This will not stand. It’s a site called Octopus Faith, and it’s a promotion for a Christian women’s speaker, and her premise is analogizing faith to an octopus.
Every octopus is an atheist, though … they told me so personally. And they are not amused.
A few years ago, everyone was in a tizzy over the discovery of Flores Man, curious hominin remains found on an Indonesian island that had a number of astonishing features: they were relatively recent, less than 20,000 years old; they were not modern humans, but of unsettled affinity, with some even arguing that they were like australopithecines; and just as weird, they were tiny, a people only about 3 feet tall with a cranial capacity comparable to a chimpanzee’s. This was sensational. Then on top of that, add more controversy with some people claiming that the investigators had it all wrong, and they were looking at pathological microcephalics from an isolated, inbred population, and then there were all kinds of territorial disputes and political showboating going on, with the specimens taken out of the hands of the discoverers, passed off to a distinguished elderly scientist whose lab damaged them, etc., etc., etc. It was a mess of a story, and the basic scientific issues are still unsettled.
Now the leader of the investigators who found the specimens has written a book, A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the “Hobbits” of Flores, Indonesia(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mike Morwood and Penny Van Oosterzee. I’m coming to this a bit late — Afarensis reviewed it already this spring — but finally got far enough down in my pile of books to encounter it.
So it seems that ScienceBlogs has a wikipedia entry, but there’s not much there, and of course it’s a little dodgy for Sciencebloggers themselves to write the entry. If anyone wants to improve on it, please do. Katherine Sharpe, our blogmistress (she’s the one with the whip, but it’s a nice whip), has dumped some basic information on the discussion page, so it ought to be fairly easy for someone to check the info and clean it up.
The journal Nature has an interview with Al Jean, executive producer of The Simpsons, specifically on the use of science and math as sources of humor in the show. (But we know the truth: The Simpsons movie is about to come out, and Nature is selling out. They even ask at the end what they can do to get a reference to their journal in an episode.*)
You can read the whole thing — they’ve made it publicly accessible — but I have to quote their stereotype of a scientist.
But we make fun of everything, so if a scientist appears on the show we make fun of them too. Generally our depiction of scientists is that they’re insular and have bad social lives, and say things in an obscure fashion that isn’t always comprehensible to the layman. From my limited experience in the scientific world I wouldn’t say it’s completely off the mark.
That last sentence is called “understatement,” I think. Sweet jebus, the description fits me perfectly! I feel like going home and hiding in the basement with a book full of acronyms from molecular biology now.
*Everyone knows the real pressing question is how to get a Pharyngula reference on the show. Come on, it’s almost as obscure as some of their math jokes!**
**Just not as funny, which is probably the major obstacle here.
This photo of a very interesting book is obviously fake, since there are no pictures of cats on it.
Comments are still trickling in and I still get email about this article, where I explain why debate is a poor strategy for dealing with creationists. I definitely don’t argue that we should avoid engaging the public, but that there are a number of reasons why the debate format doesn’t work for resolving conflicts between legitimate science and discredited malarkey. However, I missed one.
Some of you may know that a couple of commenters here resolved to have an off-site written debate on the dependency of the universe’s existence on, specifically, the Abrahamic god. The debate is at the Topical Octagon, but after The Physicist AKA Equus Pallidus put up his first rambling shamble of a post, the debate was terminated for a very common reason: plagiarism.
There is almost no creative, original work on the creationist side. I sometimes wonder if the only reason that ID gets so much attention is that one thing the ID creationists did accomplish was to infuse a collection of new arguments into their side’s corner — over and over again, the same old arguments, even down to the same words, show up in creationist debates. It’s like the scholarly tradition in creationism is a glorified version of cut & paste, lifting paragraphs from other works and stringing them together, and Behe and company at least provided some new source texts from which to steal words.
Although IDists don’t have much new to add. The last talk I heard by Behe was virtually identical, right down to the same old jokes, to the first talk I’d heard from him, ten years before.
Those European countries seem to have relics of old feudal hierarchies still prancing about, which we (and they) mostly seem to ignore except when they do something amusingly silly. The latest royal clown is Princess Märtha Louise of Norway, who is opening an “alternative therapy center,” which is loony enough, but now we learn that this particular center is going to specialize in harnessing the power of angels. She claims she got in touch with the angels through her experience with horses.
I hadn’t known there was a connection. This makes My Little Pony look a little more ominous.
She’s fourth in line for the Norwegian throne. I hope she isn’t applying her wacky quackery to the first three — is this part of a cunning plan?
How can anyone be surprised at this turn of events? Governor Goodhair of Texas has appointed a flaming, blatant, unashamed creationist and friend of the Discovery Institute, Don McLeroy, to head the Texas State Board of Education. Phil Plait is not amused. But isn’t this part of the grand Republican and Texan tradition of promoting gross incompetence? Isn’t that how we got GW Bush? This is the state of Terri Leo and Mel Gabler. It’s all more of the same.
Texas is going to be soooo interesting in the next year or two. I wonder if this is where the next big court battle is going to occur? McLeroy is just the kind of conservative theocrat who’d provoke it.
The creationist fruit-loop du jour left another comment here in which he tried to taunt me with his proximity (“is Minneapolis-St. Paul close enough to Morris for you?”) which wasn’t very effective, since his IP address said he was commenting from a community college in North Carolina. And then he replied with more wacky comments:
Feeling pragmatic? Is your focus entirely practical, on what works and what will get the job done? Are you one of those fighters for evolutionary biology who waves away all the theory and the abstractions and the strange experimental manipulations, and thinks the best argument for evolution is the fact that it works and is important? This book, The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by David Mindell, does make you sit down and learn a little history and philosophy to start off, but the focus throughout is on the application of evolution to the real world. It does a fine job of it, too.
