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I actually saw this SNL Digital Short parody of the Twilight movie trailer before I saw the real one on YouTube. Make sure to watch the real thing after the parody, makes it way funnier.
He addresses the Behe diavlog. Sort of. McWhorter states that he did not find the rebuttals to the arguments in Michael Behe's Edge of Evolution persuasive. Fair enough, but I would be curious as to what other books on evolution he has read (I think he mentioned Sean Carroll?). The math in something like John Maynard Smith's Evolutionary Genetics is really not that hard (mostly algebra). One of the major problems I have with intelligent, open-minded people, who have looked into the "debate" and are not convinced about evolution is that they know the terms of the "argument" only in the…
I rarely post much political commentary here, because it would add little value as I have nothing distinctive to say in that domain. At Secular Right I am wont to do data analysis because I think data is something that needs to be injected into political discussions and commentary. But in any case, today I put up an essay, Religious diversity & its discontents. In it I make clear my distaste for multiculturalism, so if you are a reader who would find such opinions to your distaste, I invite you not to click! My own opinion is that multiculturalism as it is presented is not a noble lie,…
Andrew Gelman has started a new blog at ScienceBlogs, Applied Statistics. Someone should design him a header, perhaps a fancified Bayes' theorem?
One of the by-products of the brouhaha (here, here) over The Atlantic article on vaccines was some interesting issues raised by the way the Knight Science Journalism Tracker handled it (here, here). If you aren't familiar with KSJ Tracker, it's a site that does "peer review" of science journalism. It's goal "is to provide a broad sampling of the past day’s science news and, where possible, of news releases or other news tips related to publication of science news in the general circulation news media, mainly of the U.S." I don't get a chance to read it as often as I'd like, but when I do I…
The past few months Technorati really stopped working for me. Hardly any new links back in, at least that they detected. They unveiled a new site recently, you can read about it at TechCrunch. I really hate it, though to be honest I'd stopped using Technorati for a while. It looks like they pruned a lot of blogs, and that might be why I stopped seeing new links. In any case, here's an unrepresentative and personal reason why I really think it's a step back: The page for Gene Expression at ScienceBlogs (this domain). The page for Gene Expression at gnxp.com, the original blog I started in the…
Eliezer Yudkowsky is on bloggingheads.tv with one of my favorite producers of brain-candy, the statistician Andrew Gelman. Here is Eliezer's An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, and David Spiegelhalter's article on Bayesian statistics in Scholar pedia (which Gelman refers to favorably).
A friend pointed out to me that the regular brown guys on bloggingheads.tv (Reihan Salam, and to a far lesser extent Ramesh Ponnuru and myself) 1) have names that start with "R" 2) lean Right
From Matt Springer of Built on Facts. For what it's worth, many people at the Summit were skeptical of Kurzweil's specific vision. I mean in the audience, not just among the speakers.
As you can see by looking to the left (right below the cutest kid that ever was) I'm participating in DonorsChoose this year. You can of course donate to any project you think is worthy, but my current list is biased in two directions: 1) Need 2) Biology Since last fall a lot as changed economically and socially, and of course people on the margins are squeezed the most. Those of us not on the margins have seen hardship, or seen those around us subject to hardship, but really this sort of thing is normalized to our relative context. Many of the projects require small amounts of money; this…
John Hawks & I did a diavlog for Science Saturday. We decided it would be appropriate to synchronize with dark-rimmed glasses. Also, Mr. Parrot kind of decided it was an opportune time to make a huge racket by swinging his perch against the cage repeatedly. Just so you know.... (I put it below the fold too)
People complain that ministers in the cabinet Iran's recently selected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government will say things so outlandish no one else would even think of saying them, but Declan Butler over at the Nature blog, The Great Beyond, begs to differ. Take Iran's Science Minister, Kamran Daneshjou. Daneshjou's credentials had been questioned in an LA Times report in August, but Butler has found that a paper co-authored by Daneshjou contains genuine peer-reviewed science. The only fly in the ointment is that it doesn't seem to be Daneshjou's science: Large chunks of text, figures…