Here’s another account from the “War on Christians” conference. These people are scary and weird.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Here’s another account from the “War on Christians” conference. These people are scary and weird.
Hey, does anybody know what’s happened with The Inoculated Mind? They’re scheduled to be the next host for the Tangled Bank, and the site seems to be down.
If that’s your weblog, get in touch with me soon.
If I had one, that is. A reader cruelly sent me a ghastly link to the Christian song stylings of Lil’ Markie.
Cthulhu, take me now. My psyche is scarred.
I haven’t watched South Park in a long time, but I understand the latest controversy is that they blanked out an innocuous, brief portrayal of Mohammed, and everyone is saying the network caved under pressure. Michelle Malkin and her fellow right-wing nutjobs are embarrassingly hysterical over it.
People, it’s a cartoon that intentionally tries to drum up shrieks of outrage…it tries so hard that I’ve lost interest in it. I can’t possibly be the only one who thinks this whole affair was done on purpose by the creators, can I? If you think this episode is significant, you’ve been played.
You tell me…should I be flattered at all the email coming in from people saying that the phrase “flailing around like a lubed-up squid” brought me immediately to their mind?
Maybe it was the erotic resonance of the image that elicits that prompts the association…
Please don’t tell me I’m the only one who detects the erotic resonance.
Science asks awkward questions, doesn’t it? I got a link to a recent paper in the BMJ (thanks, SEF!) that asks one of those questions—can fetuses feel pain?—and then takes it apart clinically, coming up with an answer that will make some adults feel pain: that answer is no.
Science fairs usually have a few pleasant surprises, a lot of ho-hum projects done by rote with little thought (sometimes clearly done the night before), and a few stinkers that reveal nothing but the student’s ignorance. The science teachers are supposed to screen the project proposals to prevent that from happening, though, so the really bad projects usually don’t get through. There’s also a hierarchy: local to county or regional to state, and only the best are supposed to progress. State science fairs usually have some very impressive work and some that might be naive, but at least the student has enthusiasm. This description of a state level science fair project is disturbing, not just because the student’s work was substandard, but because it somehow made it through what should have been multiple levels of screening.
Then I saw it. “Creator or Not? YOU DECIDE”
The title claimed we could decide, but the project left no room for vacillation. It started with a hypothesis that “The universe was created by an intelligent designer.” It went on to make the standard big number argument, and closed with the conclusion, “The universe was created by an intelligent designer.”
The big number argument: there are twenty amino acids. The average human protein has around 460 amino acids in it. Thus the number of possible combinations is a huge number. The age of the universe in seconds likewise is a huge number, but less huge than the number of possible amino acid combinations. Thus you would have to have been randomly generating these protien chains at the rate of bunches every second from the Big Bang to now before you got human protein chains. Clearly that didn’t happen; therefore, an intelligent designer did it. Quod erat demonstratum.
That’s extremely distressing. It’s sad that some kid has such a poor knowledge of logic and evidence, but it is even more troubling that the educational system has rotted out so much that shoddy work like that can actually advance that far. We should worry about individuals, of course, but this is a sign that the educational infrastructure that leads to good scientists isn’t working—there was a complete failure from parents to science teacher to fair judges, and all of those people ought to be ashamed of themselves. This is not how we get kids into the Siemens Westinghouse competition.
(via The Scientific Activist)
What a waste of good cephalopod images, using them to make a mosaic of yours truly. It’s made using some softward called MacOSaiX, if you’re interested in trying some yourself.
Palazzo has put me in a pissy mood, now. He’s mentioned those pompous god-botherers at the Templeton Foundation, who awarded 1.4 million dollars to that credulous gasbag, John Barrow.
When Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins challenged physicist John Barrow on his formulation of the constants of nature at last summer’s Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship lectures, Barrow laughed and said, “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist. You’re a biologist.”
For Barrow, biology is little more than a branch of natural history. “Biologists have a limited, intuitive understanding of complexity. They’re stuck with an inherited conflict from the 19th century, and are only interested in outcomes, in what wins out over others,” he adds. “But outcomes tell you almost nothing about the laws that govern the universe.” For physicists it is the laws of nature themselves that capture and structure the universe–and put brakes on it as well.
Yeah, and some physicists are little more than glorified numerologists.
