What kind of wimps are they out there at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities branch? They canceled classes! Just because of a major snowstorm!
We’ll have to see what happens—it’s on the way to the western campus (us) and should hit this evening. I’d also like to know why winter has dawdled about getting here until March and now is trying to give us a whole season’s worth of snow in two weeks.
We do seem to have a bunch of lushes, although that Mooney fellow seems to favor fluids that have only a passing acquaintance with beer—but I shouldn’t knock it, maybe that’s how he maintains his boyish, youthful appearance. Jennifer Ouellette gives us a more detailed summary of what goes on in the bottle, appropriately enough for a site called Cocktail Party Physics.
Chris also mentions an interestingly named wine called Evolution—I’ll have to see if the local liquor store stocks it. I’m also going to hunt down Dave Puskala, who is rumored to possess a legendary homebrew called “Angry Evolutionist”, which sounds exactly like the kind of beer I should be drinking regularly. I hope it’s potent and has a sharp bite to it.
Robert M. Sapolsky is one of my favorite science writers — if you haven’t read Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), A Primate’s Memoir(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), or Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), I suggest you get off your butt right now and visit your library or bookstore. He’s a primatologist who studies the endocrinology and behavior of baboons, but he always presents his work in terms of the human condition. We aren’t so different, we primates.
If you don’t feel like getting up right this instant, though, at least click on this link to his speech to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. You’ll get a taste of that Sapolsky humanism that will get you wanting more, and he also has an interesting message: that religion is a kind of controlled psychosis.
It’s also a message that I’m surprised is not getting targeted by the creationists more. They are so hung up on godless evilutionism that they mostly don’t seem to realized that there is another, equally ferocious wolf coming up their flank, the neurosciences. Evolution is shredding their preconceptions about history and their origins, but neuroscience is going to rip out a different, but even more central concept: the soul. Minds are the products of electrochemical and molecular/physiological activity, not spirits or souls or extradimensional magical forces — brains are meat and thoughts are the product of ions and small molecules bubbling about in coordinated patterns. That doesn’t demean us and I think it makes us just as interesting and wonderful, but it is another case where the religious guesswork is proving wrong.
This one has been around for almost a year now, but if you’re getting tired of Conservapedia, take a stroll through the CreationWiki. It doesn’t generally have that tone of having been written by a gang of third-graders, but there’s plenty of stupid on display.
(via Unscrewing The Inscrutable)
Many will argue with the conclusion of my title, but there are so many examples of outright intellectual vacuity from people who anoint themselves with the title “conservative” that it is fast becoming a synonym for “ignoramus”. We’ve lately been laughing ourselves silly at the absurdity called Conservapædia, but here’s another flabby, nutritionally empty scrap of junk food to chew over: a site called The Intellectual Conservative. In particular, I call your attention to yet another right wing rejection of a valid, well-established science by someone completely oblivious to either the principles or the evidence, in an article asking whether biology has a “Rational Evolutionary Hypothesis?” The author doesn’t seem to know anything at all about biology, but he has heard two names — Darwin and Dawkins — and no, sir, he doesn’t like ’em. He dislikes ’em so much that he’s willing to lie about them.
The evil monkey who is hosting the Tangled Bank this week is experiencing severe computer problems, so the carnival may not appear until tomorrow. I told him that mashing bananas into the keyboard and flinging poo at the screen wasn’t good for system stability, but he just bared his teeth at me and jumped up and down, screeching.
Wilkins has a good introductory video to the concept of biodiversity—why isn’t that post in your basic concepts list, John?
Kevin Russell found out it’s not easy trying to cash a check from God. The 21-year-old man was arrested Monday after he tried to cash a check for $50,000 at the Chase Bank in Hobart that was signed “King Savior, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Servant,” Hobart police Detective Jeff White said.
I blame the televangelists. They’re skilled at cleaning out the savings of old folks, and while they were vacuuming up social security checks, they probably siphoned off every penny He had.
Don’t worry about Him, though — he’s still got a lot of equity in gilt furniture and old art in Italy, I hear.
David Hone reminds me that I’ve been remiss in mentioning this new and very useful website, Ask a Biologist. The idea is so simple, you’ll wonder why there aren’t many more like it—it’s a kind of central clearinghouse where young people can ask questions about biology and get answers from real biologists and experts. If you’re a teacher, turn your kids on to it; tell them to submit a question to the list, and somebody with some expertise will try to answer.
