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pharyngula | March 27, 2009The Pope, under the spell of infallibility and religious delusion, recently declared that condoms "increase the problem" of HIV transmission in Africa. This would be news to the CDC.
Latex condoms, when used consistently and correctly, are highly effective in preventing heterosexual sexual transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Research on the effectiveness of latex condoms in preventing heterosexual transmission is both comprehensive and conclusive. The ability of latex condoms to prevent transmission has been scientifically established in laboratory studies as well as in…
gregladen | March 26, 2009When I heard the news that day ... Oh boy. I had received an email from a man whom I knew only as the father of a (now former) student. We had met once, a few years ago when his son graduated, and he gave me a very nice bottle of wine, which I shared with a select group of wine experts only last Christmas. The wine had aged well and was outstanding.
He gave me the wine as a gift for having "done so much for his son" while he, the son, was an undergraduate student. It was true. I had done a lot for the young man. I had many long conversations with him about lofty sciency concepts, and…
edyong | March 26, 2009Apropos of nothing, a whinge: my name has no u in it. It rhymes with "song" not "sung" and "long" but not "lung".
I'm fairly used to people adding in the errant u but for some reason, this has been annoying me of late. Seriously, there are only four letters, six if you count the first name too. It can't possibly be that hard.
Ed Young is another person entirely, who looks not entirely unlike a Terminator on happy pills. And while he has written more books than me, they're, er, of a different ilk.
gregladen | March 26, 2009Most of Prince William Sound's animal populations will someday recover from the lingering effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. One, however, will not: a community of killer whales unlike any other in the world.
"It's a separate population. Their genetics, their acoustics, are different from any other killer whales that we see in the north Pacific," said Craig Matkin, director of the North Gulf Oceanic Society, who has studied the region's whales for three decades.
Known to researchers as the AT1 pod, the whales' home range fell within the 11,000 square miles of crude oil dumped by the ship…
jrosenhouse | March 26, 2009Here's William Dembski holding forth on the bacterial flagellum.
Requiring no great conceptual leaps or being unable to find a case where Darwin's theory could not possibly apply is not the same thing as providing evidence. Sure, the proteins in the flagellum may have homologues that serve functions in other systems. And we can imagine that the parts were co-opted over time by selection to produce the flagellum. But so what? We can imagine lots of things. Where's the evidence that it happened that way? And why isn't the exquisite engineering that we observe in the flagellum evidence for ID…
drorzel | March 26, 2009Tonight on Thursday Night Wrestling: SteelyKid versus Sky Bison!
Roar! Roar! ROAR!
SteelyKid wins!
(Apologies to Bob Shea of Dinosaur vs. Bedtime...)
Special bonus roaring: Bob Shea on YouTube:
sb admin | March 26, 2009Itâs Cover the Uninsured Week, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is working to âhighlight the fact that too many Americans are living without health insurance and demand solutions from our nationâs leaders.â
Concern about uninsurance is growing as more people lose jobs that provided them with health insurance. But most of the factors behind our countryâs high uninsurance rates preceded the current economic downturn. According to Cover the Uninsured, average costs paid by an employee for an individual health insurance premium have risen nearly eight times faster than average U.S. incomes…
cortex | March 26, 2009Nicholas Kristof has a great column today on Philip Tetlock and political experts, who turn out to be astonishingly bad at making accurate predictions:
The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, "Expert Political Judgment," is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts' forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.
The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses -- the…
grrlscientist | March 26, 2009
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Since Tangled Bank has gone the way of the Dodo (Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker -- name your favorite extinct species here) and will probably never be seen again, despite promises to the contrary, there is a huge hole in the science writing blogosphere. A hole that must be filled. So I am proposing to do just that: I am proposing to start a new science blog carnival, Scientia, which will be be THE science blog writing carnival.
The…
gregladen | March 26, 2009...The reason people think that Robin Red Breast is a sign of spring is that we believe that robins fly south for the winter and north for the summer, so when we see them, it must be getting near summer. The fact that many robins don't migrate at all, but simply become reclusive for the winter, is not widely known....
Getting ready for Spring and Summer birding.
gregladen | March 26, 2009The following blog post is now required reading for all my students. The comments, in particular.
What one word tips you off that the writer is an idiot?
grrlscientist | March 26, 2009I know you are sitting there at your computer, cross-eyed, wondering what you are going to do this weekend. Let me make a suggestion: since I am hosting the upcoming issue of the Circus of the Spineless on 6 April, I need your help. If you can write a "translation" of a scientific paper, or an essay, a photoessay .. or poem .. or if you publish a stunning image of a squishy (or crusty) animal living creature that lacks a backbone -- not including American politicians -- on your blog to share with the world, please send the link to me. Also feel free to upload this colorful new badge as you…
cortex | March 26, 2009Over at Salon, there's a quite interesting interview with UC-Berkeley philosopher Alva Noe, author of Out of Our Heads. (I reviewed the book in the SF Chronicle last month.)
Q: Maybe I'm naive but it seems kind of obvious that the brain is the mechanism that -- in the context of a person's life and environment -- gives rise to consciousness. That's not to say it is the same as consciousness, but that it is the mechanism from which consciousness emerges.
Noe: The brain is necessary for consciousness. Of course! Just as an engine is necessary in a car. But an engine doesn't "give rise" to…
jwilbanks | March 26, 2009I gave a talk at eTech two weeks ago. It was a busy time - I was in the middle of my wedding, which was in Brazil, and I actually had to leave Brazil and fly to San Jose to give the talk, have a couple of meetings, and fly right back so that I could rejoin the wedding festivities. We were announcing a collaboration with Microsoft (which has garnered its own attention and criticism, and deserves its own blog posting here, which it will get) as well.
I'm also trying out some new themes for talks. I gave over 70 talks last year and although I loved the three core talks I gave much of the year,…
pharyngula | March 26, 2009Another revelation in the tragic Montanaplane crash endorsed by anti-choice freaks: one of the women on the plane was five months pregnant. If their deity is responsible for these deaths, not only is their god an abortionist, he's one of those hacks who butchers the mother in the process…but apparently, Gingi Edmonds is alright with that.
pharyngula | March 26, 2009One of our more popular commenters now has a couple of more letters he can tag on the end of his name in addition to the Order of the Molly. You can cheer loudly here — I don't recommend going up to his place in Boston and ringing the doorbell, since he might be recovering from the celebration still.
gregladen | March 25, 2009
Why are we watching this video again? ...
Because Ghost Bird, the documentary, has been accepted to the Toronto Film Festival. That's kind of a big deal.
Here is the Ghost Bird home page
Here is the film festival guide.
This will be in May.
Fly Ghost bird, Fly!