I thought so. You should know that they have flipped the switch on the Large Hadron Collider, and no disasters yet. Of course, all they’ve done so far is whirl around in circles at near the speed of light, with no big high-energy collisions yet … the gang at Cosmic Variance have been live-blogging the LHC tests, so watch that to see what’s new.
I hope the Democrats cultivate some ferocity soon and start running ads based on this:
Just a heads up for Calgary — I’m going to be interviewed on “The World Tonight” on AM770 CHQR Radio, at 9:15 eastern time. They say they want to ask me some questions about a cracker…I have no idea how I’ll stretch that out for 15 minutes.
After a pleasant period of my mailbox cooling down a bit, I’ve recently seen a significant surge of howling mad Catholics shrieking at me. I was wondering what prompted the resurgence, and here it is: apparently I made the cover of the Catholic League’s newsletter, The Catalyst, and am even the subject of a frothing mad editorial by Billy Donohue, a complete timeline of the Great Desecration, and various requests for the faithful to howl for my job.
It’s kind of cool, in a perverse way. Cry, babies, cry.
We got one in the comments, a pompous ass named Darin Reisler who popped in to announce of evolution that “When the evidence is looked at beyond the surface level- it fails,” and to back this up he offered a string of quotes from “prominent evolutionists”.
Man, Darin is a contemptible liar, and incompetent on top of that. It’s one of the things that annoys me most about creationists: they are anti-scholars, people who lie and distort to reinforce prior erroneous conceptions, and they really think they’re scoring points by pretending that great minds in biology agree with them, when they don’t.
We actually own a television now, installed right in our living room. In the past, I’ve gotten by with an adapter for my laptop that lets me see the occasional interesting program, but now I can actually tune in to cable stations and flip through what’s being broadcast. It has not been a worthy effort, since most of what’s being shown is dreck.
So I turned to the video store for DVDs. When I want to slack off, I’ve long been a fan of science fiction and horror movies — I grew up in the days of Hammer Films and Vincent Price and many of the cheesy classics of old school SF and creature features, and that kind of entertaining story telling is what I look for in my light entertainment. So I was rather disappointed in my browsing to discover what passes for a horror movie nowadays: an entirely predictable plot with no character, each new movie vying with each other to achieve greater and greater levels of violent torture, usually of young, attractive women, and no genuine creativity at all.
I have to agree with Trish Wilson: these movies aren’t horror or thriller movies at all, they’re torture porn. What is wrong with people that sexuality has been jumbled up with the idea of the graphic inflection of mindless torment on women? Who wants to see a movie that consists of nothing but scenes of humiliation and pain and that always seem to celebrate the monstrous rapist/murderer as some kind of franchise hero?
Trish mentions an excellent example of a movie that does mix sex and horror in an interesting and genuinely frightening way: Cat People, which really does express a terrifying conflict without degrading people as a matter of course. Where are those interesting horror movies nowadays? Any recommendations? I don’t want to see Rob Zombie’s crap or any of those one-word gore-fests like Saw or Hostel or Captivity.
Last weekend’s bloggingheads was an interesting discussion between John Horgan and Brian Ferguson on the unfortunate misconception many people have about human evolution — the simplistic idea that evolution is always about selection for individuals who are better at killing their competitors. It doesn’t work that way! Ferguson discusses the interesting and obvious idea that the data does not back up the notion that being a great warrior is generally a good strategy, because being a great warrior also greatly increases the likelihood that you’ll end up dead.
Evolution is about whatever works, and often cooperation is a winning tactic.
I guess I don’t quite see the difference from a pointless poll, but let’s bite. A right-wing blogger is asking for bipartisan participation in a “survey” about the expected winner in the presidential election. Results will not be available until after the election, but go ahead and give it a shot.
That’s a quote from Lou Engle in this video — and it’s actually kind of true. He thinks it will be a wonderful thing when people see this, and there probably are a lot of Americans who think the events portrayed are perfectly ordinary, and even commendable.
I see nothing but madness.
By picking Sarah Palin for a running mate, John McCain has turned over a rock to expose a festering, primitive insanity in our country. Look on the squirming horror, world, and learn that it does exist!
A further indictment: Juan Cole sees Palin through the lens of his expertise on the Islamic world.
John McCain announced that he was running for president to confront the “transcendent challenge” of the 21st century, “radical Islamic extremism,” contrasting it with “stability, tolerance and democracy.” But the values of his handpicked running mate, Sarah Palin, more resemble those of Muslim fundamentalists than they do those of the Founding Fathers. On censorship, the teaching of creationism in schools, reproductive rights, attributing government policy to God’s will and climate change, Palin agrees with Hamas and Saudi Arabia rather than supporting tolerance and democratic precepts. What is the difference between Palin and a Muslim fundamentalist? Lipstick.
