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purepedantry | September 25, 2006This Panda is not yet cute. It is in many ways precute. (It sort of looks like a fuzzy potato.)
In all its not-yet-cuteness, this baby Panda was born in the Atlanta Zoo to the proud Lun Lun. We can be confident that if biology takes its course, someday it will be cute -- allowing for swooning press coverage to ensue.
(Suck on that post, Cute Overload. I know your traffic regularly crushes us, but someday, SOMEDAY!!! we will defeat you.)
tqa | September 25, 2006Two recent posts over at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division blog have me ready to break out the world's smallest violin. Their new (well, newish, anyway - it's popped up from time to time before) argument is that they are being discriminated against. In the first of the two articles, Rob Crowther argues that "Darwinists" are trying to "censor" academic freedom in Michigan. In the second, John West starts by suggesting that "Of Pandas and People" should be the "Banned Book of the Year," and concludes with the outrageous and insulting claim that the "ultimate goal here is to…
thusspakezuska | September 25, 2006I was just traveling around the blogosphere and landed on this most helpful post; thanks to Bill Hooker, of Open Reading Frame, who launched my odyssey. Zuzu, who writes for Feministe, will explain much you need to know about keeping your place. This is invaluable information for any white women, or minority women or men, who are contemplating questioning the powers-that-be. Zuzu quotes Jill, who suggests one way to avoid being pegged as angry and hysterical:
...[preface your comments with] "I think y'all are SO awesome, and I totally love what you do and you're all so talented and…
stcynic | September 25, 2006My first real post at Talk to Action has been published. It's a thorough review of the history of ID activity in Ohio and Michigan as well as information on how that issue is influencing ongoing campaigns for the November elections in each state.
stcynic | September 25, 2006Baylor President John Lilley has overruled the tenure committee that voted not to give tenure to Francis Beckwith. He was denied tenure several months ago but appealed that denial. The committee reconsidered and took a second vote, which was apparently 6-5 against giving him tenure, much closer than the first vote. And now Lilley has overruled that vote and decided to give him tenure after all. I'm in an odd position on this because while I oppose virtually everything Beckwith has advocated in his time at Baylor, I like Frank personally and am on friendly terms with him.
Frankly, I don't…
tfk | September 25, 2006Every week the finest blogging of Kansas gathers at the Kansas Guild of Bloggers. This week TfK will be the guildhall.
Emaw from Three O'Clock in the Morning offers a Friday signoff, so go "Leave a comment, and maybe a link."
Previous host John from the Blog Meridian writes On clarity, a look at where we stand in the fight for clarity regarding torture. Is the Senate compromise/capitulation clearer than the Geneva Conventions? Is it better that the CIA have clarity or that citizens do? "Boy, this achieving clarity stuff is complicated, isn't it?"
Paul Decelles of The Force that Through It…
stcynic | September 25, 2006This time it's the crocodile hunter, Steve Irwin. Within days of his death, emails began to circulate claiming that he had converted to Christianity just before he died. And guess what? It was spread by creationists. There's a shock. Creation Ministries International broadcast this alleged conversion, which they then had to retract when it turned out to be nonsense. Snopes has all the details here. This really is one of the most annoying things about religious zealots. They simply cannot let a man die in peace if he wasn't one of them. This has been going on for centuries. It happened to…
tqa | September 25, 2006
Every time I see a yellow "Support the Troops" ribbon on a car that's sporting Republican bumper stickers, I want to vomit. Republicans love to talk up patriotism, and they love to use "support the troops" as a campaign slogan. But when push comes to shove, when the time arrives to actually support the troops, they are nowhere to be found. There are many, many examples of this, but it might just be harder to find a better one than the Pentagon appropriations bill that just came out of the conference committee.
The military pay raise built into the bill is one issue. The bill provides for a…
tqa | September 24, 2006Josh and Bora have already taken a swing at this, but the level of... of... of... I'm honestly at a loss for words. I just can't find any way to use printible words to describe how pissed off I am right now.
Apparently, some North Carolina residents were recently informed by the Fish and Wildlife Service that new regulations might be coming down to protect habitat for a rare woodpecker. This particular species of woodpecker will only make its home in living trees, building nests over a period of years, sometimes handing the nests down from generation to generation.
Many of the locals,…
stcynic | September 24, 2006I'm off to Lansing for the day to visit family. My brother, who lives in Colorado, is in the state and we're heading down there to visit with him. Have a great day everyone.
stcynic | September 23, 2006I've not said anything on the subject of election fixing over the last few years. I've seen lots of allegations of vote fixing in Ohio and other states, but never paid much attention to them. It would take extraordinary audacity for anyone to actually fix election results in any major way and I've pretty much ignored the issue. Basically, it would take a lot of evidence to convince me that it really happened. But after reading this article by Robert Kennedy in Rolling Stone, I have to admit that it seems a lot more plausible than I previously thought. At the very least, there's a lot of smoke…
tqa | September 22, 2006Here's an interesting take on why theistic evolution (TE) might be a bad position to hold:
So essentially, both Dawkins and Miller see no evidence of design, and their philosophy as to how evolution works is the same, yet Dawkins follows that evidence and declares the world is without a designer and Miller claims to believe there is a designer. Bizarre. So Miller apparently, like most TE's, holds to his religious beliefs on faith ~alone~. That's the problems with TE's - they can give you no reason whatsoever as to why they believe what they do in regard to their religious beliefs other than…
tqa | September 22, 2006The policy forum in this weeks issue of Science discusses a potential problem with many of the crops that people are talking about using as biofuels. In what has to be one of the more striking instances of cosmic irony, it is entirely possible that some of the plants being considered as biofuel crops might actually be bad for the environment.
The reason for this is actually relatively simple: many of the ecological traits that are found in the ideal biofuel crop are exactly the same as the ecological traits that are found in nasty invasive species.
Ideal Biofuel Crop
Invasive Plants
C4…
stcynic | September 22, 2006There are no commercials on TV I hate more than those "This is Bob" commercials for Enzyte and "natural male enhancement." Seems the government doesn't like them much either. The company that makes it has been slapped with a fraud indictment:
In one example, Wednesday's indictment cited ads placed in Penthouse and other male-oriented magazines that claimed Enzyte was developed after years of study by two doctors, one at Harvard and the other at Stanford.
"The company president and others made up information in their advertisements, such as endorsements by doctors that did not exist, and…
stcynic | September 22, 2006I know, I know. This isn't exactly surprising. You might have heard that Bill O'Reilly claimed recently that the FBI had visited him to tell him he was on an Al Qaeda hit list. I laughed when I heard it, knowing it was probably a bunch of crap. Turns out it was, according to Radar Online.
But the reaction from some of his colleagues sounds more like disbelief. "I've never heard that before," says a correspondent for Fox News, who added that neither he nor anyone he's spoken to at the network has been warned by the FBI. "I do know the government has warned Fox about threats in the past, but I…
stcynic | September 22, 2006Hans Zeiger earned many a merit badge in the boy scouts; I'm guessing he didn't earn one in logic. His latest column at the Worldnutdaily compares the Boy Scouts of America to the Imam al-Mahdi Scouts, a training group for Hezbollah that teaches young men how to be terrorists and suicide bombers. I'm not sure why he does this. The subtitle of the article is Exclusive: Hans Zeiger asks ACLU, which group advocates 'discrimination'? Comparing the fact that one is a terrorist group and one is not does not answer that question. Evidently, Zeiger believes that if he can point to a much worse group…
tqa | September 21, 2006After Janet posted the results the other day (I was crushed to learn I'd only placed sixth), I thought the nerdoff was over. For better or worse, it's not. Someone found yet another Nerd Test, and as we already know, SciBlings can't resist nerd tests. I can't either.
Modern, Cool Nerd
78 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 26% Dork
For The Record:
A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social…
stcynic | September 21, 2006As though I don't have enough blogs to write for, I have decided to join another one: Talk to Action. I would like to thank Frederick Clarkson for his generous offer to join the terrific cast of writers they already have there. Being asked to join a cast of contributors that already includes Clarkson, Bruce Wilson, Richard Bartholomew, Michelle Goldberg and John Gorenfeld, among others, is quite a compliment and I appreciate it very much. For those who are not familiar with Talk To Action, I encourage you to check it out. They are dedicated to fighting the religious right's authoritarian…
cortex | September 21, 2006From the Times:
Mr. Chavez [President of Venezeula] brandished a copy of Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" and recommended it to members of the General Assembly to read. Later, he told a news conference that one of his greatest regrets was not getting to meet Mr. Chomsky before he died. (Mr. Chomsky, 77, is still alive.)
stcynic | September 21, 2006Jason Rosenhouse links to this essay by Christopher Hitchens about the current brouhaha over the Pope's comments on Islam. Hitchens points out several ironies in the situation. The most obvious one, and I pointed it out myself earlier, is that anyone with the title Pope should be complaining of religion being spread by the sword. On this issue, he is dead on:
Now, you do not have to be a Muslim to think that for the bishop of Rome to cite this is the most perfect hypocrisy. There would have been no established Byzantine or Roman Christianity if the faith had not been spread and maintained and…