This is horrifying: somebody went on an armed rampage at Virginia Tech and killed at least 21 before killing himself. No clue yet on why this happened.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is horrifying: somebody went on an armed rampage at Virginia Tech and killed at least 21 before killing himself. No clue yet on why this happened.
The Missouri House of Representatives has passed a bill that would impose new rules on state colleges to “protect diversity” that includes this most interesting clause:
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.
You’ve got your choices: you wicked heathens can shake your fists at the heavens by reading Carnival of the Godless #64, or you granola-gobbling eco-freaks can savor Oekologie #4. Some of us can do both!
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.
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.
Then let Josh Timonen know that you’re interested.
If we were doing this right, though, it would involve ritual scarification and great bloody painful welts, rather than just a t-shirt. You’re getting off easy.
There is a short interview with me at One Blog A Day, and they asked about you people, you know, you commenters here, and I was brutally honest. Please don’t rise up and strip the flesh from my bones.
Nisbet and Mooney do it again, with an op-ed in the Washington Post … and I’m afraid they’ve alienated me yet further. I am convinced now that theirs is not an approach that I could find useful, even if I could puzzle out some useable strategy from it. In the very first sentence, they claim that Richard Dawkins gives “creationist adversaries a boost” — it’s the tired old argument that we must pander to religious belief. This is their rationale:
Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins’s arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate between his advocacy of evolution and his atheism. More than 80 percent of Americans believe in God, after all, and many fear that teaching evolution in our schools could undermine the belief system they consider the foundation of morality (and perhaps even civilization itself). Dawkins not only reinforces and validates such fears — baseless though they may be — but lends them an exclamation point.
We agree with Dawkins on evolution and admire his books, so we don’t enjoy singling him out. But he stands as a particularly stark example of scientists’ failure to explain hot-button issues, such as global warming and evolution, to a wary public.
If you missed it when the Bell Museum showed it, you’ve got another shot now: the Anthropology Club at UMTC is showing Flock of Dodos on Thursday, 19 April.
