Mike Dunford
tqa
Posts by this author
April 11, 2007
I know what I feel, and I don't like it. I don't know what to say, and I don't like that, either.
I've been trying to write this post for two hours and three beers now, and I've spent most of that time staring at a blank white box on the screen. I've started to write things time after time, and…
April 10, 2007
"You are entitled to your own opinions. You are not entitled to your own facts."-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up to provide a way for leading scientists to sit down together, evaluate all of the available data on climate change, and…
April 10, 2007
Today is another high blogging load kind of day, and like many high blogging load days it coincides nicely with a high workload day, so there's no way I'm going to be able to write about everything cool. So, I'm going to do what I did yesterday - talk about them all really briefly now, and then…
April 9, 2007
Bill Dembski says that "framing" is bad. Bill Dembski says that "framing" is bad. Good lord, I feel like I've been hit over the head with a two-ton block of solid irony. Dembski says that people shouldn't try to shape messages. My mind just can't wrap around that one.
It's like Charlie Manson…
April 9, 2007
I just found the time to read the two different versions of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group II's summary for policymakers, and I'm pissed as hell. I'd heard the reports about the epic battle between scientists and diplomats (the final score on that one was a 1-0…
April 9, 2007
During a weekend that was marked by the release of another of the IPCC's summaries for policymakers, the hottest topic here at Scienceblogs was (still) the Nisbet/Mooney "Framing Science" paper. (It's also a bit of a water-cooler debate topic here at UH right now, and I suspect the same is going…
April 9, 2007
It's another one of those days - there's just too much out there to blog about, and not enough time to do the blogging. It's partly my fault this time, of course. I've got this bad habit of taking the weekend off from blogging, so there's a backlog that stretches back to Friday.
In the stack…
April 5, 2007
The latest issue of the journal Science includes a policy forum piece written by Sciencebloggers Chris Mooney (The Intersection) and Matt Nisbet (Framing Science). In the article, they argue that scientists do not, for the most part, use effective communications strategies when trying to defend…
April 4, 2007
President Bush today continued his efforts to extort money from Congress by holding the American Military hostage. In a speech made to soldiers at Fort Irwin, California, Bush stayed on his basic message: give me the money with no strings attached or the troops are going to get hurt:
Just as the…
April 4, 2007
Creationist brain surgeon Michael Egnor has been busy over the last couple of days, posting first a "response" to Orac's challenge then a "response" to Mark ChuCarroll's repeated attempts to explain the concept of tautology to him. There have been several responses to these two posts over at…
April 3, 2007
Update - I've written a second post on this topic in response to the President's speech at Fort Irwin earlier today.
Mr. President, meet the Constitution. Constitution, I'd like to introduce you to President George W. Bush. It's been a long six years since Mr. Bush took office, and it's high time…
April 3, 2007
Senator (and Presidential candidate) John McCain toured parts of Baghdad the other day. He wasn't alone, of course. He had a few friends with him. Senator Lindsey Graham was there, too. So were Representatives Mike Pence and Rick Renzi. Oh, yeah, and they had some security with them, too - judging…
April 2, 2007
Another gem from the West Wing - this time from the season finale from Season 3:
TOBY: He's at the Yankee game right now?
SAM: Local news covered it. He said this was how ordinary Americans got their entertainment.
TOBY: I've been to 441 baseball games in Yankee Stadium. There's not a…
April 2, 2007
The Supreme Court of the United States has, in a 5-4 decision (pdf), just ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency's decision not to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the clean air act was, "arbitrary, capricious, or otherwise not in accordance with law."
The decision does not…
April 1, 2007
Me: "It's about a DVD"
Child #1: "What gender is it."
Me: "I wasn't aware that DVD's have a gender."
Child #1: "The gender. You know, is it comedy, or drama, or action?"
March 30, 2007
Via Pharyngula, I just learned what Catholic League president Bill Donohue is pissed about today - a life-size sculpture of Jesus made out of milk chocolate that is going on display in New York next week. According to Donohue, the sculpture is, "hate speech." In the same press release, Donohue…
March 29, 2007
As I mentioned earlier, there's a really interesting paper on mammal evolution in the latest issue of the journal Nature. The authors of the paper compiled a really fantastic sampling of molecular data that included data from about 99% of all currently known extant mammals. The data was then used…
March 29, 2007
It's one of the curses of blogging - there's no way to control when good stories to blog about pop up. It would be great if we could regulate the flow in some way, and get the stories to show up at nice, regular intervals. Give me one good story a day, and one really good story every second or…
March 28, 2007
According to widespread media (and blog) reports, the Bush administration is about to release a set of administrative rules changes that would "gut" the Endangered Species Act. Actually, "gut" really isn't descriptive enough to do justice to what they are getting geared up for. They are getting…
March 28, 2007
It's been a few days since I've posted anything here, so I just wanted to toss a quick post up to let everyone know I'm still alive, and haven't abandoned the blog. I had a tooth abscess pop up on me last week, and it didn't get resolved until Monday. For some reason, I had a hard time working up…
March 22, 2007
At yesterday's Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing, Senator James Inhofe challenged Gore to sign a "Personal Energy Ethics Pledge." Inhofe's antics are nothing new - the man's been opposed to a reality based reality for years now, and he's pulled plenty of media stunts to…
March 21, 2007
By this point, the name Michael Egnor should be familiar to readers of this blog - but if you need a reminder, he's the neurosurgeon who recently signed on to the staff of the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints blog. Over the last week or two, Egnor has been trying to convince people that…
March 21, 2007
I've been kind of quiet the last couple of days - I've been dealing with an exam and a dental issue - so I didn't get into the whole Michael Egnor (aka The DI's Pet Neurosurgeon) linkfest. I agree with Bora, though. It would be good if anyone who wants to Google him is able to quickly find out…
March 17, 2007
Dr. Michael Egnor is, once again, trying to explain why evolution isn't important to medicine. This time he's responding to Mark Chu-Carroll's post on Tautology. In his latest post, Egnor continues to challenge the conventional wisdom that an understanding of evolution in general and natural…
March 17, 2007
This post was originally written on 9 September 2005, and was posted over at the old place. It's relevant to a post that will be appearing shortly, so I'm moving it over here for convenience. I haven't edited the original in any way.
From a story in today's WaPo, I learned that Bayer has…
March 16, 2007
Neurosurgeon and recent addition to the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division blog Dr. Michael Egnor is at it again. He's responded to Burt's latest response to his prior response to Burt's earlier response to his - you get the drift. Burt's been doing a great job of responding to Egnor…
March 15, 2007
After a great deal of thought, I decided that a large part of the discussion that had taken place in the comments thread of my post on pedophiles and the First Amendment had gone well beyond what I am personally comfortable with having on my blog. I closed the comments section of that post and…
March 15, 2007
New Scienceblogger Rob Knop has written a couple of posts explaining his own religious views and raising one of those questions that usually manages to get people worked up here: are science and spirituality compatible? That's a question that I've found myself thinking about more than usual lately…
March 14, 2007
When I put up my post the other day responding to a Salon article accusing Army doctors of inappropriately changing physical profiles to deploy more people, there were some things that I didn't make clear enough. I did not address mental health at all, and my discussion of the physical standards…