Things That Make Ya Go Boom
mikethemadbiologist | February 19, 2008A lot of my fellow ScienceBloglings have written about the attempts in many Floridian municipalities to weaken biology education, so I won't waste bandwidth revisiting that here. But what amazed when I read this article about Floridian voters' views of evolution was the response to the question "Which of the following comes closest to what you think evolution is?":
How in the Intelligent Designer's green earth do the same number of people define evolution as creationism as do correctly define evolution? Remember, this was not a question about what was the 'correct' version of how life came…
mikethemadbiologist | January 16, 2008According to the NY Times' John Tierney, post-Sept. 11th fear of terrorism might be detrimental to one's health:
But worrying about terrorism could be taking a toll on the hearts of millions of Americans. The evidence, published last week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, comes from researchers who began tracking the health of a representative sample of more than 2,700 Americans before September 2001. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the scientists monitored people's fears of terrorism over the next several years and found that the most fearful people were three to five times more likely…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2008The sound you're hearing is the heads of everyone who cares about civil liberties going BOOM! According to the AP, the telephone companies cut off the FISA wiretap programs when they weren't paid on time:
Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.
A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.
In at…
mikethemadbiologist | December 16, 2007Jonathan Schell has recently written a superb book about the history of the nuclear age, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. What Schell does is expose a lot of the hidden assumption underlying the discussion surrounding nuclear disarmament and nuclear proliferation (which as he notes are intertwined). Here's a small taste:
In short, even in a world without nuclear weapons, deterrence would, precisely because the bomb in the mind would still be present, remain in effect. In that respect, the persisting know-how would be as much a source of reassurance as it would be of…
mikethemadbiologist | October 31, 2007I have a week off, so I've been going to the gym in the morning later than usual. I'm still recovering from the near-lobotomization of morning radio, so I wasn't prepared for a report on the "superbug" on Fox's The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet--think of it as a cheap knockoff of Regis and Kelly. Since the sound wasn't turned on for the television, I should have just left it alone, but no, I had to check out the video on the interwubs when I came home.
First, anyone who says that evolutionary biologists suck at communicating should watch this bozo. It's a classic example of how not to…
mikethemadbiologist | October 9, 2007What's one more criminal in the mix, anyway? So what if a government contractor supplied weapons to Liberia's Charles Taylor and the Taliban (italics mine):
Viktor Bout, was paid tens of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars while illegally flying transport missions for the United States in Iraq. Bout is the notorious Russian weapons merchant whose fleet of aging Soviet aircraft rivals that of some NATO countries in its size and capacity. By marrying his access to Soviet bloc weapons with his airlift capacity, Bout established himself as the world's premiere purveyor of illicit weapons to the…
mikethemadbiologist | October 1, 2007It appears that Logan airport security overreacted a little. From skippy:
star simpson, who sounds like the cartoon character host of the view, was the mit student who was arrested at logan airport last week for wearing a "hoax device," which airport police thought was a bomb, but was really just geek computer art.
....so, because most people in charge nowadays are luddites when it comes to science and technology, suddenly the rest of us have to keep our heads down and minds firmly ensconsed in the 19th century as well? (make that the 16th century...there were actual machines at work in the…
mikethemadbiologist | September 29, 2007Maha on how violent resistance often fails over the long run:
Every time a peaceful resistance is put down, somebody is bound to say they should have used guns. But when an armed insurgency is put down, or when it turns into a cycle of violence and vengeance dragging on for generations, for some reason this doesn't count against the effectiveness of armed insurgency. And how often does the residual anger from one war blossom into the next one?
In fact, I'd say nonviolent resistance has a pretty good track record, particularly as far as long-term results are concerned.
Of course, many of the…
mikethemadbiologist | September 8, 2007...attack Iran. Bartcop describes his correspondence with a U.S. naval officer (via maha--thanks...; italics mine):
I have a friend who is an LSO on a carrier attack group that is planning and staging a strike group deployment into the Gulf of Hormuz. (LSO: Landing Signal Officer- she directs carrier aircraft while landing) She told me we are going to attack Iran. She said that all the Air Operation Planning and Asset Tasking are finished. That means that all the targets have been chosen, prioritized, and tasked to specific aircraft, bases, carriers, missile cruisers and so forth....
Always…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2007Yes, I've cribbed the title from Chris Hedges' superb, must-read book, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. But Josh Marshall stumbles across a great insight about the Iraq War and Occupation, but doesn't quite carry through all the way. So the Mad Biologist will. Marshall writes about President Bush (italics mine):
And here I think we get back to the root of the matter: We are bigger than Iraq.
By that I do not mean we, as America, are bigger or better than Iraq as a country. I mean that that sum of our national existence is not bound up in what happens there. The country will go on.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 20, 2007...to me. Or at least, to the residents of my congressional district. MoveOn.org has a district-by-district list of what your congressional district's contribution to the Iraqi War and Occupation could have bought instead. For me, a resident of Massachusetts' Eight District:
*The cost to Massachusetts taxpayers alone is $12.89 billion.
*Taxpayers in the 8th congressional district are paying $998 million for the Iraq war.
What Citizens of Massachusetts's 8th District Could Have Gotten Instead:
· Health care coverage for 290,837 people--or 363,877 kids, or
· Head Start for 118,751…
mikethemadbiologist | August 5, 2007(from here)
While reading this NY Times article about houses in Newport, RI, I saw the above picture and thought, "That would be a really nice house to live in." Then my head exploded as I read the caption:
Topsy Taylor uses her stone bungalow at a former fishing club on Gooseberry Island, R.I. as a place to entertain and take naps.
Some people have a 'nap chair' or a 'nap sofa' that they like to take naps on. Some people even have a nap room. But Topsy has a fucking nap house.
A house for napping.
Tax her.
mikethemadbiologist | May 16, 2007Last night, the Republican presidential candidates were asked what they would do in a "24" situation. Intelligent Designer help us, but McCain (and Paul) were the only sane ones.
McCain noted that the "24" scenario is ridiculous. He also pointed out that torture causes us to lose our moral credibility. Doesn't McCain realize that morality is to be applied only to fetuses and prayer in schools? Giuliani and Romney went Full Metal Bauer, as digby notes:
I think it's clear that this group has come to fully understand that winning the GOP nomination is all about the codpiece. These guys have…
mikethemadbiologist | March 18, 2007Many of you will know of Freeman Dyson as a world-class physicist. But he was also assigned to RAF Bomber Command during World War II. Here are his thoughts on bombing of urban areas, from Disturbing the Universe:
At the beginning of the war, I believed fiercely in the brotherhood of man, called myself a follower of Gandhi, and was morally opposed to all violence. After a year of war, I retreated and said, Unfortunately nonviolent resistance against Hitler is impracticable, but I am still morally opposed to bombing. A couple of years later I said, Unfortunately it seems that bombing is…
mikethemadbiologist | February 19, 2007What the hell is this?
...than develop a new radiation warning symbol? According to the IAEA, the old symbol had "no intuitive meaning and little recognition beyond those educated in its significance." OK, then. But I'm going to miss this guy:
mikethemadbiologist | November 3, 2006Buckling under to conservative pressure to find the non-existent evidence that Saddam Hussein had, in fact, been building weapons of mass destruction, about a year ago, the Bush Administration placed online documents from the Saddam Hussein era that provided technical information on building various nuclear devices. Quoth the Grey Lady:
The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public…
mikethemadbiologist | September 19, 2006Let me state something very clearly: I do not want a U.S. city (or any other city for that matter) wiped out by a nuclear bomb. Having said that, we the hawks among us have lost all sense of historical perspective when it comes to Iran. When you compare the Cold War to what ever it is that we have going on with Iran, it's obvious that the existential threat of Iran isn't even in the same league:
1) Had only a fraction of the nuclear arsenals on either side been unleashed, human civilization would probably come to a screeching halt (to think, no internets!).
2) Leaving aside the nutjobs on…