June 25, 2007
Emily Yoffe's muddled explanation of why she's willing to pretend global warming won't happen is deeply confused. Consider this statement (a version of which is a common part of the denialist toolkit):
I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August…
June 24, 2007
What he said. More anon.
June 23, 2007
Apparently because we mentioned sex and death.
June 22, 2007
I rolled the dice and pulled up ten random tunes from the ether. What mysterious messages
"4.39 Am (For The First Time Today - Part 2)" by Roger Waters from the album The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking (1984, 2:02).
"Stormy Weather" by Pixies from the album Bossanova (1990, 3:26).
"Dirt Road…
June 22, 2007
Farhad Manjoo points to:
Ed Felten and Randy Picker [who] point to an interesting ruling from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals: Because people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they communicate over e-mail, the court ruled that the government must obtain a search warrant to get your e-…
June 22, 2007
The Senate sent an energy bill to the House which includes strong fuel economy standards but doesn't include provisions that would have promoted renewable fuel use. Detroit had hoped for weaker fuel economy standards, and environmental groups had hoped to see a requirement that electric utilities…
June 21, 2007
Randomly selected from songs rated 4 or 5 stars:
"This Night" by Destroyer from the album This Night (2002, 5:57).
"It's Not My Birthday" by They Might Be Giants from the album Then: The Earlier Years (1991, 1:52).
"She Was a Girl, She Was in Love" by Matt Baldwin from the album American Primitive…
June 21, 2007
The ScienceBlogs are abuzz with discussion of how scientists should handle the media. The concern from scientists seems to focus on the fear of being misquoted, and the journalists are responding by pointing out that misquotations are rare, and that when they occur, they rarely are substantive…
June 20, 2007
At World Wide Webers.
June 20, 2007
It's been a while since I did one of these:
"Crush On You" by Bruce Springsteen from the album The River (1980, 3:11).
"Carrot Juice Is Murder" by The Arrogant Worms from the album Gift Wrapped, The Best of the Arrogant Worms (2002, 3:29).
"Might" by Modest Mouse from the album This is a Long…
June 20, 2007
A theme of Season 4 of The Wire is the way that we create programs that work, and then let those programs fall apart for lack of political will. (I suppose that's the lesson of "Hamsterdam" in season 3, as well.) Mr. Presbo took a student under his wing, helped him clean up his life, brought him…
June 20, 2007
I love Threadless, I love Seed magazine, and apparently, Seed loves Threadless. We're all a big happy family.
Threadless, for those of you out of the loop, is a website where users can post t-shirt designs, other users can rate the designs, and they print and sell the top-rated shirts. Our…
June 19, 2007
The computer I usually blog from is having technical issues, so TfK is going to be intermittent for a little while while I sort things out.
June 17, 2007
It's fairly common to hear the claim that religious belief in America has been very stable over the years. That's true to some extent, but a look at Gallup's long-term trend data suggests that the long-term stability may be changing, and that change corresponds nicely with the Bush era or perhaps…
June 17, 2007
J.D. started blogging 5 years ago yesterday. Go wish him many happy returns.
For those keeping track, TfK will turn three years old on August 4, and will celebrate our anniversary at Scienceblogs on August 20.
June 16, 2007
One hundred forty eight Republicans voted against the bill funding Homeland Security operations. Speaker Pelosi explained:
The bill funds the hiring of 3,000 new border patrol agents, rejects the cuts President Bush sought in the training and equipping of first responders, and improves aviation…
June 15, 2007
In an encouraging ruling, a judge in Washington ruled that salmon raised in hatcheries cannot be considered as if they were equivalent to the wild populations:
His decision flatly rejects the idea that if enough salmon can be produced in hatcheries, there is little need to protect wild stocks. It…
June 14, 2007
A paper by Notre Dame's David Campbell (PDF link) finds that evangelicals are more likely to vote for a Republican when they live in a community with more people who do not identify with any religion. Building on a tradition of research in race relations which tests whether integrated communities…
June 14, 2007
In the 1950s, General Motors and their allies bought up and killed off streetcars in cities across the country. Whether or not you attribute that to conspiracy, it certainly reflects the shift the nation went through at the time. Cars and roads took over as suburbs grew and America sprawled out…
June 13, 2007
One of the reforms introduced by the new Congress was a requirement that funding requested by a specific member of Congress identify that member. Apparently, this year's list will not be completed until the appropriations bills get into the House-Senate conference committee. Congresswoman Boyda…
June 12, 2007
In a suit brought by the Western Watersheds alliance, a federal judge blocked the Bureau of Land Management's new grazing rules:
The BLM violated the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in creating the rules, U.S. District…
June 12, 2007
Last March, the Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam reported on research which showed that, in one interviewee's words, "We are really bad about putting ourselves in other people's places and looking at the world the way they look at it." We tend to quickly assign base motives to our opponents and…
June 11, 2007
PZ Myers looks at the poll we've been discussing lately, sees that all 72% of evolution-deniers do so for religious reasons, and wonders:
So tell me, everyone: why are scientists supposed to respect religion, this corrupter of minds, this promulgator of lies, this damnable institution dedicated to…
June 11, 2007
"Truth," the late philosopher Richard Rorty explained, "is what your contemporaries let you get away with." It has been observed that his contemporaries did not, as a general proposition, let him get away with that understanding of truth.
This comment came to mind not just because Rorty passed…
June 11, 2007
A poll released last week found that a substantial chunk of Americans think that humans were created 10,000 years ago, and evolved over millions of years. Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll explains that and other insights by pulling together their data on public views of evolution…
June 9, 2007
Peg Britton has been blogging about Kansas for 5 years. She estimates that she's the oldest daily blogger in blogtopia (as skippy calls it), and I believe her blog would be the longest-running political blog in Kansas (by six days).
June 9, 2007
The Kansas Guild of Bloggers will gather at Paul's place this week.
June 8, 2007
A majority of Americans would not change their views of a candidate who did not believe in evolution, 28% would be less likely to vote for an anti-evolutionist, and 15% would be more likely to back that candidate.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that the poll shows Americans deeply confused…
June 8, 2007
South Lawrence noise just the sound of gas being released.
June 8, 2007
NASA reveals a new island off Greenland. Well, not necessarily new:
Long connected to Greenland’s coast by ice, the island escaped recognition for what it was for nearly a century.
As you can see from the Landsat images, the island was covered by ice 20 years ago, and an ice bridge connected it…
