Contemptible ghoul

First commentator to tie the Virginia Tech shootings to Muslims, without a lick of evidence: Debbie Schlussel. And if it isn’t connected in any way to Islamic terrorism?

Even if it does not turn out that the shooter is Muslim, this is a demonstration to Muslim jihadists all over that it is extremely easy to shoot and kill multiple American college students.

She’ll connect it anyway.

The killer was Chinese. With the anticipated satisfaction, Schlussel sees that as a vindication — kick out all the foreign students!

We will not go quietly

I’m willing to read books by Simon Conway Morris, Ken Miller, and Francis Collins. I think they’re dead wrong on the religion issue, but they are smart guys who contribute positively to the debate in other ways. I will also read Behe and Dembski and <gack, hack> Wells; they are not smart people, and they’re wrong all across the board, but at least they’re not trying to pretend they’re my friend and are trying to help me, and I think it’s a good idea that we should know the enemy. One fellow who infuriates me, though, and whose point of view I find difficult to comprehend, is Michael Ruse (he’s pulled some weird stunts before, too). I can’t read any of his work anymore without feeling extreme exasperation.

Larry Moran explains why. Ruse is not a friend of science, not someone who wants to improve people’s understanding of the real world; instead he poses as our pal while accusing us of “evolutionism”. He pretends to be a fair and neutral broker mediating a conflict while obligingly demanding a complete surrender of anyone who advocates godlessness. He continues to promote this schism between “Chamberlain appeasers” and “Churchillian atheists” (ugh, but I detest those terms) because it suits his ends, which is to use the division to demand that the atheists sit down and STFU. That’s plainly his strategy in a recent article in the Skeptical Inquirer, which Moran rebuts.

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Simon Conway Morris and Life’s Solution: it’s tea.

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I’ve finished Simon Conway Morris’s Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book I’ve mentioned before and promised, with considerable misgivings, to read thoroughly. I didn’t like his ideas, I thought he’d expressed them poorly before, but I’d give his book on the subject a fair shake and see if he could persuade me.

My opinion: it’s dreck.

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Lab web pages, anyone?

Pimm is looking for examples of good laboratory homepages — he has links to a few, but is looking for more.

There is actually a conundrum there: most labs don’t want to reveal work in progress on the web (except to a limited extent), they aren’t particularly interested in public PR (something it would be good to change), and they are mostly populated with students and post-docs with a limited tenure and a specific brief that does not include webmastering. Most of the lab web pages I’ve seen out there are simple portals to a cv and maybe a few publication pdfs.

Somebody, please take this myth outside and shoot it

The BBC has another article on Ken Ham’s creationism museum, and guess what they say?

Petersburg, Kentucky, is in the middle of North America. It is supposedly within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the US population.

Aaargh, no. Kentucky is way over on the eastern side of the US. It is not within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the US population. Is Ham telling everyone this nonsense as a test of how credulous the media might be? Because he’s doing a good job of demonstrating that journalists will swallow anything.

At least this time they included the modifier “supposedly”. It’s progress, I suppose.

The Wall: A Sunday morning story

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Once upon a time, some people on a road were stopped by a wall.

We didn’t mind. It was a good place to stop for a while, and as more people coming down the road stopped at the wall, a community grew at its foot. Most people enjoyed gathering together, so the wall seemed like a fortuitous event, a good reason to rest and celebrate and work together for a while.

The wall wasn’t impassable, of course. Some could still clamber over the pile and continue on their journey, but the wall was a little daunting, and the happy community was so tempting, and few bothered.

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