Darksyde speculates about aliens… with illustrations by Carl Buell and others.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Darksyde speculates about aliens… with illustrations by Carl Buell and others.
Since the announcement has gone public, I’ll mention it here: I get to be the Scientist Guest of Honor at ConFusion, a science-fiction convention in Ann Arbor, in January of 2007. I’ll be there with Howard Waldrop and Elizabeth Moon—I’ll be the nerd hardly anyone has heard of before. Sign up now before the rates go up!
…and never read People magazine in quite the same light again.
I’m stretched out in my easy chair getting ready to watch the Oscars this evening, when this horrid ‘news’ profile about Brokeback Mountain and middle America comes on. I found it offensive: they seem to have sought out the most narrow-minded representatives of this part of the country—your stereotypical Christian bigot, a clutch of white-haired geezers—who hadn’t seen the movie, who rejected it out of hand, who claimed Hollywood didn’t understand farmers, who thought a good movie was that treacly crap, The Sound of Music. If there is anyone who doesn’t understand this part of the world, it’s the patronizing yahoos at CNN who went out of their way to find people who fit their stereotypes.
A reader sent me a link to this video of Spore by Will Wright—it’s the new simulation/god game/tinker toy by the maker of SimCity and the Sims. It looks very, very cool, and I think I’m going to want a copy when it’s available for my computer—but one thing has to be cleared up.
This is not a game about evolution.
It’s highly teleological, with a preset goal of achieving high intelligence—which is a painfully unrealistic and skewed perspective. Why shouldn’t we be able to play to become the very best squid we can be? I guess it’s necessary to constrain the advancement path of the game to something manageable, but I hope they’re crystal clear about the fact that they’re modeling something that does not resemble evolution much at all.
It still looks fun. It looks like they’ve overcome some of the limitations that made the old SimLife and SimEarth such bores, but there’s always the risk that every game here will also end up being the same, with just some more elaborate cosmetics.
That was the best line in Larry King’s interview of Jon Stewart. I didn’t quite get the point of the interview, except as a study in contrasts: the dumbest and the smartest man in the news, and both are dealing in completely fake news.
Stewart did do an excellent job of putting King in his place, though.
This sounds fun: a music theatre production illustrating Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Based on Haydn’s The Creation, Darwin’s Dream
imagines the founder of evolution meeting modern children and
challenging them to explore how his theory has advanced since his
death in 1882. Their quest takes them from the oceans where life is
believed to have begun, to Africa to meet a fossil hunter looking
for evidence of the earliest humans.
It’s also got a dance about DNA. Unfortunately, it’s in London…let’s at least have some of the music put on the web!
Via Jim Lippard, here’s a nice, positive article on the Cafe Scientifique movement, which tries to make science informal and accessible to anyone. We’re doing it again tomorrow, in which I get to be the presenter and talk about “Why all the fuss about evolution?” I hope I don’t turn anyone off with my atheist schtick, in which I clean, fillet, fricassee, and eat a baby on stage.*
*Well, actually, looking at my talk, I don’t seem to actually mention atheism anywhere. I suspect that when the audience notices my horns and tail, though, they might ask about it—so I’ll come prepared for the Q&A with a baby in my pocket. Hey, how about if I cook it over a fire from a burning Bible?
Mr Chicken, the Night Stalker, and now…Henry Morris. There is a kind of cosmic harmony to that trio, in that they all made a living with supernatural silliness to some degree, although Morris…nah, let’s not speak ill of the dead.
Matthew Nisbet has a good list of things we ought to be doing. Number one on the list is what I also think is the biggest thing we have to do:
SCIENCE EDUCATION REMAINS CENTRALLY IMPORTANT.
And I have to admit that educating you, the readers of this weblog, is actually a small part of the task. The real job lies with our public school teachers—they’re the ones shaping the education of the next generation—and no matter what we do right now, the evolution-creation struggle in the public consciousness is going to be going on for at least the next 20 years. It’s very easy to wreck a school and foster ignorance; it’s very difficult to crawl out of the rubble.
