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stcynic | October 8, 2006How much of a theocrat do you have to be to consider Bill O'Reilly anti-Christian? You have to be as out of your freaking mind as John Lofton. This actually sounds like something Jeff Foxworthy would say if you changed his famous catchphrase just a bit: If you think the guy who spends countless hours blathering like a moron about the "war on Christmas" is "anti-Christian", you might be an idiot. Or a fanatic. Or both, in this case. O'Reilly spends a huge portion of his time ranting about "secular progressives" trying to undermine traditional Christianity. To a certified nutball like Lofton,…
clock | October 7, 2006This Monday, Elizabeth Edwards will be reading from and signing her book Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers at two places in the Triangle:
The Law School Rotunda, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
(sponsored by Bull's Head Bookstore)
Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 3:00 p.m.
Quail Ridge Books & Music
3522 Wade Ave
Raleigh, North Carolina
Monday, October 9th, 2006 at 7:30 p.m.
I'll go to the Quail Ridge Books events (that is my most favourite book store in the world), so if you go and you recognize me, say Hello - I'd…
stcynic | October 7, 2006I'm off to Bloomfield Hills to play poker with my old debate pals and won't be back until Sunday afternoon. But I've got a few posts scheduled to go up so you all can keep busy arguing with each other.
stcynic | October 7, 2006AP reports:
Guards at Guantanamo Bay bragged about beating detainees and described it as common practice, a Marine sergeant said in a sworn statement obtained by The Associated Press.
The two-page statement was sent Wednesday to the Inspector General at the Department of Defense by a high-ranking Marine Corps defense lawyer.
This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one.
stcynic | October 7, 2006Holy cow, if this report is true the Republicans are in serious trouble:
House Republican candidates will suffer massive losses if House Speaker Dennis Hastert remains speaker until Election Day, according to internal polling data from a prominent GOP pollster, FOX News has learned.
"The data suggests Americans have bailed on the speaker," a Republican source briefed on the polling data told FOX News. "And the difference could be between a 20-seat loss and 50-seat loss."
On the other hand, it could well have been leaked intentionally by someone who wants Hastert's job, like say John Boehner.
catdynamics | October 6, 2006Short news in Nature says there is a claim for one of the Millennial Clay Problems
Possible exact solution to the Navier-Stokes equations by Penny Smith a Lehigh University.
That would be a serious achievement if it holds up to review.
Be interesting to code it up and see if it is stable as well as being a solution.
PS Summary by Christina Sormani at CUNY
here is the arXiv preprint
More on Good Math, Bad Math - as he says, it could be useful.
tqa | October 6, 2006Over at Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Sandy thanks me for, "unintentionally starting a public teaching journal." That was a very nice way to describe what's been going on here in the comment threads for the posts where I've talked about what I'm inflicting upon the hapless undergrads I've been assigned. It feels a lot more like being the subject of a pathology lecture. Still, I did volunteer for this, and the comments are helping - I hope.
In my last post on teaching, I vented a bit about the results of the most recent quiz I gave. In particular, I was annoyed that 25% of the…
tqa | October 6, 2006It's been a few weeks since I've done a Friday Random Ten, but I got up early and felt like listening to a little music today. As per the rules of the game, I selected my entire iTunes library and went to the Party Shuffle to see what the randomizer wants me to listen to. Today, it's a heavy dose from the political wing of my library. With both Arlo Guthrie and Leonard Cohen in the mix, it's also not the quickest playlist ever. (I was thinking about pulling the Arlo track as seasonally unsuitable, but what the hell - with Christmas decorations going up, I probably just blinked at the wrong…
pharyngula | October 6, 2006The paternal view of childbirth is that you watch the mother struggle for hours, the child finally emerges, the midwife cleans him* up, hands him to you, and that's when he unloads a bladder full of pee on you. This photo of a newly hatched bobtail squid's first reflex reminds me of that…
Euprymna tasmanica juvenile releasing ink on hatching.
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
*Boys are the most obvious culprits, since when they cut loose they hose down your shirt; girls discreetly dampen their blankies.
stcynic | October 6, 2006I thought this was quite funny. At the beginning of his daily press briefing yesterday, Tony Snow said the following:
"I know a lot of you are going to want to hear all sorts of comments about what's going on on Capitol Hill," said Snow. "I will tell you what we have to say, and then you can ask whatever questions you want, and I will be maddeningly but consistently non-responsive beyond what you are about to hear, which is that the president's made it absolutely clear that the behavior that has been reported on the part of former Representative Mark Foley is disgusting and unacceptable."
"I…
stcynic | October 6, 2006Among the religious right leaders, almost no one can be counted on to, as Jon Stewart puts it, bring the crazy as consistently as Catholic League president Bill Donohue. You're gonna love his response to the possibility that Mark Foley was molested by a priest when he was a teenager:
"As for the alleged abuse, it's time to ask some tough questions. First, there is a huge difference between being groped and being raped, so which was it Mr. Foley? Second, why didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn't allow themselves to be molested. So…
tqa | October 5, 2006My two recent posts on teaching seem to have stirred up more discussion than I first expected. Opinions are still mixed between those who favor an approach that relies more heavily on actively teaching material and those who favor pushing the students to learn for themselves. I'm still not certain which approach is better, but with today's quiz results, I have discovered one thing for certain: sometimes lots of students getting a question wrong just means that lots of students weren't paying attention.
Prior to giving the students a quiz on genetics, I reviewed some of the key concepts that…
mikethemadbiologist | October 5, 2006Revere has a very good summary of the Senate Bill which would "provide for the health of Americans by implementing a system that detects and identifies in a timely manner diseases, conditions, and events that represent a threat to humans, animals, food production and the water supply." Clearly, no one who wrote the bill talked--or more importantly, listened--to anyone who has ever tried to establish a surveillance system. Here's what's troubling with it:
1) As Revere notes, DHS, not public health officials are in charge. Ultimately, people who don't know very much about infectious disease…
purepedantry | October 5, 2006The Seed Overlords interviewed me (via email) in their continuing quest to know (Biblically) all the bloggers. Check it out here.
stcynic | October 5, 2006It turns out the FBI had the Foley emails in July and did nothing about them:
The FBI acknowledged yesterday that it did not begin an investigation in late July after receiving copies of e-mails sent in 2005 by then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) to a Louisiana teenager -- messages that troubled the boy's parents.
This really is turning out to be quite a ridiculous story. Almost everyone on Capitol Hill apparently knew that Foley had a habit of getting too touchy feely with the pages. The pages all talked about it openly, which undoubtedly got back to their sponsoring legislators. Several members…
stcynic | October 4, 2006In true Harry Potter style, Fox News magically transformed Mark Foley into a Democrat:
stcynic | October 4, 2006Buju Banton, a Jamaican reggae artist whose tour is being greeted with protests by gay rights supporters all over the country, says he's not a gay basher:
"I have never bashed any gays before, and if I bashed gays, I bashed them 16 years ago," Banton tells Billboard magazine in an interview conducted on his tour bus. "There's no tolerance from [the gay community]. I'm not a gay-basher. I'm not a homophobe."
Beautiful, he should be a politician. I've never done that, and if I did, it was a long time ago. Mind you, one of his songs talks about shooting gays in the head, pouring acid on them and…
stcynic | October 3, 2006If you want to see partisan hackery on spectacular display, you have to see this post by Hugh Hewitt spinning the Foley situation. He's taking the tried and true tactic of blaming it all on the media and changing the subject:
The Washington Times wants Speaker Hastert to resign. To do so would be to capitulate to Democratic-activist-induced and MSM-abetted hysteria. Not only should Hastert not resign, he should use every opportunity to swing back hard at a MSM deeply compromised by its ideological extremism and a Democratic Party committed to retreat and defeat in Iraq and fecklessness in…
stcynic | October 3, 2006I really must be getting old because my memory seems to be getting worse. I can't believe I didn't remember the Gerry Studds scandal, especially since the congressmen and bookmarks joke that I told the other day I first heard in the wake of that scandal (I was in high school at the time and taking part in our state's Student Congress as a senator). I knew that there was a scandal way back when involving a legislator and a page, but had forgotten all of the details until last night when I saw a mention of it that jogged my memory. But it's important to recall those details because it shows…