How sweet

That nice but batty lady, Denyse O’Leary, is teaching a course in intelligent design. At the University of Toronto. Woe, the devaluation of a great research university…!

Oh, but wait. It’s actually taught at St Michael’s College, a Catholic institution within the University of Toronto. And you have to look at the course entry to believe it. It’s a non-credit course under the category of “Scripture, Spirituality & Pastoral Care”, and the listing is buried in the middle of a lot of theology, mysticism, New Age nonsense, and gibbering madness.

it fits in perfectly.

Einstein to join Darwin in the pantheon of despised scientists

Physicists, do you feel left out? Some nobody biologist from the Middle-of-Nowhere, Minnesota gets featured in a crackpot movie, but all you get is incoherent dumpster-diving schizophrenics making tirades about your work, and never anybody who has heard of venture capital? Rejoice! Your loons are getting more professional, too!

Feature Length Doc “Einstein Wrong” Looking for Executive Producer

Two Oscar Winning Distributors Wanting a Rough Cut

LONG BEACH, Calif, October 16, 2007 – Bootstrap Productions is currently
looking for an executive producer for it’s feature-length documentary
“Einstein Wrong – The Miracle Year” due out in 2008. The documentary is
about a suburban house wife who takes on the icon of 20th century physics
to see if in fact relativity is wrong. Shot over the past 3 years, the
film has two Oscar-winning distributors interested in the project. The
film is directed by David de Hilster who has invested 13 years studying
scientists and their efforts to show Einstein wrong. It is co-produced
and edited by Andrea Tucker, and Nick Tamburri and is due out in
2008. For more info, go to
http://investing.einsteinwrong.com.

Contact:
David de Hilster
Long Beach, California
http://www.einsteinwrong.com

I hope they get that financial backing soon, because I think it would be perfect if this movie came out in February 2008, and went head-to-head with Expelled.

This could be almost as bad as that dreadful What the bleep do we know? movie. By the way, you can search all over their website, and you won’t find anything that explains what Einstein got wrong, how they figured it out, or what alternative they propose. The similarity to Intelligent Design creationism is perfect.

Time to skew another internet poll

Or in this case, perhaps, unskew one. Take a look at this poll that asks, Does Islam Oppress or Liberate Women? The leading answer so far is “Islam is generally liberating to women, freeing them from sexual pressures that exist elsewhere. “

Yeah, if by “liberating” you mean “compelling them to wear a bag over their head, not allowing them to drive or hold various public positions, and in some cases, gouging out chunks of their genitalia with a piece of broken glass.”

Old pulp crumbles into cultural irrelevance, alas

Prehistoric Pulp, my source for all pop culture with dinosaurs, reveals that there will be a new direct-to-video (not promising) animated (could be bad) movie of Turok, Son of Stone (awesome!) And it’s not the stupid bastardized version that was corrupted for video games to include cyborg dinosaurs!

Yeah, yeah, it looks a bit cheesy and cheap and it’s got cultural stereotypes run amuck, but it’s personal. Back when I was a tiny young fella and my father was a blue-collar wage slave working long hours, when he got home he’d sometimes ask me to read to him, and there were two things we both got into: Edgar Rice Burrough’s Mars stories, and Turok comic books. Both of those have faded considerably from the Great American Memory Collective, you have to be of a certain age to actually appreciate them, and they just seem a little quaint and peculiar and dated if you read them now, but hey, they were part of my childhood landscape, so I like ’em.

I’d also like to see A Princess of Mars made into a movie, but I think it’s impossible. The special effects are doable, but the tone couldn’t survive: they were all about old-fashioned gallant heroism, naked people with swords and radium pistols, and exotic, unbelievable Martian landscapes, and nowadays the casual chauvinism would get in the way, and nobody could write it straight as Burroughs did. The titular Princess is a voluptuous Martian mammal … who interbreeds with a human and lays eggs. It couldn’t be done now without cracking a joke.

Got formula?

This is a little late for any Londoners out there, but Edge had a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery that debuted last weekend. It’s a collection of scientists’ and technologists’ and artists’ answers to the question, “What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?” All of the answers are on display at the site now, so have a browse. There’s a little bit of everything, from obvious truisms (like mine) to detailed, specific formulae, to weird guesses, to stuff that is outright crazy, but nobody said exactly the same thing (which is probably a reasonable outcome from Pinker’s equation, if nothing else).

So…what’s your formula, equation, algorithm?