“some girls would like to be entomologists too”

Abdo Publishing has a line of children’s science books, including one titled “Bugs”, which a seven year old girl, Parker Dains, read with enthusiasm. And then she discovered that the series was called “the Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys“. So she wrote to the publisher, as uppity young ladies are wont to do.

So she wrote to Abdo, telling the publisher that “I really enjoyed the section on Glow in the Dark bugs and the quizzes at the end”, but that “when I saw the back cover title, it said ‘Biggest Baddest Books for Boys’ and it made me very unhappy. It made me very sad because there’s no such thing as a boy book. You should change from ‘Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys’ into ‘Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys and Girls’ because some girls would like to be entomologists too.”

It’s unbelievable what the publisher did next.

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Let’s point and laugh at the libertarian!

They really are the dumbest people in America, and most obnoxious, too. Here’s an example: police in Texas set up a DUI checkpoint, where cars were stopped and drivers quickly checked to make sure they weren’t driving with a blood alcohol over the legal limit. That’s a nuisance, I’m sure, but a minor inconvenience compared to sharing the road with drunk drivers.

Kory Watkins, a Texas libertarian and open carry proponent (so you already know he’s an idiot) objected to the police doing this job, so he was protesting at the check point, and apparently also somehow warning drivers approaching the check point so any drunkards could avoid it (a truly civic-minded fellow), when irony struck.

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Cosby & Temple divorce

Good news: Bill Cosby has resigned from the Temple University board.

US comedian Bill Cosby has resigned from the board of trustees of Temple University in Philadelphia amid ongoing allegations of sexual assault.

He said he wanted to act "in the best interests" of the university where he studied as an undergraduate.

I’m glad to hear it. Temple has a commendable mission, and Cosby was no longer a good representative for it.

“Ghomeshi was the way he was, and that I had to figure out how to cope with that”

It’s not just that Ghomeshi was a sexual harasser, it’s that management worked so hard to protect him from the consequences of his actions. The account by Kathryn Borel is damning — Ghomeshi didn’t rape her, he just made incessant, crude advances in the office, to the point where Borel was desperate for the administrators at CBC to step in and take action, and they didn’t.

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Jerry Coyne is trying to defend evolutionary psychology again

Why, oh why, do EP’s defenders rely on throwing up armies of straw men to slaughter? It’s silly. Here’s how he starts:

There are some science-friendly folk (including atheists) who simply dismiss the entire field of evolutionary psychology in humans, saying that its theoretical foundations are weak or nonexistent. I’ve always replied that that claim is bunk, for its “theoretical foundations” are simply the claim that our brains and behaviors, like our bodies, show features reflecting evolution in our ancestors.

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Nature makes a big change

This is a surprise: Nature has gone to a limited open access model. Or has it?

All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December.

The content-sharing policy, which also applies to 48 other journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG) division, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics, marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.

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