Kos screwed up

Everyone’s talking about Kos, so in one sense he’s done something smart, and he’s going to rake in some more ad dollars over all this attention — but in another Kos has blown it, big time. He has dismissed the death threats against Kathy Sierra as a) same old story that he sees all the time, b) nothing to worry about, and c) reason to suggest that the victim ought to give up blogging, which, of course, is music to the ears of the “psycho losers” who carry out that kind of attempted intimidation. Is Kos really so tone-deaf that he doesn’t realize he has just sided with people who threatened to slit Sierra’s throat and rape her corpse?

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The joke’s on them

I hesitate to mention this, but I seem to be the target of creationist humor. It’s not being targeted that I mind, but that the ‘humor’ is so lame and the photoshopping is so bad. I would have thought that I’d be an excellent subject for lampooning, being easily caricatured and having views outside the mainstream, so why are they so pathetic at it?

Never mind, I looked around the site a little more — it’s all that bad, a kind of ham-fisted exaggeration of creationist misconceptions that really only makes the creationists look foolish, on a par with Dembski’s clumsy attempts at a joke. Don’t they know that good satire has to build on some grain of truth about the subject?

Reasons to believe, according to Collins

If I see Francis Collins’ pious, simpering facade one more time, I’m going to get really pissed off. Can someone please give that man a Templeton Prize and let him retire to the Cascades, where he can stare at waterfalls to his heart’s content? CNN has an article on “Why this scientist believes in God”, and it’s just more vapid crap distilled from his vapid book.

But OK, let’s take him at his word. He claims to be presenting reasons to believe … what are they? Do they meet any kind of scientific standard?

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Let’s not just pick on the Nigerians

The oppression begins at home, and we can’t just blame the men.

I work at a bookstore. I was cashiering today when a woman and her two kids (a boy and a girl, both somewhere between 13-15) came up to the register. The mom was buying 2 celeb gossip magazines, and the boy put down a book. The girl then walked up and set down the newest volume of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.

The mom says “You can’t buy that.”

Girl: Why?
Mom: Because it’s too big.
Girl: [Brother] is buying a book that big. It’s not very expensive.
Mom: [Brother] is a boy. You’re a girl. And girls shouldn’t read big books like that. It’s too thick. Boys don’t like girls who read thick books. You want boys to like you, don’t you?

The girl went and put the book away.

We really need an admissions test for parenthood.

(via Byzantium’s Shores)

Are you going to believe someone who thinks with his feet?

Chuck Norris convinced me before that the bruised and jellied blob bobbing about in his cranium isn’t working so well anymore, but this video of Norris advocating a bible-based public school curriculum is the final kicker.

He’s fronting for an organization that’s trying to smuggle bogus history and religious propaganda into our schools. It’s a shame—after playing a hero for so many years on TV, he’s fading away in the real world as one of the bad guys.

Someday, Cosmopolitan will ask me to write a piece on beauty tips, too

My opinion of Wired magazine just dropped a couple of notches. They’ve got Gregg Easterbrook pontificating on a science issue, the origin of life. Easterbrook is a sports writer with absolutely no clue about science—I’ve commented on his incompetence a few times before (OK, more than a few times). This time he’s soberly stating that no one has done any research on abiogenesis since Miller/Urey, or what they’ve done is a series of failed experiments, and that there are no hints in nature about the chemical origins of life, therefore, maybe a god did it … while completely oblivious to the fact that no one has ever done any research on gods or higher beings, and that there is no evidence for their existence. The man is an idiot. I am still utterly baffled why anyone consults that twit for his opinion on science.

Well, I don’t need to dirty my hands with the fool this time. Smithers, release the Poor Man Institute!

(By the way, I’ll plug it again: if you’re looking for a good summary of the research in early chemical evolution written for a lay audience, I recommend Hazen’s Genesis. I guarantee you that Easterbrook hasn’t read it, from his comments in that article linked above.)

Killing comic book characters for Jesus

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The pop culture hysteria is getting ridiculous. The movie 300, based on a graphic novel treatment of the sacrifice of the Spartans in the battle of Thermopylae, has become a political palimpsest with everyone trying to find support for their agenda in it—but get serious, it’s a comic book on the big screen. Similarly, a few have tried to see omens in the death of comic book hero Captain America recently. Again, it’s a comic book — superheroes die all the time, and they bounce back like Jesus or get replaced by someone else willing to look ridiculous in public wearing garish Spandex. For the most obvious example of a hyperbolic search for Meaning and Significance in the death of fictitious characters, though, we have to turn to the religious — they’ve got so much practice at it, after all. Ladies and gentlemen, behold Rabbi Marc Gellman, whose thesis is that the Spartans and Captain America died for God.

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The daily egnorance: the mind reels

What are we going to do with Michael Egnor? He seems to be coming up with a new bit of foolishness every day, and babbling on and on. Should we ignore him (there really isn’t any substance there), or should we criticize him every time (although he’s probably capable of generating idiocy at a phenomenal rate—he’s got a real talent for it)?

I’m not going to link to the awful “Evolution News & Views” site, and I’ll make this brief. His latest gripe is with the recent Newsweek cover story (that I had some problems with, too), but his argument is silly.

This is your assignment. You are to read the mind of someone named “Lucy.” Actually, you are to find out where Lucy’s mind came from. You can’t meet Lucy. She’s been dead for 3.2 million years. Your only data will be a fragment of Lucy’s fossilized skull and genetic analysis of some apes, men, and lice.

This isn’t a bad dream. This is an exciting new branch of evolutionary biology, and it’s on the cover of Newsweek magazine. And they’re serious.

The article doesn’t claim to be able to read dead minds. It cites a few studies in paleoneurology, where some interesting correlations between hormones and brain-associated proteins with behavior might provide some general insights. If Egnor is going to build straw men, he could at least try to make the stuffing a little less obvious.

He also goes on and on about how he can’t read brains by looking at blood flow in his work. We know. No one claims that we can. Of course, Michael Egnor does use these indirect measures to diagnose general properties of the brain — broad function, health, injury, etc. Unless he wants to argue that the physical state of the brain has nothing to do with the individuals possessing it, in which case he is out of a job, it’s awfully strange for him to claim that we can’t learn anything by examining brains and the molecules associated with him…and the only way he can do it is by inventing this false claim that biologists are saying they can “read the mind”.

He’s going to have to do better than this dishonest junk. I’m getting bored with him already.

Scott Adams reads Newsweek. Uh-oh.

If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, the insignificant, minute information Adams has on evolution must be exceedingly risky—it’s like the atom bomb of ignorance. In this case, it’s not entirely his fault, though. He read the recent Newsweek cover story on evolution, which fed his biases and readily led him smack into the epicenter of his own blind spots, and kerblooiee, he exploded.

This is a case where the flaws in a popular science article neatly synergize with an evolution-denialist’s misconceptions to produce a perfect storm of stupidity.

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