February 28, 2007
Oscar winner An Inconvenient Truth available online.
February 28, 2007
Western States Agree to Cut Greenhouse Gases:
Five Western governors agreed yesterday on a plan to cut their states' emissions of gases linked to global warming and to establish a regional carbon-trading system, though they stopped short of saying how drastically they will seek to reduce greenhouse…
February 28, 2007
Red Letter Day rounds up the six City Commission candidates' statements on the proposed registry. The three progressives are for it, the two growth-for-growth's sake candidates are wishy-washy, and the pastor is predictably less wishy than washy. Given the demographics involved, it would be bad…
February 28, 2007
In a world in which public domain speeches by government officials on government time are copyrighted, it's hard to conclude anything other than that copyright is broken.
If it is not "fair use" to present film shot by CSPAN's cameras of congresscritters at work for educational purposes and with…
February 28, 2007
Chad is bemoaning the increase of "stat-geekery" in sports:
I'll admit that I'm somewhat torn about this. I am, after all, a professional nerd, and enjoy working with numbers, so I can see the appeal of quantitative data. And a lot of the regular statistics used in basketball are pretty crude…
February 27, 2007
The unofficial results show that the City Commission race will be between progressive candidates Highberger, Schauner and Maynard-Moody and aggressive growth candidates Dever, Chestnut and Bush.
The major issues of the race will be "smart growth" versus growth without an adjective. That will…
February 27, 2007
Imagine you were an editor, and two stories came across your desk. One shows that chimpanzees use spears, giving insight into the origins of weaponmaking and violence in human society.
The other article shows that spider monkeys hug to avoid fights:
Hugging diffuses the tension when two bands of…
February 27, 2007
Despite Tony's endorsement, I'm not loving Stay Red Kansas. Tony thinks it's written by insiders, but I see a lot of juvenile errors, and I almost suspect that it's a new venture by the gang from Fire Kansas Democrats. The mistakes they make are basic, like claiming that the RNC would kick in…
February 26, 2007
The New Scientist reviews Conservapedia. Along with our own Dr. Myers and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the article quotes one:
Joshua Rosenau, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas and contributor to Science Blogs claims the site has a darker side. "On some…
February 26, 2007
It never ends, does it. KC mayoral candidates are on TV. I confess I haven't watched those races at all. Read Tony or whatever to find out who's who.
I'm with Red Letter Day on the Lawrence City Council elections. You get to vote for 3 candidates, the top six votegetters go on to the general…
February 26, 2007
Bruce Chapman writes about "encouraging signs in Baghdad" at the DI's blog:
The days you do not hear on the news of some new killing of American troops in Baghdad is a day when the news really should announce: "No Americans Were Killed in Baghdad Today" or even "In Iraq Today."
That's right. In…
February 26, 2007
Chris Mooney is intrigued that the the Discovery Institute is "outing" him, and wonders:
most importantly, doesn't Discovery have anything better to do?
No.
This has been a simple answer to a simple question.
February 26, 2007
Science has a great set of articles on the problem of renewable energy production, a topic of great importance as we ponder not just global warming, but energy policy in general.
Fixing our energy generation, distribution and usage would be a critical problem even if the current system weren't…
February 26, 2007
The ultra-wingnuts at the Council for National Policy can't decide who to endorse:
Many conservatives have already declared their hostility to Senator John McCain of Arizona, …[who] once denounced Christian conservative leaders as “agents of intolerance,” and to former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of…
February 25, 2007
Set aside, for the moment, Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small's conviction for violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Set aside, too, that he petitioned the judge to allow him to perform his 100 hours of community service by reading about that law and the Endangered Species Act, and coming up…
February 25, 2007
Where environmental groups had been fighting against new coal plants only days ago, a record buyout will put TXU firmly behind their agenda:
Under a proposed $45 billion buyout by a team of private equity firms, the TXU Corporation, a Texas utility that has long been the bane of environmental…
February 24, 2007
Scibling Chad weighs in on the discussion between Mark Kleiman and Kevin Drum among others, over whether firing teachers would improve the schools. Kevin wonders whether principals would know enough about teacher performance to know which ones to fire. Kleiman observes that "that discussion…
February 24, 2007
Jim Zumbo is a famous hunter, and has been writing about guns, the outdoors, and hunting, for decades. He has a TV show and is an editor and writer for the second largest outdoor magazine in the nation. Or rather, he was all those things. He lost it all one evening, when, after a hard day of…
February 24, 2007
Via Grrl.
Your Linguistic Profile:
45% General American English
25% Yankee
20% Dixie
5% Upper Midwestern
0% Midwestern
What Kind of American English Do You Speak?
February 23, 2007
Of course, McCain was more subtle than my title, arguing "I believe that if we fail and leave you will see chaos and genocide." As if that wasn't already what we see.
Those of us without rose colored glasses, of course.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a post about the Panglossian paradigm in…
February 23, 2007
While John McCain serenades the creationists at the Discovery Institute, Rep. Duncan Hunter is putting them on his campaign team. Dr. Henry Jordan, newly named co-chairman to the Presidential committee, told the Associated Press "I mean you’ve got to be stupid to believe in evolution, I mean…
February 23, 2007
Via ThinkProgress, Dick Cheney tells ABCNews:
I think there’s an emerging consensus that we do have global warming. You can look at the data on that, and I think clearly we’re in a period of warming. Where there does not appear to be a consensus, where it begins to break down, is the extent to…
February 23, 2007
The Wichita Eagle reports that a proposed state law would allow censorship of letters from sex offenders at a state medical hospital. The bill follows an Eagle report on dangerous conditions at the hotel which was based on a tip from an inmate.
I understand the rationale for censoring…
February 23, 2007
The Wall Street Journal surveys where the major oil companies stand on Global Warming.
February 23, 2007
In today's Washington Post, what loonie leftist wrote:
The real "inconvenient truth" about climate change is that some people are losing their rights and freedoms because of the actions of others -- in either the quality of the air they breathe, the geography they hold dear, the insurance costs…
February 23, 2007
Ohio ID Network boss Roddy Bullock claims:
Kansas (of all places) became the first state to officially impose on public school students an atheistic definition of science
This is either false or meaningless. The Kansas standards do not promote atheism, and if that is the sense of the term, then…
February 22, 2007
Following an idea that occurred to me while being interviewed for an article on the Conservapedia, I tried replacing the inadequate page on the ACLU with the comprehensive Wikipedia entry. Before I had a chance to create an entry for Christianity by the same means, my account was blocked. Alas,…
February 22, 2007
Threadless is a great site where people submit shirt designs, and highly rated designs are printed and sold. Brilliant, beautiful shirts are readily available there.
To their great credit, our Seed overlords have partnered with Threadless. Submit up to three designs on the theme "Science is…
February 22, 2007
One of the late Stephen Jay Gould's regular observations was that the evolution of life on Earth has been highly contingent. Minor, often random, events in life's history have reverberated throughout the eons. One of the many fatal flaws of the "specified complexity," Billy Dembski's idea for…
February 22, 2007
First it was anti-wilderness advocate Gail Norton leading the Interior Department, authoritarian hacks Alberto "Bind, Torture, Kill" Gonzales and John Ashcroft as Attorneys General, Spencer "Abolish the Energy Department" as Secretary of Energy, as well as mine industry officials running mine…
