tqa | February 5, 2008
It looks like there's definitely going to be a little bit of good political news for everyone tonight - a statement released by leading theocon James Dobson:
"I am deeply disappointed the Republican Party seems poised to select a nominee who did not support a Constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage, voted for embryonic stem-cell research to kill nascent human beings, opposed tax cuts that ended the marriage penalty, has little regard for freedom of speech, organized the Gang of 14 to preserve filibusters in judicial hearings, and has a legendary temper and often…
tqa | February 5, 2008
Yesterday, I wrote a post about Casey Luskin's misuse of the ResearchBlogging.org "Blogging about Peer-Reviewed Research" icon. Today, Casey removed the icon from his post, and provided an explanation for his actions. I'm glad that he decided to cease his misuse of the icon, but his explanation leaves a heck of a lot to be desired. He admits no wrongdoing, makes no apology, and presents a series of excuses for his actions that - even if accepted at face value - are weak at best.
The first excuse he presents is essentially a claim that he didn't know what he was doing:
A co-worker had…
tqa | February 5, 2008
It's Super Tuesday, but the primaries aren't the only political action in town. My kids came up with an election of their own. They created, and are both running for, the position of "President of the House." Both of them have been putting up posters, and each of them has independently discovered a common political strategy. My daughter managed, in just a couple of hours, to master the fine art of the meaningless slogan ("Vote for me and do what is right"). My son has mastered the tactic of slapping his posters directly on top of his opponent's. They're ten and eight respectively. I think…
tqa | February 4, 2008
Casey Luskin has a post up over at the Discovery Institute's website that discusses an article that was recently published in PLoS Biology. The post itself is nothing particularly remarkable - Casey takes a paper that says that current hypotheses don't adequately deal with all of the problems of figuring out how life started, and claims that a lack of a workable hypothesis is evidence that an Intelligent Designer is needed to explain how life got here. Along the way to the argument from ignorance, he manages to misrepresent portions of the article, put words into the author's mouth, and use…
tqa | February 4, 2008
Over the weekend, ScienceBlogs was treated to a view of how at least one European views American politics. Archaeologist Martin Rundkvist looked at our spectrum of political belief and compared it to normal politics in his native Sweden. From his perspective, all of American politics is right-wing. Even the Liberal Party, he tells us, is part of the political right in Sweden - and not because they are advocating for things that are all that different than liberals do in America. Lest you think that this is just a European perspective, Australian John Wilkins agrees that the range of…
tqa | January 30, 2008
It's safe to say that 2007 wasn't the best year of US Army 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside's life. She started off the year with a bullet wound to her torso that damaged, among other things, one lung, her liver, and her spleen. She ended her year as an outpatient at Walter Reed, waiting for her superiors to decide whether or not she would have to stand court-martial for inflicting that wound upon herself. In between, she had to recover from her physical wounds, learn to deal with the inner demons that led to them, she had to deal with superior officers who believed that she would be more…
tqa | January 27, 2008
Very early this morning, the Discovery Institute's Rob Crowther posted an article over at the DI's "why's everyone always picking on us" blog. I'm not exactly sure what inspired Rob to get some work done late on a Saturday night, but the result is an article that's so chock full of hysterically absurd misrepresentations and bizarre claims that it's impossible to resist the urge to comment.
The apparent cause for Rob's rant was his displeasure with an op-ed that was published in the Austin American-Statesman on Friday. The op-ed was written by the past-president, president, and president-…
tqa | January 24, 2008
Over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins has a post that criticizes a recently-published journal article. Normally, I agree with John - in fact, if it's true that the best measure of someone's intelligence is how often their views match yours, then John Wilkins is an absolute genius. But even Einstein had off-days, and (again, based on the agreement standard) I think this might have been one of John's.
The article in question, by paleontologists Sarda Sahney and Michael Benton, examines how long it took for ecosystems to recover after the end-Permian extinction. The dinosaurs weren't…
tqa | January 23, 2008
Over at the Discovery Institute's blog, Rob Crowther is playing up the "Dissent from Darwinism" list. Again. The list is nothing new. They've been working on it for several years now, and have managed to accumulate "over 700" signatures from around the world. Given the number of scientists on the planet, and the degree to which the DI folks have relaxed their definition of "scientist", it's hardly a stellar performance on their part. As much as I'd like to ignore the list for being the laughable public relations gimmick that it is, I'm not going to this time. Crowther managed to punch one of…
tqa | January 19, 2008
Unlike many of the denizens of ScienceBlogs, I'm not in North Carolina for the 2nd Annual ScienceBlogging conference. I figured that any party that PZ Myers isn't at isn't worth attending. Now, I find that he's gone and snuck down there behind my back. (Apparently after one hell of a makeover, too.
tqa | January 18, 2008
Via today's Daily Kos Cheers and Jeers, I learned about a story in yesterday's Denver Post that details allegations that the Army is deploying troops who should be left at home (I missed Olbermann's take on it last night). According to the article, commanders are deploying soldiers who don't meet basic medical standards. The article focuses on a couple of cases, with one - the case of Master Sgt. Denny Nelson - getting the most attention. Master Sgt Nelson suffered a serious injury to his foot prior to deployment, and was not supposed to run, jump, or lift more than 20 pounds. That's a bit…
tqa | January 18, 2008
It's been a couple of days since I posted on the New Hampshire recount. At the time, I fully expected that I wouldn't do another post on the topic, but a couple of things that have happened since then changed my mind. First, Scibling Chris Chatham included me in a list of people who he thinks should get off their "soapboxes", stop "hurting America", and focus on the statistical anomaly he's identified. Second, and far more importantly, preliminary recount results are in from a number of precincts.
First, let's look at this "Diebold Effect" thing again. When I took my first look at the…
tqa | January 16, 2008
In the week since the New Hampshire voting, a number of people have become increasingly concerned about some of the things that they've seen in the results. Two things, in particular, have gotten a lot of attention. The first is the difference between the pre-election polling, which had Obama ahead by a considerable margin, and the final result, which was a clear victory for Clinton. The second is a difference in outcome when hand-counted precincts are compared to precincts where the ballots were counted using machines. Obama came out ahead in the hand-count areas, while Clinton came out…
tqa | January 14, 2008
Today's big science news is the Messenger flyby of Mercury. The Messenger spacecraft is scheduled to do a flyby of the planet about four hours from now, en route to it's final destination - Mercury - which it will reach in 2011, after completing additional flybys of the planet Mercury in October, and the planet Mercury in 2009. (Apparently, the orbital dynamics of getting a spacecraft into orbit around a relatively small planet that's relatively close to a star are a bit complex.)
The main part of the scientific mission might not start for another few years, but there are still going to be…
tqa | January 11, 2008
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of…
tqa | January 9, 2008
As the dust settles in New Hampshire, people are starting to talk about the winners and losers, and what it all means in the grand scheme of the election. Some are looking for excuses reasons why Obama didn't actually pull off a win when every poll conducted in the known universe last week said he would. Others are discussing the critically important question of whether the whole "tears" thing helped or hurt Clinton, and whether the emotions were real or fake. Then there's the pressing question of whether Fred Thompson's arrival in South Carolina was a calculated political decision, or if it…
tqa | January 8, 2008
Over the last couple of decades, a great deal of research has been done on the effect of global warming on coral reefs. The vast majority of that research has focused on the currently observed and potential future effects of climate change on reef-building corals. Coral, however, are not the only organisms that contribute to building a reef. A group of organisms known as the "coralline algae" also secrete calcium carbonate, and contribute to building up reefs. In a paper available online in advance of publication at Nature Geoscience, a group of researchers report on the results of an…
tqa | January 8, 2008
Today is the 185th anniversary of Alfred Russel Wallace. He's best known, of course, as the young(ish) scientist who, while recovering from malaria somewhere in Indonesia, independently came up with the same ideas about evolution that Darwin had been working on for three decades, wrote them up, mailed them to Darwin, and catalyzed the old boy into finally getting the damn book written. In fact, that part of his career is so well known that it's hard to find any mention of Wallace that doesn't also bring up Darwin. Despite his enormous talents as a naturalist, he's almost always cast as…
tqa | January 7, 2008
Chris Mooney's recently-published article in Seed magazine has stirred a bit of discussion about the role of the Presidential Science Advisor, and just who would be a good choice for that position. Of the two questions, the first is probably the more important, but the second is more fun to argue about - at least for the few people who are more or less fluent in the who's who of the scientific community. Several people (including Chris) have already suggested names. I've got a few to suggest, too.
Of course, it really is necessary to talk about the job description first. The role of the…
tqa | January 7, 2008
Today's Wall Street Journal has a page A1 article (and accompanying blog post) about John Edward's decision to invoke the Nataline Sarkisyan case in his campaign-trail discussions of health care. Sarkisyan, you may remember, was the 17-year-old California girl who died a few weeks ago, shortly after her family's insurance company turned down her doctors' request that they cover a liver transplant for her. The tone of the article is somewhat negative toward Edwards' decision, and not all of their criticism is entirely unfair.
Edwards, they claim, "has been bashing big health insurers in…