Uncategorized
stcynic | December 13, 2005As I'm sure you all noticed, this page has been unreachable for about the past 18 hours. My hosting service, IPowerWeb, apparently had a major hiccup. As you can also see, everything from Saturday forward has been erased. I'm trying to get through to tech support now to see if there is any hope of restoring the lost posts and comments. If not, they are lost forever. I have several new things to post, but I may hold off until I get through to tech support to make sure everything is working right again.
stcynic | December 9, 2005I'm hitting the road shortly for a most interesting weekend. Last year I told the story of my oldest and dearest friend, Rick, finding out that he had a sister. He was raised essentially without a family. His mother died when he was a toddler, then he was raised by his grandparents until both died while he was still young. He lived with my family for a time during high school. Last year he got a call from a private investigator who had been hired by a woman to find her mother, and he found out that she was dead, but that Rick had the same mother. He wondered if Rick would want to be contacted…
stcynic | December 8, 2005My longtime readers know that I have very mixed feelings about Richard Dawkins. On the one hand, I certainly recognize that he is quite brilliant both as a scholar and as a writer. His extremely lucid prose has undoubtedly helped millions of laypeople better understand the theory of evolution and the many lines of evidence which support it. On the other hand, I think his outspoken, even militant atheism, too often offered almost as a package deal with evolution without any meaningful distinction made between the two, also drives millions of people away from even attempting such understanding…
stcynic | December 8, 2005Jason Kuznicki has a very entertaining post envisioning a conversation between Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, the three avatars of the Hindu god Brahman, about the "War on Christmas" nonsense that is sweeping the right wing media like a wildfire.
stcynic | December 7, 2005The Fordham Foundation has released a report on state science standards for public schools. This report was compiled by a board of experts in various scientific fields, including Paul Gross, Panda's Thumb contributor and co-author with Barbara Forrest of Creationism's Trojan Horse. You can scroll through the state-by-state list and see how yours did. The good news for Michigan is that on the specific subject of evolution, we received the highest score possible (3 out of 3); the bad news is that our overall score was a 'D' (48 out of a possible 100).
The two major complaints that the…
stcynic | December 7, 2005There is quite an interesting little battle going on among the folks at the National Review. It began when John Derbyshire posted this item on The Corner about the views of Gertrude Himmelfarb on evolution. If you don't know who Gertrude Himmelfarb is, she is surely among the greatest American intellectuals of the last 100 years (and I say that as someone who disagrees with many, perhaps most, of her views). She is the wife of Irving Kristol, the godfather and founding intellectual of what we today call the neo-conservatives, and she is an historian by training. Despite her brilliance and…
stcynic | December 6, 2005Well, kind of. The Cato Institute has launched an interesting new project called Cato Unbound. It's a combination blog/magazine billing itself as "a virtual trading floor in the intellectual marketplace, specializing in the exchange of big ideas." Each month they will present an essay by a prominent scholar on some big issue of the day, then they will present critiques of that essay and an exchange of ideas with other prominent scholars, who will respond to the original essay and to one another. And they're off to a great start.
The first issue has an essay that answers the question of what…
stcynic | December 3, 2005I don't care what happened to Natalie Holloway. I don't. Enough already. I give. Get off my TV screen.
stcynic | December 1, 2005I've often heard the Food Network referred to jokingly as "food porn". Here's an analysis of the network's offerings that argues that it actually does borrow techniques from porn to make the food more alluring. I find it quite amusing.
stcynic | November 30, 2005I just got an email from the Thomas More Law Center. Apparently the family in Novi that was being told to take down their nativity scene contacted them and they threatened the HOA with a lawsuit. The HOA backed down and told them they don't have to take it down. Doesn't much matter to me either way, but that's what happened.
Update: The Detroit News is reporting about it and some of the article is quite amusing. Like this guy:
Anthony J. Dickow lives in the same Tollgate Woods subdivision as the Samona family and says the story has "stirred my blood and I am outraged!"
"Let's say I wasn't a…
stcynic | November 29, 2005This is very cool. Carl Buell, better known by perhaps my favorite nickname of all time, Olduvai George (if you don't get the reference, do a google search on "Leakey" and all will be revealed), has finally gotten around to starting a blog. Carl has been a frequent commenter here at Dispatches. He is by profession an illustrator who does scientific drawings for books and magazines. Indeed, he did all of the illustrations for at least one book by Carl Zimmer and I'm pretty sure it's more than one. He's also a hell of a guy and it's about damn time he joined the blogosphere.
It suddenly occurs…
stcynic | November 29, 2005Last night, Genie Scott of the NCSE spoke at Michigan State and about half of the board of Michigan Citizens for Science was there. The subject of her speech was, essentially, the evolution of creationism, how creationism has evolved over the last 80 years in the United States. It was, as expected, an excellent and information packed presentation. One of my fellow board members, who had never had the opportunity to meet Genie in person, commented that she was very impressed by how personable and charming she was as a speaker.
After Rob Pennock gave her a glowing introduction, she took to the…
stcynic | November 28, 2005I'm off to Lansing to meet with and hear an address by Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education. She's giving a speech at the Kellogg Center Auditorium at 6 on the evolution of creationist strategies and most of the MCFS board will be attending and, presumably, heading out for a meal afterward. See ya'll tomorrow.
stcynic | November 27, 2005I just finished my appearance on the Jim Babka radio program, which was entirely too short. It's just so difficult to even begin to examine the issue in any depth in a one hour show where we've really only got maybe 25 minutes of airtime in between commercials and sponsor's reports and the like. So he asked me to come back on next week to continue the discussion, which I'll gladly do.
stcynic | November 25, 2005I will be appearing on Jim Babka's Culture Repair show on the Genesis Communications Network on Sunday afternoon between 5 and 6 pm eastern time. You can also listen online by going to this page and selecting a feed at that time. I'll be on the show alone with Jim, no other guests, and we'll be talking about intelligent design from various perspectives. Please tune in if you get the chance.
stcynic | November 24, 2005Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I'm off to my parents' house for the day. I hope everyone has a great day with their families. In Michigan, we have a tradition. We eat far too much, then fight over who gets the couch, then we all watch the Lions play, which makes us want to regurgitate the meal we just ate. Call it athletic bulimia.
Update: Well, scratch that idea. My parents just called to tell me not to come. Apparently the weather is worse down there than it is up here. We got about 6 inches of snow yesterday, with more on the way today. That alone is not a big deal, but we're also getting…
stcynic | November 23, 2005Joe Carter has a review up of a new documentary called The God Who Wasn't There, by Brian Flemming, which takes the rather audacious position that there was no man called Jesus at all, that the Jesus of the bible is entirely fictitious and invented out of whole cloth. I've not seen this movie yet, but a was contacted by a publicist for the film who asked me if I would like to receive a review copy of it. I replied:
"While I wouldn't mind having a review copy, I can tell you that you're fighting an uphill battle with me. I think it's unlikely in the extreme that Jesus never existed. I think it…
stcynic | November 22, 2005This is totally coincidental, but on the heels of my leaving In The Agora, Paul Musgrave has also ended his tenure there as a contributor. That is a real loss, surely a much bigger loss than my leaving. Paul is easily among the dozen or so best writers on the blogosphere. When he writes on a subject, his thoughts are always meticulously well thought out and well expressed. The good news is that he will still be blogging at his personal blog.
stcynic | November 22, 2005***There is an update at the bottom of this post with yet another email and response***
I received an email this morning from Todd Zywicki, the person I criticized yesterday for making false and inflammatory accusations against PZ Myers and then, in Orwellian fashion, attempting to make them disappear as though they'd never happened. Here is the text of that email:
"Frankly, I suspect that what really happened here is that Zywicki used the term without knowing what it meant. I suspect he thought that "Lysenkoist" was just a Russian word for "Darwinist" when, of course, the opposite is true.…
stcynic | November 22, 2005I was on the phone last night with my friend Rick and he told me about this project called Kalamazoo Promise. I grew up in a suburb of Kalamazoo and my parents still live there. Rick works for the city of Kalamazoo today. Someone very wealthy in the area - and their identity is a complete mystery - has started an endowed fund promising to pay the tuition for each and every student that graduates from Kalamazoo Public Schools to attend any public university or community college in the state. It works on a sliding scale depending on how long you attended. Someone who was in Kalamazoo public…