A reluctant plug

The Evolution Sunday project, which tries to recruit clergy to advocate good science at least once a year, has sent out a request for scientific expertise to help them. They’re well-meaning, but they need it. Try reading some of their collection of Evolution Sunday sermons, and what you’ll find is usually attempts to piggyback the validity of truth by religious revelation on the credibility of evidence-based reasoning.

I personally do not support the Evolution Sunday project — I think it benefits religion far more than it does science in that it lends support to superstition and taints evolution with nonsense — but in a truly ecumenical and catholic spirit, I’ll at least mention it for those of you who think otherwise.

Besides, imagine giving me a red pen and a sermon to edit. My eyes would start to glow, I’d channel the damned soul of Abdul Alhazred, and the end result would drive whole congregations mad.

Did anyone else get a recent flood of email from Michael Korn?

I’d just like some reassurance that there are other targets out there, since
Korn is on the run.

An anti-evolutionary Christian extremist suspected of sending threatening letters to biology professors at the University of Colorado has gone on the lam, according to a staff member familiar with a police investigation into the matter.

Not that I’m panicky or anything, but I am more comfortable knowing he’s in Colorado than just somewhere.

OK, just to be on the safe side, I let the local police know that this guy is on the loose, and that he’d sent me some strange email yesterday. It’s highly unlikely he’d show up here … but if he did, there would be only one reason for him to be here.

Uh-oh, we’re in trouble now: we’re all four-eyed 97 pound weaklings, and ID is pumping up

OK, this is the final straw. The Intelligent Design creationists send out press releases, they peddle textbooks in our classrooms, they publish dishonest books of pseudoscience, and now … and now, they’ve come out with a popular magazine.

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I’d complain some more but I’m afraid they’d kick sand in my face and beat me up.

(via ERV)

Storm World

Back when I was a youngling, I read a very exciting series of science-fiction novels called The Deathworld Trilogy, by Harry Harrison. The premise was that there was this horrifically fierce planet in the galaxy, with gravity twice Earth-normal, constantly erupting volcanoes, and savage, ravenous beasts that were out to destroy anything that moves. The humans who settled there became heavily muscled with lightning-fast reflexes and a militaristic society that provided some of the best soldiers in the universe. Now that is the setting for old-school science-fiction.

The genre isn’t dead! I picked up a copy of a book called Storm World(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). I figured it would be another tale of heroic humans conquering impossible odds in a dangerous setting, this time on a planet rife with ferocious storms. The story provides the storms, alright, but, boy, was I disappointed otherwise: it was the most unbelievable science-fiction novel I’ve ever read.

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