Obama, cheerleader

The White House has released the text of Obama’s speech to school chidren. It’s nothing deep, just a bit of rah-rah, study hard, you can do great things, yadda yadda yadda. It certainly shouldn’t have freaked out all those schools that were reluctant to expose their kids to the words of our Socialist Foreign President.

There’s nothing specific in it, as you might expect, and science gets a cursory mention.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy. 

Mostly harmless. Maybe a few students will be inspired.

Unfortunately, he chose to end with the standard political platitude. You know, the one that leaves the freethinking students in the cold.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Would it have killed you to simply end with the first two words of that sentence, Obama? Please? You don’t have to be anti-religious, you just have to leave the superstition out of public pronouncements.

You really know how to hurt a guy

Well. You know, I mentioned that my contributions here were going to be greatly reduced for a while, while I was busy plugging away at this damnable book. I had a very busy and productive day, pounding away at the keyboard, and didn’t even look at the site until this evening…and then what do I discover? Traffic is up!

I get the message. You don’t need me at all. Instead, all it takes is a wacky creationist or two yammering away on a random thread to trigger SIWOTI syndrome and get you all refreshing over and over.

Just for that, I’m going to put my head down again tomorrow and hammer out more words that won’t go in the internet. I expect a zillion page views, OK?

Phil Plait ditches bloggingheads, too!

This is not good for bloggingheads: that makes the third high profile science blogger to announce their rejection of bloggingheads, after Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer. Phil would be #4, except I realize I was rather ambiguous about it when I mentioned it before.

So, just to clarify, NO, I won’t be conversing on bloggingheads in the future…which I regret, since I think the site had some real potential.

Several of the commenters on Phil’s site do not think it is a good idea, because lunacy like creationism ought to be confronted whenever we can do so. I agree! The problem with bloggingheads wasn’t simply that creationists were given a venue — it was that creationists were given a venue without voices opposing their ideas. It was setting up crackpots with softball interviews that made them look reasonable, because their peculiar ideas were never confronted. That’s what has to be rejected, not the idea of arguing with bad ideas (although Sean Carroll makes a good case that some ideas are so bad they don’t even deserve debate), but a site that promised discussion yet became open mic night for loons.

Pareidolia for the godless

Hey, those other people get their Jesus in a pita, their Hebrew blessings from croaking fish, and Allah in their sliced fruit, so it’s about time we got something. How about a fifteen foot tall A in a geological anomaly?

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Sean Murphy sent me this; you can find it in Boulder Canyon up Sugarloaf Road, in Colorado. I don’t expect to hear in the news that the Colorado atheists are all lined up there with candles and anointing oil, OK, or I’ll be very disappointed in you. It’s just a rock.

Most excellent news from Wyoming

I reported a while back that the University of Wyoming geology museum was in danger of extinction: it has been pulled back from the brink by a generous private donation of over half a million dollars, with matching funds from the state. I don’t like to see significant public institutions’ survival depending on the whim of individuals, but we take what we can get, and are grateful for it.

The evolution of Darwin

When I was in New York a while back, I got to meet Ben Fry, a clever fellow who has been doing some amazing things with data visualization. One of the things we played with was a a new toy he’d worked out, or rather, a new application of some old tools. One of the things biologists are interested in is change over time, and we compare genomes to see where changes have occurred between two or more species; one of the reasons we’re interested in the chimpanzee genome, for instance, is that it is close to ours, and what scientists are doing is comparing the two, looking for the key differences.

There are other things that change over time that lend themselves to these sorts of analyses. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species went through six editions during his lifetime, and it wasn’t a static document at all — he revised, sometimes extensively, and he added new material, sometimes in response to new data, sometimes in reaction to public and private concerns.

What Fry has done is taken the text of all six editions, compared them, and color-coded the words by when they were added. Then he rendered them in teeny-tiny print and splashed them up on the screen so you can see when and where changes occurred in Darwin’s text. It takes a while to load, since it is loading the full text of six editions of the Origin, plus annotations, but then you can just move your cursor around over the blocks to read and see what he was thinking. For instance, one thing that jumps out at you is the huge block of red in the middle of the document, a whole large section that was added in the sixth edition. Mouse over it, and you’ll see how it starts:

I WILL devote this chapter to the consideration of various miscellaneous objections which have been advanced against my views, as some of the previous discussions may thus be made clearer;

That makes sense; this is a piece of the story that Darwin added late, after the book had drawn a lot of criticism, to address specific problems.

It’s a fun gadget. Go explore the evolving mind of Darwin!