In a surprising discovery, reading the Wall Street Journal opinion pages will make you 57% dumber, will kill 8,945,562,241 neurons, and will force you to invent ridiculous statistics. Don’t follow that link! The article will make you cry as you go through a Flowers for Algernon experience.
If you’ve been following the Australian lungfish saga, there’s a new development, and it’s an ugly one. As the Noosa Journal reports (they don’t seem to have a web accessible archive, so this issue may vanish soon; here’s a screenshot), the Queensland government is actively suppressing scientific information that highlights the environmental costs of building the damaging dams.
The Beattie Government has ordered the shredding of a vital report used to list the unique Queensland lungfish under Federal environmental laws, according to a world authority on the species, Macquarie University’s Professor Jean Joss. The shredding order follows suppression of the report shortly after it was published, she said.
If the order is carried out, a vital piece of evidence will have been destroyed to support a challenge to the Mary River Dam under Federal Environmental laws.
The suppressed study analyzed the effects of a small weir that was put on the Burnett River, showing that it had a drastic effect on lungfish breeding and recruitment, and predicted that the greater effect of a dam would “reduce recruitment to a Critically Endangered level, at which extinction is assured.”
You know the other side is completely in the wrong when they’re reduced to hiding reality. The Queensland government seems to have adopted the American Republican style of policy making.
Chris Mooney is trying to kill me.
It’s true. He sent me this book, The Republican War on Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (now available in a new paperback edition!), that he knew would send my blood pressure skyrocketing, give me apoplexy, and cause me to stroke out and die, gasping, clawing in futile spasms at the floor. Fortunately, I’ve been inoculating myself for the past few years by reading his weblog (now also in a new edition!), so I managed to survive, although there were a few chest-clutching moments and one or two life-flashing-past-my-eyes experiences, which will be handy if I ever write a memoir.
If you’ve heard the strange little anecdote about GW Bush that’s going around, you will find Tild hilarious today. The illustration is perfect.
Forbes has an article on billionaires who oppose the stem cell ban (free reg required): the subtitle is “Billionaire cash has kept embryonic stem-cell research alive—just barely,” which really says it all. It discusses the extremely generous gifts private donors (and also some state funding by referendum) that have kept stem cell research afloat in the world of GW Bush and the religious right. There’s quite a bit of money flying around out there.
These are policemen who do not understand their obligations as officers of the law. These are policemen who ought to be summarily dismissed from their jobs.
They won’t be.
(via The Lippard Blog)
The latest in Pharyngula-approved carnivals:
Now, open that thread and sing!
Neddie Jingo has an appalling example of the kind of presentation used to promote our strategic plan in Iraq. Go take a look and weep—it’s one of those meaningless godawful PowerPoint-style assemblages of boxes and arrows. You know what I mean: a nightmare of chartjunk that distracts everyone into contemplating the relationships of graphical abstractions on a screen rather than actually dealing with the substance behind them.
I’m actually very impressed that he managed to also put together a paragraph actually explaining what the graphic is supposed to mean, and that the paragraph makes sense…and exposes the deficiencies in the plan.
Once upon a time, it took a fair amount of effort to put together a slide for a presentation. It involved photography—that stuff with film—and you had to plan well ahead and put it together with some care. You had to think about what you were going to include. And when you put all that work and planning into each slide, once it was projected on the wall, you spent a good bit of time carefully explaining it to your audience. The slide was an illustration of some data, and the interpretation and explanation was done with the words you used to accompany it.
Now what I see with PowerPoint is a proliferation of graphical noise and short bullet points, accompanying by a steady bloating of the number of slides shown. An image is no longer a piece of real-world data, but something the speaker flashes up as a substitute for saying anything. As the Neddie Jingo example shows, it can be a flying piece of fantasy with no substance behind it at all…but string enough of those together and you can zip through a pretense of a talk without actually having to say anything.
One measure of a good talk to my mind is being able to imagine the video projector failing, and the speaker still being able to communicate a sensible idea to the audience. PowerPoint isn’t the point of your talk, it’s a convenience, a crutch, a tool for making some data visible. Nothing more.
Although it does look like it can also be a weapon of mass distraction when misused by the military.
Some people seem to be outraged at the idea of people stopping the killing in the Middle East. Those people are, curiously enough, some very prominent Christians.
A small minority of evangelical Christians have entered the Middle
East political arena with some of the most un-Christian statements I
have ever heard. The latest gems come from people like Pat
Robertson, the founder and chairman of the Christian Broadcasting
Network, and Rev. John Hagee of Christians United for Israel. Hagee,
a popular televangelist who leads the 18,000-member Cornerstone
Church in San Antonio, ratcheted up his rhetoric this year with the
publication of his book, “Jerusalem Countdown,” in which he argues
that a confrontation with Iran is a necessary precondition for
Armageddon (which will mean the death of most Jews, in his eyes) and
the Second Coming of Christ.In the best-selling book, Hagee insists that the United States must
join Israel in a preemptive military strike against Iran to fulfill
God’s plan for both Israel and the West. Shortly after the book’s
publication, he launched Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which,
as the Christian version of the powerful American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, he said would cause “a political earthquake.”
With the outbreak of the war on Lebanon, he and others have called
to their followers to pray for Israel, and for the continuation of
the war on Lebanon. They have demanded that Israel not relent in
what they call the need to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. They seem to
have completely forgotten the very core of the Christian faith.
Forgotten the core? What’s that—proselytize, evangelize, convert the heathen, or kill them all and let God sort ’em out? I think Rev. Hagee is perfectly representative of the historical mainstream of the Abrahamic religions.
To our current infestation of cheerleaders for Jesus: if you want to comment on this thread, please make it clear whether you a) believe in the Rapture, Armageddon, etc., b) believe that a war in the Middle East is a necessary precondition for biblical prophecy to be fulfilled, and c) think this is a good thing.
(via Liz Ditz and Boing Boing)
Kung Fu Monkey has a great Daily Show clip—the last few lines from the foreign correspondent are especially biting.
