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stcynic | September 2, 2006Gene Healy at the Cato Institute blog has an absolutely perfect illustration of how partisanship leads to hypocritical howls of outrage. He links to this post at Free Republic from 2000, before Bush took office, about how the FISA court rubber stamps pretty much anything the president wants when it comes to intelligence gathering. The commenters were appalled - absolutely appalled - at this outrageous power grab by the administration. A few samples:
"This is beyond frightening. Thank you for this find."
"This does not bode well for continued freedom."
"Franz Kafka would have judged this to…
stcynic | September 2, 2006I am happy to announce that August was another record month for this blog with 191,000 hits. That's an average of almost 6200 hits per day. It drops to about 3500 on the weekends, so the average during the week is over 7000 hits per day. I certainly never imagined 3 years ago when I started it that I would ever have that many readers. I have no doubt that a big reason for that is the community that has grown up around it, a community that includes all of you who contribute so much with your comments as well as all of my blog neighbors. So thank you all for keeping things going and helping…
stcynic | September 1, 2006A commenter at Daily Kos had a very funny prediction on how Deborah Owens Fink can attack Tom Sawyer in their race for the Ohio Board of Education:
(CUE "DIRE" VOICE)
"Tom Sawyer SAYS he whitewashed the fence. But all he's whitewashed is his liberal record. Voters want to know -- just what WAS he doing on all those long night alone with Huck Finn? This November Send a message to Tom Sawyer -- tell him HIS brand of life on the Missisippi is not the life YOU want. Tell Tom Saywer he can't whitewash his past."
"Paid for by friends of Injun Joe"
I would have said "Paid for by Swift Boat…
tqa | September 1, 2006Over at Pharyngula, PZ is beating up Starbucks over one of the quotes on their cups. The quote is by Discovery Institute fellow Wesley Smith, and it reads:
The morality of the 21st century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value simply and merely because it is human? Answer yes, and we have a chance of achieving universal human rights. Answer no, and it means that we are merely another animal in the forest.
There are some good reasons to doubt the wisdom of selecting a quote by this particular author, but I think that…
stcynic | September 1, 2006My thanks to my old pal DarkSyde for writing up this post about the campaign between Tom Sawyer and Deborah Owens Fink for the Ohio State Board of Education. After the holiday weekend, I'll have more revelations about Owens Fink and the misguided policies she's pushed in Ohio.
stcynic | September 1, 2006It turns out that Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia also had a secret hold on the bill, not just Ted Stevens. That is no surprise to anyone who knows Washington. Byrd is the Democratic doppelganger to the Republican Stevens. His spokesman, amusingly, claims that Byrd didn't really want to stop the bill, he just wanted time to read it before signing off on it. Uh, yeah, right. And if you believe that, I've got a bridge to nowhere - named after Sen. Byrd, naturally - to sell you. If he really wants time to read the bills before he votes on them, why isn't Byrd supporting the Read the Bills Act…
moleculeoftheday | August 31, 2006Teflon, while it seems like a material in a weird class of its own, is actually just the fluorinated analogue of polyethylene - milk jugs and Saran wrap.
Fluorination, however, does funny things to molecules. Difluorine, or F2 is an absurdly reactive molecule. It has a lot of energy to give up in oxidizing a substrate. The flip side of this is that fluorinated molecules tend to be in a deep thermodynamic well (and therefore very inert). For this reason, PTFE is used in cookware coatings and electrical insulation.
The other thing about fluorination is that it confers certain odd colligative…
tlambert | August 31, 2006The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports.
When Mayla Hernandez saw news of a double homicide Friday night, the circumstances seemed too familiar.
She told the Sheriff's Office her boyfriend John Dorsey called her to pick him up around 12:30 a.m. Saturday on Sycamore Drive. He had blood on his forehead, was upset and wouldn't explain what happened.
By 8:30 a.m. Saturday, police arrested Dorsey and charged him with two counts of second-degree murder. His girlfriend played an instrumental role in his capture, the Sheriff's Office said.
Dorsey shot and killed Stephen Bunting, 20, and John Lott, 19…
stcynic | August 31, 2006Mark Plus posted a comment last night that included a great idea for the perfect retort to all this Darwin leads to Hitler crap. Here it is:
And on 9/11, the World Trade Center was knocked down by creationists who hate evolution. What's your point?
tqa | August 30, 2006Via a National Geographic research team, we learn that there is still a thriving market for ivory - protection laws and biodiversity be damned. The pictures below the fold, taken from the National Geographic website, are for any of you who might be considering buying something made of ivory in the near future. Be warned: it's not a mealtime image.
It's good to know just how ineffective anti-poaching measures really are in Chad, I guess.
purepedantry | August 30, 2006Kyra, Kyra, Kyra...
Note to self: turn off mic in the john.
Kyra Phillips, anchor of CNN's "Live From...," unwittingly upstaged President Bush's speech in New Orleans with on-the-air analysis of her husband and the marriage of her brother -- all live from a CNN ladies room.
Unaware that her wireless microphone was "live" during her break, Phillips could be heard overriding Bush"s prepared address Tuesday as he was seen marking the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
The Atlanta-based Phillips, in conversation with an unidentified woman in an echoey room, dismissed most men with a vulgar…
purepedantry | August 30, 2006Those of you who read an earlier post here noted that I was somewhat skeptical of the technical aspects of the so-called ethical stem cells. I felt that there were several technical hurdles that had to be surmounted before this technology could be used reasonably.
It turns things were even worse than I thought.
New Scientist reports that Nature has issued a clarification to the article because many had complained that the scientists had been disingenuous in suggesting that no embryos had been destroyed in that set of experiments. In fact, 16 embryos had been destroyed.
Early press reports…
tqa | August 30, 2006This week's Ask a Scienceblogger Question involves an article in The National Review Online that was clearly written by a complete bloody moron. The question is this:
I read this article in the NRO, and the author actually made some interesting arguments. 'Basically,' he said, 'I am questioning the premise that [global warming] is a problem rather than an opportunity.' Does he have a point?
The author of the paper actually does have a point, but not much of one, and it does not justify his line of argument.
If the point that the author is trying to make is that global warming can create…
tlambert | August 30, 2006Maria Farell asks about ipod alternatives. I have an Iriver H120 which I'm very fond of. The only drawback to Iriver is that while their hardware is better than Apple's, their firmware leaves something to be desired. But you can use Rockbox, an open source replacement which is much better.
hrynyshyn | August 30, 2006I will second David Ng's plea for everyone to watch or read the farewell speech of the outgoing UN ambassador for AIDS, Stephen Lewis. It's a rare combination of passion and reason, one that should leave every civilized person seething at what can best be described as a colossal failure of democracy's promise.
Lewis' speech is a 16-part list of axioms that too many politicians and bureaucrats have ignored for years. Each one is there primarily because public and government sentiment have abandoned the accomplishments of science and rationalism in favor of prejudice and dogma.
At the top is an…
grrlscientist | August 29, 2006A friend sent this "thought for the day" that I'd want to share with all of you;
Friends are like butt cheeks.
Shit might separate them
But they always come back together again.
A lot of peeps are helping me out, especially during my hospitalization, so I just want to take this opportunity to let all my butt cheeks out there know how much I appreciate you and everything that you are doing for me.
Muchas smoochas,
your other butt cheek
(GrrlScientist)
tqa | August 29, 2006It would seem that we had a little bit of an earthquake last night. The quake is listed as having a magnitude of 3.7 by the USGS, and was felt on the islands of Oahu and Molokai. My first person account of the experience is below the fold.
I didn't notice a damn thing.
My daughter did, though, and so did my next door neighbors. My daughter came downstairs right after the quake, and told me that something had just pushed up under her bed. Naturally, being the calm, kind, considerate father that I am, I told her to stop fooling around and get back to bed - and got even firmer about the whole…
stcynic | August 29, 2006Al Franken wrote a letter to the National Review after being falsely accused of never hiring minorities. It's quite an amusing letter, as expected.
tqa | August 28, 2006The paperback edition of SciBling Chris Mooney's book The Republican War on Science comes out today. I read it a while back, and I'm looking forward to going through it again.
This is one of those books that everyone should read. Chris does a fantastic job of documenting case after case after case where science has been misrepresented and/or ignored in efforts to help advance the Republican political agenda. People can debate whether or not the Republicans are consciously trying to downplay science, but the effects are the same. To see that, you need look no further than the recent episode…
stcynic | August 28, 2006From the AP:
The Alabama Democratic Party Executive Committee wants Larry Darby, whose radical views include the belief that the Holocaust did not happen, to stay out of future Democratic Party primaries.
The executive committee passed a resolution Saturday telling Darby, who lost a race for the party's nomination for attorney general, that "he is not welcome in the Alabama Democratic Party."
Darby, former director of the Atheist Law Center in Montgomery, responded by saying the vote shows that the state party's leadership is "intellectually and morally bankrupt."
Being called intellectually…