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gregladen | August 29, 2010Creationists have often argued that they did not come from apes, a view usually ridiculed by the scientific community. Recent evidence, however, suggests that they may have actually been right. Scientists think that at the dawn of mankind, when the rest of the human race was busy evolving and adapting to their environment, creationists were refusing to take part in the evolutionary game, and as a result of this are therefore thoroughly unevolved human beings.
Read the rest, where the DNA evidence is also discussed.
gregladen | August 29, 2010I'm skeptical that it is possible to make fried beer. I find it hard to believe that one can be human and not be a hypocrite at least some times. I'm skeptical that atheist doctors will actually conspire to kill you sooner than other doctors. I'm skeptical that science experiments always work.
gregladen | August 29, 2010I know a lot of you are interested in the Yellowstone Caldera. WEll, a recent article has come out on the topic in Geophysical Research Letters. Chris Rowan has summarized, reviewed, and analyzed the paper here.
The way the CDC talks about flu mortality has changed. This is interesting, important, and possibly even annoying. Superbug explains and discusses it here.
Speaking of Superbug:
(Stolen from here)
The latest on Huxley is Here. That's T.H., not Huxley D.L. It's the third part in The Primate Diaries biographical survey of the famous scientist.
I've had carved pangolin. Well,…
gregladen | August 29, 2010Skeptically Speaking's Podcase show Karl Mamer is now a podcast, here.
(Includes Josh Witten on irrational beliefs and evolutionary theory.)
gregladen | August 29, 2010Five years ago, on August 29th, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the coast of Louisiana with sustained winds of 125 mph. In what Republicans at the time claimed to be an utterly unrelated event, New Orleans was devastated by a flood around the same time. Apparently, New Orleans remains pretty much still devastated. Well, the poor parts do, other parts have been fixed up, I hear.
Scientists had predicted that a hurricane like Katrina would hit New Orleans and do pretty much what it did. So, we call August 29th "Oh fuck, we should have listened to the scientists" day.
So, happy "Oh Fuck"…
gregladen | August 29, 2010ultimate showdown
Who would name their cats emacs and vi?
It would be really cool to have two cats and name them sed and awk.
pharyngula | August 28, 2010At least we can dismiss her latest fluff in the first sentence:
Is physical science - as some people say - omnicompetent? Can it (that is) answer all possible questions?
"As some people say" is one of the more perniciously lazy phrases in the English language. And setting up a straw man as the starting premise of an article is not encouraging. The answer to both is no. We don't know all possible questions, and science is just a tool. A very successful tool, but one with no alternative in sight (and Midgley certainly offers none).
To be fair, Midgley goes on to chatter about some very…
gregladen | August 27, 2010Wanted; A storage container for data media (cd's, dvd's, SD cards, etc.) that is not made of materials that seem to be even more delicate, subject to weathering, and flamable than the data medium itself.
See the whole "WANTED" list here.
gregladen | August 27, 2010With each new drop of information spilled by the media, the case seems clearer that Hauser made up data. As Nicholas Wade reports, this would potentially be "the unforgivable sin."
"Given the published design of the experiment, my conclusion is that the control condition was fabricated," said Gerry Altmann, the editor of the journal Cognition, in which the experiment was published.
...
"There is a difference between breaking the rules and breaking the most sacred of all rules," said Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia. The failure to have performed a…
mspringer | August 27, 2010If you take a flashlight and shine it at a wall or through a prism or do pretty much anything with the light, you'll find that the effects of the light change in direct proportion to the amount of light the flashlight's putting out. Twice the light, twice the reflection from the wall. Twice the light, twice the brightness in each color component of the prism spectrum. Nothing really changes qualitatively as you change the light intensity, the only difference is quantitative.
This property of light is called linear optics. Until the last half-century or so it was just called "optics". The…
gregladen | August 27, 2010Check out the Furious Purpose blog, written by a long time denizen of the Internet, yet newish blogger, written by ...
...an overworked emergency room doctor, a father and citizen, and I blog infrequently about stuff that interests me.This might include things like Health, Politics, Religion, and whatever tickles my fancy !
I have a particular interest in issues related to public health including health politics, the role of religion in public life, and rationalism/skepticism.
I'll leave it to you to go find the post that focuses on yours truly, but really, the rest of the blog is quite…
pharyngula | August 26, 2010Not that I've become morbid lately — I feel lucky that I got a potential problem taken care of before it became a crisis — but this story by Mike Celizic is inspiring and terrifying at the same time. He's a journalist who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, knows his life expectancy is now measured in weeks, and has gone public with a cancer journal to describe his last days. It's brave stuff, and the kind of courageous end we should all aspire to.
Note, of course, that the Christian cowards have infested the comments with come-to-Jesus declarations. Let's be better than that: a person…
dolittle | August 26, 2010For all the fellow fish-lovers out there, you must check out this article on a new exhibit of fish bones! Kyle Luckenbill of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia has been taking x-rays of fish specimens. The photos were so attractive, they are now displayed in an art exhibit.
gregladen | August 26, 2010Jim Emery's series is complete, and you should look through it. I find it interesting that he speaks about the "Macaca moment" and all that entails, given the current situation in the Minnesota Governor's race.
Jim's posts describe what it was like to be in the communications division of a major congressional campaign:
Inside the Political Process: Jim Emery and the Madia Campaign
Inside the Political Process: The Role of Communication
Inside the Political Process: Framing the Debate
Inside the Political Process: Epilog
gregladen | August 25, 2010In addition to a serious neck wound, Ahmed H. Sharif suffered cuts to forearms, face and one hand while trying to fend off Enright, prosecutor James Zeleta said while arguing against bail.
Enright had asked Mr. Sharif if he was a Muslim, and when he responded in the affirmative, Enright yelled some Arabic words, and told him to "consider this a checkpoint" while he attacked him with a Leatherman or similar tool weapon.
Enright volunteered for Intersections International, a group that promotes interfaith dialogue and has supported a controversial proposed mosque near ground zero.
...
Sharif…
gregladen | August 25, 2010In which an actual living person, instead of just the ashes of TV actors, will be launched into space.
Here's a picture of the rocket and it's friend, the submarine:
Our mission is very simple. We are working towards launching a human being into space.
This is a non-profit suborbital space endeavor lead by Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen, based entirely on sponsors and volunteers.
Click here to find out more, and if you like, give them money.
gregladen | August 25, 2010Obviously, I have to switch parties:
Katie Couric once described bloggers as journalists who gnaw at new information "like piranhas in a pool." But increasingly, many bloggers are also secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement.
"It's standard operating procedure" to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that "at least half the bloggers that are out there" on the Republican side "are getting remuneration in some way beyond…