January 7, 2011
Congrats to the bloggers chosen for the Open Lab blogging anthology. I was a judge this year, as I was last year, and it's amazing how much really good science blogging is out there. Jason Goldman deserves enormous credit for taking on the difficult task of putting together not just the best…
January 4, 2011
The sky is blue. Winter is cold. Jerry Coyne is upset with NCSE. These are the implacable truths anchoring us in reality. The interesting question is not whether Coyne is upset with NCSE, but what he's upset about this time.
Today, Coyne is upset that the award-winning, NSF-funded website…
January 4, 2011
To be clear, my last post was not a defense of a phrase that I use. I searched my archives, and don't see any instances where I referred to atheists as "militant." Indeed, that post is the only one where I used the word "militant" without quoting someone else! I don't think it's the best term to…
January 4, 2011
PZ Myers points to a governor of Pakistan's assassination, and insists: "Don't ever call atheists militant, except where they do something like this."
Which is all well and good, and I suppose I wouldn't want to be called militant either. But I also wouldn't want to contradict the dictionary.…
January 3, 2011
Ophelia Benson has a post up looking at an interview between Benjamin Nelson (a sometime commenter here) and Chris Mooney. Nelson summarizes the interview, and the broader accommodation/confrontation conflict, by writing:
[Mooney's] stance is self-consciously political. At least to some extent,…
January 3, 2011
Sandy Levinson makes a good case that Wednesday is the acid test for the Obama administration's commitment to "Change We Can Believe In." On Wednesday, the President of the Senate, Vice-President Joe Biden, will be asked to rule that the Senate is a non-continuing body, which he will do if he has…
December 31, 2010
And may every year suck less than the one before!
December 31, 2010
Denyse O'Leary â I call her D'OhLeary for short â quotes John Templeton making the ontological argument for God:
Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose?
But this is an awful argument, and especially badly stated here. Let'…
December 31, 2010
The British Centre for Science Education sent this New Year's note:
Happy new year to our friends in the NCSE
For those unfamiliar, this is the reference our friends across the pond are making. And a happy New Year to y'all as well!
December 31, 2010
Ed Brayton has been doing yeoman work to expose the overtly religious agenda of various parts of the armed forces, especially the Air Force. Today he posts the second part of a story about the Army's "Soldier Fitness Tracker," a survey which evaluates "spiritual fitness," and can require soldiers…
December 29, 2010
Virginia Hughes, once the benevolent overlord here at Scienceblogs, asks the Question of the Year: What is Life, Anyway? She notes that many of the major scientific discoveries or advances of the year hinged on that question, and this month's Astrobiology has a series of essays on the state of our…
December 28, 2010
Mark Cothren of Kentucky cannot recognize a raccoon with mange. This is noteworthy mainly because Texans can't recognize a dog with mange, either.
It's also noteworthy because it's possible Mark Cothren is related to Martin Cothran, and there's a new blogger at Martin Cothran's blog. He signs…
December 25, 2010
Attention conservation notice: A couple thousand words that can be summarized as: "Someone is wrong on the internet."
Jerry Coyne has a longish reply to my post yesterday. He seems quite upset about it. He seems to think I'm very, very wrong. And yet he cannot manage to characterize my argument…
December 24, 2010
The nice thing about being an agnostic is feeling comfortable saying "I don't know" when there's not enough evidence to say yes or no.
I mention this because I want to be clear that I mean no criticism by saying that I don't know if Ophelia is right about the positive effects of New Atheism. She…
December 24, 2010
Rape Victim Refuses TSA Breast Grope; Handcuffed, Arrested by Police:
Claire Hirschkind couldn't go through the stripsearch scanner because of a pacemaker-type device in her chest. So she was taken to a female TSA officer to be groped.
"I told them, 'No, I'm not going to have my breasts felt,' and…
December 21, 2010
I'll be in and out of internet contact for the next few days, so I may or may not respond to any new wingnuttery from Michael Egnor. But it's worth making a few broad points.
First, nothing I've written should be taken to suggest that fetuses (especially in the third trimester) don't have moral…
December 19, 2010
Michael Egnor is still upset. Earlier, he penned an inaccurate, misleading, and ⦠well ⦠egnorant defense of his views on abortion, responding to my critique of his claim that personhood is easy to define.
His earlier reply repeatedly and incorrectly attempted to associate the content of this…
December 17, 2010
Shorter Martin Cothran: More evidence for Global Warming:
English winters are cold and snowy, therefore Al Gore is fat global warming is a hoax.
Outside the fictional world of Martin Cothran â where Lost Cause mythology counts as history, as does Noah's Ark â scientifically literate folks know that…
December 16, 2010
Stephen Post tells Science & Religion Today that civility isn't the solution to the problems of modern politics:
civility rests ultimately on deeper notions of respect for and love of humanity. Love is an affirming love of the otherâs being, respect is a modulation of love, and civility is an…
December 14, 2010
Having defended Holocaust deniers and crusaded against gay parents, I shouldn't be surprised that Martin Cothran, lobbyist for the Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family and occasional shill for the Disco. 'Tute, would defend treason. In defending the secessionist States, Cothran mostly just…
December 13, 2010
â¦And rightly so. He wrote, after a vote to allow debate on repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell failed to clear a 60 vote plurality: DADT didn't fail. The Senate did:
The bill repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell didn't fail: The Senate did. The bill got 57 votes, not 49. As Dylan Matthews pointed out, a…
December 12, 2010
Shortly after Michael Egnor launched his first defense of creationism at the Disco. 'Tute's blog, the wags at Panda's Thumb coined the term "egnorance," to describe "the egotistical combination of ignorance and arrogance." It was funny, and remains so years later, because it's true.
Which brings…
December 8, 2010
Steve Benen wraps up the late-breaking reactions to the tax deal, most surprisingly Sen. Mary Landrieu's vigorous opposition:
It seemed at least plausible to me that we'd see some Kabuki theater when it came to congressional Democrats' reaction to the tax plan agreement. Perhaps they'd feign…
December 7, 2010
I know Christopher Maloney is a quack because this is how quacks act. PZ Myers wrote a blog post way back when pointing out that Maloney is a quack, a naturopathic "doctor" in Maine. He urged parents to skip vaccinating their kids, and to have them drink berry juice and take garlic pills instead…
December 7, 2010
Lotsa people are pretty pissed right now. The President and Republicans in Congress cut a deal that will extend Bush-era tax cuts â taxes opposed vigorously by Democrats and fiscally sane Republicans at the time. In exchange for giving in to Republican demands on the tax cuts, the President got a…
December 7, 2010
I'm so glad I didn't blog about the arsenic bacterial. The paper's basic methods were probably flawed, and NASA won't defend themselves. In short, we don't know yet whether there's even a story yet, let alone one deserving a press conference.
"We cannot indiscriminately wade into a media forum…
December 4, 2010
Michael Egnor is trying to pick a fight over abortion with P.Z. Myers. Egnor is building a bog-standard argument that every human zygote has an inherent right to life, therefore abortion is immoral (the unargued assumption being that a woman's right to life doesn't really matter). It's a reminder…
December 4, 2010
Dave Bruggeman, whose blog on science policy I find generally indispensable, has an odd distaste for the idea of a Republican war on science. Most recently, this emerged in response to a review by the Department of Interior's Inspector General into a report on the post-BPocalypse oil drilling…
December 4, 2010
Steve Benen and Andrew Sullivan are discussing the dickishness of Republicans, and the value in calling out 'dickishness'. Sullivan notes:
What we've observed these past two years is a political party that knows nothing but scorched earth tactics, cannot begin to see any merits in the other party'…
December 1, 2010
Eric Cantor, Republican whip and soon-to-be Majority Leader has a horrible idea. He wants to cut government spending (which is not necessarily the best choice right now), and he thinks the place to start is the NSF.
To top it off, he's too lazy to do his own research. So he put up a website where…
