April 21, 2011
A few days ago I was over at Jerry Coyne's blog and got into some conversations that regular readers here might be interested in. In the course of one of his regularly scheduled whinefests about how people are too mean to gnu atheists, Coyne wrote:
we're not McCarthyites with a secret "list".…
April 20, 2011
Point of Inquiry:
Our guest this week is Josh Rosenau, the Programs and Policy Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), and writer of the blog "Thoughts from Kansas" at ScienceBlogs....
In this interview with Karen Stollznow, Josh presents the "Three Pillars of Creationism",…
April 20, 2011
Aaron Schwarz has a petition urging The White House and Congress to unlock science research:
Three years ago this week, the National Institutes of Health announced that all medical research they fund would have to be published as "open access" -- available to anyone, for free, over the Internet.…
April 20, 2011
Via USA Today, we learn about a study showing that people who meditate frequently behave in a more rational manner than non-meditators, and they do so because different parts of their brain take charge of certain kinds of decisions.
The study was based around a common test of rational behavior…
April 19, 2011
Chris Mooney has been hard at work lately, through his journalism, his blogging, and his podcast at the Center for Inquiry, trying to understand why denialism is so pervasive. In the new issue of Mother Jones, he lays out some of "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science":
an array of new…
April 14, 2011
...Or "What I've been up to for the last week or so."
Last week was a busy travel week. I was in West Virginia for the first half of the week, on a whirlwind tour of the Morgantown area, speaking in the geology department at West Virginia University, then twice at a symposium on science…
April 11, 2011
In my post about Pastor Jones and the Quran burning, I wrote that I'm a First Amendment maximalist, and so defend the right of someone to burn a Quran, but noted also that Jones' actions were clearly intended as a provocation, and that a smart lawyer could probably convince a court that Jones'…
April 3, 2011
John Pieret reads Jerry Coyne so you don't have to, and catches Jerry Coyne rewriting history. Pieret notes in particular that Coyne is insisting that "faitheist" was never meant as a pejorative, when it clearly was, and has always and exclusively been used as such. For Coyne to try to rewrite…
April 2, 2011
NationalJournal.com - Six of Ten Political Insiders Believe Public Is Ill-Informed:
When it comes to policy, the political class doesn't have a lot of faith in the public's IQ. In the latest National Journal Political Insiders Poll, a solid majority of political operatives â 59 percent â said the…
April 2, 2011
Sam Harris has a brand new blog, and already has managed to lard it with roughly what you'd expect: tendentiousness, insistence that religious is wrong because it won't change (and that religions which do change are illegitimate for doing so), and the usual pro-repression politics.
Referring to…
April 1, 2011
From Denial Depot, Jaws: A movie review:
A group of so-called government funded "experts" whip up alarmist fears of a killer shark off the coast of Amity, a sea side town. Their goal is to destroy the local tourist industry, send Amity back to the dark ages and thus achieve their underlying…
March 31, 2011
Via the Monkey Cage, a study which used an interesting survey technique to assess just how wingnutty the teabaggers really are. They did a survey focusing on issues involving race and politics, especially in states where Tea Party candidates did well last November, and along the way managed to…
March 28, 2011
In the course of talking about other things, Jason Rosenhouse raises a tricky issue:
Fundamentalists are rightly excoriated for pretending that theirs is the only acceptable form of religion. But it is hardly an improvement when academics suggest that real religion is high-minded and metaphorical…
March 28, 2011
The vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch.
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Jonathan Swift, "On Poetry: A Rhapsody"
There's so much to love about this story from Nature…
March 26, 2011
Jerry Coyne then: Rules for life:
If two friends tell you the same thing about yourself, it's probably true.
Jerry Coyne now: thinks the several friends saying the same thing about him must be wrong:
more Gnu Atheist-bashing from fellow atheists... inspired by Michael Ruse's rants equating Gnus…
March 24, 2011
Shorter Longer PZ Myers: Why are we bombing Libya?:
I don't see any difference between Barack Obama responded to a request by the Arab League, endorsed by the United Nations, to establish a no-fly zone with a clear end-game and limited engagement which will prevent Gadhafi from murdering his people…
March 22, 2011
In my twitter feed, I commented briefly on the election results in Egypt. The vote was on a package of constitutional reforms. As I understand it, more liberal Egyptians opposed the amendments because they wanted more wholesale reform of the constitution. But the amendments passed overwhelmingly…
March 21, 2011
The problem of evil has become a topic of discussion again. I don't think I've blogged about theodicy in any depth since 2006, so I guess it's time to take it up again.
In brief, the problem of evil is classically posed as a question of why evil should exist in the world if there is an omnipotent…
March 21, 2011
Mike the Mad Biologist weighs in on a debate Brad Delong has been curating, about the status of economics as a science. Noting that examples from biology are being introduced as comparisons for economics, Mike writes:
It really does matter: if economists are going to use biology as a model for…
March 18, 2011
Kevin Drum reports on an essay by James Heckman that would be depressing if it weren't predictable. The basic idea is expressed in this graph:
Drum summarizes:
The chart shows achievement test scores for children of mothers with different levels of education. Children of college graduates score…
March 18, 2011
Theda Skocpol says it's Time for National Greatness Liberalism:
America needs a National Greatness Liberalism -- a brawny brand of politics that makes a tough-minded argument about what it will take from our government and democratic politics to regain our national economic strength and rebuild a…
March 18, 2011
Via Southern Fried Scientist, the Galapagos-based Charles Darwin Foundation reports:
In the aftermath of the tidal surges induced by the March 11th Japan earthquake and tsunami, a team of more than 20 staff and volunteers worked shoulder to shoulder to clear debris, retrieve equipment and clean…
March 16, 2011
Via Laughing Squid, we learn that students at the UK's Strode College were tasked with building outfits from cardboard packaging, and one created this whimsical number. If they'd just incorporate the technology from these prosthetic tentacles, this would be the greatest thing ever.
March 16, 2011
Folks are talking about the problem of evil. John Wilkins takes on the problem of the problem of evil and Darwin, arguing that, for theologies where the problem of evil is a problem, evolution probably does less to exacerbate the issue than basic physics, or physiology, or first principles of…
March 15, 2011
As you presumably know by now, the earthquake in Japan damaged a series of nuclear reactors at the Fukujima Daiichi plant. Due to damage from the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, safety systems failed and the reactors could not be shut down the way they were supposed. Hydrogen gas built up and…
March 11, 2011
Law enforcement agencies move against Sovereign Citizen movement in Fairbanks:
Five people, including militia activist Schaeffer Cox, were arrested Thursday in the Fairbanks area for allegedly conspiring to kill multiple Alaska State Troopers and a federal judge.
The group had stockpiled weapons…
March 11, 2011
@Dave Ewing:
The headline you won't be reading: "Millions saved in Japan by good engineering and government building codes". But it's the truth.
My heart goes out to all the people affected the earthquake in Japan, and by the resulting tsunamis which have hit much of the Pacific basin. Heck, we…
March 10, 2011
...Is telling the truth. This answers the NPR ombudsman's question:
It's hard to decide which of [fired NPR development director Ron] Schiller's remarks [in a heavily-edited video released by dishonest jackass James O'Keefe] was worse for someone representing NPR.
- That the Republican Party is "…
March 8, 2011
Via John Sides at the Monkey Cage, a study from the Muslim American Public Opinion Survey finds that the most religious American Muslims are more likely than the least religious Muslims to take active roles in community politics (rallies, letter-writing campaigns, voting, political donations, etc…
March 7, 2011
BCSE reports, via the Independent:
A prominent British imam has been forced to retract his claims that Islam is compatible with Darwin's theory of evolution after receiving death threats from fundamentalists.
Dr Usama Hasan, a physics lecturer at Middlesex University and a fellow of the Royal…
