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grrlscientist | February 9, 2006
Transmission electron micrograph of
Avian Influenza Virus.
(click image for larger view in its own window)
I just received a message from ProMED-email regarding the appearance of the avian influenza virus that was just identified in Nigeria. ProMED-email is a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases that serves to keep medical personnel and other professionals up-to-date on emerging diseases around the world. In this message, Debora MacKenzie, a writer for NewScientist.com news service, points out that;
The article [in NewScientist.com] was posted before we found out the…
stcynic | February 9, 2006Allen MacNeill, who guest posted here a few weeks ago, has started his own blog. Allen teaches evolutionary biology at Cornell, so he'll certainly have a lot to add on this subject. Check it out.
stcynic | February 8, 2006Sal Cordova is an ID advocate who teaches at (I think) George Mason University. He now blogs at Dembski's home for wayward sycophants and comments there often. Lately he's been pushing this notion that Jack Krebs and Nick Matzke refuse to answer this simple set of questions he poses. He apparently thinks that this is a very difficult question to answer and really reveal some flaw in our position. So much so that he can't wait to get us in court to catch us in a Perry Mason moment. He's brought it up in at least two comments (here and here) lately. Here's how he phrased it in one of them:
In…
stcynic | February 8, 2006A reader left this in a comment, but it should be up top:
James Randi underwent bypass surgery last Thursday. He is currently in stable condition. He is receiving excellent care, but will need quiet time to recover. We will release more information as it becomes available, and we ask everyone to please respect the family's wishes for privacy at this time. For those who feel a need to help, please consider donating blood at your local Red Cross or Community Blood Center. Cards may be sent to Randi in care of JREF, 201 SE 12 Street, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33316.
We certainly send our best wishes…
stcynic | February 8, 2006Josh Claybourn has a post about a bunch of kids from East Grand Rapids high school here in Michigan who are in trouble with the school after posting pictures of themselves and other students drinking at parties to their blogs. And it turns out that the school monitors the blogs of students:
Goethal said security officers monitor known sites of local bloggers. The school takes limited action, usually calling parents if they spot stories about parties or other items of concern.
I've got a problem with that. According to the report, none of this behavior took place on school property or at…
stcynic | February 8, 2006In a new post at Uncommon Descent about the Wisconsin bill, Dembski makes a big deal out of the fact that Ronald Numbers attended the press conference announcing the bill and may have had a role in writing it. Numbers, for those who don't know, is a historian of science from the University of Wisconsin and the author of The Creationists, which is the definitive book on the history of creationism in America. But in the process, Dembski makes a dishonest charge against Numbers based on a quote that absolutely does not support his charge. He writes:
And while Ron did endorse my book THE DESIGN…
stcynic | February 8, 2006Iran has decided to rename Danish pastries "Mohammedan" pastry - a new twist in the crisis which has triggered protest by Muslims throughout the world against cartoons of Mohammed first published in Denmark.(link)
Nice to know that we don't have a monopoly on idiotic politicians. I still think that every legislator who voted to rename french fries "freedom fries" in the Congressional cafeteria should have been impeached for stupidity above and beyond the call of duty.
stcynic | February 8, 2006What's wrong with this picture? The US, home of the first amendment, plays "yeah, but" games with freedom of expression over the Danish caricatures; Russia, for so long the world's leading agent of repression, takes a strong stand in favor of a free press:
A Moscow museum has announced it will exhibit the entire series of cartoons of Mohammed that have caused riots throughout the Islamic world.
Yury Samodurov, director of the Sakharov Museum and Public Center, said on Russian television that the center was ready to organize a public exhibition of the cartoons satirizing the founder of Islam…
stcynic | February 7, 2006I've just spent the last couple hours watching the funeral of Coretta Scott King and shedding not a few tears. I may be a heathen, but I have a great affinity for gospel music and good preaching. Rev. Joseph Lowry was brilliant, the first President Bush was unexpectedly charming, and Bill Clinton delivered his usual brilliant oratory (Hillary really should learn not to follow him to the podium; she looks terrible by comparison). And Maya Angelou was inspiring. I hope others got to watch it and took away the message that we all have an obligation to work for justice, liberty and equality.
Okay…
stcynic | February 7, 2006Ibn Warraq, a Muslim dissident who is well known in the skeptic movement (I've heard him speak and read much of his work), has an article in Der Spiegel about the caricatures (thanks to Sandefur for pointing me to it). I'll quote a long passage from the article below the fold:
The cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten raise the most important question of our times: freedom of expression. Are we in the west going to cave into pressure from societies with a medieval mindset, or are we going to defend our most precious freedom -- freedom of expression, a freedom for which thousands of…
stcynic | February 7, 2006Sandefur also discovered that Larry Arnhart, a strongly pro-evolution conservative philosopher, has a blog. And wouldn't you know it, right at the top is a fascinating post addressing several of my favorite subjects all at once - Straussianism, evolution and natural rights. This will be a must-read.
stcynic | February 7, 2006More details are coming out about Jacob Robida, the 18 year old who tried to kill 3 people in a gay bar in Massachusetts and then fled and was shot and killed by officers in Arkansas. Some of the details aren't surprising:
Robida's mother told police her son had come home after the attack around 1 a.m. with his head bleeding, then left again.
Police searched his room, finding the message, an apparently homemade poster with a Nazi swastika and anti-Semitic writings, as well as a makeshift coffin, Walsh said.
The significance of the coffin was unknown, he said.
A police report released Monday…
loom | February 6, 2006I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, I need more stories about leeches. I want to find out what scientists are learning about how leeches evolved.
And I know that's not all you want.
You want to watch a leech video.
And you want a podcast about leech evolution.
Well, you're in luck.
Here's the story, which I wrote for tomorrow's New York Times. It's a profile of Mark Siddall, hirundologist extraordinaire at the American Museum of Natural History. His motto: We are always the bait.
The story inspired the video team at the Times to film Siddall, who explains why we really shouldn't…
stcynic | February 6, 2006Some of you may have noticed that Positive Liberty is down at the moment. I'm not entirely sure why at this point, there is some suspicion that it got hacked, but we were planning on changing hosting services anyway so it may just stay down until we get it moved. In the meantime, Sandefur and Rowe are posting at Rowe's personal blog. And they've already got some interesting posts up.
stcynic | February 6, 2006Not that this is going to surprise anyone, but the Catholic Church has issued an official statement saying that no one has a right to say anything that might offend "the faithful":
The Vatican on Saturday condemned the publication of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammad which have outraged the Muslim world, saying freedom of speech did not mean freedom to offend a person's religion.
"The freedom of thought and expression, confirmed in the Declaration of Human Rights, can not include the right to offend religious feelings of the faithful. That principle obviously applies to any religion…
stcynic | February 6, 2006I was contacted this afternoon by Scott Hechinger, a recruiter for the New York City Teaching Fellows program. New York City has a chronic shortage of math and science teachers and they developed this program to help alleviate that shortage. In the last five years, this program has helped 7500 people go through a subsidized Master's Degree program and become math and science teachers, but they need many more. If any of you out there have a bachelor's degree in a math or science related subject and are interested in becoming a teacher, they are taking applications for the June 2006 class right…
grrlscientist | February 6, 2006After my essay, What is LabLit? was linked by the new literature blog carnival, Bookworm linked to it and graciously added a book to the growing LabLit list. This book, Quite a Year for Plums, Amazon by Bailey White, has mixed reviews. Like most titles in the LabLit genre, this book is unfortunately out of print although it can be purchased through Amazon. In short, Quite a Year for Plums is about "a plant pathologist [who] learns how science should be used to understand nature rather than to conquer and master it."
This is another book I'd like to review here!
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tags: LabLit, literature,…
stcynic | February 6, 2006PZ Myers has posted a follow up to his post on the Muslim caricatures, and while I think he's correct to say that some have caricatured his own position, I still think the uncaricatured position is problematic. Clearly, he is not arguing for Islamic radicalism, nor is he arguing that religion should never be satirized, nor is he arguing that the Danish newspaper should be forbidden from publishing such satire. To suggest otherwise is to argue against a straw man. But at the same time, it's a little difficult to flesh out exactly what his real position is.
He clearly has a very distinct…
grrlscientist | February 5, 2006The Literature Carnival, issue #6, is now available. This is a new carnival that celebrates the best recent blog essays about books and writing. Even though they very kindly included one of my pieces, they also linked some interesting essays; I was especially interested to read an essay about intellectual snobbery that appeared in this carnival.
If you would like to participate in the next Literature Carnival, please send your essay links to Dana, author of Much Madness is Divinest Sense. The next deadline is Friday, 18 February.
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tags: blog carnival, literature
stcynic | February 4, 2006When it comes to the science of evolution, PZ Myers and I are in almost complete agreement; when it comes to other issues, it's scarcely possible that we could be further apart. The latest example of this is his essay on the Muhammed caricatures and the attending controversy. PZ appears to believe that because Muslims are a "poor minority", they are insulated from satire. I could not disagree more with his assessment of the caricatures:
I've seen the cartoons, and they are crude and uninterestingâthey are more about perpetuating stereotypes of Muslims as bomb-throwing terrorists than…