Those are two good words to describe McCain/Palin supporters…and I don’t know which one is scarier.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Those are two good words to describe McCain/Palin supporters…and I don’t know which one is scarier.
This video contains a nice breakdown of exactly who the wackaloons on the Texas Board of Education are, and will help you figure out who to vote for in the upcoming elections.
I always find it astonishing that Don McLeroy and Terri Leo actually have positions of responsibility in the Texas educational system. The system is really messed up down there, have you noticed?
Reader wombat found a fascinating site in response to the creationist debate in Kentucky, led by Dr. Ben Scripture. It’s an utterly bizarre page about a petrified human brain, and it is typical creationist tripe. They have gathered a collection of “authorities”, where they make much of their pedigrees (don’t blame me, the “Dr. X, Ph.D.” is the redundant formula they use on the site.)
The photos show these people and others gushing over this lump of rock, with testimonials like:
After all that, you’d expect to find some remarkable degree of similarity, wouldn’t you? It convinced a neuroanatomist, after all, and surely all those people with their fancy degrees couldn’t be fooled. But then they show us a close-up photo of this “brain”.
They’ve got to be kidding. That’s a lumpy rock. It’s no brain; I’ve seen a lot of brains in my time, from fish to frogs to lizards to birds to all kinds of mammals, and that looks nothing like any of them. Here, in case you haven’t seen one, is a photo of a human brain:
This is the Ed Conrad effect. Hand some ignorant people a random lump of rock, tell them it’s a fossil, and their imaginations will do the rest. There is no excuse for these “experts”, though — the author of the page claims that “It has been examined and determined to be a petrified human brain by many people with high degrees in several different fields of study and occupation.” That just goes to show that even the most qualified people in creation ‘science’ have to be flaming idiots.
Northern Kentucky University is going to have a mock trial on teh creation/evolution debate. They say the intent is to legitimately explore the issue.
“It is part of the mission of the Scripps Howard Center to conduct public forums,” said Mark Neikirk, the Center’s executive director. “I’ve heard President Votruba state many times that a college campus should be a safe place for difficult conversations.” Neikirk said that while the evolution/creation science debate is a difficult and polarizing topic, the mock trial format is designed to provide structure for a civil, informative exploration of the public policy questions raised by the debate.
I have to call bullshit on that. What this really is is an attempt to contrive a debate between science and superstition in which the superstition side gets to pretend they have equal status. And, of course, science issues are not settled in a courtroom, ever.
Worst of all, though, is the way they’re planning to resolve the issues.
The first 200 people in attendance will have an opportunity to serve as jurors, using small remote control clickers to register their opinions both before and after the trial. At the conclusion of the proceeding, they will decide the case.
Yeah, right…in Kentucky. The local churches will bus in a mob, retired godbots with nothing else to do will get in line early, and they’ll all have predetermined (and blessedly ignorant) views of the outcome before they get started. The theological lackwit they have babbling the case for the supernatural can come in half-drunk and still count on ‘victory’. This fight has been thrown before it even gets started.
Here’s something you can do. Write to the president of NKU, James Votruba, and let him know that this is a joke of an event that only brings embarrassment to his university.
At first, I was a bit disappointed in this result, but then I realized it’s actually rather interesting in a negative sense. Investigators tested the effects of squid ink on other squid; the entirely reasonable idea being that it could contain an alarm pheromone that would have the function of alerting neighboring squid in the school of trouble. It works — adding ink to a tank of Caribbean reef squid sends them scurrying away.
However, when they removed the pigments from the ink and added that, the squid couldn’t care less. That says there is no chemical signal, only a visual signal.
That makes sense, I suppose — oceans are big and would dilute any chemical signal fairly rapidly, so pheromones would only work well over a fairly short range (although some fish certainly do have extremely sensitive olfactory senses, so it could be done). Still, Aplysia eject some potent chemical signals with their secretions, which work when directly squirted into the face of a predator, so there was a chance the cephalopods might have evolved something similar.
This routine will not fly, not even if you are Republican.
Do you remember the 80s, when MTV actually played music videos, and pop bands all had weird concept videos that didn’t seem to have much to do with the song, but were just productions to make you look at them? How about this: imagine if the lyrics of the song actually told the story portrayed in the video. You might get something like these renditions of Tears for Fears and A-ha. I laughed. Especially at “I’m gunna kick some ass with my own pipe wrench.” Pipe wrench fight!
Note the little dig at Michele Bachmann near the end, too.
Jesse Bering has an interesting article on why many people have so much difficulty holding a realistic view of death — why they imagine immortal souls wafting off to heaven, and why they can’t imagine their consciousness ceasing to exist. He’s trying to argue that these kinds of beliefs are more than just the result of secondary indoctrination into a body of myth, but are actually a normal consequence of the nature of consciousness. We never personally experience the extinction of our consciousness, of course, except for the limited loss of sleep — and we always wake up from that (at least, until the last time), so we at least have personal evidence that would inductively imply immortality.
It’s also a set of beliefs that are remarkably pervasive. Our language and culture and habits of thought make the idea of survival after death continually crop up.
Tina Fey opened Saturday Night Live last night. It would have been much funnier if they’d left that awful vice presidential candidate out of the sketch altogether.
