July 7, 2010
Scibling Superbug has a good summary of what's wrong:
Summing up: By including this corporate-written blog in its stable of otherwise independent blogs, and especially by presenting it in the same format as the independent blogs, with insufficient labeling and transparency, Sb has imperiled the…
July 7, 2010
More and more of the other ScienceBloggers have weighed in on the Pepsi-written nutrition blog being hosted here at SB. A few more have announced blogging sabbaticals or simply shuttered their SB blog and opened up shop elsewhere.
In addition to a mea culpa sent to the bloggers, the overlords have…
July 6, 2010
The ScienceBloggers have been whooping it up on Twitter, pissed as can be that PepsiCo has bought a blog on Scienceblogs to talk about nutrition and public health issues. This is very silly, and the tweeters have been working hard to come up with hypothetical examples that might match the…
July 2, 2010
So Chris Hitchens canceled his book tour in order to get cancer treatment, and some douchebag is crowing about it, saying that it's all part of God's great plan. You see, it's a slow-growing cancer, which will give Hitchens time to recant his neocon imperialism atheism. PZ's response is exactly…
July 2, 2010
Enjoy this celebration penned by Canadia's finest cartoonist, Kate Beaton:
July 1, 2010
Ever since I edited my high school poetry magazine, I've been a fan of W. S. Merwin, both as a poet and as a translator of poetry. In honor of his selection as US Poet Laureate, here is one of my favorites â Separation by W. S. Merwin:
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle…
July 1, 2010
In February, Penn State issued a report clearing climatologist Michael Mann of 3 charges of academic misconduct arising from the theft of emails from a server at a British university. More recently, a British parliamentary report dismissed claims that climate scientists had behaved improperly.…
June 29, 2010
PZ is unamused. I criticized his criticism of prayer vigils in the Gulf, and he responds:
It's strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here's another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand…
June 29, 2010
Via ClimateProgress (who got it from Barefoot and Progressive), we get Kentucky's Republican nominee for the US Senate, Rand Paul, at an event for local homeschoolers. At the top of the Q&A, he's asked when he became a Christian and how old the earth his.
Paul has no trouble giving a detailed…
June 28, 2010
Robert Byrd, the longest serving legislator in US history, died last night in a Washington hospital. He overcame the racial politics of his upbringing, repudiating his youthful flirtations with the Klan and championing a vision of the Constitution that secured rights to all Americans. He was a…
June 26, 2010
PZ Myers is disappointed. There's a massive oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is incapable of stopping it, as is the federal government, and the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida (and soon on to Georgia and the Carolinas) are being coated in a chocolatey rainbow of crude oil. This is bad,…
June 24, 2010
Martin Cothran, scourge of all deviation, whether from his ideal of "classical education," from his creationist beliefs, from his homophobia, from his misogyny, from his aversion to women who assert their own sexuality, or from his conservative ideals, wants us all to know:
My mother still keeps…
June 22, 2010
I don't care that Gen. McChrystal and his aides got drunk and talked smack. I care that they were dumb enough to do so on the record with a reporter, and I care that McChrystal is behind schedule on in implementing his plan to win in Afghanistan. Neither speaks to his competence, or his staff's…
June 21, 2010
Contrary to the expectations of my correspondent Miss.Alberta.Smith, invitations to international symposia generally do not have one exclamation point â let alone 15 â in the Subject line.
June 21, 2010
Remember when Disco. spinner Casey Luskin rolled out this silly attempt at refuting critics of irreducible complexity?:
Car engines use various kinds of bolts, and a bolt could be seen as a small âsub-partâ or âsub-systemâ of a car engine. Under [Ken] Miller's logic, if a vital bolt in my car's…
June 21, 2010
Casey Luskin, Disco. 'Tute spinner, has recently relaunched a fight over whether and how textbooks use embryological drawings from Ernst Haeckel's 19th century popular works. In his two posts (excerpting from a jumbled essay he wrote for a law review), he repeatedly claims that those drawings are…
June 20, 2010
John Fleck, a superstar science journalist whose work on water in the southwest is consistently brilliant, has some sage thoughts on the Problem With Science Journalism:
In the newspaper this week, I took a whack at what I think is one of the fundamental public misunderstandings about the nature of…
June 18, 2010
You may recall a small brouhaha among science fans some time back when the clowns in Insane Clown Posse released a video of a song declaring their hatred for "scientist[s], y'all motherfuckers lying and getting me pissed." The offense of scientists? Trying to answer bog-simple questions like "…
June 14, 2010
His defense of mountain removal mining:
I donât think anybodyâs going to be missing a hill or two here and there.
Stupid hills, always getting in the way.
June 8, 2010
In 2000, Will Saletan described Joe Lieberman's crusade against lurid Hollywood. Joe, he explained:
has spent years trying, through shame and intimidation, to cleanse movies, television, pop music, and video games of gratuitous sex and violence. [â¦]
When asked on Meet the Press about the…
June 7, 2010
For reasons passing understanding, people continue to listen to the Thomas More Legal Center. Listening to their nonsense cost the Dover Area School District a cool million, and now some buffoons in Michigan have taken TMLC's help in a suit challenging the Affordable Care Act. TMLC litigator…
June 7, 2010
You remember Kris Kobach, right? Once a Congressional candidate with ties to white supremacists, before that a Justice Department staffer on a since-abandoned racial profiling scheme, after which he bankrupted the Kansas Republican Party, and is lately famous for authoring Arizona's "show me your…
June 6, 2010
Never let it be said that I don't acknowledge error. Ophelia Benson, responding in part to my earlier posts on the World Science Festival's science and faith panel, points out amistake I made:
Meanwhile â Josh Rosenauâs claim, in his post on why there shouldnât be any atheist scientists on the…
June 6, 2010
Steve Matheson writes An open letter to Stephen Meyer:
Dear Steve:
â¦Yes, it would be great to follow up on our brief meeting onstage, and to find ourselves in situations in which topics of mutual interest are discussed by knowledgeable and intelligent people (at conferences, for example, or in…
June 6, 2010
So we're getting ready for another round of California's dysfunctional government by proposition. The ballot will include a proposal for Louisiana-style open primaries, in which the top two vote-getters proceed to a runoff in November.
It doesn't strike me as an intuitively awful idea, as it…
June 3, 2010
Ophelia and Larry are upset. In particular, they are upset that Chad Orzel and I thought it was OK to have a panel about how scientists reconcile their religious faith and their scientific work but not to include panelists who reject the panel's premise.
This was the point that Chad and I were…
June 2, 2010
Chad Orzel, responding to Sean Carroll, is absolutely right. The question is whether a panel at the World Science Festival (funded by Templeton, ZOMG!) should include incompatibilist atheists in a discussion about science and religion. Chad argues that doing so would derail the discussion:
In the…
June 2, 2010
People are idiots. Who looks at megatons of toxic goo being spewed out of a pipe and thinks: "I know, let's make that toxic sludge radioactive!"
May 31, 2010
Daily Kos asks 1200 voters:
Most astronomers believe the universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago in a massive event called the Big Bang. Do you think that's about right or do think the universe was created much more recently?
Saints be praised, 62% of the public accepts the Big Bang and a 13.7…
May 31, 2010
A year ago today, George Tiller was murdered in cold blood. Tiller was a Wichita OB/GYN known for being one of the few doctors who would perform third trimester abortions. Scott Roeder came into Tiller's church, where Tiller served as an usher, and shot him to death before his family and friends…
