September 10, 2010
I just got a copy of this letter, sent by Tom Holland, the Democratic candidate for Kansas Governor, to the Kansas Chamber of Commerce:
Members of Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Industry Executive Board,
Thank you for contacting my campaign regarding your endorsement process for Kansas Governor…
September 9, 2010
I'm back from getting married, back from Brazil, back to work. Got my Twitter software working again, reading blogs, and am convinced that nothing has changed in the last month.
Are we still talking about "Don't be a dick"? Yes, and now we're talking about whether it's dickish to call the radical…
August 27, 2010
The Times takes on current debates in linguistics, and asks:
But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us.
All I can think is: "Never! The House of Mogh is dishonored for seven generations!" Then I remembered that Duras ultimately did get the rightful blame for the…
August 8, 2010
And that somebody's me! If this post goes up when I scheduled it to, the ceremony will have just started.
It's been a crazy year of planning, but everything seems ready to go as planned. Tomorrow we go on a honeymoon and I'm obliged to leave my computer behind, so no blogging until late August…
August 2, 2010
T. Ryan Gregory asks this important question: Who is a scientist? It's a followup to a post titled: "Graduate students are not professional scientists. Discuss," which â briefly â argued that grad students are scientists in training, not yet scientists-full-stop. In the later post, he explains:…
August 1, 2010
Deepwater Horizon Alarm Intentionally Disabled:
Testifying before a federal panel investigating the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Transocean employee Michael Williams said that an alarm designed to warn the crew if combustible gases were in danger of igniting was deliberately disabled. â¦
Williams…
July 27, 2010
Disco. president Bruce Chapman wonders:
It is not clear why the number of academic freedom cases seem to be increasing. Is it because the iron hand of ideological conformity is squeezing professors more tightly? Or is it because more subjects of attack are fighting back in court?
Or is it because…
July 26, 2010
Convention centers and convention center hotels should offer free internet access. There's no excuse not to do so.
And no, Louisville Convention Center, it does not cost $100/day to provide access in your exhibit hall. Hell will freeze over before I or any sane person would pay anything like…
July 26, 2010
I'm another year older, as is Mick Jagger!
July 26, 2010
An interesting new article today at the Skeptic's Dictionary, explaining the backfire effect. Several recent papers have found that information contradicting people's initial beliefs can actually increase their acceptance of those beliefs. This is true in political contexts and in religious…
July 25, 2010
I spent the last few days at the 5th Netroots Nation, in Las Vegas. As always, the conference has been a whirlwind of political geekery and good, clean fun. This year featured a video address by the President, and Q&A sessions with the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the…
July 20, 2010
Calitics has the story about that whooping cough epidemic:
With whooping cough now at epidemic levels, it's becoming clear that one of the primary culprits is the idiotic trend over the last 10 years of parents, mostly affluent whites, opting out of vaccination out of a baseless fear that the…
July 20, 2010
Yesterday, Bora Zivkovic announced he was leaving ScienceBlogs. This is kinda huge. Bora is as close to a scienceblogging god as any scienceblogger will admit to believing in. He gives every evidence of omnipresence and omniscience about the interplay of science and the internet. He's created…
July 19, 2010
In February, at the AAAS meetings in San Diego, Stephen Schneider gave a gangbuster talk about climate change denial. Schneider was energetic, feisty, and absolutely right about the challenges faced by scientists trying to talk to the media. NCSE's Genie Scott, a fellow panelist, came away deeply…
July 19, 2010
Sensuous Curmudgeon and PZ are both having fun poking through the background of Kansas gubernatorial candidate Joan Heffington. Heffington forthrightly calls for creationism to be taught in public schools, and pledged to demand advocates offer a âbiblical and constitutional reason exist for the…
July 17, 2010
Shorter PZ Myers: Backlash? Harming the cause? Where?:
Simplicity is preferable to science.
Let us accept, arguendo that this post is poorly written. So what? Does that mean it's wrong? When did PZ Myers â the scourge of framing â come to defend the notion that science discussions are best…
July 16, 2010
The back and forth here in comments and at Jason Rosenhouse's blog has been interesting and stimulating in the last few days. The question of how the rise of New Atheism will or has changed public attitudes towards evolution, towards religion, and towards atheism/atheists are all important…
July 15, 2010
â¦hypothesis testing!
To recap, Jason Rosenhouse, who I love like a brother, put up a post using a poll from VCU and data from Gallup polling to address a hypothesis about "New Atheists," a hypothesis he attributes broadly to the critics of "New Atheism." He's since clarified (in a comment…
July 14, 2010
Attention conservation notice: 3000 words about how smart people who ought to know better are reading way too much into a poll.
Last May, NCSE reported on a poll on evolution conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University. The results were, to my eye, in line with most of the other polling out…
July 14, 2010
I saw war criminal John Yoo as I was heading to the gym this morning. Lacking proper equipment, I did not effect a citizen's arrest, but I did give him a stern glare. He's surprisingly tall.
July 14, 2010
Over the weekend, the skeptics gathered at James Randi's annual The Amazing Meeting, or TAM. By all accounts, it was a great show. Probably the most buzz came from a talk by Phil Plait, which became known as the "don't be a dick" speech, because, well, he argued that skeptics will be most…
July 14, 2010
Joel Mathis is upset with the National Review. The conservative journal responds to last week's ruling against the federal Defense of Marriage Act, an act that blocks legal recognition of legal marriages between same-sex couples, by arguing:
If heterosexual coupling did not regularly produce…
July 14, 2010
My favorite part of the report above on "Chupacabras in Texas?" is when the rancher comments that the "chupacabra" he shot was "acting just like a neighbor's dog." The reason is pretty simple. It was a neighbor's dog. It got mange and lost its hair. I think the term for a Texas rancher who can…
July 13, 2010
In the comments on my previous post, there's an important update from George Soule, a communications director at the Carnegie Foundation, and I updated the post to reflect his clarifications.
In chatting with him, he had a useful explanation of how the science standards process differs from that…
July 12, 2010
A draft of the Standards Framework for national science standards, funded by the Carnegie Foundation and sponsored by the National Governors Association and the US Chamber of Commerce (among others), has been published. The National Research Council drafted the framework, and is seeking comment…
July 9, 2010
Pepsi's Chief Scientific Officer addresses #Sbfail:
Earlier this week, PepsiCoâs blog, Food Frontiers, was added to ScienceBlogs.com so we could begin open discussions about the role science can play in finding solutions to global nutrition challenges.
Mmmm, sorta. The blog was indeed added (then…
July 8, 2010
On New Year's Eve, 2009, Oscar Grant and his friends were taking BART back from the San Francisco celebrations to their homes in the East Bay. They were raucous at minimum, and reportedly started a fight on the train. Police pulled them off the train because of their behavior, and planned to…
July 8, 2010
Shorter Senator David Vitter:
What has abortion got to do with women?
After reporters asked why Vitter assigned a women's issues portfolio to an aide who had been charged with domestic violence after threatening his girlfriend with a knife. Vitter told the reporters: "he handled issues including…
July 8, 2010
So Pepsiblog has finally died. Seed will be having a conference call with us bloggers about how to mend the damage. Leave questions or comments to pass along in the comments. This was the only move they could make at this point, but it may have come to slowly to fix the reputation of…
July 7, 2010
Let's set aside contentious topics like the PepsiBlog wars and try a nice, soothing discussion of science and religion.
You'll recall that, a month ago, I agreed with Chad Orzel that it was OK for the World Science Festival not to put a New/Affirmative/Explicit Atheist on their panel about Science…
