I applaud the merger of mindless entertaining fantasy and useful health information.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I applaud the merger of mindless entertaining fantasy and useful health information.
On this day in 1986, the space shuttle blew up shortly after launch.
I was a graduate student in Oregon. I remember it vividly: starting a normal day in the lab with NPR on the radio, as we would, and the news came on. We spent most of the morning staring out the window, listening to the reports coming in, and didn’t get much work done that day.
Where were you?
It looks like the Malheur occupation is ending with a whimper. Ammon Bundy has asked everyone to surrender and only 5 4 people are left in the refuge (on additional left since that last link). They’re sitting around, drinking beer. One person has died, and there’s apparently video on the way to show whether it was suicide-by-cop or an execution — given the police record on this kind of thing, I’m not even guessing whether it was one way or the other.
So…four frustrated, angry people sitting around, complaining bitterly about the evil big guvmint. It could still get bloody. They have lots of guns, and they’re stupid enough to use them.
Maybe what we need to do is just wait for the beer to run out.
Oh god no. He hasn’t learned a thing. Lindy West is just running circles around him on Twitter right now, an embarrassment that David Futrelle has documented. There are signs of desperation everywhere. He’s grasping at every lifeline the MRAs toss at him: someone tells him that Futrelle is an abuser of women and liar, with A Voice For Men as a source.
@RichardDawkins The author of that article, David Futrelle, is a proven serial liar, and himself a harasser of women https://t.co/PnRhU0GSgm
— Macroagression (@DL502) January 28, 2016
Dawkins’ response is to say that’s interesting. Even smart people are prone to confirmation bias, I guess.
For the quality of argumentation on Dawkins’ side, I’ll just point out this response to me when I praised Lindy West’s arguments.
@pzmyers hahahahahaha, fuck off. you just like her because she’s as fat as you, loser @thelindywest @RichardDawkins
— Gerry Wallington (@gerrywallington) January 28, 2016
hahahahahaha, fuck off. you just like her because she’s as fat as you, loser
And now…you know you’re really in trouble when an atheist starts comparing himself to Jesus.
Jesus de-platformed. Heaven Gazette reports that the Second Coming is disinvited. Jesus had not a single woman or minority among 12 Apostles
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) January 28, 2016
Jesus de-platformed. Heaven Gazette reports that the Second Coming is disinvited. Jesus had not a single woman or minority among 12 Apostles
This is how you know I’m not actually a cephalopod: I’m pining for more limbs to adequately facepalm myself.
In a recent quack conference, Deepak Chopra did his usual thing: taking new science that he understands poorly and stuffing it full of magic bogosity.
According to Chopra, that pesky inflamed microbiome is sentient. The genome, microbiome and epigenome, which the author collectively calls the “super gene,” are referenced throughout the interview. His book, Super Genes: The Key to Health and Well-Being, was published last year.
Oh, no! Every time I use the bathroom, I am slaughtering billions of sentient beings? I’m going to have to stop pooping.
Richard Dawkins was supposed to be one of their speakers this year. But then he approvingly tweeted a certain video, and…this happened.
The Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism has withdrawn its invitation to Richard Dawkins to participate at NECSS 2016. We have taken this action in response to Dr. Dawkins’ approving re-tweet of a highly offensive video.
We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and even offensive, views. However, unnecessarily divisive, counterproductive, and even hateful speech runs contrary to our mission and the environment we wish to foster at NECSS. The sentiments expressed in the video do not represent the values of NECSS or its sponsoring organizations.
We will issue a full refund to any NECSS attendee who wishes to cancel their registration due to this announcement.
I thought I was the guy who was supposed to be blacklisted!
I don’t think any Bush is qualified to understand how higher education works. Jeb!s latest gaffe:
There are a lot of beautiful buildings being built on college campuses, but you can’t get a course on Friday afternoon. And a professor, tenured professor, may not be teaching many more courses than one per semester.
Those lazy liberal elites! Except that he’s all wrong.
Some professors do teach one course, or even less, per semester. But those faculty have instead exchanged teaching responsibilities for greater research, lab management, and grant-writing responsibilities. Many universities allow you to buy out of teaching obligations with grant funds, but that isn’t escaping any work at all.
Anybody who knows anything about how universities work would know that what matters in the accounting is contact hours — I’m supposed to have a certain number of hours working with students directly every week, in class or in lab. It doesn’t matter when those hours happen, although we try to distribute them to meet student demand. We teaching faculty, in the hours we aren’t engaged with students, are tied up in lecture prep, grading, etc. (also, office hours don’t count as contact hours). If I get a lighter class load on Friday, it means I’ve got a heavier load other days of the week.
My current load is: two 65 minute lectures on Monday and Wednesday, three 50 minute lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and two 3 hour labs on Tuesday and Thursday. I also work with our senior seminar students, which is an additional two hours a week. All those classes require additional hours of prep, and fluctuating amounts of work on grading. The lab requires lots of set up time — I started setting up fly crosses back in December. I was doing prep work on Christmas.
This is also work that gives many people the heebie-jeebies — public speaking? Seven times a week? That would horrify a great many Americans. One of the few jobs that probably requires more public speaking is politician, but there’s a difference between that and professorial work. We’re required to know what we’re talking about, and be accurate.
A woman says she was raped by Neil deGrasse Tyson in grad school. She contacted me and asked me to share her story. But here’s the disgraceful exploitation that’s going on.
She did not know who I am, at all. She came to me because she was advised to…by slymepitters. The same people who have been indignant for years that women might speak out against harassers. They are trying to deploy this woman as a weapon.
An article asks why biology students have misconceptions about science, and it clears up one misconception while implying another. Cool!
Here’s their example of a common error of thinking:
Zebras developed stripes to avoid predators.
That error is incredibly common: it’s the problem of thinking teleologically. Stripes didn’t evolve for a specific goal. The interesting point in the article is that biology students are just as likely to have these misconceptions as non-biology students, but that they are better at arguing for the teleological fallacy, which suggests that biology education is reinforcing the misconceptions. Uh-oh.
But I have to point out that the educators discussing this problem went on to reinforce another misconception, that the stripes are adaptive.
Annalee Newitz has declared “Mission Accomplished” in the decades-long resistance to the ignorant theocrats who wanted to destroy Dungeons & Dragons. There have long been regressive Conservative Culture Warriors who railed against the game, and I remember a time in the late 70s and 80s when there were lots of silly stories in the media about the corrupting evil of fantasy role playing. Those just don’t happen now.
And yet the half-elf thieves and evil clerics and dorky kids with dice won at least one melee in this particular culture war. That’s abundantly obvious when you consider that the media is dominated by D&D-influenced stories. Meanwhile, the anti-D&D campaigns today have been reduced to items like this shabby little pamphlet, digitized by a gamer who wanted to memorialize a hard time in geek history. It’s a clear example of history being written by the winners.
When D&D types win a war like this, however, they don’t try to erase the perspective of the enemies who once threatened them. They have too much respect for the source material. In the 1980s, angry mobs of parents burned their kids’ D&D books. Those kids, now grown up, digitize and annotate the pamphlets that once condemned them.
Realistically, though, the bad guys never had a chance. It was a lot like the War on Christmas: conservatives grimly tut-tut about dangers of changing mores, while everyone sensible blithely goes on putting up Christmas trees and buying presents and getting together with their family. Similarly, we all went on throwing dice and inventing fantasy scenarios while the geezers clutched their Bibles and moaned.
It was hardly any kind of war at all, which is how we “won”. Just wait a few more years, and people will be finding old footage of Bill O’Reilly, and pointing and laughing.
