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stcynic | May 15, 2006Some of you who watch Dembski's blog may have read his false accusations aimed at Kevin Padian over the last couple weeks. As it turns out, the whole thing was nonsense. Someone sent him an email about a paleontologist from Berkeley who allegedly singled out a church in the area that is predominately Asian as having a big influence on the ID debate around the campus. For that horrible crime, Dembski accused Padian of bigotry and posted cartoons portraying Padian as Archie Bunker and as a member of the KKK (that one was posted by DaveScot, to no one's surprise).
Well after receiving a letter…
stcynic | May 15, 2006One of the things I've noticed over the last couple years is that there is large collection of conservative webpages that tend to print columns by the same mostly unknown writers - Vincent Fiore, Robert Meyer, Jim Kouri, Joseph Grant Swank and many others. You can find them all over the web on pages that are essentially clones of each other, featuring amateur (and amateurish) pundit wannabes like these. But this column, by someone named Curtis Dahlgren, is one of the strangest and most incoherent screeds I've ever read. It has a title - "Justice" is blind-drunk with raw judicial power - that…
stcynic | May 14, 2006Some of you may remember a few months back my post about Larry Darby, former head of the Atheist Law Center who is now running for attorney general in Alabama. Eugene Volokh and I both wrote posts outing Darby as the total nutball that he is after a series of bizarre posts he made to the ReligionLaw listserv that Volokh runs. Now it seems that folks in Alabama are catching on to his barbaric and ignorant views, while Darby takes his crusade to other states. In addition to being a holocaust denier (he says that less than 200,000 people died, and most of them died from typhoid), he also sounds…
grrlscientist | May 13, 2006
Your Blogging Type is Confident and Insightful
You've got a ton of brain power, and you leverage it into brilliant blog.
Both creative and logical, you come up with amazing ideas and insights.
A total perfectionist, you find yourself revising and rewriting posts a lot of the time.
You blog for yourself - and you don't care how popular (or unpopular) your blog is!
What's Your Blogging Personality?
Well, this is true, but .. I am surprised: this quiz only relied on four questions, each with only two possible answers, to determine that! How many possible "blog types" were there? In this…
grrlscientist | May 13, 2006
Your Inner Child Is Surprised
You see many things through the eyes of a child.
Meaning, you're rarely cynical or jaded.
You cherish all of the details in life.
Easily fascinated, you enjoy experiencing new things.
How Is Your Inner Child?
tags: online quiz
stcynic | May 13, 2006Kevin Shapiro, a neuroscientist from Harvard, has an interesting op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about ID and the neo-conservatives that is very much worth reading. And by neo-conservative, he doesn't mean the casual, everyday political slur (where "neo-con" has become as much an empty buzzword for the left as "liberal" is for the right, a word whose only meaning is "Them"); he means the movement of former leftists who became conservatives, led by folks like Irving Kristol and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb. And as Shapiro points out, the relationship between conservatism and evolution…
grrlscientist | May 12, 2006The Teaching Carnival, issue 9, was published today. It links to many interesting essays, especially since the academic year just ended for many people, so they have both the time and the material to write about.
stcynic | May 11, 2006This guy just does not give up. In his latest, he completely ignores the substance of my response, pretending that it didn't exist. But he does throw in this one bit of stupidity:
Ed also had this little gem: "I'm not against the government mandating that evolution be taught as a theory in schools at all." I wonder what happened to the relentless anti-creationism crusader?
What on earth is this idiot talking about? Of course I am all for teaching evolution as a theory in public schools. I spend a great deal of time and energy defending the teaching of evolution in public schools. I have no…
stcynic | May 11, 2006Tim Sandefur has posted a reply to Francisco's post about Dover and mootness over at the Panda's Thumb. Well worth reading.
stcynic | May 11, 2006When it comes to the relationship of evolution to atheism, there are basically two positions from evolution supporters. There is the Dawkins/Dennett position that evolution provides strong support for atheism, that it renders theism useless, and so forth. And there are people like me, Wesley Elsberry and Eugenie Scott, who take the position that while evolution is certainly incompatible with certain forms of religious belief, it is not incompatible with other forms of religious belief; further, that there is no logical reason why evolution and faith must contradict (and among those three,…
jstemwedel | May 11, 2006I can hardly believe that it's time for another Skeptics' Circle, but the evidence seems to support the conclusion that it is. EoR at The Second Sight has a real gem of a carnival, collecting bright and shiny examples of blog essay doing their skeptical best to prevent us from having rocks in our heads.
(The graphics are very pretty, too.)
apalazzo | May 11, 2006(from Daily Zeitgeist) There's a new Halliburton product for any CEO concerned about the upcoming apocalypse: SurvivaBall.
What is this crazy Brave-New-World device? From Halliburton's web site:
Most scientists believe global warming is certain to cause an accelerating onslaught of hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, etc. and that a world-destroying disaster is increasingly possible. For example, Arctic melt has slowed the Gulf Stream by 30% in just the last decade; if the Gulf Stream stops, Europe will suddenly become just as cold as Alaska. Global heat and flooding events are also…
grrlscientist | May 11, 2006Several more blog carnivals have been published, all of which I contributed to;
I and the Bird, issue 23, hosted by BirdDC, includes a quiz for the birders among you, and those who can identify all 27 pictured birds will win a free Peterson Field Guide!
The Skeptic's Circle, issue 34; critical thinking crystallized. The host for this issue, The Second Sight, written by EoR, says;
Eor surveys the Wonderful World of Crystals, and receives some interesting etheric vibrations as a result. By applying the higher vibrational properties of these gems to his chakras he received contact with various…
tsmith | May 11, 2006As usual, EffectMeasure is one step ahead of me. A news report came out yesterday suggesting that influenza may infect people through the gut. At least 4 routes of evidence suggest this possibility. 1) In birds, influenza is an intestinal infection. 2) Several cases of H5N1 have presented with diarrhea, generally uncommon in human influenza infections. 3) H5N1 virus has been isolated from rectal swabs from humans. 4) Some people have no risk factors for infection besides drinking duck blood. Revere further elaborates on all the red flags this virus has raised.
grrlscientist | May 10, 2006There are a few blog carnivals available for your reading pleasure, all of which saw fit to include one or more pieces by me;
The Tangled Bank, #53, Go Climb a Tree!. The entries are arranged in a story format.
Carnival of the Vanities, #191. This carnival has a pirate theme, and my particular contribution was included in Kang's Picks for the Tutu Brigade.
Carnival of Education, #66. All entries are arranged under the titles for the five skits from Monty Python's Flying Circus for your ease of locating them.
loom | May 10, 2006In case you were worrying that life on Earth would be wiped out by a catastrophic burst of gamma rays, rest easy. It turns out that our galaxy may not be a very good source of gamma ray bursts. I found this particularly interesting given recent speculation that gamma rays bursts might have triggered mass extinctions in the past. (News article here, original paper here.) The bursts are clearly catastrophic, but probably not close enough to Earth to cause much trouble.
stcynic | May 10, 2006At the risk of doubling his daily hits up to a whopping 26 for the day, I can't help but respond to the latest rank stupidity emanating from our old pal dlamming. This glutton for punishment keeps taking brave leaps in the dark, and keeps landing with a resounding thud. He is responding to my post about the growing nanny state. On the matter of the Arkansas example, he ducks right into the punch and says that he does support a law that would prevent taking a child to McDonald's:
Actually, that doesn't sound like a bad idea - maybe it should be a crime to take kids to McDonald's. We don't let…
stcynic | May 10, 2006In addition to their constant whining about us "Stalinist" evolution supporters oppressing them, it seems the ID crowd has a new complaint: anti-ID "bigotry". Dembski's latest whine declares "Anti-ID bigots -- they're everywhere in the academy, and your tax dollars support them!" He then posts part of an email from an anonymous ID supporter complaining of opposition among the scientists he works with. I'm sorry, Bill, but disagreement is not the same thing as bigotry. Victim chic is annoying enough when it's engaged in by people who have historically faced oppression; it's downright…
stcynic | May 10, 2006Jon Rowe emailed me a link to this article this morning, wherein Ray Comfort - the boneheaded apologist who thinks ID is true because bananas fit perfectly in the hands of primates - challenges Bill Maher to a debate over intelligent design. Comfort seems to love challenging people to debates who have no expertise at all in the subject being debated. I'm sure Maher will treat this with all the seriousness with which it ought to be taken. As Christian apologists go, Comfort makes Josh McDowell look like Aquinas himself. He isn't the bottom of the barrel, he's underneath it.
stcynic | May 10, 2006One of the things that has happened in competitive debate over the last decade or so is the development of the "kritik" (pronounced just like critique). This was just beginning to come into use when I was getting out of coaching and judging in the early 90s and at the time I thought it was a healthy development. Explaining how and why it began will require a bit of background in how a debate is structured. After an explanation of the general structure of how such arguments are used, and the levels on which they are used, I'll make it specific to the type of kritik that the Louisville Project…