Politics
gregladen | February 26, 2008... And Mike Huckabee is not standing for it...
Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has endorsed an amendment to Colorado's constitution declaring that a fertilized egg is a person.
"This proposed constitutional amendment will define a person as a human being from the moment life begins at conception," Huckabee said in a statement backing the Colorado Human Life Amendment.
"With this amendment, Colorado has an opportunity to send a clear message that every human life has value.
This is not good enough, because it does not cover unfertilized eggs. Menstruaters are Murderers! This…
jrosenhouse | February 26, 2008From last night's Tucker:
CARLSON: This was my 20th--literally, I think it was my 20th Oscar night in a row where I didn't watch any of it.
WOLFF: It was really bad. I don't know if it's stagflation or bad weather or whatever, but I was just not in the mood, friend. I blame stagflation.
CARLSON: Watching rich people congratulate themselves, no.
Rich people congratulating themselves. The punditocracy in a nutshell.
Oh, and more people watched the Oscars on Sunday than watch Tucker in a year.
gregladen | February 26, 2008Rick Perry, Eagle Scout, has written a book about the boy scouts, defending their homophobic and anti humanist activism.
An Eagle Scout and the father of an Eagle Scout, Perry stresses the importance of Scout values such as being "courteous and kind." (He is fond of phrases like "gosh" and "jiminy cricket.") He has received the Silver Antelope Award for outstanding service to the Scouts.
Asked in a recent interview if being gay was a choice (I presume the interview pegged Perry for gay, otherwise why ask him this question), he replied:
I'm not a social scientist. I can't answer the…
gregladen | February 26, 2008According to the New York Times, "An
Errant Satellite Is Gone, but Questions Linger" ...
Should the people of the world be breathing a sigh of relief that the risk of a half-ton of frozen, toxic rocket fuel landing who knows where has passed? Or should they be worried about the latest display of the United States' technical prowess, and see it as a thinly veiled test for a shadow antisatellite program?
drorzel | February 26, 2008The local fraternities and sororities hold occasional dinners/ discussions with faculty, to demonstrate that they're engaged with the intellectual life of the college. One of my students invited me to dinner at the Change in Kinetic Energy fraternity tomorrow night, and I agreed to do a discussion of physics and politics.
That's a vague topic, because I didn't have anything really definite in mind for it, other than that it seems better suited to a dinner and discussion than any of my regular presentations, which tend to be PowerPoint lectures. That doesn't really seem appropriate, so I…
oracknows | February 26, 2008
...and this time it's a home invasion.
Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sig pointed me to this incident, which has all the markings of still more animal rights terrorism. This time, the attack occurred at the University of California Santa Cruz and involved a home invasion by masked intruders:
SANTA CRUZ - A UC Santa Cruz faculty member whose biomedical research using animals sheds light on the causes of breast cancer and neurological diseases was the target of an attack Sunday afternoon, reportedly by animal rights activists.
UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal confirmed late Monday that an off-…
drorzel | February 26, 2008On the subject of silly things said about academia, Matt Yglesias does a quick pass over "assessment,", and in the process recommends Alan Kruger's research that claims the benefits of elite colleges are all from selection effects. He links a Newsweek article on the topic, which contains this paragraph:
Dale and Krueger then compared graduates who had been accepted and rejected by the same (or similar) colleges. The theory was that admissions officers were ranking personal qualities, from maturity to ambition. Students who fared similarly would possess similar strengths; then, Dale and…
cevans | February 25, 2008As a blogger, I usually willfully delineate a giant chasm of non-communication between myself and political issues, preferring to dabble in the absolute: time, space, theoretical technological infrastructures, and, recently, aliens. I wrote one very reticent entry in 2005 about chimeric research, prefacing it with the pronouncement that "this blog will rarely concern iself with Pressing Science Ethics Issues," a statement that has proven in the intervening years to be true.
However, I can't deny that my love of the sciences has blossomed under the steely wing of one of the most anti-science…
oracknows | February 25, 2008Back in late December, I came across an op-ed piece in the New York Times written by Dr. Atul Gawande, general and endocrine surgeon and author of Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, that struck me as a travesty of what our system for protecting human subjects should be, as it did fellow ScienceBlogger Revere.
In brief, the article described an action by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Human Research Protection that, on its surface, appeared to be a case of bureaucracy hewing to the letter of the…
gregladen | February 24, 2008Here they are, in all sizes for all blogs, sidebars, and other places on the web. Or blow it up and put it up on your lawn next to your Obama or Clinton sign! Or use it as the template for a tattoo. ...
clock | February 22, 2008Chez describes how and why CNN fired him for blogging and then piles on!
Spread the word. The old media needs to learn to respect the people formerly known as audience.
evolvingthoughts | February 21, 2008
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article discussing a study as to why there are so few conservative academics, in the light of the campaign by conservative activist David Horowitz to propose and "academic bill of rights". The answer? John Stuart Mill put it best:
What I stated was, that the Conservative Party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract that assertion; but I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and…
clock | February 21, 2008Lawrence Lessig is running for Congress and blogging about it. It would be sooooo nice to have him elected. Join the Facebook group and donate.
grrlscientist | February 20, 2008tags: politics, democracy, superdelegates, Roy Zimmerman, streaming video
For this morning's video, I thought I'd share this little song with you, mostly because I have been asked to interview a local superdelegate for a story that the Huffington Post (where I volunteer) is writing. This time, I will try to write a story for you on my blog about this interview. At least, I am hoping I can (is interview material proprietary?). Anyway, regardless of whether I am allowed to write my story for you, I can share this clever little song by political commentator, Roy Zimmerman, which is billed as "…
oracknows | February 20, 2008Deep underneath the brick and steel of a nondescript building somewhere in Manhattan, within the very bowels of the city itself, not far from the Seed mothership, Orac waited. After over a year's absence, the monster had returned to consume the most unpalatable brain of a former Nixon speechwriter who had decided that he knew more about biology than biologists and that calling pseudoscience pseudoscience was akin to that tactics of Hitler and Stalin in suppressing dissent. Since then, Orac had noted an uptick in the monster's activity. Hooked into the primitive human computer network known as…