Politics
drorzel | June 4, 2007Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from the TED Global conference on Technology, Enetertainment, and Design as they apply to Africa. He's live-blogging the talks by people ranging from Ethiopian paleontologist Zeray Alemseged to some mononymic Irish singer.
This is one of those things where reading Ethan's blog makes me feel like a schmuck. I mean, he's using his blog to spread the word about ways to use technology to improve the lives of millions of the world's poorest people, and I'm posting links to doggerel poetry about cats...
I'll be doing some conference blogging of my own later this week,…
j7uy5 | June 4, 2007
href="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070402/toronto_survey_070402?s_name=&no_ads=">Baghdad
was ranked the world's least enticing city with a score of 14.5.
"Least enticing." That is one way to put it.
pharyngula | June 3, 2007No, I didn't watch it.
So, tell me…did anyone ask them if they did not believe in evolution? Did anyone raise their hands?
Which one am I most likely going to have to vote for in the next election?
clock | June 3, 2007Just to show how seriously FoxNews is taken as a 'mainstream' media channel, only three Democratic candidates will appear in their 'debate': Biden, Kucinich and Gravel for 90 minutes of comedy certain to be funnier than anything Saturday Night Live produced in the past five years.
But there is a real debate tonight, at 7pm EDT on CNN which will showcase all the candidates. I guess that Wolf Blitzer will put on his most serious face when asking questions thick with right-wing frames. It will be interesting to watch.
Boston Globe has already published the 'secret' talking points for Obama…
oracknows | June 3, 2007I haven't yet mentioned it, but since Friday evening I've been in Chicago for the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting. (If anyone happens to be attending the meeting and is interested in a meetup, let me know. My time's pretty well booked until I leave on Tuesday afternoon, but we might be able to squeeze something in.)
Since my sisters live in Chicago, Friday night I met up with them and we decided to go out to a bar to get some beer and burgers. The bar, on West Division Street in Wicker Park, was Smallbar. I'd never been there before, mainly because the bar didn't exist when I…
evolvingthoughts | June 2, 2007
Well blow me down and call me a dishmop. Reed Elsevier, who I recently criticised for running arms exhibitions while publishing medical and other intellectual journals, and who were boycotted by medical authors, has folded. They are, according to this story, getting out of the arms exhibition business. And so they should.
I'd like to think my threat of philosophers boycotting Elsevier journals played a role, but then I'd also like to think that I was living in luxury in French Polynesia...
Late note: Hat tip to Grllscientist.
oracknows | June 2, 2007I know, I know. Denialism.com and Screw Loose Change already posted this, but it's just such a lovely loony example of the "logic" used by 9/11 conspiracy theorists (a.k.a. "9/11 Truthers") that I couldn't resist posting it too. Here, we see a 9/11 Truther "duplicating" the fall of one of the Twin Towers with stackable plastic in box trays:
The mind boggles. Be sure to watch it to the end. You just won't believe it.
Ah, the power of the scientific method!
clock | June 2, 2007In response to my previous post on the subject, I received a following e-mail (personal information omitted) from Colorado:
I'm active in opposing this for many reasons including the forced removal of American citizens from their homes and lands by the U.S. Military, the reality that the expansion serves the purpose of a multinational miltary-industrial complex, the use of the military as a tool of economic development for Colorado Springs, and the destruction of thousands of pre-historic and historic sites including world-class dinosaur digs and track ways.
Here are a couple of things that…
drorzel | June 2, 2007Setshot lurches back to life to point out the only Democratic primary coverage I need to read: a New York Times piece on Barack Obama's love of pick-up basketball:
From John F. Kennedy's sailing to Bill Clinton's golf mulligans to John Kerry's windsurfing, sports has been used, correctly or incorrectly, as a personality decoder for presidents and presidential aspirants. So, armchair psychologists and fans of athletic metaphors, take note: Barack Obama is a wily player of pickup basketball, the version of the game with unspoken rules, no referee and lots of elbows. He has been playing since…
jlynch | June 1, 2007Over at Denialism, Mark neatly outlines Alexander Cockburn’s descent into crankdom regarding global warming, a descent that neatly illustrates the clarity of Mark’s crank HOWTO (which predates his exposure to Cockburn’s droolings - I know as it was I who tipped him onto them).
Update (6/2): Tim @ Deltoid catches Cockburn in the quote mine.
hrynyshyn | June 1, 2007Last night in Washington DC was held the 80th annual Scripps Spelling Bee. I love watching 8th-graders spell words they (and I) have never heard before. Two items of interest arose. First, the runner-up, for the second year in a row, was a Canadian, Nate Gartke of Alberta. Second, the favorite difficult word of another finalist, Isabel A. Jacobson of Wsconsin, is kakistocracy. What a marvellous word.
NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. kak·is·toc·ra·cies
Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.
Never has there been a word so timely yet so underused.
pharyngula | May 31, 2007Errm, why haven't we started the impeachment proceedings on George W. Bush yet?
Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."
Is it because the Democratic Party is so gutless they can't even legislate against an unpopular war, making a despised president untouchable?
jlynch | May 31, 2007Births
1931 - John Robert Schrieffer, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1941 - Louis J. Ignarro, American pharmacologist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1799 - Pierre Lemonnier, French astronomer
1832 - Ãvariste Galois, French mathematician
1910 - Elizabeth Blackwell, American physician
1976 - Jacques Monod, French biologist, Nobel laureate
1986 - James Rainwater, American physicist, Nobel laureate
2006 - Raymond Davis Jr., American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
grrlscientist | May 31, 2007tags: Jimmy Carter, politics, cartoon, humor
Okay, here's one more cartoon I want to share with you .. I hope no one yells at me for doing so (even though I do provide attribution)
This cartoon is by the amazing Pat Oliphant
Correct me if I am wrong, but is there a secret handshake that all presidents must learn to hold the office? The reason I ask is because it seems as though being outspoken and honest is a terrible sin after they leave office, that all presidents must either keep their mouths shut or remain in solidaity with the current resident of the White House, although I have no…
clock | May 31, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days.
Enrique has the best one-sentence summary of the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science.
The article divides that "what children know prior to their exposure to science" into two categories: the intuitive grasp of the world (i.e., conclusions they come up with on their own) and the learned…
pharyngula | May 31, 2007Suddenly, it makes sense. Schizophrenia is a methodology. Now we also know who is watching.
pharyngula | May 31, 2007Sam Brownback has an op-ed in the NY Times today, in which he explains with much straining at gnats why he was one of the Republicans who did not believe in evolution. Short summary: he reveals his own misconceptions about the biology, and mainly pounds the drum on how important Faith and Religion and God are. It will be persuasive to people who are already convinced that God is the most important thing in the universe, right down to what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms, but it underscores my conviction that faith is the enemy, the source of many of our problems…such as the promotion…
pharyngula | May 31, 2007If you're concerned about the military appropriation of an important fossil site, here's more information. It's not just some old rocks, it's a historical and ecologically significant site that's about to be overrun by a bloated military.
The Picket Wire Canyonlands hold not only the largest dinosaur track site in North America, but the ruins of the Dolores Mission, its graveyard, the ruins of an early ranch, and Native American petroglyphs. The historical, scientific and archaeological value of the canyon cannot be overstated. It is simply priceless and, because entire towns and families are…
tsmith | May 31, 2007In the comments to the XDR-TB update post, Scott suggested that bloggers were putting too much emphasis on whether the TB patient was stupid/arrogant/self-centered/whatever, and later that "waxing indignant is pointless." I started this as a response to those comments, but thought instead it might be an interesting conversation--is it pointless? Certainly indignation about this guy's behavior won't change what's happened. Indignation about creationists' abuse of science won't make them stop. Does it have a point? My thoughts on it below the fold.
So, my thoughts. I think there…
pharyngula | May 31, 2007I'm not a fanatic about gun control—guns are dangerous tools, but so are chainsaws—but sometimes…man, sometimes I think we ought to put more restrictions on them to keep them out of the hands of dangerously stupid people. Take this story, for instance. A police officer hears a noise in his basement, suspects it's an intruder, and the idiot takes a shot at whoever it is. Unfortunately, it turns out to be his 18 year old daughter sneaking into the house after a late night out.
So basically this guy was firing a handgun in his house at someone he hadn't even tried to identify, using deadly force…