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stcynic | March 22, 2006For crying out loud, the exaggeration of this nonsense simply will not stop. CBS News has elevated them to having won the national title in this article. Reporter Steve Hartman says, "They just clinched the national title - ahead of Harvard, even." No, no, a thousand times no. They haven't won any national title, they never have and I'd venture to guess that they never will. They are a mediocre college debate team that only manages to pile up a lot of points by going to novice and JV tournaments that most top schools don't bother to go to.
grrlscientist | March 22, 2006I am working on my course syllabus for my conservation genetics course today. I have a deadline Thursday that I must meet. But before I start, I wanted to share this graphic with you. This graphic explains how your computer works in one easy to understand "Where's Waldo" type picture. Presumably, there is sound with this too (I checked; it's a wav file), but I can't hear it on my computer.
Update: the graphic-plus-sound version for all non-IE browsers can be accessed here (it's rather loud, so be ready to turn the volume down a little).
Thanks, Dawn!
tags: silliness
stcynic | March 21, 2006Burt Humburg sent me this picture from a conference we attended 3 years ago at Berkeley. I think I have to do it as a popup image because it's too wide for the columns on this blog. It's a bunch of us at dinner at Spangler's in Berkeley. View image.
From the left to the right: Guy from Colorado Citizens for Science whose name I forget; Woman from a physicist's society whose name I forget; Nick Matzke of the NCSE; Alan Gishlick of the NCSE; Liz Craig of Kansas Citizens for Science; Skip Evans, formerly of the NCSE; Burt Humburg, the typhoid mary of creationism; Steve Rissing of Ohio Citizens…
stcynic | March 21, 2006You gotta hand it to this cretin - when he loses it, he loses it big. Matt Young puts up a perfectly reasonable post at the Panda's Thumb about a teacher in Colorado who was suspended for showing a 12 minute sock puppet animation of the opera Faust and the absolutely ridiculous response that followed (parents in the community accusing her of being a lesbian and a Satanist - over an animated opera, for crying out loud?). And DaveScot responds by railing at Matt Young like a lunatic:
Then over at Panda's Thumb Matt Young and the usual suspects are whining about this teacher being disciplined…
grrlscientist | March 21, 2006
The sun and the moon over the North Pole.
Photographer: Unknown.
I am teaching a graduate journalism class at NYU today, so I won't be back at the keyboard until this afternoon or evening. Today's lecture? The wonders of writing about science on a blog. This will be an interesting experience for me because I am not a journalist and also because blogging is such a rapidly evolving cultural phenomenon that I think it is difficult to speak coherently about it.
So I will leave you with this lovely photograph that a friend sent to me to share with you. If you click on the image, a much larger…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2006
Do your eyes deceive you? Can you really trust your senses, or do they sometimes deceive you? Take this quiz to find out! It's a lot harder than you think. This quiz also includes an explanation for each question that helps you understand how your brain is "tricked" by your senses.
My score: 14/20. I guess all that Anatomy and Physiology teaching served me well! (i got 19/20 on the second try -- that line graphic is tricky).
I found it interesting that a crying baby is so danged loud (I thought my perception was simply a measure of my own annoyance level) -- nearly as loud as a pop concert…
stoat | March 20, 2006A variety of stories have come in recently (or at least fairly recently - I'm a bit behind the times, and it was a heavy weekend, wot with E getting chickenpox and the central heating failing) about CO2 levels, e.g. Sharp rise in CO2 levels recorded from the BBC. This turns out to source at a NOAA release, which has a nice pic but I can't find the data for 2005, only up to 2004. Also note that is "global" avg; just Mauna Loa is here.
Anyway, the point I was going to make was that this could have been better titled; CO2 levels are now at a record (though not at Mauna Loa, because of the annual…
stcynic | March 20, 2006YouTube has the entire episode of South Park about scientology available to watch online. It's quite funny, with the humor existing on several levels.
grrlscientist | March 19, 2006
This graph shows what two links from Daily Kos and one link from Instapundit in the span of two days can do for your blog traffic. For those of you who don't know, Daily Kos is a high-traffic politically liberal team-written blog, whereas Instapundit is a high-traffic politically conservative single-author blog.
This graph depicts traffic to Scientific Life during the previous 30 days, and the numbers along the x-axis denote the dates for the end of February through the middle of March. The green area shows the number of visitors, or "hits", and the purple area shows the total number of…
stcynic | March 19, 2006You know, for all of Jerry Falwell's complaining about the "liberal media", he's getting an astonishing amount of credulous and fawning coverage over the completely meaningless fact of the Liberty debate team being ranked #1 in the nation according to a point(less) system. The latest is a long article in the New York Times Magazine, of all places. Mark Twain famously said that there are three kinds of lies - lies, damned lies, and statistics. This is a perfect example.
As I've explained before, the #1overall ranking in college debate is nothing more than a total points system that counts…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2006
Do you remember how, at some point in the recent past, I wished that the Harry Potter online quizzes were more challenging? Well, someone heard me. Because this Harry Potter quiz relies on questions written by readers, it nicely confirms my working hypothesis that the most difficult quiz/exam that could ever be written is the one composed by the students themselves. [flash required]
Since I spent most of last night watching Harry Potter DVDs, I thought this quiz would be easy. Oh, how wrong I was. Besides the fact that the questions are written by a bunch of 12 year old HP fanatics, these…
grrlscientist | March 18, 2006This is another in a long line of on-line quiz silliness.
You Are New York
Cosmopolitan and sophisticated, you enjoy the newest in food, art, and culture.
You also appreciate a good amount of grit - and very little shocks you.
You're competitive, driven, and very likely to succeed. (GrrlScientist note: um, yeah, whatever you say)
Famous people from New York: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Tupac Shakur, Woody Allen
What American City Are You?
What other possibilities are there? So far, I found Austin, Boston, and Miami. Oh, and Los Angeles.
tags: online quiz
grrlscientist | March 18, 2006In a few days, I will be speaking to a graduate student journalism class at NYU about science blogs and blogging and, because you are the experts, dear readers, I would like to ask you a few questions. I have already asked you what you do, where you live and your age (but please do tell me these things if you haven't already), but now I would like to ask you about blogs in general. Why do you read blogs? What is it that you get from blogs that you do not get from the media, books and email/IM? What other reading do you do (newspapers, magazines, books, etc.)? Do you also watch TV? What would…
stcynic | March 17, 2006Jeff Jacoby has a column in the Boston Globe about the situation with Catholic Charities and gay adoptions in Massachusetts. It's not nearly as balanced and thoughtful a column as you usually get from him, but I'm going to agree with the core of his argument while rejecting the over-the-top rhetoric with which it is delivered. There is much that is wrong with his article, and I'll address those things, but the basic policy position is a sound one.
The overheated rhetoric begins with the headline: Kids take back seat to gay agenda. That's a ridiculous headline and flat out wrong. On the merits…
stcynic | March 16, 2006The editor of the student newspaper at the University of Illinois has been fired for published the infamous 12 caricatures of Muhammed. The board of the paper did not say that he was fired for flagrantly and wantonly committing journalism, but they might as well have.
stcynic | March 16, 2006Pat Hayes from Red State Rabble also noticed Richard Thompson's ridiculous quote, but he found some interesting parallels with David Duke. I really must add Red State Rabble to my links. It's an absolute must-read blog.
grrlscientist | March 16, 2006I managed to get wireless access from the courthouse, yippee! So I am checking in to let you know that the blog carnival, I and the Bird, issue #19, is now available. It is hosted by my blog pal, Bora, author of Science and Politics. This carnival focuses on the best writing about birds and bird watching in the blogosphere that has been recently published and it is jam packed with all sorts of fascinating articles. Bora was so kind as to include a piece (well, a rant, actually) that I wrote, too!
tags: blog carnival
stcynic | March 16, 2006Here's a couple blogs we should definitely be reading. The first is Good Math, Bad Math. This blog is authored by Mark Chu-Carroll, a computer scientist, and he specializes in critiquing the standard creationist arguments on probability and information theory. The second is Immunoblogging, authored by microbiologist and immunologist JM O'Donnell. He had an excellent post in the Skeptic's Circle about creationist arguments concerning the immune system.
stcynic | March 16, 2006The latest issue of the Skeptic's Circle is up at Paige's Page. One of my favorite entries is this post by Jim Lippard about his long experience with Scientology. Jim does really good work in this area. He's not only taken on Scientology but also Amway, an organization with many of the trademarks of a cult including the same kind of heavy handed intimidation of critics that he ran into with Scientology. I really should write more about Amway myself.
Another excellent entry is this one from The World According to Pooh, which fisks a really pretentious article taking Jon Stewart to task for…
grrlscientist | March 16, 2006Thanks to the IT peeps at Seed Media for this nifty "scheduled post" feature because I have been playing with it all week long (I have used it only rarely since February after my initial disappointment when several scheduled messages didn't show up as scheduled. But I later learned that this featured was not enabled then).
Anyway, as I was saying, I love this "scheduled posting" feature and I am using it right now, in fact. As I write this, it is Wednesday night at 8pm. I am sitting in a local Starbux, peering out the windows while I piggyback on a free wireless connection and pretend to be…