Change is coming, you might as well embrace it

Mark Morford is wonderfully excited about the prospects for biological research, and I don’t blame him. Consider what the world was like in 1900 and how physics and engineering changed it by 2000; from horse-and-buggy and steam locomotive to interstates and jet planes, from telegraph to world-wide communication networks. We’re going to see a revolution of that magnitude in the coming century, too, and you can expect biology and medicine to be at the forefront. Well, maybe. As Morford writes, the alternative is to

…hold tight to the leaky life raft of inflexible ideology (hello, organized religion), to rules and laws and codes of conduct written by the fearful, for the fearful, to live in constant low-level dread of all the extraordinary changes and radical rethinkings of what it means to be human or animal or male or female or hetero or homo or any other swell little label you thought was solid and trustworthy but which is increasingly proven to be blurry and unpredictable and just a little dangerous.

We know which side GW Bush and the Republican party are on: with the knuckle-draggers and antique hierarchies of organized religion. Our president has vetoed a bill to support stem cell research. This is remarkable: he has only vetoed three bills in his entire presidency, and two of them have been with the intent of killing stem cell research. Just as remarkably, our representatives in congress haven’t been able to muster the numbers to override that veto. Imagine if the American government had voted to censure the Wright brothers and to outlaw the internal combustion engine at the turn of the last century, or if they’d decided to condemn the kinds of radical and dangerous physics being pursued at places like Princeton and Chicago. It wouldn’t have changed a thing about the natural world, or the discoveries that were made; it might have slowed the pace a bit, but the changes would still have come from England and France and Germany and Japan and the Soviet Union … the biggest difference would be that the United States would be an irrelevant backwater.

That’s what the Republicans are doing to this country right now: damning us to a future as a backward, corrupt mess, a big, blundering headache for the world. In 2100, will the rest of the planet see us in the same way Turkey was seen in 1900?

I’m rated WHAT??!?

Some people were annoyed that I included a link yesterday that led to a silly story that used strippers as an example of good marketing, that also included a photo of a woman in lingerie. It was very mild stuff, and I’m not going to apologize for that; the worst thing at the link was the sexism, and I will say that I do not endorse that at all. Sometimes I will talk about sex here, and although I’m not going to start sprinkling the articles with coarse and exploitive porn, I’m also not going to be shy about the frank talk.

Then Cocktail Party Physics had to ruin my self-image as an unabashed libertine by mentioning this site that you can run your blog through and get a rating. I’m afraid Pharyngula is …

What's My Blog Rated? From Mingle2 - Online Dating

Mingle2 – Online Dating

I feel so Disneyesque now.

Get your own research, creationists!

One of those annoying habits creationists organizations have is the appropriation of legitimate scientific research to ‘support’ their claims. They almost never do, actually—the creationists have to misrepresent the science, and often they even offer interpretations flatly contradicted by the contents of the paper. For an excellent example, here’s the author of a paper on ERVs complaining that Reason To Believe’s use of her work was unjustified.

I eventually decided to reclaim my research from the people who have consistently tried to distort the science to support their own agenda. I checked a few months ago and found my paper in the RTB archives. I emailed the website’s creators, explained that they had misunderstood the meaning of my paper, that it actually provided evidence in support of evolution, and politely asked if they could please remove it from their site. I repeated my request a couple of times. I never received more than a bland message in reply saying that they would look into it.

She has also posted a summary of her work that shows she was testing evolutionary predictions, and that the evidence fit the predictions of evolutionary biology, not the ones Reason To Believe (an old-earth creationist group) wanted.

You know, I’ve seen a fair number of creationists misrepresenting scientist’s work to fit their conclusions, but I’ve never seen the reverse, where a scientist grabs some creationist’s hard-earned data and claims it supports evolution. I wonder why?

Oh … I forgot. It’s because the creationists don’t have any data! Silly me.

I ♥ Seattle

Ahh, Seattle.

Seattle is godless.

We are, rather famously, one of the least churched cities in North America. It seems that most of us have better things to do on a Sunday morning than go to church. Seattleites would rather take a hike. Or nurse a hangover. Or fire up the bong.

It sounds like my kind of place…and it should, I grew up there.

So I’m taking a little vacation to the Pacific Northwest, and will be visiting family and taking in the sights the first week of July, from the 1st to the 8th. All you Seattleites can use this thread to tell me how wonderful the place is and what I ought to do in my brief visit there. Is the Science Fiction Museum worth seeing? Any fabulous seafood restaurants that have opened in the last 10 years? Good brew pubs? I think I’ll skip the churches.

And of course, if anyone wants to meet up somewhere, sometime, maybe we can arrange something here. It’s a brief visit, unfortunately, but I should have an evening or two free.

An octet of vignettes

Dang. Tagged. Can’t you people leave me alone?

All right, here are the rules.

  1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
  2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
  3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
  4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
  5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog

I suppose I could list what I had for dinner over the last 8 days, you guys don’t know that, but then I’d have to confess about those lazy days when I ate microwaved leftovers over the sink, and there’d go my suave image as a debonair man of culture. So instead you get eight random recollections.

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Hitchens interview

Catch this Hitchens interview while it’s still available. He’s lovably irascible. My favorite part:

Interviewer: Do you think you would win more converts to atheism if you were less dismissive of religious…

Hitchens: I have no idea, but I can’t be other than dismissive. I hear someone like that sheep-faced loon from [garbled…a previous caller] I have to say it sounds like bleating to me, and I have to remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I’m not a sheep and I don’t need a shepherd and what shepherds do when they’re not actually messing around with their sheep is they’re keeping them around and alive so they can be fleeced and then killed. And yes, hearing these bleatings from the church of England does remind me of that and I don’t feel any need to make converts by not saying what I think. I leave it to them to make their hypocritical, unctuous, pseudo-friendly statements in the hope of keeping people inside the church.

Andy Schlafly’s “success” story

Another major paper has a story on Conservapædia. I’m sure Andy is proud of his accomplishment — the truly stupid would be proud of promoting stupidity.

Schlafly, 46, started small, urging his students to post brief — often one-sentence — entries on ancient history. He went live with the site in November. In the last six months, it’s grown explosively, offering what Schlafly describes as fair, scholarly articles. Many have a distinctly religious-right perspective.

There’s some complaining at the end—there’s a rival wiki, RationalWiki, that comments on Conservapædia silliness, and some of its members also edit Conservapædia, prompting much outrage at those liberals who want to “destroy” them. I don’t think we can blame liberal mockery for these entries, though:

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