Reviews of bad movies can be more fun than the movies themselves

Gary Farber has been collecting reviews of 300, the new movie about the Spartans at Thermopylae, and they certainly are amusing — I haven’t seen the movie, but I suspect my opinion of it will be close to Howard Waldrop’s and Lawrence Person’s. I saw the trailer, and while the cartoonish style is to be expected given the source, the lack of historicity and indulgence in fantasy grates terribly. At least the kitsch is generating interesting reactions.

Finney vs. Seivers

Raymond Finney, MD of Tennessee wants to ask a bunch of pompous questions of his state board of education (“Is the Universe and all that is within it, including human beings, created through purposeful, intelligent design by a Supreme Being, that is a Creator?” etc., etc., etc.). Although I’m getting my fill of arrogant doctors lately, I really don’t have any problem with a stuffed shirt in the state senate asking questions, and now we learn that neither will the Tennessee courts—it’s not unconstitutional. As long as there is no penalty if the education commissioner doesn’t answer, or answers in a way Finney doesn’t like, it’s not an issue.

And of course, I’ve already written up the answers for the commissioner, helpful guy that I am. A simple “NO” will handle it.

Finney has admitted his actual goal now, though, and I do think that this ought to be smacked down hard.

Finney, a Maryville Republican, said he wants the department to say there’s no scientific proof for the theory of evolution and to let schools teach creationism or intelligent design.

That is a fundamental misconception, and one I wish we could somehow hammer into these gomers’ heads. There is no scientific proof of anything…proof isn’t something scientists deal with at all. It’s an inappropriate demand in several ways.

  • It singles out evolution, but as I said, there is no scientific proof of anything. Why not question cell theory or electromagnetism?
  • If Finney is going to demand “proof”, where’s the proof for creationism or intelligent design? He’s awfully inconsistent.
  • The word Finney is actually looking for is not “proof”, but “evidence“. Evidence is what we look for in science classes. There is evidence for evolution; there is none for creationism or intelligent design. Case closed.

Finney is a kind of standard issue pretentious creationist boob, and he’s said what his kind always say … a load of codswallop. The real test here, and what I’ll be very interested to see, is Education Commissioner Lana Seivers’ response. This is where a competent and no-nonsense educator should simply cut through the crap and put Finney in his place. Or she can be a dithering political creature and betray the educational goals of the teachers and students of her state by sucking up to the grandstanding pol. I don’t know a thing about her, so we’ll have to see how she emerges from this little test of character.

Molly winners for March

Once again, in the nomination thread for the Molly award, two names came up over and over again, and since this isn’t the kind of thing where we should nit-pick, I’ll put up two winners once more:

Date Winners Sample comments
March 2007 Blake Stacey He’s a smart feller.

whenever I’m reading a comment and thinking “Right on, man” I come to the end and there’s his name.
Hank Fox He’s funny and always includes a thought provoking statement with clarity and logic.

Very bright guy who comes up with the greatest metaphors to make his points.

Now I know there are a few complaints about this being a popularity contest, but that’s because it is — that’s the whole point. You all know you don’t just come here because you like me—judging by my mail, a fair number of you are driven to fits by me—but there’s also this community of active commenters here that attracts readers, too. This is a tool to give me an excuse to acknowledge the gang lurking under the articles.

PSA

Avoid Las Vegas between May 17th and 20th. There’s a conference going on there that will be like a black hole of stupid, with both Sylvia Browne and Deepak Chopra and a host of low-wattage luminaries of woo in attendance, and there may be a kind of intelligence implosion going on. Your brain may get sucked into the dark pit of delusional dimness if you’re too close.

Michael Egnor, Paleyist surgeon

The Discovery Institute seems well pleased with their new anachronistic acolyte, a modern neurosurgeon who harks back fondly to the ancient wheeze of Natural Theology from a few centuries back. He’s been promoted to being a regular contributor on the DI Media Complaints Division web page, and he manages to combine the arrogance of a surgeon with the ignorance of most creationist hacks in a way that I’m sure the other DI fellows envy — he’s like the apotheosis of the Intelligent Design ideal. Why, he’s got the dishonesty of Wells, the pomposity of Johnson, the ineffectual stupidity of Luskin, and the egotism of Berlinski, all wrapped up in one package.

Anyway, I’m not planning to waste much effort on the archaic old fossil, but fortunately, Mark Chu-Carroll, Mike Dunford, and Orac are gleefully sharpening their knives and are planning to make Egnor’s welcome to the blogosphere acutely memorable. Orac has a challenge up now, asking Egnor to present…

…instead of his usual evidence-free assertions brimming with unjustified confidence, some actual evidence to support his claims. Inquiring minds want to know: Will Dr. Egnor show us some of these wonderful insights into human biology and disease provided or facilitated by the design inference or will he simply keep repeating the same misinformation?

I predict he’ll keep babbling substance-free nonsense, with occasional detours into whining about incivility. This is a problem with the followers of Paleyism: they are actually satisfied with assertions that lack a mechanism or evidence, because they see mysteries and unsolved complex problems as testimonials to the greater power of their god designer, and every explanation and solution is heresy.

Interconnections everywhere

You really should take a closer look at this map of publication links between scientific disciplines. Here’s the description:

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This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.

There’s an amazingly detailed version of the map available at Seed, and it visualizes an important point: all of the sciences are interconnected, sometimes very indirectly, but the contacts are there. When some clueless ideologue (like Michael Egnor, who is up to the same old tricks again) tries to split off a major subset and pretend it is irrelevant, he has to ignore the breadth of science.

Cephalart

Did I say it was St Patrick’s Day? I was mistaken…it is actually AIR KRAKEN DAY!

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While you’re celebrating with excessive imbibage today, keep scanning the skies—about the time you fall over backwards and your eyes are glazing and defocusing, you might just spot the fabulous air kraken gliding overhead.

It’s been a light week for cephalopod art, and I just have a few more examples below the fold.

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