The big, important news is, of course, the death of a gold-digging addlepated model (I’m sorry that she’s dead, but really…it’s not something worth flogging over and over on the news), so the feature on atheism that CNN was going to show has been bumped to Friday.
Unless somebody in programming gets a yen for accordion music, I think.
Are you a voice talent? Want to participate in an online drama? Sign up for a part in a podcast recreation of parts of the Dover trial. It should be fun, if you’re into that kind of thing.
I’m not volunteering, I’m afraid. I can’t act, and I’m also afraid that the closest match to my voice would be Michael Behe, and I’d die of mortification.
He’s singing about theistic evolution, so he must be one of those appeasers…but since he’s funny, I’ll forgive him.
At least I freely admit it…so here, for your viewing pleasure, a brief musical interlude:
There’s some pulse-pounding high speed insect racing action going on in this animation, and one excellent dipteran crash, but otherwise, not much resolution to the story, and the nice spider gets shafted.
And I was rooting for the spider.
You can find several loving closeups of Davy Jones at this site—there’s also some text, but it’s all High Geek as near as I can tell.
Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he’s a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he’s written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole ‘nother column of the times table drops out of his brain, objects to this threat. He starts off by agreeing with Pitman’s argument, but does so by tying it to some of his lunatic obsessions—he’s a pro-smoking anti-vaccination guy.
I’ve made much the same argument relative to policymakers who unscientifically exaggerate the dangers of secondhand smoke and bureaucrats who ignore scientific evidence about the dangers of universal vaccination.
This approval will not last. The rest of his column is a weird paean to excusing ignorance of science. You see, if people learn more math and physics, they’ll get the idea that we live in a “clockwork universe”, and then they won’t like music or poetry anymore. Seriously.
They seem to sneak past the alarms that my bluntness usually sets off. Mike Dunford has a nice quote from that subversive radical, Terry Pratchett:
“Look at it this way, then,” she said, and took a deep mental breath. “Wherever people are obtuse and absurd . . . and wherever they have, by even the most generous standards, the attention span of a small chicken in a hurricane and the investigative ability of a one-legged cockroach . . . and wherever people are inanely credulous, pathetically attached to the certainties of the nursery and, in general, have as much grasp of the realities of the physical universe as an oyster has of mountaineering . . . yes, Twyla: there is a Hogfather.”
(For those not familiar with the backstory, the Hogfather is the Santa Claus equivalent in his fantasy stories.)
Well, if we can’t find the new Architeuthis video, we can at least enjoy a little Cephalopodmas carol, Squid and Whale.
If you’d like something more traditional, here are the lyrics for the Twelve Days of Cephalopodmas. You already know the music.
Lastly, should you really want to get into the festive spirit of the holiday, here are some photos of a whale necropsy. Warning: there is blood, there are guts. How much? Well, they used a large backhoe as a retractor.
Is anyone else getting a “look how stupid Americans are” vibe from all the British coverage of Ken Ham’s creation ‘science’ museum? It’s another story from the European press that politely echoes Ham’s overblown claims for his grandiose edifice to ignorance, and mostly recycles the same old stuff we’ve heard over and over again. It really does seem to simply parrot whatever the Answers in Genesis con men say with complete credulity…for instance, I’ve seen this strange comment repeated multiple times in these kinds of stories.
Two-thirds of the US population lives within six hours’ drive of Cincinnati, but Mr Ham has bigger ambitions for tackling agnostics further afield.
Hold it. Think. Check your facts. Look at a map, and you’ll see that that domain outside of a circle with a radius of 300 miles includes everything west of Chicago, the entire urban Northeast, and most of the major cities of the South, such as Atlanta. It includes Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc., a populous region to be sure, but how can one argue that a small area that excludes California, Texas, New York, and Florida contains the bulk of the nation’s people? That’s an area of about 280,000 square miles in a country of 3,700,000 square miles—shouldn’t that make a reporter stop and think, especially when it is an area that does not include our regions of highest population density?
I’m beginning to feel a “look how stupid the BBC can be” vibe right now, myself. Does anyone know where this mysterious number comes from? Is it Ken Ham lying, or is it the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce lying?
