Demonstrating once again that we northerners are dour old puritans, Argentina has legalized gay marriage.
If this means Argentinians are damned, that’s just more good news: there will be Carnival in hell.
Really, they are. A while back, the Institute for Creation Research moved to Texas, where they expected a friendly welcome, and instead they got spanked: their request to be allowed to hand out degrees was turned down by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. This made the ICR angry, and they made a wacky lawsuit. A genuinely deranged brief. Their minds work in very twisty weird ways.
They’ve gone down in flames — they are not authorized to give out degrees. But those creationist brains that scuttle sideways and inside out are not daunted by this mere legal restriction! Their website now proudly proclaims that they offer a Master of Christian Education (M.C.Ed.) degree. How can they do that?
11. Is ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics program accredited?
Due to the nature of ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics—a predominantly religious education school—it is exempt from licensing by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. Likewise, ICR’s School of Biblical Apologetics is legally exempt from being required to be accredited by any secular or ecumenical or other type of accrediting association. That’s freakin’ brilliant. Are they offering accredited degrees? NO. The THECB refused to license them. But instead of saying that, they cleverly dodge the question. Imagine some poor gullible teacher suckered into getting a Masters in “Christian Education”, and then going back to her school administrators and waving her diploma around to justify getting a promotion. “Is that an accredited degree from a licensed university?” “They are exempt from licensing.” “So it’s not licensed…is it accredited?” “They are legally exempt from being required to be accredited.” “So it’s not accredited.” “WHERE’S MAH RAISE?”Share this:
That’s the latest news, anyway: radio masts operated by the Vatican have been implicated in an increased incidence of cancers nearby.
It is such a juicily evil story — it would just fit the Pope’s Bond villain image so well — but, and I really, really hate to defend the Vatican, I don’t buy it. Sorry. I know it’s my mission to smack the Catholic church around, but this is a case where I just find it highly unlikely.
I have not read the report; all I’ve seen so far is the accusation, the small numbers (19 deaths in 23 years) and the excessive charges — 6 people are being investigated on criminal charges of manslaughter. Something’s just not right here.
These stories crop up regularly. People claim power lines or cell phones cause cancer, but none of the data really support it — there is no plausible mechanism where these very weak fields could be causing cancer, and at best the epidemiological studies show there can be only a very small effect…or more likely, no effect at all.
Maybe there are some new and persuasive data and statistics in this new Italian study, but even if they actually have a believable measure of an effect, it’s not going to justify criminal charges. It’s also peculiar to focus on just the Catholic church; are there no other shortwave radio antennas in Italy?
Apparently there are: the Italian navy has radio masts in the same area, but to make the report even weirder, only Catholic antennas and not naval antennas cause cancer. I’d like to know how they determined that, and what makes Catholicism carcinogenic.
It’s always party time in the exuberant thread, but now it’s party time with magic tricks!
(Current totals: 10,618 entries with 1,056,455 comments.)
Bleh. MSNBC is running a terrible article that claims they have “proof” that chickens came before eggs. It’s just an awful mess, and one of the scientists is at least partly responsible.
The scientists found that a protein found only in a chicken’s ovaries is necessary for the formation of the egg, according to the paper Wednesday. The egg can therefore only exist if it has been created inside a chicken.
…
“It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first,” said Dr. Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University’s Department of Engineering Materials, according to the Mail.
No. What they found was a specific molecule called ovocleidin which is a member of a family of C-type lectin-like proteins. These things are all over the place; they’re cell adhesion molecules, some are involved in cell signaling, some function in modulating the immune system and blood clotting pathways. They’re even found in snake venoms. They’re found in everything from C. elegans to mammals. Their key property is that they bind calcium.
In birds, these proteins have been coopted to regulate egg shell formation. They bind calcium and can seed the crystallization of calcium carbonate, and also control the rate of crystal formation. Chickens have ovocleidin, but geese have an ortholog, ansocalcin, and ostriches have struthiocleidin. There seems to be a lot of lability in what particular calcium-binding protein is used in shell formation, and it’s probably the case that most of the sequence is free to mutate without affecting the nucleating function.
You simply can’t make the conclusion the reporter was making here. The species ancestral to Gallus gallus laid eggs, the last common ancestor of all birds laid eggs, the reptiles that preceded the birds laid eggs…the appearance of egg laying was not coincident with the evolution of ovocleidin. The first chicken that acquired the protein we call ovocleidin now by mutation of a prior protein also hatched from an egg.
What were the people involved in this story thinking?
These are the only flowers I want in my garden. Thanks to Meg for sending it along!
We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And here is a website that tells you everything that will happen…in the Future!
You may be excited to know that we have a specific date for the imminent demise of Christianity: 2240. It’s all based on this very scientific graph.
Yes, my friends, in the future we will be able to predict complex sociological phenomena from a short sample of data by fitting it to a straight line. We cannot do this today without gagging, but in the Future, it will be easy!
My friends, there is so much more. Before Christianity fades away so completely and so linearly, hunger and disease will be eradicated in 2200, you’ll be able to upload your mind to a computer in 2220, and you’ll be able to travel to nearby stars in your anti-matter fueled starship in 2230. Well-fed godless starfaring software minds for the win! For the Future!
Even greater wonders await us in 2300, when we become naked blue superhumans. In the FUUUUUUTUUUUUURE!
I know, I know already. We’re getting creationist and religious ads appearing on the right sidebar.
Seed has farmed out some of their ad space to a generic ad provider, which doesn’t pay us much and which stuffs in ridiculous ads from any old desperate wanker who wants to buy some attention. In this particular case, I know the guy behind the ad: he was one of those obsessed cranks who, for a while, was sending me nagging emails every day demanding that I read his ReVoLuTiOnArY ThEoRy. I guess he got tired of the cold shoulder and decided to buy space on the web, a sure measure of exactly how much validity we should assign to his claims, i.e., none.
Anyway, I read his site so you don’t have to. Really, you don’t: these are ads paid for by impressions, not clicks, so every time you load this page and get served up that ad, you are costing him money. So don’t click on the ad at all, that’s what gives him a sense of accomplishment. The best thing you can do is visit Scienceblogs over and over again, bleeding away the money he sunk into the ad and transferring it to my pocket, and never once click on it.
Anyway, his schtick is really clumsy. He wants you to visit his page in which he makes lots of dramatic claims, and then in order to go on and read more, you have to give him a name and address and get on his mailing list. Don’t do it. It’s like signing up for a subscription to have moldy maggoty tapioca poured in your ear every day.
Here’s what he says if you were to waste your time clicking on his ad. It’s a prediction that Darwinism will expire in a few years.
It’s no different than the Berlin Wall in 1986, Enron in 2000 or the US financial markets 3 years ago: It’s a bubble propped up by academic theorists, atheist zealots, politics and shell games – not hard science.
All that needs to happen is for the right 3-5 scientists to step forward and expose the evolution industry for what it is…. and it’s not a question of “IF”, it’s only a question of WHEN. Darwinism has about 2-5 years left. And when the !@#$ hits the, fan it’s it’s gonna be quite a spectacle.
But that’s not the important part! The real crime is that the “evolutionists” never bothered to tell you how evolution REALLY works. The evolutionary process is neither random nor accident. It’s purposeful, it’s pre-programmed, it’s so ingenious and elegant it takes your breath away.
In fact the evolutionary paradigm I’m about to share with you was first proposed more than 60 years ago. It was an object of derision and ridicule until it won the Nobel Prize for Science in 1983.
No, he doesn’t actually share the secrets with you. You have to sign up for his ego-serving mailing list, and then he’ll tell you. Maybe. He was dunning me with email for a long time, and he never managed to say anything that made sense or even revealed a speck of biological knowledge. He’s an electrical engineer and he’s an idiot. Surprise!
By the way, there is no Nobel Prize for Science. There is a Nobel Prize in Physics, which was won in 1983 by Chandresekhar and Fowler for work on stellar evolution and the formation of elements; I don’t think that’s it. There’s a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, won by Henry Taube for work on electron transfer reactions; even less likely. Then there’s the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, won by Barbara McClintock for the discovery of mobile genetic elements; BINGO. McClintock’s work was certainly surprising, amazing, wonderful…and also difficult to understand, and I can tell you that I’ve always been dazzled by the astounding insight she brought to that work, but no, it doesn’t revolutionize evolution in any way. It’s all pure genetics, no magic, and certainly has no implication of a designer.
As for his claim that Darwinism is in trouble and will end in 2013 — <snore>. It’s a creationist cliche, and they’ve been saying this since before Darwin. Predictions that evolution is doomed have been collected by Glenn Morton in The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism.
The funniest one there is Dembski’s prediction in 2004 that “molecular Darwinism” will be dead in the next five years. The only interesting thing about these predictions is that they set a date for the next creationist-mocking party. See you in 2013!
The biggest consumer of porn in the US is Utah, and hotels report increased viewing of porn during religious conventions. Could there be a relationship between religiosity and private viewing of porn? Here’s another datum: use google to look at searches for pornographic terms world-wide.
Google ranks Pakistan No.1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in searches per person for certain sex-related content, FOXNews.com said.
Pakistan has ranked No.1 in searches per-person for “horse sex” since 2004, “donkey sex” since 2007, “rape pictures” between 2004 and 2009, “rape sex” since 2004, “child sex” between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, “animal sex” since 2004 and “dog sex” since 2005, according to Google Trends and Google Insights, features of Google that generate data based on popular search terms.
The country has also been No.1 in searches for “sex”, “camel sex”, “rape video” and “child sex video”.
Yuck, FoxNews is saying this? Confirm it for yourself, try looking at the data on Google Trends. Pakistanis do love their Google. Next in the running: India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Turkey, and trailing the pack, the United States and Australia. Just to see if it was some weird artifact of Pakistanis googling everything, I checked a few random terms, big screen TV and football and oil. Nope, Pakistan was nothing special in any of those searches — they just really want to see more camel sex.
Before you get too smug, though, the US is #1 in searches for squid sex.
That one might be my fault.
Barbara Ehrenreich critiques positive thinking — and blames some of our problems on it. There’s a lot of truth here, and it’s also entertaining to watch.
