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grrlscientist | April 8, 2006
You Belong in Dublin
Friendly and down to earth, you want to enjoy Europe without snobbery or pretensions.
You're the perfect person to go wild on a pub crawl... or enjoy a quiet bike ride through the old part of town.
What European City Do You Belong In?
What's your city?
My other city (depending upon how I answered question 5) was Amsterdam.
tags: online quiz
stcynic | April 8, 2006Guess who's back? Back again. lamming's back...tell a friend. You have to see this amusing bit of stupidity from dlamming, the little brain pimple who got so obsessed with calling me an elitist a few weeks ago:
Last but not least, what weekend wouldn't be complete without another ridiculous post from Ed Brayton? This time he's taking on Cynthia McKinney, the representative who was grabbed while going into the House and hit a police officer. Apparently he's never heard of racism... or this thing called the U.S. Constitution, which specifies that members of Congress
be privileged from…
grrlscientist | April 8, 2006
In an effort to help us learn more about our common ancestor with the fishes, I found a quiz that tests your knowledge of modern fish.
(Pictured above: Coelacanth. Image linked to source)
My score - 100%
That was rather easy, wasn't it?
tags: fish, online quiz
apalazzo | April 8, 2006There is an interesting entry over at In the Pipeline about a recent paper in PNAS: Microparadigms: Chains of collective reasoning in publications about molecular interactions.
In this paper, the authors analyzed summaries of papers as processed by Geneways - a fancy database of factual statements derived from published papers.
From the paper:
In this study, we focused on chronologically ordered chains of statements about published molecular interactions, such as ''protein A activates gene B'' or ''small molecule C binds protein D.'' Each chain comprises chronologically ordered positive and/…
stcynic | April 7, 2006I mentioned a couple days ago the new fossil of a species dubbed Tiktaalik roseae, which beautifully fills a gap in the fossil record for the fish-amphibian transition. The response to this find from the ID creationists has been quite amusing. The DI media complaints division promptly posted a response that is deliciously inconsistent. On the one hand, it says that the find is "no threat" to ID because ID doesn't necessarily deny evolution or common descent (which depends on which ID advocate you ask, of course). On the other hand, it tries to argue that it's not an intermediate form anyway…
stcynic | April 7, 2006I want to thank everyone who was kind enough to send me banners to choose from. Several people did and they were all good. As someone who is completely clueless when it comes to the use of photo editing software, I am just amazed at what people can do with them and how quickly they can do it when I don't even know where to begin. The winning entry is from Jeff Hebert, the same one who did the Edhead graphics. I chose this one because of the background. For an enthusiastic advocate of Enlightenment thinking, a picture that clearly invokes the rennaisance is perfect. My thanks to Jeff for…
stcynic | April 7, 2006Yesterday's release of court documents from the special prosecutor in the Scooter Libby case, which say that Libby has testified that he was expressly told that President Bush himself had signed off on the release of classified information, could be the bombshell that brings down Bush. My father, a lifelong Republican, called me yesterday and said, "That's the last straw. It's time to impeach this man." I've got a couple long quotes, which I'll put below the fold. The first is from the LA Times story on this revelation:
According to the new court filing, Libby testified to a grand jury that…
grrlscientist | April 7, 2006This quiz is really low-tech, so I have the questions here, and the questions with their answers below the fold. This is, of course, a self-graded, self-reported quiz.
1) How long did the Hundred Years War last?
2) Which country makes Panama hats?
3) From which animal do we get catgut?
4) In which month do Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
5) What is a camel's hair brush made of?
6) The Canary Islands are named after what animal?
7) What was King George VI's first name?
8) What color is a purple finch?
9) Where are Chinese gooseberries from?
10) What is the color of the…
apalazzo | April 7, 2006So one of the most important stories over the past week (besides the immigration bill in congress), was the health insurance bill in Massachusetts.
I won't give you a summary of what's been going on but instead give you some links to articles & opinions on the whole topic. Then I'll give you some interesting links to Malcolm Gladwell's view on American style Healthcare vs. the Canadian Healthcare system.
So about the Mass plan:
Boston Globe: Mass. bill requires health insurance
Legislative leaders say their plan would:
Cover 92,500 people by bringing more people onto MassHealth, the…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2006Another new blog carnival (for me) has been published. The 39th edition of the Carnival of the Clueless is now available. This blog carnival celebrates blog writing about clueless idiots everywhere. Needless to say, with the current administration in place, there is plenty of material out there to write about, even if you aren't pretending to be a 14-year-old girl on the internet. Despite the fact that this is primarily a right-wing blog carnival, I managed to slip one past them anyway. Hrm.
Okay, after a little more investigation, I found that they do publish stories of cluelessness that…
apalazzo | April 5, 2006then you read this story: Prof denied grant over evolution. Agency wants proof Darwin is correct; But McGill says committee's reasoning is faulty. From the Montreal Gazette:
McGill University says the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council made a "factual error" when it denied Professor Brian Alters a $40,000 grant on the grounds that he'd failed to provide the panel with ample evidence that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is correct.
Now I don't like writing about ID, because it's honestly it's like talking about individuals who don't believe in algebra, but I just can't…
stcynic | April 5, 2006Another commenter at Dembski's blog tries to answer my post about engineers and evolution. Here is the statement he quotes from me:
Of what possible relevance is engineering to evolutionary biology? The average engineer likely doesn't know the difference between a species and a speculum. Why would anyone think that they speak with any more authority on evolutionary biology than they do on art history or the art of the zone defense?... An engineer has no more legitimate authority to speak on evolutionary biology than a certified mechanic or a culinary school graduate.
And GilDodgen replies:
In…
stcynic | April 5, 2006It appears that a commenter is trying to top Dave's ignorant question with even more ignorant statements on the subject. DonaldM writes:
The question has broader implications than you mention, Dave. If the newly elected board had recinded the policy at their December meeting, prior to the Judges ruling, they would have made the Judges ruling unnecssary. Furthermore, it may have saved the school board some money by doing so. It makes you wonder what behind door conversations might have taken place. It appears that they wanted Jones to rule...but why?
Also, it appears a motion to recind the…
stcynic | April 5, 2006That really should be the theme of many pro-ID articles. Doug Moran over at Dembski's home for wayward sycophants links to this article in a University of Michigan publication about three UofM professors who are for ID. It begins by credulously citing the DI's famous "dissent from darwinism" statement. You know, the one that doesn't actually have anything to do with evolutionary theory:
A single innocuous statement sums up "A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism," a petition that was released in 2001 and has since garnered over 500 signatures of experts, reading, "I am skeptical of claims for…
stcynic | April 5, 2006Why don't I get mail this funny? As usual, Paul answers them with his requisite wit and verve.
stcynic | April 5, 2006The other day, William Dembski reported Eric Pianka to the Department of Homeland Security because he and his fellow creationist Forrest Mims claim that Pianka is fomenting bioterrorism. Today, the FBI is going down to interview Pianka in Austin. And today, Dembski is offering a wager concerning the man:
I'm willing to wager $1000 with David Hillis that sympathy not just nationally but at UTAustin for Pianka will take a nose dive once his TAS speech goes public. Of course, we need to set the terms of this wager more precisely. But it's a wager easily settled -- Pianka needs merely to make his…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2006The 185th edition of the Carnival of the Vanities is now available for your reading pleasure. The Carnival of the Vanities is the first blog carnival that was ever instituted, and it focuses on the best writing recently published on a blog on any topic. This week's host, Iowa Voice, accepted no more than 15% of all submissions received, so you can be assured that only the best of the best writing on any topic was included in this carnival. So considering the high rejection rate, I was surprised to learn that the host included not one, but two (!!), of my essays in this prestigious carnival,…
ddobbs | April 4, 2006Even as my
New York Times Magazine article about deep brain stimulation for depression went to press, a new study came out throwing more light on the "network model" of depression discussed in the article.
In the article I wrote about (among other things) how some interesting work by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg has begun the work of linking genetic and neurochemical models of depression to the "network" model that's emerged over the last 5 to 10 years. As the article explains, the neurochemical model, which emphasizes levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin (the focus of drugs like…
stcynic | April 4, 2006Okay, we now have the ability to replace the banner on top of this page (the part that has the title and subtitle of the blog) with something specific to our blog. The problem is that I'm completely clueless when it comes to the use of photoshop or similar programs, so I'm soliciting help from my readers. In fact, let's make it a contest to see who can come up with the coolest banner for the blog. The winner will get my undying gratitude and the applause of Edheads everywhere. The correct size, I'm told, is 756 x 70 pixels. And the color scheme needs to fit in with the rest of the page's drab…
stcynic | April 4, 2006This is so cool. I took someone to task for misrepresenting my position and said that they weren't arguing with me but with the "Ed in their head". Jeff Hebert, a longtime reader and a graphic artist, thought that concept was funny and he designed two graphics for me. I'll post the first one on the front page and the second one below the fold. Thanks to Jeff for doing it, these are hilarious. And I'm amazed at how much they really do look like me when you only had the one picture on my old blog to go on. Great work.
#2, a takeoff on the Grateful Dead's "deadheads":