Seaducer sent me this photo, taken on a dive near Bonaire—the colors and shadows and the meaty, fleshy look of the beast give it a wonderfully baleful look.
Neddie finds something rather disturbing: a border guard leaving a comment in a blog, flaunting his knowledge of the comings and goings of the blogger at a border crossing. It’s vaguely threatening, in a “I know where you live” kind of way. The assertion that “you do not have a right to privacy” is even more creepy—I think someone on the border patrol is a little too full of himself.
I’ve driven up to Canada a couple of times now, and the remarkable contrast has been how pleasant and casual the guards at the entry into Canada have been, and how surly, snide, and officious the guards coming back into the US have been. I don’t quite understand the point of having the guards at the border treating people as potential criminals; it’s not as if real criminals and terrorists are going to be at all dissuaded by supercilious snottiness, but legitimate visitors to our country are going to be dismayed by our gracelessness at the doorway.
Even us residents aren’t at all thrilled with their behavior. After showing multiple forms of ID and answering all their questions, they still acted suspicious and resentful, as if they were offended that I had dared visit a foreign country, and they weren’t sure if they should let me come back home. (Uh-oh…next time I visit Canada, are the guards going to mutter about my blog and subject me to a strip search now?)
First, an important message from Randy Olson:
Second, another important message from Randy Olson: one of the DVD extras for the movie has been released to YouTube! It’s got my picture in it, but skip that, watch for…
Jack Cashill’s little falsehood about Haeckel’s embryos. He accuses SJ Gould of sitting on the problems of Haeckelian recapitulation for 25 years, only mentioning it in 1995. Of course, Gould published a whole book in 1977, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, that laid out the failures of Haeckelian recapitulation in pedantic detail. Cashill also claims “…the Haeckel embryos which are being reproduced in every single significant textbook1 in America as the single best proof2 of Darwinism3…”; how many errors can you count in that short sentence? I get at least 3.
And most importantly, catch the cynical quote from Michael Behe at the end of the clip. It’s worth watching for that alone.
“My kids don’t go to public schools, what do I care?”
A new book titled Flock of Dodos (a book, not the movie, and apparently the two have nothing to do with each other) is coming out, and Glenn Branch of the NCSE tells me it mentions something vile about William Jennings Bryan, the defender of creationism at the Scopes trial. That’s his campaign poster to the right. Look closely, very closely — it’s a rather small image — down at the bottom left. There’s a cephalopod defending the American flag, and some kind of crazed scullery maid attacking it with an axe. Obviously, Bryan was no friend of biodiversity.
The description in the book of this image is like so:
Subtlety was not one of [William Jennings] Bryan’s strong suits. His campaign poster from that same election [1900] depicted, among other things, a sort of Lady Liberty archetype attacking a giant octopus with an axe.
This is clearly an incorrect interpretation. The octopus is central and beautiful, and if that were actually Lady Liberty, she ought to be half-naked. I think it’s Bryan advocating an uprising of the servile classes to destroy loyal invertebrate-Americans, the treacherous dog. I’m glad he lost the election.
Fox News happily reports that a scientific study has found that Religion is Good for Kids!
Jean Mercer scrutinizes the study, finds it dubious at best, and Dale McGowan suggests that a better title would have been Religion May Make Some First Graders Marginally Easier to Manage.
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with making first graders more docile—it would make them less likely to turn their priest in to the police, for instance. The paper is making its conclusions from some rather shaky and selective analysis of subjective observations, though, so it isn’t even particularly reassuring about that.
I am a little concerned about the way the data was sampled, though. There’s this one bit:
Because of their dependence on Early Childhood Longitudinal Study information, Bartkowski et al. were restricted to some very simple measures of religious participation, with stress on the congruence of fathers’ and mothers’ religious attendance. The measures included the question, “Do you and your [current partner] often, sometimes, hardly ever, or never have arguments about religion?”
Um, in my family, we’d answer “never” — we rarely even discuss religion. Congruence was high, there was little conflict in our family; does this mean that if we’d participated, we’d have been one of the data points supporting the conclusion that religion is good for kids?
The regal old willow that has graced our front yard for longer than I’ve been alive, and which has sadly shown signs of advancing senescence, is scheduled for termination tomorrow morning. It’s a beautiful old tree, but its habit of dropping a ton of log every spring has made it a hazard, so we’ve decided to end it quickly, rather than a slow death by yearly spontaneous lopping of limbs.
I’ve had several people ask me about this tree, and several have mentioned their sorrow at its imminent passing. If you’d like to pay last respects, tonight is your last chance. Feel free to step into the yard and give it a goodbye hug (be careful, though, and don’t shake it too much—I disavow any responsibility for falling branches.)
The execution of the poor tree will be an all day job on Friday, and unfortunately, it’s got to be carried out in public. For those of you of delicate sensitivities, you might want to stay away from 3rd and College Avenue until Saturday.
Some conservative named Patrick Hynes is unhappy that the Republican candidates were asked their opinion of evolution. His argument is two-pronged: it is reasonable to disagree with scientific opinions on the matter, and it is unreasonable to ask the politicians of his party what their opinion of a scientific issue might be.
Brent got asked a question by Vox Day: to list Christianity’s 10 greatest sins against science. He expands a little bit:
I’m reading all of these New Atheist books, I keep reading these condemnations of Christians being anti-science, but no one ever bothers to explain exactly what they mean by that. I mean, what the Hell does Galileo’s trial have to do with Christian attitudes today, except as some sort of analogy for… something current? But what?
I mean, if the worst thing people have done is put someone on trial 500 years ago, is it really such a huge deal? Now, I’m assuming that there are other things, such as opposing Federal stem cell funding and pushing for ID in the public schools, but there has got to be more. So, in what other specific ways are Christians endangering science? Is Galileo still a top ten grievance? What else is there?
Bleh. Day is looking for some specific list of incidents, like Galileo’s persecution by the church, or perhaps George Deutch’s arrogant attempts to hide scientific conclusions at NASA. That’s typically superficial of him; that’s not the objection at all. The problem is that religion instills odious patterns of thinking in large numbers of people, ideas about how the world works that actually get in the way of improving our culture. The problem isn’t Galileo specifically, but that religion provides institutions and a rationale for Galileo-like situations, and inculcates support for such decisions in the populace.
Here’s my quick list of objections to religion. Please note that I understand there will be individual variation, both between people in a sect and between sects themselves (Calvinists and Unitarians will have different views of destiny, for instance, and Buddhists seem less prone to the tyranny of authoritarianism). Also, the general public will embrace these sins a little less fervently than creationists and fundamentalists, but they’re all there to some extent—while sometimes I’ll mention creationists as extreme examples, that does not mean I am implying that all religious people are creationists.
Oh, and forget 10; this dial goes up to twelve.
I’m a traitor. Remember how I was going to lead the Science Caucus at YearlyKos? I was really looking forward to that and we had some great ideas for a productive session. I hope who ever takes over for me can use some of that.
That’s right — I’m not going to be able to make it to YearlyKos this time around. I’m bad. I’m selfish.
What came up is an invitation to something called a Science Foo camp, sponsored by Google, O’Reilly, and Nature … and it sounds titillating enough that I just can’t turn it down. So I’m abandoning the Kossacks this time around, but I’m sure there’s enough science talent going there that I’ll be easily replaced.
Come on, it sounds like Foo camp will be nerdvana. How could I possibly miss it?
Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a bear kills a moose in someone’s driveway, and then rips its heart out and eats it. Even better, Skemono has links to the video. It makes me glad I don’t live in Alaska.
People should ask Skatje about the time she met a moose on a camping trip. She did not show up at our tent gnawing on a bloody heart, I guarantee you — but I haven’t seen her move that fast since.
