 24, 2008
Next Triangle blogger meetup is this Wednesday at 6pm at Milltown (307 E. Main St., Carrboro). It is organized by our friends at Orange Politics, for several years the model for local political organizing online. It is likely some of the local politicos and candidates will show up. It is free and open for all and, heck, if you do not want to chat about politics, you don't have to - we'll chat about everything and anything anyway, as we usually do ;-)
terrasig | March 24, 2008Last week we spent some time discussing the shortcomings of the generic vs. brand name drug debate, focusing on an example of non-bioequivalence between the antidepressant Wellbutrin XL and its generic competitors.
Three days later, I then received an e-mail from one John Procter about a movement to get Washington to move forward on the approval of lower-priced generic biotechnology drugs now that original branded products are facing patent expiration. One source indicates that a $20 billion market value of biological products will be coming off patent by 2015. The US FDA has been reluctant…
pharyngula | March 24, 2008Britain is experiencing some dissent over research on human-animal hybrid embryos. One the one hand, you've got researchers and charities arguing that this is a technique to probe deeper into the genetic and molecular properties of developing organisms, and is key to developing treatments for genetic diseases and developmental abnormalities; on the other side, we have plaintive lowing from the do-nothings and ignoramuses about the "sacredness" of human life, and kneejerk rejection by the usual collection of suspects, the Catholic church.
In his Easter address today, Cardinal Keith O'Brien,…
gregladen | March 24, 2008Myers? Myers? .... Myers? ..... Myers? (He's not here, Ben ... Your producer threw him out.)You know about the incredibly ironic dust up, whereby Expelled! producers kicked PZ myers out of line at a pre-release showing, but failed to notice that Richard Dawkins was standing right next to him. The evidence suggests that this major bit of bad publicity for Expelled! may have led to the movie being pulled from some pre-release showings. It it too early to be sure of this, and there may be several factors other than the utter embarrassment of this incident at play here. For instance, it is…
evolvingthoughts | March 23, 2008
So here's a neo-Thomist talking about species, and not getting it due to (i) prior metaphysical commitments, and (ii) not understanding Aristotle - dude, he never called anything a species, not in the biological sense. Eidos and genos were just ordinary words he coopted for the Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics. He used them interchangeably in the Liber Animalia, and sometimes didn't use either words for living kinds. Rule Number One: You can't do science by definitions.
Here's a furore (is that pronounced "few-roar" or "few-ror-ay"?) about whether to respond to the Expelled gaff. Nisbet…