Hard to disbelieve

Tomorrow is 5 May, and I mentioned in my
review of A Brief History of Disbelief that this excellent documentary on atheism/agnosticism was supposed to be aired on PBS stations all across the country around this time. It’s been hard to track down, though; I’ve looked in my local TV listings, and there’s no mention. Readers have contacted their stations directly, and some have reported back that they will be seeing it, while others have found that their stations are not carrying it. It’s very confusing.

Well, a reader found a grid listing all of the airdates and stations that will be showing A Brief History of Disbelief. If you’re in San Diego or Philadelphia, it’s well covered; otherwise, it’s scattered very sparsely on the map. It is not being shown in Minnesota.

Rock star?

Larry Moran has already mentioned this recent article in Cell on this strange new fad of science blogging. He was interviewed along with many others of us, including me. I don’t know about this bit:

The rock star of scientist bloggers is Paul Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, who writes Pharyngula. With about 20,000 visitors per day, Pharyngula is currently the most popular science blog according to Technorati. Myers started writing about 4 years ago. “It was a casual decision. One summer I had some free time and started typing away. And people started coming to the site,” he recalls. “I thought that I would stop in a month or so but I didn’t. I find it useful for communicating with other scientists and the community.” Myers not only writes about his brand of science, developmental biology, but often discusses politics and religion. “The blog would not be as popular if it was only about science,” he says. “I am popularizing science using political issues as a hook.”

This just isn’t good enough. I need to know which rock star. The Roger Waters of the blogosphere would be cool. David Bowie would be nifty, too, although I’m not thin enough. The Keith Richards of science blogging would be troubling … but if I’m the Ozzie, I’m hanging it up.

Go ahead and talk about the Republican debate

I don’t want to talk about it — I despise the whole field — but everyone is emailing me about it, and I was even talking to my mother on the phone tonight and she asked me about it (I said I wouldn’t watch those weasels unless they were in a crotch-kicking contest). I’ll let this thread open up for a free-for-all discussion of the cacophony.

All I’ve heard so far is that a) they avoided talking about Bush, preferring to measure themselves against Reagan (Reagan was almost as great an incompetent as the current resident, so they’re obviously aiming low), and b) when they were asked about evolution, a goodly subset of them were so stupid that they said they didn’t believe it. Too bad this debate wasn’t merged with that quiz show, so some stern harridan could have announced, “You are the weakest link!” and pulled a lever that would have catapulted them into a shark tank or something entertaining.

So who are the Republican anti-science goons? Huckabee, Brownback, and … ?

Watch the response at Crooks and Liars. The foolish three are Huckabee, Brownback, and Tancredo.

Kevin Padian explains macroevolution

The gang at the NCSE have put together Padian’s testimony at the Dover trial with the slides he used. You may have already read the transcript, but with the figures added it acquires a whole new dimension — it’s basically a wonderfully done primer in the basics of macroevolutionary biology. Next time some creationist tries to simper at you that he accepts microevolution, but that there’s no evidence for macroevolution and he refuses to believe it, point him at this page. It’s aimed not at scientists, but at the judges and lawyers at a trial, so it’s eminently comprehensible to any intelligent layman … and it crushes the bogus rejection of macroevolution that they are so fond of using.

WAAGNFNP declares war on Technorati

And who can blame them? Technorati, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is one of those services that watches activity on the web, and then puts up metrics and ranks and scores, and tries to distill the flux into something simpler and more comprehensible, which often reduces to telling you how many people are trying to find pictures of a naked Paris Hilton. When the mob votes, it always seems to lead to the lowest common denominator. The We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party is trying to subvert all that with a campaign to push the WAAGNFNP into the upper ranks of Technorati’s odd WTF category. A “WTF” is a user-written blurb that tries to identify a hot topic and explain something about it—any member of Technorati can write a blurb, and also vote for it, and the WTF page is another ranked list of these popular blurbs. Get in there and rock the system!

There are no Pharyngula blurbs, sad to say, and even sadder, I used to be on their Top 100 Favorited Blogs, and I’ve slipped off the list lately. Don’t forget, new people, you can click here to increase my Technorati favorited rank.

Another blithering ignoramus against science: Roy Varghese

The Dallas Observer has published a profile of Roy Abraham Varghese, a wealthy computer and business consultant who funnels money into ‘spirituality’ nonsense, that is not only so stupid that it pained me to read it, but but was also poorly and confusingly written — the reporter is utterly credulous and gushes over Varghese like the most pathetic fanboy, but then every once in a while tosses in a paragraph that takes a critical stance, but reads as if he has just cribbed an argument “for balance” and stuck it in, like a lump of hard thought floating in a sea of New Agey, fuzzy religious porridge. It makes one wonder if an editor had tried to sharpen up the slop by telling the writer to throw in some random scientific paragraph. The goofy philosophy is bad enough, but the graceless prose and incoherent structure is agonizing.

You know this article is in trouble from the first paragraph.

For a quarter-century Roy Abraham Varghese has been assembling God proofs. Along the way he won over the world’s most influential atheist.

[Read more…]