Mike Dunford
tqa
Posts by this author
February 16, 2007
I was watching M*A*S*H a few days back and saw this scene. For some reason, I can't quite get it out of my mind.
Frank: Well, everybody knows war is hell.
BJ: Remember, you heard it here last.
Hawkeye: War isn't hell. War is war and hell is hell, and of the two war is a lot worse.
Fr. Mulcahy: How…
February 14, 2007
But seriously, folks, watch the video. Franken does the best job of explaining what government is for that I've seen in a long, long time.
February 14, 2007
Presidential hopeful John Edwards just released his plan for ending the Iraq war, making him the second of the major Democratic candidates to announce a proposed solution to our involvement in the conflict (Barack Obama sponsored a bill, S.433, last month that is in the Senate.) Looking at the two…
February 12, 2007
As you may know, today is the 198th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Birthday wishes have been posted on a number of blogs, as an assortment of scientists and scientific enthusiasts mark the occasion. For my own little tribute to Mr. Darwin, I'm going to talk about why he is the subject…
February 8, 2007
In an article made available today on the New England Journal of Medicine's website, University of Chicago researchers report on the results of a study that assessed how the moral beliefs of physicians affect their advice to patients. There is good news and bad news in this study. The good news is…
February 8, 2007
PZ Myers reports (and the report is confirmed on both CNN's and Richard Dawkins' websites) that tonights episode (Thursday, 8 Feb, 8pm Eastern) of Paula Zahn Now will revisit the story of the atheists, and replace the uninformed panel discussion with an interview of Richard Dawkins. As much as I'd…
February 7, 2007
Update: It appears that CNN will be re-airing the story at 8 pm Eastern tonight (Thursday, 8 Feb). The original panel will be replaced by an interview with Richard Dawkins.
A recent CNN story on atheism has sparked a great deal of outrage from the online atheist community. The story, which was…
February 6, 2007
Representative Dave Weldon (R-FL) recently issued a press release that has been getting a little bit of play at a couple of blogs on the political right. In the press release, Weldon accuses Democrats of taking money from NASA to fund other projects, including AIDS relief for Africa:
"The raid on…
February 5, 2007
A couple of years ago, when I was just starting on my graduate career, I decided to investigate the possibility of studying a feral population of rock wallabies that lives in one of the valleys above Honolulu. I (finally) wound up deciding that these animals weren't the best group to use to study…
February 5, 2007
Looking through the few months worth of posts here, it occurs to me that I haven't done a lot with one of the first categories I set up - the "An Incomplete Autobiography" one. I'm going to try and start to use it a little more - it's the place where I'm going to put the various little stories…
February 5, 2007
Texas governor Rick Perry's recent decision to mandate that all 6th grade girls in Texas be given the new HPV vaccine has a lot of people up in arms. What I just don't understand is why the absolute jackasses who are objecting to this are being treated as if they hold a legitimate point of view…
February 2, 2007
Over at the Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division, Michael Behe seems to be a wee bit concerned by the attention that a recent Nature paper is getting, moaning that, "It seems some scientists have discovered that one way to hype otherwise-lackluster work is to claim that it discredits ID…
February 2, 2007
I didn't join the crowd of Sciencebloggers paying tribute to Molly Ivins yesterday because I didn't know what to say. Everything, it seemed, had been said - frequently by Ms. Ivins.
Today, I read her last column. The whole thing is worth reading, but the last paragraph is truly spectacular:
We…
February 1, 2007
. . . there is an equal and opposite reaction, plus an unlimited number of unintended consequences.
The Flintshire County Council in Wales recently decided to change their procedures for de-icing the local roads. Instead of spreading rock salt, which is effective but can be corrosive to vehicles…
February 1, 2007
As several bloggers have already noted today, the White House has somehow altered the search function on their website so that it ignores virtually all mentions of the phrase "global warming." The funny thing is, they couldn't even manage to do that without screwing up.
At the moment, if you go to…
January 31, 2007
In a previous post, I discussed the highly inappropriate Pentagon response to Linda Bilmes' study of the potential financial costs stemming from servicemembers wounded or injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this post, I'm going to talk about a very serious flaw that I found while examining that…
January 31, 2007
Revere, at Effect Measure, comments on a story that just appeared in Inside Higher Education. The article detals a completely outrageous attempt at dealing with unfavorable information:
What set off the Pentagon was Bilmes' estimate for the current number of injured of 50,500. William Winkenwender…
January 31, 2007
There's an interesting op-ed on teaching evolution in today's edition of the International Herald Tribune. The opinion piece is written by Michael Balter, and suggests that, "The best way to teach the theory of evolution is to teach this contentious history." To support this position, Balter points…
January 30, 2007
I always find it a bit amusing when someone who is exceptionally good at identifying (and mercilessly mocking) stupidity in certain circumstances turns out to be totally oblivious to his own stupidity. That's exactly the case when it comes to Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame). He's gone off the deep…
January 30, 2007
Walter ReMine (an anti-evolutionist who ardently believes that "Haldane's Dilemma" is a real problem for evolution) recently updated the entry for "Haldane's Dilemma" at the CreationWiki. The update does not directly refer to my recent posts on the topic, but does address the points that I made.…
January 30, 2007
An interesting comment about open access has been left over at Bora's place. The commenter is clearly not in favor of open access, and provides a number of reasons for her opposition. I'm going to break the comment into a couple of parts, and address all of the objections separately.
OPEN ACCESS…
January 30, 2007
Over the last couple of days, quite a number of articles have been posted here at Scienceblogs commenting on the for-profit academic publishing community's most recent efforts to fight mandatory open access to government science. The industry group representing the major publishers of academic…
January 29, 2007
In 1862, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer used the phrase "survival of the fittest" to describe Darwin's concept of natural selection. It's not a bad phrase, really, and it doesn't do a bad job of describing natural selection - the individuals in any population that are "fittest" - best…
January 28, 2007
I've got a strange feeling that this answer is going to be, by far, the most common one among the Sciencebloggers:
What Kind of Reader Are You?Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading…
January 27, 2007
Jim Lynch, in an apparent attempt to see if he could get my blood pressure to break new ground, just sent me a link to this discussion of Rush Limbaugh's latest bit of verbal flatulence. Rush appears to have some rather interesting views on women in the military, and he decided to express some of…
January 26, 2007
Yesterday's post on evolutionary speed limits and Haldane's Dilemma has sparked some interesting discussion, and some of the comments have already started to move beyond the very simple scenario that I outlined. Next week, I'll post a couple of more complex examples, and look at the effect of…
January 25, 2007
There's been a bit of talk about "Evolutionary Speed Limits" over at the Intelligent Design weblog Uncommon Descent. Most of the discussion involves "Haldane's Dilemma." This concept is rooted in an article written by the noted evolutionary geneticist J. B. S Haldane in 1957. There's a lot of math…
January 23, 2007
Jake Young has a link up to a story about a family's recent misadventure on AirTran Airways. Apparently, they were removed from their flight because, after more than 15 minutes, their 3-year-old was still pitching a temper tantrum and refusing to stay seated:
The Kuleszas said they told a flight…
January 23, 2007
I made a fairly large error when I wrote my previous article on the health care "plan" that Bush will announce during the State of the Union Address later today. When I did my back-of-the-envelope calculations of the tax breaks that different people would receive under the plan, I missed an…