jlynch | February 28, 2006The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is partnering with Carnegie Museum of Natural History in a first-of-its-kind program that will educate medical students on the evolutionary history of humans and animals. By learning the origins of human disease, such as back pain and cancer - which existed in Jurassic Age dinosaurs - students should better understand contemporary public health concerns and think about treatment and prevention approaches that modern society may have overlooked. More here.
jlynch | February 28, 2006Busy, busy here. Lectures to prepare, theses to read, grading to be done. Will be back later, but for the moment, feast your eyes on "Microsoft redesigns iPod packaging" ... so true, so true.
jlynch | February 26, 2006News from Answers in Genesis, Henry Morris, the godfather of American young earth creationism and founder of the Institute for Creation Research died last night at the age of 87. Like him or loath him, Morris' influence on American anti-evolutionism was huge. See here for more details.
jlynch | February 25, 2006
You Passed 8th Grade Math
Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!
Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?
Well, PZ and Grrrlscientist were doing it. And I only want to be one of the cool kids in 8th grade.
jlynch | February 25, 2006When I was growing up in Ireland, the Olympics were something worth watching; amateur athletes not getting monetary compensation, giving it their all, and happy to do so because it was the Olympics. Perhaps a major factor was the fact that Irish athletes were often outside shots to win, and when they did medal, it was priceless.
Since coming to this country in 1994. I have to say that any love of the Olympics has been slowly but surely bled out of me. It's hard to choose why - the constant jingoism of the commentators, the human "interest" stories that go on longer than the actual events,…
jlynch | February 23, 2006Given the fact that Henry Thoby Prinsep has appeared twice on these pages over the past few days, and that Nick referred to him as a "footnote in history with a weird name" (I'm not picking on you Nick!), it only seems right that I share some information on him.
Prinsep (1792 - 1878) was a civil servant that work for the British government in India and eventually served as a member of the important Council of India for sixteen years. As an obituary for his son, Val, noted, Prinsep was "one of the ablest of Indian Civil Servants of his time; he was Persian Secretary to the Government, and was…
jlynch | February 23, 2006My post on the Darwin photo was picked up by Nick at the Panda's Thumb. Yesterday, I contacted Kevin Repp, Curator of Modern European Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke and I received this reply today:
Many thanks for your query. As it turns out, the photo in question is indeed of Mr. Princep. How it came to be cataloged as one of Darwin is a mystery. The inscription business makes it all the more curious. In any case, I have alerted our digital library cataloging staff, and the record will be corrected promptly. Thanks again for pointing this out to us.
Mystery solved ... well sort…
jlynch | February 21, 2006This is just too funny for words. This weekend, Boingboing ran a story about a woman who lost her camera while on holiday, and of a Canadian family that found it, but refuses to return it because doing so would upset their son. Cory received this letter:
Hello doctorow,
I am sure that you must have have proof that this camera was stolen and that you just would not be accusing someone of something that you know nothing about ? I am a lawer and am interested infinding out your response please respond as I am interested in finding out what proof you have.
Regards
Don Deveny Queens council 2006-…
jlynch | February 21, 2006Janet has some useful advice to students following the New York Times piece on emails from students to professors that a bunch of Sb'ers have already commented on. My favorite has to be,"How U doin?" is generally too informal an opening for an email to your professor.
Yup. And "dude" isn't the best way to open an e-mail either.
Most of the time my students are great on e-mail. Sometimes however ...
jlynch | February 21, 2006
Above is not (see comments) a picture of Charles Darwin, taken obviously in his later years. He commented that "I like this photograph much better than any other which has been taken of me." The original is in the Beinecke Library at Yale.
jlynch | February 20, 2006Grrlscientist has a review up of Ruse's book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (2005), so I thought I'd copy a review I wrote that appeared in Nature Cell Biology (Dec 2005 issue).
As an undergraduate in Ireland in the mid-80's I ran across a copy of Ashley Montagu's book Science and Creationism. Frankly, I felt that I was reading some kind of parody â could there actually be people in a technologically literate country like the United States who denied both the fact of evolution and the hypothesis that natural selection was a mechanism for such change? Such opposition was not an issue in…
jlynch | February 20, 2006The American Association for the Advancement of Science is this nations premier scientific body and was founded in the 19th century to promote science (along the model of its British counterpart). Ironically, one of its early supporters was the great creationist Louis Agassiz - whom many have described as the last great American creationist scientist - and in the early 20th century, William Jennings Bryan was a member.
The AAAS met in St Louis last week and the Board of Directors issued the following statement [pdf] on evolution:
Evolution is one of the most robust and widely accepted…
jlynch | February 19, 2006Rob Skipper is a philosopher and historian of biology whom I had the pleasure of spending some time with last year at the Dibner Institute Seminar at Woods Hole. So, I note that he and his group at the University of Cincinatti have a new blog, hpb etc. Drop by and say hello!
jlynch | February 17, 2006Earlier on today I posted the following which seems to have disappeared from the page:
After spending yesterday evening preparing for classes by watching the ICR video Thousands ... Not Billions and the ID flick The Privileged Planet, I awake to read this. Randy Olson, following an MFA in filmmaking from USC, has decided that the way to improve evolution education is basically to engage in sort of dumbed-down glossiness that anti-evolutionists specialize in; all surface flash with little real depth. Olson seems to have forgotten that communicating science is difficult and it's complexity…
jlynch | February 17, 2006
Quailtard: farm-raised quail released for the hunters to fire at. As in: "Look, the mere fact that we're even talking about how the vice president drives up with his rich friends in cars to shoot farm-raised wingless quailtards is letting the quail know 'how' we're hunting them" (Rob Corrdry, The Daily Show, 2/13/06).
(via Boingboing)
jlynch | February 15, 2006Dan Ely is a physiologist who supported the Ohio lesson plan that was defeated yesterday. In this skreed, the DI tries to make out that Ely - who testified in Kansas - has been unfairly represented as a creationist. Let's look at the Kansas transcript, shall we?
Q: Welcome to Kansas. I have a few questions for the record for you. First I have a group of yes or no questions that I would like for you to answer, please. What is your opinion as to the age of the earth?A: In light of time I would say most of the evidence that I see, I read and I understand points to an old age of the earth.
Q…
jlynch | February 15, 2006I like Firefox and have been using it since it was a very early beta. However, of late I've noticed that it is really hogging memory. Turns out, it's a "feature" (see this Slashdot article). More importantly, you can fix the "feature" but page loading will take a little hit.
jlynch | February 14, 2006The Ohio state school board has just voted (11-4) to eliminate a lesson plan and
science standards that opened the door to teaching ID. See here and here. Panda's Thumb alread has a thread open.
jlynch | February 13, 2006Over at Slashdot, there is a story discussing readers' first computers. The first computer I owned was a ZX-81 with an 8k ROM, 1k RAM and a Z80A cpu (more specs here). I learned to program in BASIC and assembly on it and stored programs on audio tape. That was 1982. In 1984, I got a Commodore 64 - a whooping 64k of memory, great graphics (sprites, anyone?) and sound. I think it was 1990 before I bought a computer that ran Windows. My next machine wont.