I’m surprised at how this affects me. She was a wonderful woman, wise and funny, and this is a great loss to the nation. Whenever I’m tempted to just write off the whole state of Texas (thanks to a few of its rather prominent representatives), I just remind myself, “Molly Ivins,” and know that I’m being unfair.
Kevin Hayden has put together a sweet tribute to Molly Ivins. We’re all going to miss her.
Since I got ribbed a bit for my antique D&D lore in a previous comment, I have to defend myself from charges of extreme nerdlitude by distracting you all with a real nerdfest: a discussion of who would win in hand-to-hand combat between a first level magic-user and a housecat, complete with computer simulations.
The answer: under the modern rules, the cat usually wins. (When I played, if you said something like “I whack the cat with my staff”, there might be a quick check to see if the cat dodged, and otherwise, we’d just say, “OK, you killed the cat. Now what?” Dang rules lawyers and proliferating nit-pickery.)
Everyone should congratulate ScienceWoman—she manage to land a 7 pound minnow.
Here’s another account of Phil Plait’s talk at TAM5, with more details. I think he threw in a little bit of snark there.
I won’t complain, though—I can afford to be magnanimous after my overwhelming victory over Bad Astronomy.
A strange map—it gives an equivalent nation in GNP for each state in the US:
Some are weirdly appropriate: Minnesota compares with Norway, France and California are mates, and Dick Cheney’s home state shares something else in common with Uzbekistan. Texas and Canada, though…hey, do you think if we tell them that it will double their GNP, that they’ll take Texas off our hands?
Really. This is painfully sad: a young woman enters a water-drinking contest to win a video game console for her kids, and ends up dying of water intoxication.
Gary Farber of Amygdala is in a crisis, both financially and in his health. This is such a waste: Gary is one of the all time great online raconteurs with a long history of bloggy productivity and the respect of swarms of other internet personalities. If someone were setting up a weblog franchise similar to scienceblogs, they ought to snap him up to anchor their site—he’s that good. And at this point, the tiny amount he’s asking for means he’ll work for cheap.
Help him out however you can. And if you’re looking for an interesting and provocative commentator, hire him!
Edge has this annual question, where they ask a lot of smart people something general and provocative, and collect the essays into a webpage. This year, the question is “What are you optimistic about? And why?“
There are a lot of answers, many of them very specific—people are optimistic about the new supercollider, or climate change, or something specific to their discipline—while others are so general that they don’t say much (Humans will survive, somehow!). What I thought interesting, though, is that there was a bit of a trend to one particular kind of answer. Some of the people who answered in this particular way are:
In short, what all of these writers have in common is that they all believe people are going to WAKE UP. They’re going to appreciate evidence and rational thinking and skepticism and generally, science more — they’re going to develop more demanding standards for truth, and they’re going to look at what people tell them more critically.
What a splendid hope! It’s about time we had a new Enlightenment.
I’m not quite so optimistic about the possibility of it actually happening, but I can join in the wishful thinking — yes, these would all be grand changes to see occur. Let’s all work towards making it happen.
Quacks have no shame, but once reputable science and engineering magazines should have some vestiges of it. Popular Science magazine will take money from anyone for the ad revenue, as Cyde Weys demonstrates with a scan of an ad for energized water. It will cure cancer and diabetes, and kills bacteria. It’s crazy and stupid.
Your blood is 94% water and billions of people flush their diseases along with medication into the ground water 4-5 times/day and it ends up at a faucet somewhere. If you have well water and people in the area have cancer, you have a good chance of getting cancer! S.D. Woman: “All around me they have MS, but they all drink pure water from ordinary distillers, filters, ozonators, reverse osmosis and alkaline water machines. The water is pure, why do they have MS?” People in the area with MS flush their diseases into the ground water and you pump the water up to your faucet, proving that the products don’t work!
Wow. So much stupid packed into so few words. It’s an ad that relies on ignorance to generate fear and hysteria so people will buy their product: cancer (with some exceptions) and multiple sclerosis aren’t infectious diseases that you catch from your water. And how about this?
How about the AIDS dentist on CBS 60 Minutes? They all use pure water along with 4,000 dentists surveyed, and yet their purest water can’t even kill pathogenic bacteria! Ours does!
Those dentists! Those bastards! They’re all out to give you AIDS unless they use our magic water!
It has to be seen to be believed. It’s plain ol’ snake oil sold with a full page ad in Popular Science.
