Oh, come on. A poll at a forum for the Minerals, Metals and Materials society that asks, “Which U.S. Presidential Candidate Would Better Advance Science and Engineering if Elected?”, and John McCain is winning 59% to 39%? That poll needs some adjusting.
This site, Academia.edu, is kind of nifty, but it’ll be even niftier when more people join up. It’s a web page that indexes academics, displaying them and their affiliations in a tree diagram. Play with it, if you’re one of us, sign up, and if you know a professor, let ’em know about it.
Things are getting ugly at scienceblogs right now — you’ve probably noticed all the errors in making comments, and those of us on the inside are struggling even more to get through to put up posts. Rumor has it that we may be undergoing some kind of denial-of-service attack — we’re short of information ourselves, since our tech people are too busy tearing their hair out and pounding on recalcitrant iron to give us updates. We’ll know more when everything is fixed. Soon, I hope. Until then, have patience and try not to post too many duplicate comments.
We may have to switch to old media. I’ll be on KPFT radio tonight, at 10:30 pm Central, along with some other guy named Phil Plait. I think we’re going to talk about the Republican version of supporting science, which consistes of complaining about overhead projectors and bear DNA, while endorsing candidates who believe Jesus would hunt dinosaurs from his helicopter.
This is shocking news, but not too surprising: I know a few of the people in this facility, and when I talked to them last they were deeply concerned about this possibility. The University of Hawaii is planning to shut down the Kewalo Marine Laboratory. They’re doing it so they can funnel more money into the expansion of a cancer research center, which is certainly valuable, but not at the expense of closing half of their marine facilities. This is especially shocking because heck, when students here in the cold and land-locked midwest talk to me about going into marine biology, many of them ask about Hawaii — it’s only natural that they’d imagine a tropical island would be a haven for that kind of research, and it is. It’s just that the state doesn’t support it. This is an ironic fact:
The Kewalo scientists said that Florida, also an ocean state, has 22 marine labs. “Even Georgia would have more marine labs (four) than Hawaii” if the Kewalo facility goes, said Michael Hadfield, biosciences research center faculty member and former director.
So I should tell my students that Georgia would be a better place to study marine biology? That’s nice for the South, not so nice for Hawaii.
And it’s not as if Kewalo has been unproductive — they’ve turned out some amazing work. Mark Martindale is there, as the director. The man is a Very Big Name in the field of evo-devo — go back through my evo-devo posts, and he keeps popping up everywhere. He’s working on early pattern formation in the metazoans, and his papers are indispensable in understanding early evolutionary events.
An old friend of mine, Elaine Seaver, is also there and doing fabulous work on a promising new system, the polychaete worm Capitella. If you want to know about body plan evolution, we need the kind of comparative approach she’s taking.
Write. Contact:
Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education
Hawaiʻi Hall 211
2500 Campus Road
Honolulu, HI 96822
808-956-7837
Let them know what an incredibly short-sighted decision this is, and what a failure of vision in the making. Not only does it harm the university immediately, damaging their reputation and costing them a useful facility, but think of the message it’s sending, that productive and esteemed faculty at the University of Hawaii can have their work so cavalierly dismissed and their laboratories demolished.
This is truly a thing of beauty: Sean Hannity, after using the tawdry guilt-by-association gimmick against Barack Obama, gets the same thing done to him. Watch the man squirm in frustration!
Bonus! The clip is presented by Keith Olbermann!
Double bonus! It’s got Rachel Maddow commenting on it!
Super duper triple bonus! John Cleese sent in a poem about Hannity!
Ode to Sean Hannity
by John CleeseAping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity
Time for a group liberal smirk and swoon, everyone.
So very, very cold. I am tempted by this hat — as a purely practical matter, of course — since it would do such a fine and stylish job of keeping my brain warm during the long and bitter winter months here.
I could even wear it while blogging.
Elizabeth Dole is continuing her campaign in North Carolina of smearing her opponent, Kay Hagan, for simply associating with atheists. We atheists are the “most vile, radical liberals in America,” out to wage war on Christmas and stock boy scout troops with homosexuals, and we actively support political candidates who are atheists. I know … how dare we.
I have a personal reason to be offended, however. The Dole ads cite endorsements by two atheists, FriendlyAtheist.com and DaylightAtheism.org. Now hang on…what’s so scary about the Friendly atheist? And Daylight Atheism sounds positively pleasant. Couldn’t they find one mean, cruel, truly frightening atheist to give a testimonial, like maybe one with an obscure and somewhat intimidatingly intellectual name?
Yeah, I’m feeling left out.
I will say anyway that if you live in North Carolina and you have an opportunity to vote for the open-minded and thoughtful Kay Hagan and against the Rovian slimebeast named Elizabeth Dole, please do so. If she’s got the endorsement of the Friendly Atheist and Daylight Atheism and even Pharyngula, you know she’s on the side of goodness and light.
Some guy named Quentin Letts made a list of the 50 people who wrecked Britain. I’m a bit handicapped in reading it, since I don’t know who Quentin Letts is, and I have never heard of 9/10ths of the people being damned by him, but I did recognize a few, like Tony Blair and this guy:
Anti-religionist Dawkins, the best-known English dissenter since Darwin, is the merciless demander of provable fact.
He is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and tours the world lecturing the elites of the West that they are stupid to believe in any god.
He proselytises against the proselytisers, most of his targets wishing they had a fraction of his apparent certainty.
He is the anti-preacher whose sermons are designed to erode churchgoing and, with that, weaken our happiness.
A man less obsessed with himself and with the narrow calculations of men in white coats might realise that religion, although never offering proof of God’s existence, can sugar catastrophe and brighten chasms.
In times of turbulence, the human being is little different from the vole or the dormouse. It will take shelter where it can.
No amount of superior lecturing from an anti-Christ, not even one with so important a title as his, will alter that.
Typical apologetic rubbish. Atheists aren’t trying to weaken anyone’s happiness; atheists are happy without god. We’ve discovered that you don’t need a veneer of lies to make it through life, and that the truth and reality and the real world are satisfying and beautiful — and that the nonsense the priests tell you is squalid and pathetic. The Trinity is a feeble glimmer next to the glory of the Calculus, Genesis is a short, limping, clumsy limerick next to the epic poetry of Evolution, and the mewling whining of sanctimonious theologians is a simpering whimper drowned out in the vigor and rigor of good, roaring science.
I actively despise this attitude that the purpose of an idea is to be a band-aid against reality — that the virtue of religion is glossing over pain with happy lies and wishful illusions. Yes, in times of turbulence we should seek shelter…but real shelter, in ideas of substance that can provide real help, not this dishonest sugarcoating.
He’s right, though, that it’s often tough to get people to accept the strength of reality when there’s always a slithering pack of lying con-artists always ready to provide glib promises of prosperity and immortality and love eternal at no greater cost than throwing away one’s intellect and integrity to believe in a fantasy. I guess Letts’ idea of what wrecks a country is a bit different than mine: I can see the ruin of my country all around me in the acceptance of the false dream of faith and the blind obedience to pious authority. I know, it feels so good to close one’s eyes and pretend all is well while the chaos rises all around, and damn those people yelling “WAKE UP!” — but they aren’t the wreckers. They’re the only genuine hope we’ve got.
