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grrlscientist | October 24, 2006I ran across this word today in my reading of Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith, and I think it's a fine word to share with all of you.
Inchoate (in-KOH-it, -eyt or, especially Brit., IN-koh-eyt) [Latin; incohÄre; to begin, to start work on]
not yet completed or fully developed; rudimentary.
just begun; incipient.
not organized; lacking order. /li>
Usage: Even though the Democrats could capture one or both houses of congress, their plan of action appears to be an inchoate mass of ideas at this point in time.
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tags: inchoate, word of the day, vocabulary
razib | October 24, 2006
Note: Download file here (it has more precise percentages on blue eyes in Norway, someone could try their hand at some game theoretic modeling if they were inclined, I lack the time right now).
Ruchira Paul brought this article to my attention:
Before you request a paternity test, spend a few minutes looking at your child's eye color. It may just give you the answer you're looking for...Their studies...show that blue-eyed men find blue-eyed women more attractive than brown-eyed women. According to the researchers, it is because there could be an unconscious male adaptation for the…
stcynic | October 24, 2006Via Radley Balko, take a look at this review of a new PBS documentary in the New York Times and this article in the Washington Post. Remember those reports from military planners saying that Rumsfeld threatened to fire anyone who talked about the need to plan for a post-war occupation of Iraq? Well here's the result:
"The Lost Year in Iraq" doesn't bother going into a discussion about whether the war was a good idea to begin with. It moves right to Baghdad's fall in April 2003 and the looting that began hours later and soon "verged on chaos," as the narrator says.
"We were totally unprepared…
tqa | October 23, 2006This weekend, an issue that came up in a post by Kevin Beck over at Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge really got me thinking. Kevin was amusing himself by shredding one of the denizens at Stop the ACLU, who was complaining about a Florida court decision that permitted a minor to bypass the state's parental notification law, and obtain an abortion without informing her parents. The post got me thinking about parental consent and notification laws in general, and my own views. I have to admit that this is an issue that really makes me uncomfortable.
Personally, I think that abortion is a…
grrlscientist | October 23, 2006Fatuity (fah·TOO·i·tee) [Latin fatuits, from fatuus; silly, foolish.]
n. pl. -ties.
smug stupidity, utter foolishness. absurdity. A ludicrous folly.
something that is utterly stupid or silly.
Usage: The possibility that the Rethuglicans can maintain their stranglehold on both houses of congress appears to be an exercise in fatuity.
Do you have a better usage? If so, please share!
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tags: fatuity, word of the day, vocabulary
stcynic | October 23, 2006According to Bishop Ussher's now-famous calculation, God created the earth on October 23, 4004 bc. Which makes today that 6010th birthday for the planet. Unfortunately, she hasn't aged well. She looks like she's about 4.55 billion years old.
stcynic | October 23, 2006James Wolcott has another post on Dinesh D'Souza's appalling argument that we should become more like the Taliban in order to make them hate us less. He includes a few quotes from the book that are so stupid they leave your mouth agape as you read them. For instance:
"The left doesn't blame America for undermining the shah of Iran, getting rid of Ferdinand Marcos, or imposing sanctions against South Africa."
As Wolcott rightly points out, it was the left that argued for imposing sanctions against South Africa and the right that fought against them. Our beloved VP, Dick Cheney, not only voted…
jlynch | October 22, 2006
Benedict is at it again:
"Contemporary life gives pride of place to an artificial intelligence ever more enslaved to experimental tecnhiques [sic], thereby forgetting that all science should safeguard mankind and promote his tendency to authentic goodness."
"Letting yourself be seduced by discovery without paying attention to the criteria of a deeper vision could lead to the drama the myth [of Icarus] speaks of." (source)
I guess he's trying to tell us that ignoring the "deeper vision" leads your wax wings to melt and you'll never get to "authentic goodness." Crystal clear, that is.
Funny…
stcynic | October 22, 2006I have a confession to make: I have a passionate hatred for Deepak Chopra. I think the man is a complete and utter fraud. So I'm always glad to see people give him the thorough reeming he deserves so much. Orac has a good one here. Chopra is someone whose funeral I would actually protest outside of. The guy has spent a lifetime telling people that their "quantum power" can allow them to live forever. When he dies, a few signs calling him a fraud seems pretty reasonable to me. And perhaps the millions he has earned fleecing the credulous can be put to some good use.
stcynic | October 22, 2006Or just found lying around, according to an anonymous package containing the source code for their voting machines on a disk. That package was sent to Cheryl Kagan, a former Maryland legislator who has been a critic of computer voting machines. These systems are remarkably easy to manipulate and it really is important that there be a paper trail to validate the results, at the very least.
stcynic | October 21, 2006Agape Press has a report about a man in Virginia who was fired from his job at a Cargill plant for having a sign on his vehicle aupporting Virginia's anti-gay marriage amendment.
Luis Padilla was reportedly terminated from his employment at a Cargill Foods plant in Harrisonburg because of a written message on the rear window of his pickup truck that read: "Please, vote for marriage on Nov. 7." That is the day when voters in Virginia will be considering a proposed amendment to the state constitution protecting traditional marriage...
The Family Foundation of Virginia sent a letter to Cargill…
stcynic | October 21, 2006ThinkProgress reports on O'Reilly's complaints about the blogosphere recently. After commenting that knows "for a fact" that "President Bush doesn't know what's going on in the Internet", and complaining about bloggers attacking people, he said:
I think - I have to say President Bush has a much healthier attitude toward this than I do. Because if I can get away with it, boy, I'd go in with a hand grenade.
Good thing you can't get away with it, Billy boy. That little thing called the constitution gets in the way. At least I think it does. Do we still have a constitution, or did Bush issue a…
stcynic | October 20, 2006When I'm looking for a tightly-reasoned, logical, well thought out position, I always turn to Glib Fortuna. Okay, just kidding. But if you're looking for an opinion full of ridiculous, hyperbolic rhetoric, take a gander at this post from our ol' pal Glib. He's discussing who will take over as committee chairmen if the Democrats win control of the House in November. And I especially like this part:
We now have a nice roundup from Susan Jones of bills actually introduced by some of the very same Stalinists who would befoul leadership positions at the dawn of the New Year
Stalinists. Well Glib,…
stcynic | October 20, 2006When the Science Bloggers had their nerd-off recently, I finished dead last. I could not hold a candle to the sheer geekiness of the rest of the group (especially Orac, the Uber-nerd). But last night I boosted my nerd cred: I knocked Wil Wheaton out of a tournament at Poker Stars (which says nothing at all about our relative skill at poker, by the way; I had the cards and he didn't the last two hands and that was that). I was on the verge of going out myself when suddenly I was in two hands against Wil and one other guy and I was lucky enough to win them both and boost myself up to over 8000…
stcynic | October 20, 2006The outrage for Maher Arar continues. Arar is the Canadian man who was captured by American authorities on a false tip from Canadian law enforcement, sent to Syria and tortured for 10 months before being released. He is completely innocent, as a Canadian board of inquiry showed recently. And to add insult to injury, quite literally, he could not fly to the United States recently to accept a human rights award because he's still on the government's no-fly list. He accepted by videotape instead:
He broke down in tears during a videotaped acceptance speech at the National Press Club, when he was…
stcynic | October 20, 2006This. Is. Unreal. Try and wrap your mind around these statements:
The top US general defended the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God.
"He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country," said Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Mind boggling, isn't it? Every single thing Rumsfeld predicted before the war has turned out to be false. What he claimed would be a quick, easy, $50 billion war has turned into a trillion dollar boondoggle that has made us less safe, nor more safe. Anyone who claims he's…
stcynic | October 20, 2006Yoo has been on an extraordinary roll lately, one bit of breathtaking hypocrisy after another. Marty Lederman correctly lampoons him for his latest, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal cheering the MIlitary Commissions Act. Yoo emphasizes the court-stripping component to the legislation, its most dangerous and indefensible party, and he cheers wildly. I'll post an excerpt from Lederman's dead on reply below the fold:
Eliminating the checks and balances of judicial oversight has been the primary goal of the Administration all along, as John's own memos and other writings quite forthrightly…
tqa | October 19, 2006Rick Santorum's political base has been shrinking rapidly. His approval numbers are in the sewer, and he's down by double-digits in the polls. Santorum's campaign skills, however, are well respected. He knows how to motivate his base, and how to get people to the polls. Just the other day, he demonstrated exactly why he's such a highly regarded campaigner, coming out with an innovative new method for motivating the -ing insane demographic. All you need to do there is show that you are one of them.
grrlscientist | October 19, 2006
Did you like my newspaper story? It appeared in today's issue of The Daily Prophet.
Write your own newspaper story.