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gregladen | October 3, 2012For three decades, the National Center for Science Education(NCSE) has focused most of its efforts on defending the teaching of evolution in the classroom. Increasingly, however, the teachers its executive director, Dr. Eugenie Scott, hears from are under fire for teaching global warming. So much so that in January, the organization formally added a climate initiative to its efforts to support the teaching of science. Scott spoke on August 6, 2012 in Minnesota, sponsored by the Will Steger Foundation and the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, where she was joined by…
gregladen | October 2, 2012How Religion and Science Interact and the Issue of Evolution
A featured speaker at Westminster College's 2012 Symposium on Religious Experience in a Global Society, Dr. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (Oakland, California), discusses religion, science and evolution. Almost 80 years after the Scopes trial, the debate over the teaching of evolution continues to rage. There is no easy resolution—It is a complex topic with profound scientific, religious, educational, and legal implications. Dr. Scott discusses the nature of the evolution-creationism…
gregladen | October 2, 2012You'll recall when Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai was filmed admitting that the voter ID law he ushered in for that state was designed to make sure Obama lost there to Mitt Romney (see below). Pennsylvania is sort of a swing state, but Obama winning there would not have shocked anyone even from the perspective of a few months ago before Romney started "running" for president (and by "running" I mean "stumbling"). Since then, all three states that have voter ID laws in place to bias the election towards Republican candidates have seen a backlash against this atrocious insult…
jrosenhouse | October 1, 2012I am slowly working on an article for Skeptical Inquirer about the ways in which religious apologists use mathematical arguments in their rhetoric. Among these arguments are the familiar creationist claims about probability and information theory, but there is also a family of arguments based on the effectiveness of mathematics itself. The basic argument is that mathematics is so useful for describing the world solely because God, in his benevolence, designed the world to be describable in that way. They will often cite Eugene Wigner's 1960 article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of…
gregladen | October 1, 2012Last week's edition of Skeptically Speaking (two Sunday's ago) is now available as a podcast download.
This week, we’re looking at film and video as an exciting, engaging way to communicate science to the public. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan spends the hour with independent film-maker and former BBC video journalist Brady Haran, and artist and filmmaker Henry Reich, creator of the Minute Physics YouTube series. They’ll discuss the promise and pitfalls of telling science stories in moving pictures.
Go here to get the podcast.
Meanwhile, we await last Sunday's interview with David Dobbs…
gregladen | October 1, 2012By now you've probably read the story of Leo Traynor's troll. The very short version: Leo, and later his wife, were stalked on the internet by a horrid troll; the horrid troll eventually started to leave horrid objects with messages at Leo's house; The troll was baited and investigated by an IT expert who could identify him as a teenager that lived not far from Leo; Leo got in contact with the teen-troll's parents, arranged a meeting, forgave him, and the troll seemed kinda sorry.
I think that's a great story and I hereby doff my hat to Leo. But, I have two gripes I want to make. Well, one…
mspringer | October 1, 2012Hey, how about that! Three people in our optics group here at Texas A&M (Professor Alexei Sokolov, postdoc Miaochan Zhi, and grad student Kai Wang) had a photograph from one of their optics experiments make the Optics and Photonics News Image of the Week:
Image of the Week: Raman sidebands from a femtosecond pulse
The crystal in the foreground is being hit by two pulses of light, which interact with the material and each other in such a way as to form numerous other beams with different wavelengths, forming the rainbow of discrete beams seen in the photograph.
This is an effect which…
gregladen | September 30, 2012Sunday Funnies, two of them: Funny and Political Funny.
And, the latest Huxley Video, How to comment on a blog post.
gregladen | September 30, 2012
Arrrrrrgh.
... for science-oriented secular skeptical people like you?
Halloween is when the really scary things make their appearance, mostly in the form of the Halloween Costume Industry. This is when we learn about all those latent adult sexual fantasies involving school children, for example.
But more insidious and damaging, if not just plain annoying, is the janus-faced monster of jack-booted gender policing and Disney/Pixar marketing. Little girls should be princesses or some other girly thing, and little boys should be race cars or some other boyish thing.
Huxley will be…
gregladen | September 29, 2012This week's Skeptically Speaking should be very interesting. David Dobbs, author of Reef Madness, will be on to discuss Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina: A New Biography. There will also be a segment on ENCODE.
Details HERE. Listen live on Sunday (and participate) and download the edited podcast later in the week.
gregladen | September 24, 2012Helium is rare. It is not produced in factories, and the places where it is found in the wild are unusual. When it gets lose, it tends to drift out into space. Simply put, it is a hard to find commodity with a limited availability. Helium is important in science. Big Science Projects like the Large Hadron Collider use Helium to cool magnets down to near absolute zero. Helium is also used in MRI machines, which have become an important part of medial research and diagnosis. Without a supply of Helium, a lot of important science projects would be in trouble.
From the BBC:
Prof Welton…
gregladen | September 24, 2012But at the same time say that Obama is doing it wrong:
The campaign’s plan cited four priorities – giving NASA focus, working with the international community, increasing the nation’s capacity to defend its assets in space and easing trade limits on foreign sales of American “space goods.” Romney did not suggest increased space spending — his budget plan would force cuts in domestic programs, including space — but on increased reliance on commercial firms to get Americans and their goods into space. That mirrors the Obama administration’s plan.
mspringer | September 24, 2012There's this grim and affecting scene in both X-Men and X-Men: First Class - a young Erik Lehnsherr watches his family hauled away by Nazis through the gates of a concentration camp. He's being dragged away by the Nazi guards, and he uses his magnetic powers for the first time to grab the gates with his burgeoning magnetic powers. The combined efforts of the guards aren't sufficient to pry him loose and they finally have to club him over the head. We'll call this Comic Book Physics Paradigm 1:
Paradigm 1: Newton's 3rd Law
Later on, as the adult Magneto, he shoves around gigantic satellite…
gregladen | September 24, 2012First, if you don't have health insurance, that's OK. Just wait until you are catastrophically ill and then they'll pick you up in an ambulance and bring you to an emergency room. He does not discuss what happens later when they come to collect the payments. Also, according to Romney, an Obamacare like plan was a great way to manage health insurance for Massachusetts at the time he was governor, but this does not apply to other people.
gregladen | September 22, 2012First this, from a blogpost by David Firestone:
On the most basic level, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is responsible for saving and creating 2.5 million jobs. The majority of economists agree that it helped the economy grow by as much as 3.8 percent, and kept the unemployment rate from reaching 12 percent.
The stimulus is the reason, in fact, that most Americans are better off than they were four years ago, when the economy was in serious danger of shutting down.
But the stimulus did far more than stimulate: it protected the most vulnerable from the recession’s heavy winds. Of…
gregladen | September 22, 2012Skeptically Speaking #182 Science Cinema
Sunday, September 23rd, Skeptically Speaking will record "before a life UStream audience" as per usual:
This week, we’re looking at film and video as an exciting, engaging way to communicate science to the public. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan spends the hour with independent film-maker and former BBC video journalist Brady Haran, and artist and filmmaker Henry Reich, creator of the Minute Physics YouTube series. They’ll discuss the promise and pitfalls of telling science stories in moving pictures.
We record live with Brady Haran and Henry Reich…