Here’s more or less what I said at the YearlyKos panel today, assembled from my notes and with all the “ummms” removed. It’s very general, but hey, what can you do in ten minutes? Next time they should give me 30 minutes and I’ll flash up some genes and copulating squid and splutter out more blasphemy.
As you watch the time fade away, sit back and enjoy it and start mentally rewriting your talk. I had it pared down to “I’ll post it on the web later, bye!”
Hey, everyone! The new ScienceBlogs main page has been launched, and the Seed nerd-kings have added a whole new crop of blogs here. Take a browse, you might discover some new favorites.
After the recent struggles trying to keep up with the traffic on this site, you wouldn’t think I’d feel compelled to go trolling for more visitors, but isn’t that the nature of weblogging? The only point to it all is to rack up a bigger score than the next guy, as if we were playing pinball. So what’s a good ploy? As Lauren has cleverly pointed out, sex sells. And while it may be estrogen week, I’m going to buck the trend, since we all know what’s really important for weblog popularity: penises.
The fugu is a famous fish, at least as a Japanese sushi dish containing a potentially lethal neurotoxin that was featured on an episode of The Simpsons. Fugu is a member of the pufferfish group, which have another claim to fame: an extremely small genome, roughly a tenth the size of that of other vertebrates. The genome of several species of pufferfish is being sequenced, and the latest issue of Nature announces the completion of a draft sequence for the green spotted pufferfish, Tetraodon nigroviridis, a small freshwater species.
I’m here in sunny Las Vegas, hanging out in the lobby with the free wireless and watching all the funny blogger nerds with the orange badges walking by. Heh. Oh, hang on…I’m wearing an orange badge and blogging in a corner. Yeah, I’m such a nerd.
I don’t know how much time I’ll have for actually posting things here this weekend, but I’ve queued up a series of reruns to appear automagically at various times, so the site won’t be totally drying up. Half the liberal blogosphere seems to be here, so I’ve got to do something to keep a void from appearing.
Creationists are fond of the “it can’t happen” argument: they like to point to things like the complexity of the eye or intricate cell lineages and invent bogus rules like “irreducible complexity” so they can claim evolution is impossible. In particular, it’s easy for them to take any single organism in isolation and go oooh, aaah over its elaborate detail, and then segue into the argument from personal incredulity.
The mighty Kent Hovind has struck out.
On June 5th 2006, Hovind pled nolo contendere as
charged to three counts: constructing a building
without a permit, refusing to sign a citation and
violating the county building code. Hovind was ordered
to pay $225.00 per count. The plea brings to an end a
5-year battle over a $50.00 building permit. Hovind
estimates he spent $40,000 in legal expenses on this
case. Meanwhile, the property taxes for Dinosaur
Adventure Land are in arrears in an amount of
$10,338.36 ($4,955.23 for 2005 and 5,383.13 for 2003
and 2004).In both criminal and civil trials in the United
States, a plea of “nolo contendere” means that the
defendant neither admits nor disputes the charge or no
contest. It literally means “I do not wish to
contend.” Spiro Agnew famously approximated it as “I
didn’t do it, but I’ll never do it again.” This plea
is only recognised in the U.S. No formal plea is
required in civil matters where paper pleadings are
used.
