It grows to 1 or 2 meters tall, and it blanketed the land one time, when Indians tried to fight the government.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
It grows to 1 or 2 meters tall, and it blanketed the land one time, when Indians tried to fight the government.
The Lakota and Dakota are fighting another battle in which they are the underdogs: North Dakota oil interests are building a pipeline across the state, right near the Standing Rock reservation and their water supply, the Missouri, Mississippi, and Big Sioux rivers.
You know, oil pipelines leak, right?
So look at these amazing photos of the current standoff.
The police keep standing on the wrong side of every fight, don’t they?
Finally, a germ of evidence: a “flood of near Biblical proportions” has destroyed the home of…Tony Perkins. It’s almost believable, except that this would be practically the first time God actually smote a deserving target.
I might have to do some serious soul-searching (first, I’d have to find my soul) if this god were to destroy the entire Patriarchy Research Council.
If you’re concerned about other flood victims, go here to find out how to help.
Undark has a very good article on how journalism could be changing the problem of sexual harassment in academia. It really is a big mess that needs cleaning up.
Katze, BuzzFeed wrote, had been admired for, “preaching calm in the face of fear” during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Yet the laboratory he had led for nearly 30 years “was descending into chaos.” He was found to have “misused university resources for personal gain, including by asking an employee to do chores for him and solicit a prostitute,” the story said.
Katze responded by suing the university in federal court for violating his rights as a tenured professor. He also sued BuzzFeed to block release of the documents in the investigation, which included more than 100,000 text messages, emails, and other material. Both suits were unsuccessful, a fact noted in the story by Azeen Ghorayshi, a staff reporter at BuzzFeed, who has been tracking cases of sexual harassment by scientists for months.
I’ve noticed, over the years, how often harassers use legal intimidation to try to suppress word of their actions getting out…and how often it totally fails and often serves to spread the news even more. There are processes in place to examine these issues; rushing to the courts means you’re either a) trying to suppress an unwanted finding, or b) trying to prevent an unwanted finding from occurring. There is a place for the legal recourse when an unjust ruling is made in the process, but it’s awfully hard to argue that Katze’s case was unfair.
I’d also point out that it’s peculiar because usually the process is weighted in favor of the harasser, anyway.
But maybe the science journalists will actually make a dent in the problem. It’s also a good sign that these reporters are tackling the hard cases.
And yet, reluctant whistleblowers and tangled knots of competing interests and motivations have forever been the hard stuff of journalism, whatever the beat, and science journalists are as obliged as any member of the profession to keep digging, keep writing, keep exposing. Sure, such work won’t change things overnight. But change — however sluggish and freighted with cultural inertia — can’t happen without it.
“I think in the long run,” Balter said, “[a] cultural change will take place that will make sexual harassment more difficult to get away with.”
We can hope.
That concept is so dead. But if you know someone who still trots out the ol’ argument from personal incredulity, show them this simple video about the evolution of the eye.
Yesterday it was Ray Kurzweil. Today it is Steven Pinker. What is it with these people trying to reassure us that the world is getting better for the average person? They’re the real world equivalent of the ‘This is fine’ dog.
Look, I agree with them: in many ways, the world is gradually getting better for some of us, and slowly, increasingly more people are acquiring greater advantages. I am personally in a pretty comfortable position, and I’m sure life is even better for oblivious buffoons hired by google to mumble deepities, or for Harvard professors. Pinker and Kurzweil even make the same trivial argument that it’s all the fault of the news:
News is a misleading way to understand the world. It’s always about events that happened and not about things that didn’t happen. So when there’s a police officer that has not been shot up or city that has not had a violent demonstration, they don’t make the news. As long as violent events don’t fall to zero, there will be always be headlines to click on. The data show — since the Better Angels of Our Nature was published — rates of violence continue to go down.
This thread is for talking about whatever doesn’t fit into the other categories. Caine is your curator.
How Brian Cox keeps his cool is quite impressive. Here, he’s arguing with an Australian senator and climate change denialist, Malcolm Roberts, who keeps insisting, quite rightly, that evidence is important, that evidence trumps opinion, that policy should be defined by empirical evidence…and every time Cox shows him the evidence, he simply rejects it, accusing NASA of faking the data, and arguing that the various climatoogical agencies have been colluding to “corrupt” the data.
I guess it’s a step forward that the kooks are at least acknowledging that real data is important, now we just have to carry it through to the next step, of paying attention when the data slaps them in the face.
I’m not the only one who thinks Ray Kurzweil is an ignorant buffoon — here’s a post dissecting his latest foolishness:
People think the world’s getting worse, and we see that on the left and the right, and we see that in other countries. People think the world is getting worse. … That’s the perception. What’s actually happening is our information about what’s wrong in the world is getting better. A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you’d never even hear about it. Now there’s an incident halfway around the globe and we not only hear about it, we experience it.
The big problem with this? It’s not true. Like, at all.
Let’s start with the time period he’s talking about: A century ago. One hundred years. That would put us smack dab in the middle of 1916.
Do you know what was going on in 1916? The world was tearing itself to bits with destructive technology. The United States wouldn’t enter the war until the following year, but World War I was the war that would see men being annihilated with tanks, machine guns, mustard gas, the works. And everybody knew about it. How do I know this, sitting here in 2016? I just walked three feet behind me to a bookshelf and looked for some of my magazines from World War I.
The author is pointing out that one problem with Kurzweil’s claim is that it is simply false; Kurzweil wants to argue that we think the world might be getting worse is that we’re just aware of what’s going on, but clearly, almost everyone had a crystal clear idea of the horrors that were going on a century ago.
But I think there are other problems, as well. The world might be getting worse, it might be getting better, but this is a question about people’s perception of the world, and I suspect most of us think we’re better off than we were a century ago (with significant exceptions for bombed-out nations in the Middle East, or people victimized by terrorist groups, like ISIS or Boko Haram). I know I’d rather live in the 21st century than the 19th or earlier. So his initial premise is wrong, or at least misleading.
Another problem: when was this mythical time that a village could get wiped out and one a few miles away wouldn’t know about it? Communication was slower, but the information would get there eventually. Europe had a series of continent-wide wars in the 17th century; Rome controlled everything from Syria to Britain. Information might have flowed via boat or horseback rather than fiber optic cables, but it’s simply not true that people in the Middle Ages or the ancient world were sitting about only aware of the local dungheap.
It is also egregiously absurd to claim that we not only hear about it, we experience
events around the world. We don’t. For instance, the latest news from Nigeria is that Boko Haram is still holding 200 girls captive. Are you experiencing it? Have you felt even a tiny fraction of the pain the families of those girls have felt over the last two years?
And finally, I have to point out that his definition of ‘better’ is unstated and implicit — he assumes that a better world is one where people have more and faster information about events in the next village or the next continent. Why? In particular, if we do nothing with the information we have about the next town over, how does that improve the planet?
But then, this is Kurzweil all over: ignorant of history, ignorant of science, but mumbling words of technological wish-fulfillment and making his fans happy.
You’d think Rudy Giuliani would have 9/11/2001 seared into his brain, since he shrieks about it so much. But here’s Giuliani, stumping for Trump:
Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States. They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.
He must also trust that the Trump fans are friggin’ idiots, too.
You don’t believe Giuliani could possibly have said that? Here it is, at 57 seconds into this clip. Most remarkably, before he made that claim, he listed specific attacks by radical islamic terrorists, in 2001 and 1993.
Maybe he thinks Obama has been in office for 23 years?
