Bruce Sterling writes an obituary for blogs

Write faster, everyone, you don’t have much time. Bruce Sterling gives blogs only ten more years.

“There are 55 million blogs and some of them have got to be good,” Sterling said, during a speech here at the SXSW conference in reference to the slogan on blog search site technorati.com. “Well, no, actually. They don’t.”

“I don’t think there will be that many of them around in 10 years. I think they are a passing thing.”

I think he’s right, and he’s wrong. This idea of self-publishing and babbling on the net isn’t going to go away—I expect it’ll be going on in some form or another as long as we’ve got a network to play on.

Otherwise, though, sure, something is going to change, it always does. I wouldn’t mind some radical new change that would allow us to jettison the ugly term “blog”, but I think Sterling is being a poor judge of human nature if he thinks us primates will stop chattering at each other, even if the quality of our communications never rise to his standards of “good”.

“Spirituality”? Another word for lies and empty noise

If you go to the main ScienceBlogs page, you’ll discover that the Buzz for the day is this little gem, triggered by one of our newbie bloggers:

Spirituality and Science

Over the last few hundred years, science has provided a mind-boggling richness of answers about the workings of the universe. For many people the importance of religion, at least as an explainer of the natural world, has shifted. Is it possible to believe what science teaches us about nature, and also be a person of faith? A Galactic Interactions post about being a Christian and a scientist has ignited an explosive debate.

Appropriately enough, the latest Templeton Prize has just been awarded. $1.5 million for this rubbish:

Professor Taylor has written extensively on the sense of self and how it is defined by morals and what one considers good. People operate in the register of spiritual issues, he said, and to separate those from the humanities and social sciences leads to flawed conclusions.

“The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimension can be remarkable,” Professor Taylor said in remarks prepared for delivery at the announcement of the prize at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York this morning. This is damaging because it “affects the culture of the media and educated public opinion in general.”

There’s also much more at the Templeton Prize site. He blathers on and on about “spiritual thinking” and a “spiritual domain” without ever telling us what the heck it is, although it does seem to be all tied up in believing in a religion, any religion. So, someone tell me, how am I supposed to hear this “spiritual dimension”? What is it supposed to mean?

Near as I can tell, it means making up vague nonsense about special values only religious people can have, and getting a cool million five for insisting on it. What a sweet scam, and what a useless lot of hot air.

(via Butterflies and Wheels)

Comedy and Science in Melbourne

Australian comedy may be a risky business — didn’t they give us both Yahoo Serious and Barry Humphries?1 — but in case you want to chance it, I’ve been informed by Ben McKenzie, The Man in the Lab Coat, that he’ll be doing a comedy lecture show about science this April.

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Here’s a cool thing: he has offered me comp tickets for the opening week. Since nobody is standing up to offer me comp flight tickets to Australia, or comp teaching stand-in to cover my classes while I’m away, he has said I can pass them on to any interested readers who might be willing to travel to Melbourne (surely there can’t be any readers who actually live anywhere near Melbourne, can there?). I’ll give them away2 to anyone willing to take them who will also send me a summary of the event — just sing out in the comments.

If you want to know more first, here’s the description and listing for the show.

1I know, an American has no right to mock, since we gave the world both Carrot-Top and Pauly Shore.

2The first Pharyngula Give-Away with Prizes! I should have invented a better contest.

Brian Flemming interview

Here’s a good interview with Brian Flemming, the documentarian behind The God Who Wasn’t There, who also irritated a lot of prissy reactionaries who have too-tight pants with his blasphemy challenge on youtube.

Simon Owens: Do you think the “blasphemy project” is an effective way for atheists to come out of the closet?

Brian Flemming: The Blasphemy Challenge has certainly encouraged quite a few godless folks to unequivocally state that they aren’t afraid of Satan. I think it’s hilarious that this is actually a controversial statement to make — as if Satan were not a purely mythological character. The Blasphemy Challenge is radical compared to how we normally talk about superstitions such as Christianity, but it shouldn’t be. It should always be acceptable to declare one’s independence from Bronze Age myths. In fact, it shouldn’t really be news at all.

I must say I’ve laughed and laughed at all the shrill indignation those little videos stirred up. He’s exactly right — the whole rationale behind the challenge was to highlight the misplaced reverence even liberal, self-professed non-Christians have for the paraphernalia of religion, and it accomplished that goal wonderfully.

Luskin and the New Mexico creationists

Dave Thomas has written an op-ed opposing a bill in New Mexico that would promote Intelligent Design creationism in the classroom under the guise of academic freedom. This is a standard ID game; carefully word the bills so that they refer vaguely to some evidence that doesn’t exist, so that they can pretend they are asking for equal time for the same category of scientific story when it is actually a case of promoting the guesswork, handwaving, and religiously-motivated biases of the creationists to have equivalent status with the evidence of scientists.

Casey Luskin is on the job, though, and he tears into Thomas’s op-ed … or rather, he tears it into little pieces and rearranges the words until he’s got a pastiche he can criticize. It’s a shameful performance that puts the dishonesty of the Discovery Institute on display.

[Read more…]

David Menton — pwned!

David Menton, one of the ‘authorities’ at Answers in Genesis, has scribbled up another mendacious collection of nonsense about tetrapod evolution. Alas, poor Menton — he caught the attention of Martin Brazeau, a real scholar and researcher in sarcopterygian and tetrapod evolution, who did what creationists dread: he actually checked on the facts behind Menton’s claims. Would you be surprised to learn that there are not only dishonest quote mines that twist the author’s meaning, but that he is caught making up facts about the fossil? Brazeau even contacted Ted Daeschler, one of the authors of the Tiktaalik work, to check on some of those assertions … and there’s no way around it. David Menton is a liar.

It’s hilarious. Brazeau also takes care to document some of the real facts about transitional tetrapods — well worth reading even if you don’t care for the spice of schadenfreude.

I thought I’d never vote for a vampire, but…

So, in the last election, we Minnesotans briefly enjoyed the company of a vampire running for governor. Unfortunately, Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey was arrested before the election and we missed out on the potentially amusing spectacle.

Somehow, though, he is now free (damn those cunning vampires!), and is planning to run for president. As a most interesting and admittedly tempting part of his campaign platform, he is promising to impale GW Bush if elected.

He’s crazy, I wouldn’t have given him a chance, but dang if he didn’t come up with a vote-getting idea. They’re cunning, those vampires, they’ve had centuries to think up these plans. If he tossed Cheney in as a bonus, he might just sweep the election.