Hey! Go read these! You can talk about anything you want in the comments!
Next week’s Tangled Bank will be hosted at OK so I’m not really a cowboy. Send your links directly to indiancowboysblog-at-gmail.com, or to [email protected], or to me. Any new volunteers to host? The next open slots are available in February and later.
It’s time for another edition of that popular game where I browse through the mailbag and see what peculiar images people have sent to me, prompted by my peculiar reputation. It’s not all flabby, slimy squid this week!
Check it out: The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is an Anglo-American secular charitable organization that is in the process of being set up. They have a long list of causes they will support—science and education on the top of the list, but also many other traditional charitable goals—and all with an overt secular mission. It is a brilliant idea I can get behind, and I think it has the potential to give a visible focus to the good efforts of godless people everywhere.
The Christian group that spread the initial rumor that Steve Irwin had been “born again” shortly before his death has retracted the claim.
But as encouraging as it might be for Christians to know they
may share heaven with Irwin, the group now concedes there is reason
to doubt the conversion. The unverified story was sent out by an
exuberant staff member, said the group’s managing director, Carl
Wieland. “Though we are able to substantiate our suggestion that
Steve’s wife, Terri, was a church-going Christian, the stories of
Steve coming forward can, at this stage, not be substantiated,” he
said in a statement on the group’s website.
Note the name: Carl Wieland. The Australian co-founder of Answers In Genesis, the creationist group. I am not surprised.
Don’t be too grossed out, but the University of Wisconsin Madison has put a whole series of high-quality videos of human dissection online. It’s extremely cool, but not for the squeamish—there’s more than just the sight of a cadaver getting hacked up, and the sound of a saw on bone or a chisel being used to peel up the cranium are, ummm, memorable. At least you’re spared the odor and the textures.
I’d almost forgotten how muscular gross anatomy is—it takes some heft and brute force to take apart a body.
(via Mind Hacks)
ID advocates are prone to brag about their self-professed expertise, which all too often relies on some respectable knowledge of engineering or other fields irrelevant to biology. DaveScot, the raving mad anti-scientist at Uncommon Descent, is a perfect example…but even in their own domains of knowledge they too often prove to be incompetent. Case in point: their blog has somehow become delisted from Google, and now DaveScot is flailing about, trying to find someone to blame. His answer? Wesley Elsberry did it. It’s all because other sites mirror their content, which he thinks Google finds offensive.
It is so predictable that Michigan candidate for governor Dick DeVos is a Republican and a Christian.
First I reported that Palaeos was lost, and then that it might be found, but now it looks like we can safely say it is being reborn. The old version of Palaeos has been at least partially restored, but the really important news is that a Palaeos wiki has been set up and people are working on reassembling old content and creating new information in a much more flexible format. If you’ve got some phylogenetic or palaeontological expertise, you might want to consider joining the Palaeos team and helping out with this big project.
This is what I like to see: high school science teachers blogging. Particularly when, in this new blog, Beautiful Biology, the teacher stands up for good science.
That’s exactly how it should work. Biology teachers should teach evolution unapologetically, and when clueless parents protest, they should be politely told that they are wrong. Repeat that every day in every school district, and creationism will slink back into the shadows.
