Science
oracknows | June 15, 2006I don't know if it's possible to be to the right of Ann Coulter, but Spacemonkey over at IMAO gives it a try.
I'm not sure that he succeeds. After all, he says, "We let God's will or survival of the fittest, if you swing that way, be the appeals process."
I don't think that Coulter would never concede even in the least that anything even remotely connected with evolution could be true--at least not in public.
tqa | June 15, 2006
Pick a Scienceblogger - any Scienceblogger - and you'll find someone who loves science, and thinks that everyone should be exposed to it. That's one of the reasons that we spend time hammering out these posts. We also, as a group, have this funny belief about science education. We think it's important. We think that it's a good thing for children to learn about the way their world works, and we're all for anything that helps with that.
That's why there are, as you may have seen on the main Scienceblogs page, a whole bunch of us clamoring for your money right now. We're embarking on a…
pharyngula | June 15, 2006Lots of stuff about the intersection of science and politics in the US today—here are three things to read over breakfast.
Bruce Sterling suggests that American science is experiencing creeping Lysenkoism, and reports that "the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues." He predicts a rather grim end for our science and science policy.
Before long, the damage will spread beyond our borders. International scientific bodies will treat American scientists as pariahs.…
drorzel | June 15, 2006Weight and weight loss has turned out to be more popular than I would've expected as a blog topic-- I get a remarkable number of search engine hits looking for some sort of diet information. Given that, I would be remiss if I failed to note an ongoing series of posts on "fat acceptance" at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge, one of the new ScienceBlogs members:
Part one
Part two
Part three
(The promised parts four and five will undoubtedly show up soon.)
The basic thesis is that being overweight is Bad, and that "fat acceptance" advocates are Bad People. This has resulted in suprisingly…
catdynamics | June 14, 2006Aftenposten reports a survey of 1736 Norwegians finds the majority think sex is better sober
The majority is larger for the women.
A full 1/4 of the men, and a surprising 1/5 of the women think sex is better after a couple of glasses of wine.
Be interesting to know the demographics, and correlate...
For some reason I was checking the Aftenposten domestic pages for news, and I'm not even norwegian...
pharyngula | June 14, 2006Leading in to the Carlin-Coulter cage match on Leno tonight, we've also got Phil Plait on the SciFi Channel. It should be a cheerful evening, since he's discussing the end of the world.
I'm watching it now, and I will say that Phil is adorable…but the show is awfully cheesy, sprinkled with clips from science fiction movies and treating nuclear terrorism with the same seriousness as the possibility that the robots might revolt and enslave us, or aliens might land and start disintegrating people. And, as an indicator of their concern for detail, they keep spelling Paul Ehrlich's name as "Paul…
pharyngula | June 14, 2006That Stephen Hawking guy is saying that we need to get colonies out there in space to preserve the human race. I'm a space opera fan, I think space exploration is a worthy endeavor, but I have to admit that watching Chris Clarke whomp on Hawking is very entertaining, and I agree. Hawking has it all wrong.
When fans of technology start preaching about escaping disaster on earth by setting up space stations and moon colonies and terraforming Mars, an image comes to mind: a dying hanged man, kicking and squirming, ejaculating reflexively and dribbling a few pitiful drops of semen into the dirt.…
pharyngula | June 14, 2006Friday, at 3:15 ET, on NPR's Science Friday…it's Mooney vs. Bethell. Bethell doesn't stand a chance.
drorzel | June 14, 2006Rob Knop talks about a great teaching moment: A student who refused to just smile and nod:
I was very grateful for that student. You see, when professors ask, "do you understand that?", it's not a test. It's not the professor trying to catch the students up in admitting to being confused, it's not the professor trying to sepearate the good students (Hermiones) from the bad students, the latter being the ones who will admit to struggling with the material. When we ask the question "do you understand that?" we ask it because we want to, yes, find out if the students understood what we just did…
catdynamics | June 13, 2006Interesting piece of journalism by the Grauniad
They ordered a 78 "letter" piece of DNA for a smallpox envelope protein.
As they note, the actual genome is rather longer than that, but as they also note, there are techniques for reconstructing genomes from DNA pieces.
I don't think anyone will be synthesizing smallpox from less than 100 base length pieces, got to be easier ways to do it (start from a chickenpox virus and edit it?); but they make an interesting if overhyped point.
Update: Nick at Scientific Activist also comments.
He notes that this suggests a need for more government…
pharyngula | June 13, 2006Seed has an interview with Joan Roughgarden, somewhat controversial evolutionary biologist and author of Evolution's Rainbow : Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). Here's the short summary of her basic thesis:
Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection--she's no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can't explain the homosexuality that's been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that…
drorzel | June 13, 2006Weirdly, this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question may be the hardest one to answer yet:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
Most of the responses have taken this as an "If you had it to do over, what sort of scientist would you be?", and that's the source of the problem. It's not that the question itself is all that difficult-- I actually have a stock answer for that. The problem is that I don't really like the premise of the question (he says cryptically, promising to explain…
pharyngula | June 11, 2006The young partisan hack appointed to NASA, who took it upon himself to filter the science a little bit to suit right-wing biases? It seems he was a demonstrably bad boy.
I wonder what ever happened that unqualified creep? I know he resigned from NASA, I'm just wondering if he has now fallen upward to a Republican think-tank or something, the usual wingnut reward for incompetence.
pharyngula | June 11, 2006
Not all the email I get is from cranks and creationist loons. Sometimes I get sincere questions. In today's edition of "Ask Mr Science Guy!", Hank Fox asks,
I was thinking recently about the fact that wax collects in one's ears, and suddenly thought to be amazed that some part of the HUMAN body produces actual WAX. Weird. Like having something like honeybee cells in your ear.
And then I started to think about what sorts of other ... exudates the human exterior produces. Mucus, possibly several different types (does the nose itself produce more than one type?). Oils, possibly several…
pharyngula | June 10, 2006
To continue a bit of theme, I mentioned that there were some different ways to approach biology, and that old-school systematists with their breadth of knowledge about the diversity of life are getting harder and harder to find. This is something I also bring up in my introductory biology course, where we discuss how biologists do their work, and I mention that one distinction you can find (which is really a continuum and frequently breached) is that there are bench scientists and field scientists, and they differ in multiple ways. Bench scientists tend to be strongly reductionist, tend to…
drorzel | June 10, 2006Large meteorite hits northern Norway:
A large meteorite struck in northern Norway this week, landing with an impact an astronomer compared to the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima.
The meteorite appeared as a ball of fire just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, visible across several hundred miles in the sunlit summer sky above the Arctic Circle, Aftenposten reported.
My favorite bit of the (very short) story is this living-in-the-future moment, though:
Peter Bruvold, a farmer, said he happened to be out in the fields with a camera because he was tending a foaling mare and he photographed the fireball.…
pharyngula | June 10, 2006
Ah, the libertarian extremists have found my site and are making comments. It's a peculiar pathology that thinks environmentalism is an evil plot, that planning is communism/socialism, and that Jesus was a good capitalist. It is particularly irksome to try and deal with people who are so far gone that they deny science warning them of environmental dangers and impending problems.
How irksome? Imagine that a scientist and one of these deranged libertarian right-wing anti-environmentalist science deniers go out for a drive one day...
LIB: Isn't this wonderful? I have a desire to drive, and…
pharyngula | June 9, 2006Here's more or less what I said at the YearlyKos panel today, assembled from my notes and with all the "ummms" removed. It's very general, but hey, what can you do in ten minutes? Next time they should give me 30 minutes and I'll flash up some genes and copulating squid and splutter out more blasphemy.
Two hundred and thirty years ago, when our country was founded, we faced a number of crises: we were a small weak country, threatened by great world powers, and at war. We persevered and succeeded, and I think we won out because of two fortunate endowments or opportunities. The founding…
sb admin | June 9, 2006No surprise here: a highly-regarded climatologist declares that the Bush administration is "muzzling government scientists" and covering up the facts about global warming.
Warren Washington, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, said that Bush appointees are suppressing information about climate change, restricting journalists' access to federal scientists and rewriting agency news releases to stress global warming uncertainties.
"The news media is not getting the full story, especially from government scientists," Washington told about 160 people…
terrasig | June 9, 2006No surprise here: a highly-regarded climatologist declares that the Bush administration is "muzzling government scientists" and covering up the facts about global warming.
Warren Washington, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, said that Bush appointees are suppressing information about climate change, restricting journalists' access to federal scientists and rewriting agency news releases to stress global warming uncertainties.
"The news media is not getting the full story, especially from government scientists," Washington told about 160 people…