Well, it’s time for my usual wild night of partying…oh, wait. I never do that. My wife is out at a neighbor’s party, while I’m sitting at home, nursing a painful tendinitis flare-up, and drinking…tea. Sorry, image. I’ll probably just read for a while, and if I’m feeling rambunctious, I might have a wee glass …
Monthly Archive: December 2012
Dec 31 2012
Mary’s Monday Metazoan: In with the new!
Is this the time of year for metaphors about the old’uns fading away and new ones beginning? (via Australian Geographic)
Dec 31 2012
Wait, that’s not a super-villain!
Here’s an interesting scenario: how an ‘evil’ super-genius could take over the world. Basically, it involves building a new nation-state which openly and thoroughly embraces science and technology, not just electronics, but also biotechnology. It’s a little bit pat — apparently, there are no trade-offs and compromises in building a super-scientific nation, and none of …
Dec 31 2012
No, I haven’t forgotten Taslima!
She’s been doing excellent work covering the rape in Delhi, that patriarchal mindset, the weird Indian combination of eroticism and sexism, and the death of the recent rape victim. You should be reading her blog and Avicenna’s to see what’s going on in India!
Dec 31 2012
Keith Kloor responds
And it’s even worse than I expected. I had presentiments of failure: last night he tweeted this at me. Talk about completely missing the point…he had previously written a post quoting Saul Bellow saying science was unsatisfying; I was baffled about why he thought Bellow was a particularly insightful contributor on this topic, especially since …
Dec 30 2012
So long, and thanks for all the Archaea
Biologist Carl Woese has died of pancreatic cancer at age 84: Carl and his colleagues wrote two papers published in 1977 that overturned a universally held assumption about the basic structure of the tree of life. They reported that the microbes now known as Archaea were as distinct from bacteria as plants and animals are. …
Dec 30 2012
Accommodationists are so easy to outguess
Brace yourselves. Keith Kloor promises to rebut me once he finishes watching some football game today. Just to make it easier for him, though, I threw together a simple accommodationist bingo card. Let’s see if he can do it while avoiding these extraordinarily cliched words and concepts. I’m going to predict it will be the …
Dec 30 2012
What were you doing in the 1950s?
Well, actually, I was sucking on a bottle and struggling to get potty trained, but I had enough of a taste of that era to shudder at the thought of revisiting it. The Nuclear Secrecy Blog is my idea of a scary horror story — don’t visit it unless you really want to get drawn …
Dec 30 2012
What I did on my Newtonmas vacation
…was, mostly, having houseguests. And falling behind on my writing, but in a good way. One of the perks of living next door to a National Park is that there’s an easy default option for entertaining friends who come to visit. It’s especially good if that National Park has climbable rocks to allow visiting kids …
Dec 30 2012
The new definition of “fundamentalist”
Keith Kloor, a journalist and blogger at Discover, really doesn’t like those fundamentalist atheists and he echoes those ridiculous comments by Peter Higgs. The other big argument waged by a vocal group of prominent scientists involves the assertion that science is incompatible with religion. This insistence by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne …
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