Mike Dunford
tqa
Posts by this author
February 12, 2009
As you might recall, early yesterday I noticed that Google had decided to put up a Darwin logo, and predicted that some folks were going to raise hell as a result. That was, of course, one of the safest predictions this side of "it's going to rain in the Amazon Basin sometime this year", but I…
February 12, 2009
Tonight, we've got a special Conservapedia Quiz for you. This will test your ability to correctly identify the wingnut wackaloon nonsense given a range of choices. The quiz consists of one question, the answer to which may be found at the Conservapedia entry for Natural Selection.
According to…
February 12, 2009
I am amusing myself with several little experiments; I have now got a little weed garden & am marking each seedling as it appears, to see at what time of life they suffer most.--Charles DarwinLetter to Joseph Hooker21 March 1857
A few years ago, I was talking with one of my professors. We'd…
February 12, 2009
If you've ever wondered what kind of knowledge base is required to become involved at high levels in science and technology policy, you might want to watch a Senate confirmation hearing sometime. Earlier today, Drs. John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco sat down in front of the United States Senate…
February 12, 2009
Seed's got a video up on their website that outlines the entire history of life on earth. Go watch it. It's really cool, and it'll just take a minute.
February 12, 2009
Updated - The archived video is now available on the committee website, so I've been able to go back and fill in the details I missed due to earlier technical problems.
Due to technical problems, this liveblog of the Confirmation hearings for Jane Lubchenco and John Holdren begins in progress.…
February 12, 2009
There's a lot happening today.
200 x 2: Today marks the 200th birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. I know a lot more about biology than about history, so I'll be concentrating on Darwin. But I certainly don't want to dis Lincoln.
There will be a large number of posts on…
February 11, 2009
Conservapedia has a category for pages about abstinence. This category currently contains a single entry, for "teen pregnancy".
February 11, 2009
As you may have heard, Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich) is in a bit of hot water right now. The Congressman, who is the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, posted a number of updates to his Twitter page while in Baghdad recently.
The Congressman's motivation?…
February 11, 2009
...in our ongoing debate about government funding for scientific research is now available at his blog Freespace. I'm a bit tied up with other things today and tomorrow, so it may be Friday before I get a chance to post a response. In the meantime, since his blog doesn't allow for comments, feel…
February 10, 2009
If you're following the ongoing discussion Tim Sandefur and I are having on whether or not the federal government should fund science at all, there's a new article you should really go read. Stanford Professor Steve Quake has a guest column up at Olivia Judson's blog that talks about the way we…
February 10, 2009
Tonight, instead of playing around with the front page and the news items at Conservapedia, I clicked their "random page" link. The first click brought me to their entry for The Thrawn Trilogy - a series of Star Wars novels. This particular entry was entirely plagiarized from this Star Wars wiki,…
February 10, 2009
Tim Sandefur and I don't agree about the proper role of government when it comes to funding scientific research. He fairly strongly believes that there are many reasons why it's wrong for the government to fund scientific research. Tim's provided a number of reasons to support his belief, and I…
February 9, 2009
...but here's a new(ish) Conservapedia howler for you. This one comes from their news page entry for Super Bowl Sunday:
An overweight and over-the-hill Bruce Springsteen is performing songs from the 1980s at the Super Bowl halftime. Wonder why? He supports the liberal agenda hook, line and sinker…
February 9, 2009
Timothy Sandefur and I recently wound up arguing the pros and cons of government funding for basic scientific research. We've decided to take our discussion from email to our blogs.
Tim is a libertarian, and it's safe to say that he's not the world's largest fan of government funding for most…
February 8, 2009
There is little doubt that if there is any one person serving in the United States Senate who can be identified as anti-science, it is Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe. He's called global warming a "hoax", tried to pass a novelist off as a climate-change expert at a Senate hearing, and referred to…
February 8, 2009
The walking collection of pathetically cruel hominids known as Westboro Baptist staged a protest at a high school recently. This particular high school attracted their attention because last year it elected a gay male student as "prom king/queen". The students responded with a counter-protest:
The…
February 7, 2009
A series of articles just published in The Sunday Times reports that it appears likely that Andrew Wakefield falsified much of the data that was used in the 1998 Lancet article that first identified the MMR vaccine as a potential cause of autism. If the charges leveled by the paper are remotely…
February 7, 2009
A bit later than promised, here's the clip from last night's Rachel Maddow show where she so accurately described the current Republican strategy when it comes to the stimulus bill.
Here's the high point:
Republicans may not like it but the way to create jobs fast is through spending. It matters…
February 6, 2009
Unfortunately, it's Rachel Maddow. I say unfortunately not because I dislike Rachel (I don't), but because it would be really, really, really nice if the making sense thing was coming from one of our elected officials. I'll slap the clip up on this blog, with some of the juicier quotes, as soon…
February 6, 2009
I'm about to say something that I very rarely say: good for Harry Reid. Every now and then he does something that threatens to threaten his well-earned reputation for spinelessness. Today seems to be one of those days. Apparently, he's informed Olympia Snowe that if she wants to see cuts on the…
February 6, 2009
TPM has a list of stimulus cuts that a group of senators led by Democrat Ben Nelson and Republican Susan Collins have proposed. The cuts are at 77.9 billion and growing, and include a great deal of the science-related spending. On the chopping block:
750 million - half the proposed increase - of…
February 6, 2009
We're pretty familiar with hotspot volcanoes on earth. A rising plume of magma reaches to the crust, creating a volcano. The magma plumes can that cause the hotspots stay in the same spot for tens of millions of years, but plate tectonics works to keep the crust moving above the plume. The result…
February 5, 2009
When people arrive at this blog via the google, it's usually because they're searching for a combination of words that doesn't produce a lot of hits. Often, it's a series of words that looks suspiciously like things that have to do with some sort of homework assignment.
Earlier tonight, someone…
February 5, 2009
Representative Tom Coburn (R-OK) has submitted the following amendment to the stimulus bill:
None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available under this act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park…
February 5, 2009
...because it's been more than 10 days since their "hit man" sent me the warning.
I'd forgotten how amusing a good email scam can be, because the filter in my gmail account has gotten pretty good at figuring out what's spam and what's not. I was reminded a few minutes ago when I went in and…
February 4, 2009
Ed Yong has a nice article up about a new fossil find. This one is megafauna that probably wouldn't be very charismatic up close - a fifty foot, two thousand pound + snake.
Over at Wired Science, there's an article about some fossilized traces that represent the earliest evidence of…
February 3, 2009
An article published tonight in the journal PLoS ONE is forcing scientists to rethink everything they thought they knew about whale evolution.
OK. That's not actually true. But I've got a bet going that "someone" is going to use the phrase "rethink everything" in their story about this find, so…
February 3, 2009
It occurs to me that I should add a caveat to yesterday's post about the politics and pomposity of referring to yourself as "Doctor". There is in fact at least one set of circumstances that can make referring to yourself as "Dr." pompous to the point of being hysterically funny: when your "…
February 2, 2009
What's more pompous: an accomplished professional woman who went back to school and earned a doctorate at age 55, or a newspaper setting itself up as the arbiter of who should be allowed to use that title?
The LA Times apparently thinks that the person who earned the degree is the pompous one,…