The newest Tangled Bank is now online at Science and Reason.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
If you’re at work, I hope you have headphones; if you don’t, check in once you get home. Here are a couple of audio recordings of good science.
It wasn’t a clean sweep that threw all the rascals out, but the Kansas school board election did return a little more balance and helped out the pro-science side. Thoughts from Kansas summarizes the results:
The Board is back in moderate hands no matter what. The night is, on balance, a victory. It’d be nice to further marginalize the extremists by winning the remaining races in November, but we’ve got a majority that will implement the science standards recommended by the scientists, educators and parents of the science standards committee. The Board can focus on bigger issues. They can dig into ways to address the special challenges of rural districts, and to find solutions to the problems faced by the students in poorer urban districts. Real challenges, not fake controversy. Helping kids, not fighting culture wars.
Best of all, it looks like Connie Morris has lost her seat on the board. That’s good news right there.
One entry in the carnival roundup for today:
Otherwise, I’m running about in Minneapolis, paying another visit to the airport and going to a meeting at UMTC, so talk among yourselves. I’ll be back later.
She’s written up her experiences at BlogHer. It’s also a good guide to where all the women are at in the blogosphere.
Let’s be clear on this: I’m merely the token moonbat in the wingnut parade, OK? You can tell because I actually have the best hat of them all.
A while back, I mentioned these hate-filled loons in Kansas who were harassing a hotel owner because he was flying a rainbow flag—Pandagon has an excellent summary of the contretemps—in short, he had the flag in memory of his son, the local paper talked up the association of the rainbow with gays, and boy howdy, all of a sudden he was getting boycotted and abused by the community. In the latest news, some Kansas bigot has cut down the flag.
I had a letter from the hotel owners forwarded to me.
The daughter is flying away to lovely Paducah, Kentucky today (another drive to the airport for me, bleh), so I was thinking of suggesting that she visit Ken Ham’s brand-new creationist museum for me, as a kind of mole…darn it, though, Paducah’s almost as far out in the boonies as Morris, and it’s nowhere near the ‘museum,’ which is up somewhere near Cincinnati, and still has a year to go before it opens…so no super-secret evilutionist missions for Skatje this time, other than to temporarily increase the average IQ of the state for a little while.
I do have to say that that article ends on a nice note.
Scientists say fossils and sophisticated nuclear dating technology show that Earth is more than 4 billion years old, the first dinosaurs appeared around 200 million years ago, and they died out well before the first human ancestors arose a few million years ago.
“Genesis is not science,” said Mary Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. “Genesis is a tale that was handed down for generations by people who really knew nothing about science, who knew nothing about natural history, and certainly knew nothing about what fossils were.”
Ham said he believes most fossils are the result of the Great Flood described in Genesis.
That ought to be media policy: anytime they do a story on a creationist, get a strong, sharp quote from someone who knows some science to slap ’em down.
You may recall that Martin Brazeau was going to spend July doing fieldwork—well, he’s back, and is going to be telling us about his exciting month in a Canadian cow pasture, if ever you wanted to hear a first-hand account of paleontological research.
