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grrlscientist | March 15, 2006One thing I try to do really well is promote any issue of a blog carnival that I host. I am certain that everyone does this, but because I did win a "biggest blog whore" award recently, I like to believe that I am somehow special in this respect (one disclaimer: the "Best of Blogs", or BoB, awards are limited to low- to moderate-traffic blogs, so you can think of them more correctly as "the best of the rest" awards). So let me toot my own horn for a minute because this issue of Tangled Bank (TB) has been linked since this early morning by several of the "Big Boys"; Glenn Reynolds at…
stcynic | March 14, 2006From one of the diarists at DailyKos comes this quote from Jamie Raskin, a law professor at American University. He was testifying in front of a Maryland legislative committee on an anti-gay marriage amendment and one of the legislators used the Bible to support her arguments against gay marriage. Raskin replied:
Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You didn't place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.
Bravissimo.
stcynic | March 14, 2006Jason Kuznicki has decided to declare an "opposite day", wherein he defends an idea he disagrees with and attempts to do so without making a parody of that position. He chose to defend the divine right of kings, an idea that is anathema to his libertarian mindset. I was asked to give it a shot as well, but to try and make the strongest argument I can for ID, while an ID advocate would make the strongest argument against it that he can. I have too much on my plate at this point to devote the time to that project, but I might take him up on that offer sometime in the future.
grrlscientist | March 14, 2006
The Extreme Survival Quiz is very nicely formatted, so I thought you might enjoy playing with it while I work on Tangled Bank. My score? 15/17. According to this quiz, this means I have what it takes to be an extreme survivor, and I am allowed to wear an "I Will Survive" Gloria Gaynor t-shirt in good faith. My wrong guesses and accompanying comments are below the fold. How did you do?
I did really well with the animal attack (not surprisingly) and the man-made disasters questions. Even though I got all the shark questions correct, for example, I wonder, what would I really do if I was being…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2006Welcome to everyone who came here via Daily Kos! Please indulge me by looking around for a few minutes.
Daily Kos just linked to a photo and story about NASA that I posted yesterday. According to my statmeter (which I expect will crash any second now), I am receiving approximately 100 hits every 5 minutes, to start.
It's so exhilarating that it's almost scary.
And best of all, the word from DarkSyde is, my peeps, that Daily Kos will link to Tangled Bank tomorrow in an open thread. This will not generate quite as many hits as today's link, but it's still gonna be quite a party for all the…
stcynic | March 14, 2006Aerik Knapp-Loomis (whoever the hell he is) has written a follow up in response to my post about his rather incoherent screed about me. It's far worse than the first one. All you really need to see is this one ridiculous statement:
He says I'm barely coherent. Well then, I suppose his assumptions about the morality of the Catholic Charities of Boston's decision are so engrained he can't even see them as assumptions and thinks there's some universal agreement with them.
Even after being told in no uncertain terms that I am an enthusiastic supporter of adoption by gay couples and individuals,…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2006My friend, Sara, sent me two Yellow Ibis t-shirts so I could postpone, by a couple more days, that long and lonely trudge through ten foot high snowdrifts to the laundromat. Yellow Ibis is a small company that sells science-based products such as mugs, engravings, prints and t-shirts. The shirt that I am wearing today is light blue with Darwin's "I Think" Tree of Life on it. This tree is copied from the first one ever drawn by Darwin (pictured) in his notebook, Transmutation.
As I see it, this shirt is essential apparel for any practicing evolutionary biologist. I am anticipating that PZ…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2006"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."
-- Charles Darwin, On The Origin of Species By Natural Selection.
Tomorrow at roughly this same time, my issue, #49, of Tangled Bank will be published. If you have written an essay about science,…
stcynic | March 13, 2006I found this trackback to an angry and not terribly coherent response to my post about Catholic Charities pulling out of the adoption business. Someone named Aerik Knapp-Loomis didn't like that I require comment registration, so he posted his comment to his own blog and called me out for a "monumental moral failure" for my post. Why? Because adoption is a good thing. Well, no kidding. You'd think I had come out and applauded what Catholic Services did. Here is the sum total of what I said in terms of my reaction to their decision:
On the one hand, I think they are completely wrong in their…
stcynic | March 13, 2006Whoever this dlamming character is, and whatever reason he has decided to target me specifically, he appears to have a particular gift for making himself look foolish. After tilting at the windmill once and coming out looking quite silly, he's now back again with another set of distortions in this post about my post concerning Catholic Charities and gay adoptions. In it, he cites the following statement from me:
"Interestingly, the group decided not to ask for a religious exemption, which they can do under Massachusetts law."
He then cites the following from the Boston Globe article that I…
grrlscientist | March 13, 2006I have been writing my class syllabus (conservation genetics) for awhile today and as a reward, I thought I'd peek in on you all to see what you are doing. I just learned that, for reasons that escape me, the Koufax Awards voting deadline has been extended until tonight. I think this is great!
So, just to prove to you all that I did not win the first runner-up in the BoB Awards' "blog whore" category for nothing (badge at top of left sidebar), here I am again, asking for your vote for the 2005 Koufax Awards. This round of voting is simply to identify those 6-10 top vote recipients for each…
grrlscientist | March 11, 2006Okay, you have to guess which Simpson's character I am before you can read below the fold. Then, after you take the test, you must tell me which Simpson's character you are.
You Are Lisa Simpson
A total child prodigy and super genius, you have the mind for world domination.
But you prefer world peace, Buddhism, godlessness and tofu dogs.
You will be remembered for: all your academic accomplishments. [GrrlScientist note: these test writers do have a sense of humor, don't they?]
Your life philosophy: "I refuse to believe that everybody refuses to believe the truth."
The Simpsons…
stcynic | March 11, 2006I know we've probably got one last blast of winter left here in Michigan, but as far as I'm concerned today is the official start of spring. Why? Because the first rack of ribs is in the smoker. It's been in there about an hour and I just put in a second load of applewood chips, flipped and basted the ribs. I'm trying a different rub than I usually use and I'm basting with coke instead of my usual apple cider. It's about 60 degrees and the sun is shining. I washed my car earlier. And the conference championships in basketball are on TV. Welcome back, Spring. You don't know how much you were…
grrlscientist | March 11, 2006
The Ultimate Cure for Bird Flu!
Striving always to keep the public informed as to our current state of knowledge (and lack thereof) regarding bird flu!
tags: bird flu, Influenza, humor
Thanks, Ian!
stcynic | March 11, 2006My pal DarkSyde continues his terrific series of interviews with science advocates with Barbara Forrest today. No one has been more valuable in this battle than Barbara. As I wrote during the Dover trial, she was the witness that they feared the most. They spent a great deal of time and energy trying to get her testimony excluded because they knew it would be damaging to them, and it was.
grrlscientist | March 11, 2006
I have 14 submissions right now. Where are your words of wisdom?
Tangled Bank: Only four days away!
Article Submissions: email links to your submission(s) to PZ Myers, or to the Tangled Bank host [at] tangledbank [dot] net by 14 March 2006. Please write "Tangled Bank" in the subject line. All submissions will be acknowledged by email within 24 hours, so if you do not receive a response from me in that time frame, please resubmit (this is to avoid loss of any submissions to an overactive spam filter). I wish to encourage lots of "new faces" and third-party nominations, so please let me know…
grrlscientist | March 10, 2006
I have been collecting links to all the birthday wishes that were posted for PZ so everyone can enjoy them (yes, things are a little crazy at the moment because I have a job interview today, too).
If I have missed the link to your birthday wish, please do send it to me so I can add it to the list.
Note: Squid photo by Adam Laverty (I am no expert on squishy creatures, but isn't that really a cuttlefish in the photo and not a squid? The photographer identified it as a squid, which is why I named it as such, too).
10,000 Birds managed to post a birthday wish, despite the fact that Mike, the…
stcynic | March 10, 2006The Worldnutdaily has yet another article on the search for Noah's Ark and how it has been "rejuvenated" by a satellite picture of what looks for all the world like nothing more than a typical mountain ridge. Along the way, they mention the frauds of Wyatt Archaeological Research (Ron Wyatt is one of the most transparently ridiculous con men of the last century; the fact that he continues to have so many followers - among them Kent Hovind - is a testament to human credulity). Finding Noah's Ark is a lot like finding oil in Israel - they're always this close to finding it and if only you would…
stcynic | March 10, 2006The North County Times, a local newspaper in Southern California, just published an interesting profile of fellow Panda's Thumb contributor Mark Perakh. I've mentioned his fascinating life before, having spent time in a Siberian prison camp in the Soviet Union before emigrating to Israel and then to the US. And from the picture, he looks pretty good for an 81 year old man! We all continue to send our best wishes to he and his wife Valentina as they put their life back together after their home burned down a couple months ago.
grrlscientist | March 9, 2006
I broke all the etiquette rules, PZ, because I did not ask your wife or daughter before I got a virtual pet for you for your hatchday. However, this pet is a little different than most because it does not use a litter box, it doesn't have to be walked three or five times per day, nor can it starve to death!
I know that you like animals and technological wizbangery, so my virtual gift to you, PZ, is the delightful roboraptor. The roboraptor stands 32 inches tall, has built-in touch and motion sensors that allow it to react to its environment and, best of all, it can either roam freely or it…