Media
scientificactivist | June 21, 2006Today, the Interacademy Panel on International Issues (IAP), an organization of 92 scientific academies from around the globe, released a statement endorsing the importance of teaching evolution as a fundamental scientific principle. The IAP emphasizes the following uncontested evolutionary facts:
In a universe that has evolved towards its present configuration for some 11 to 15 billion years, our Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago.
Since its formation, the Earth - its geology and its environments - has changed under the effect of numerous physical and chemical forces and…
pharyngula | June 19, 2006I have a DVD of The Horror Express, starring Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Telly Savalas. There's a short clip of a conversation I'd like to extract as an mpeg or quicktime movie—even extracting just the audio would be nice.
It's a classic. Christopher Lee is explaining his discovery of an ancient fossil to a beautiful woman:
Lee: That box of bones, madam, could have solved many of the riddles of science. If the theory of evolution is confirmed, if the science of biology is revolutionized, if the very origin of man is determined…
Beautiful woman: I have heard of evolution. It is immoral…
pharyngula | June 19, 2006I succumbed to the tempting link Corrente waved around, and clicked through to see Connie Chung's farewell to some cable show I never heard of before. I suffered horribly, so it's only fair that you share my pain.
pharyngula | June 16, 2006I've been listening to Bethell vs. Mooney on Science Friday, and I've come to one conclusion: I really need to slap Ira Flatow. Repeatedly. And maybe kick him a few times, too.
He was playing right into Bethell's hands. Bethell was rambling and vague, and he went on and on, and Flatow fed into it. Mooney had to interrupt several times and demand a chance to rebut (and good for him—he was on the attack, as he needed to be), and at least once Flatow stopped Mooney for a commercial and then asked Bethell to follow up afterwards.
Worse, Flatow wouldn't allow any depth. They'd start getting into…
pharyngula | June 14, 2006Leading in to the Carlin-Coulter cage match on Leno tonight, we've also got Phil Plait on the SciFi Channel. It should be a cheerful evening, since he's discussing the end of the world.
I'm watching it now, and I will say that Phil is adorable…but the show is awfully cheesy, sprinkled with clips from science fiction movies and treating nuclear terrorism with the same seriousness as the possibility that the robots might revolt and enslave us, or aliens might land and start disintegrating people. And, as an indicator of their concern for detail, they keep spelling Paul Ehrlich's name as "Paul…
scientificactivist | June 13, 2006Although Steinn Sigurdsson of Dynamics of Cats beat me to this one, I still thought I would chime in. The Guardian reports today that is was recently able to purchase a 78-nucleotide sequence of DNA based on the small pox genome and that it was able to get the supplier to mail it to a residential address. The article is alarmist and sensational, but it raises an issue that in general has probably not been given enough thought.
As The Guardian points out, it would be very difficult to reconstruct the 185,000-base pair genome of small pox from such small pieces of DNA, and the closest…
pharyngula | June 12, 2006Mooney gets written up in the Las Vegas Sun. Here's what I get in the same article:
Friday's panel included a Minnesota biology professor…
Yeah, that's it.
Someday, I will be famous enough to warrant actually mentioning my name! They'll misspell it, but still…
pharyngula | April 13, 2006The Online Journalism Review has an article based on interviews with several of us loudmouths here at scienceblogs.com, if you want yet another look at our perspective on this venture.
pharyngula | March 5, 2006I'm stretched out in my easy chair getting ready to watch the Oscars this evening, when this horrid 'news' profile about Brokeback Mountain and middle America comes on. I found it offensive: they seem to have sought out the most narrow-minded representatives of this part of the country—your stereotypical Christian bigot, a clutch of white-haired geezers—who hadn't seen the movie, who rejected it out of hand, who claimed Hollywood didn't understand farmers, who thought a good movie was that treacly crap, The Sound of Music. If there is anyone who doesn't understand this part of the world, it's…
pharyngula | March 3, 2006That was the best line in Larry King's interview of Jon Stewart. I didn't quite get the point of the interview, except as a study in contrasts: the dumbest and the smartest man in the news, and both are dealing in completely fake news.
Stewart did do an excellent job of putting King in his place, though.
pharyngula | February 27, 2006This sounds fun: a music theatre production illustrating Darwin's theory of evolution.
Based on Haydn's The Creation, Darwin's Dream
imagines the founder of evolution meeting modern children and
challenging them to explore how his theory has advanced since his
death in 1882. Their quest takes them from the oceans where life is
believed to have begun, to Africa to meet a fossil hunter looking
for evidence of the earliest humans.
It's also got a dance about DNA. Unfortunately, it's in London…let's at least have some of the music put on the web!
pharyngula | February 27, 2006Via Jim Lippard, here's a nice, positive article on the Cafe Scientifique movement, which tries to make science informal and accessible to anyone. We're doing it again tomorrow, in which I get to be the presenter and talk about "Why all the fuss about evolution?" I hope I don't turn anyone off with my atheist schtick, in which I clean, fillet, fricassee, and eat a baby on stage.*
*Well, actually, looking at my talk, I don't seem to actually mention atheism anywhere. I suspect that when the audience notices my horns and tail, though, they might ask about it—so I'll come prepared for the Q…
pharyngula | February 20, 2006Matthew Nisbet has a good list of things we ought to be doing. Number one on the list is what I also think is the biggest thing we have to do:
SCIENCE EDUCATION REMAINS CENTRALLY IMPORTANT.
And I have to admit that educating you, the readers of this weblog, is actually a small part of the task. The real job lies with our public school teachers—they're the ones shaping the education of the next generation—and no matter what we do right now, the evolution-creation struggle in the public consciousness is going to be going on for at least the next 20 years. It's very easy to wreck a school and…
pharyngula | February 19, 2006You can tell when a dogmatic theist has to review a book by an unapologetic atheist: there's a lot of indignant spluttering, and soon the poor fellow is looking for an excuse to dismiss the whole exercise, so that he doesn't have to actually think about the issues. That's the case with Leon Wieseltier's review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell—it's kind of like watching a beached fish gasp and flounder, yet at the same time he apparently believes he's the one with the gaff hook and club.
It's full of self-important declarations that reduce to incoherence, such as this one:
You cannot disprove…
pharyngula | February 15, 2006I often listen to Minnesota Public Radio on my drives to Minneapolis and back—I've got the 3 stations memorized (88.5, 88.9, and 91.1), and know where each one cuts out and I need to switch to the closer transmitter. My only complaint is the annoying, chirpy fund drives, which always drive me to fumble for some 'foreign' station…and that's difficult. Here in the western part of the state most of what you find are country western and gospel and horrid pop rock stuff.
Now I have another reason to be irritated at those repetitive pleas for me to fork over a hundred bucks for a travel mug and the…