You’ve got almost a month to get it together: it’s the second annual Carl Sagan memorial blog-a-thon. Write something in honor of Carl Sagan by sometime around 20 December. This event got a huge response last year — it ought to be possible to top it this time around.
One of our Minneapolis Christian talk radio stations, KKMS, is organizing a trip.
Join Jeff & Lee as they travel with Heartland Tours & Travel to the Creation Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio! Jeff & Lee will be doing a live broadcast from the museum, and you can be there to see it all happen! of course, there will be other great stops along the way – Chicago (and famous Chicago pizza), the Wisconsin Dells with it’s huge waterpark, shopping at the Tangier Outlet Mall and more! this is a tour that will inspire your faith and make lasting family memories.
Don’t you think they could really use a scientific guide to go along with them? Call me, Jeff & Lee — I’m willing to waive my usual fee to accompany your bus as a consultant.
I am rather amused that what will inspire their faith is Chicago pizza, a tacky amusement park, and shopping.
(h/t to Eva)
An article in the NYT on surname frequency settles the most important issue of our time:
|
Myers |
83 occurrences/100,000 people, rank 85. |
|
Meyers |
21 occurrences/100,000 people, rank 528. |
Now can everyone please start using the dominant, correct spelling?
Once upon a time, a company named XVIVO put together a beautiful computer animation of molecular activity in the cell — you may have already seen it. I have some quibbles with it — there is no water shown, and the behavior of the molecules is too simplistic, without enough noise (molecular behavior at the scale shown ought to be rich with Brownian phenomena) — but it’s dramatic and spectacular, which was the intent. The whole thing was made to inspire and inform Harvard biology students, so it’s actually owned by Harvard and XVIVO.
Now for the curious and nefarious part of the story. Fellows of the Discovery
Institute love this video. It shows the complexity of the cell, and that there are all kinds of specific functions going on within it, so to them, ignorant as they are of the evolutionary history of any of the molecules involved, it seems to support their contention that cells are full of arcane molecular machines that must have been designed. Never mind that these are proteins and other molecules; never mind that we have identified gene families and patterns of descent within these molecules; never mind that complexity is a hallmark of evolutionary processes and products. This is a movie they can show the rubes and say “Wow! I don’t understand that (always true)! You don’t understand that (usually true)! Therefore, JEEEZUS!” That’s their goal.
So what would a group of good Christians with the aim of renewing American culture do? Simple. Steal the video. They’ve grabbed the video, retitled it, removed the biological explanations for the phenomena, dubbed in a really bad, unprofessional narration on top of it, and stripped off the credits. Now, in their various traveling patent medicine shows, they flaunt this unattributed, modified video ripped off from Harvard Biology, and use it in their generic argument from ignorance for anti-evolutionism.
They are shameless thieves.
ERV has documented one example — Dembski used it in his talk at the University of Oklahoma, at which he profited to the tune of about $10,000. If you find yourself at a DI event and see the video played, you might want to take note and let her know.
I was happily absorbed in my slightly vegetative stupor on the couch when my roommate walked into the room and starting talking about physics. Ugh, physics, I thought, but I politely listened as she began talking about lenses, specifically how they are related to sight. It is common knowledge that the images we see are inverted on the retina, and then further processed. However, my roommate was discussing experiments done on humans that inverted their vision by 180 degrees and found that, though at first they could not function normally, eventually they adapted. I thought this was fascinating, and wondered what the brain had to do with this process. Unfortunately my roommate’s knowledge was pretty limited, so I decided to do some research of my own.
Research on visual distortion of the retina has been going on for quite some time. Devices have been used that invert the retinal image, so that everything is seen upside down. At first subjects wearing this device will reach for things and miss, or will bump into things as they travel about a space. Eventually, they adapt. What I wanted to know is how do they adapt? What changes take place in the brain that allow them to do so? Is it just simply learning to reach a little farther to grab something, or walk a bit differently to avoid bumping into something? What is happening at the neural level?
Look: you can buy me on Amazon now, for 99¢ cheap. It’s all through this strange new device Amazon is selling, called a Kindle, which is a fancy new e-book reader with some nice display technology and an absolutely evil business model. Now instead of buying books that you can do with as you please, you can lease them and get digital copies all bound up in DRM hindrances. The hardware is a step forward, the software lock-up of all the content is a big leap backwards, one that is going to doom it all to failure.
Kottke seems unimpressed, Business Week likes it, John Gruber hopes it flops. I’m with the nay-sayers.
Hey, is anyone reading this on a Kindle?
I mentioned last week that the Discovery Institute misrepresented the Minnesota state science standards, pretending that they endorsed “teaching the controversy”. Now Dave Thomas goes through the other 3 (or 4? The DI can’t count) states that the Discovery Institute slandered, and guess what? They don’t support creationism either.
If there actually were a god, Cyclone Sidr would have spun through Bangladesh, selectively eliminating all the two-faced scumbag missionaries who exploit the poor in the name of their deity. Chris Mooney cites an example from the Baptist Press:
In the hours before Cyclone Sidr reached the coastal areas of Bangladesh, Southern Baptists and other Christians began praying — aware that the Category 4 storm potentially could usher hundreds of thousands into an eternity without Jesus.
…
“Last night a lot of people died and entered an eternity of suffering,” Neely said. “Almost none of them has heard a Christian testimony or biblical explanation of who Christ really is. They have never heard the truth about who God really is, who they are in His sight or what God’s plan is to save us from our sin through Christ.”
The title of the source article is also offensive: “Their prayer: that faith in Christ follows cyclone “. That’s looking on the bright side, I guess — all the destruction, the desperation, and the displacement represent marvelous opportunities for the scoundrels and scalawags of religion to move in and harvest souls for Jesus.
I sometimes hear people claim that religion provides consolation to the bereaved. This is a perfect example of the opposite: a manipulative religion used to incite anguish and fear and misery in the minds of survivors.
Well, the Japanese whaling fleet has left port to go slaughter some whales. This is bad policy for several reasons.
Killing endangered animals is always a bad idea, and the Japanese don’t even do it humanely. This is bloody slaughter for the sake of bloody slaughter, and it’s going to harm large species that are easily tipped over the brink into extinction.
It’s basically done as a subsidy for the whalers. This is not really a profitable business. I get irritated by the local farmers who are raising corn for ethanol, an exercise in inefficiency and waste that gets them government money…but getting money for killing large rare animals is more vividly worse.
The biggest reason I despise Japanese whaling is a bit selfish and narrow, I have to confess. It’s because of this:
Japan kills more than 1000 whales a year in the Antarctic and also the Pacific Ocean using a loophole in an international moratorium that allows catching whales for research.
That is such a lie. It demeans science. Japan is not throwing money into their whaling fleet as a research tool; I know what marine biological research looks like, and it rarely involves harpoons, flensing knives, and a cannery. Give university marine mammalogists the money to equip boats to pursue whales, and they won’t look like this:
Note the big “RESEARCH” stenciled across the hull. It’s a lie. It ought to say “BUTCHERY”. The research done by whalers is miniscule, and could be better done without the associated killing.
It may be our next trouble spot. They have a creationist majority on the school board, and they’re saying stuff like this:
Despite the Pennsylvania case, some school board members want both intelligent design and evolution taught in Polk schools. They say they have received numerous e-mails and phone calls in support of intelligent design.
“My tendency would be to have both sides shared with students since neither side can be proven,” Tim Harris said.
Tim Harris, you’re a moron. You need to recognize this fact soon, so that your self-confident ignorance doesn’t lead your school district into a catastrophic law suit that will make you a poster boy for the taxation and education problems that will ensue. Look at Alan Bonsell. That could be you.
“Those who are unaware of history are doomed to repeat it” is really true here. I say this as a friend and fan of public schools—thinking that you are serving a pious community by trying to sneak religion into your schools is a formula for disaster.
Sensible residents of Polk County: I have a suggestion. You should get together and buy each board member a copy of Humes’ Monkey Girl, and tell them to read it…and that they’ll be tested on it. If your school board members are functional illiterates, make them watch the PBS documentary on Judgment Day. The clear message of the trial is how the hubris of certain school board members led the whole district into folly and financial ruin. Another message is that the people they think are their friends, the fellows of the Discovery Institute, will abandon them at the first hint of trouble, and that those who stay you might wish had left, since in the case of the Dover trial it was Behe and Minnich who helped kill the case.
And to people everywhere: if you can, run for your local school board. These small groups of people have tremendous influence on American education, and yet you will find the most remarkably stupid people seated on them, people who campaign on a platform of destroying public education. You will receive no glory and no fame and the power you exercise will not be appreciated by the students it benefits, but we need hundreds of thousands of smart people to take those seats and steer education in a rational direction. If you don’t, there are a million Tim Harrises waiting in line to run it into the ground.
