My physicist friends will be embarrassed at this tale of a creationist
physics professor campaigning against science education. Maybe it’s not the physics—it’s the dairy products overdose.
Since I was asked to do something about that empty “About” tab at the top of this page that used to take you to a really boring page that said “Lorem ipsum,” I’ve put a little useful information up there. It now tells you what Pharyngula means and how to pronounce it, has a few biographical details, and by popular request, includes links to the complete random quote file, the complete “Taste of Pharyngula” file, and the complete blogroll. The layout needs a little work, but the information is there, at least.
The Strib has an article on Camp Quest of Minnesota, the secular summer camp that is starting up this week. It’s a fairly good story, although it’s unfortunate to see it overwhelmed by the gigantic rah-rah story on crazy Pentacostalism spread over the next two pages of the paper, by the same reporter.
By the way, I’ll be volunteering at Camp Quest on Friday, to show the kids how to deal with creationists.
Richard Gallagher is one of those guys I’m not ever going to like much. He’s the editor of The Scientist, yet he wrote an editorial encouraging us to embrace Intelligent Design in the classroom, in the perverse hope that by giving ID that much attention, students will naturally disregard it. That was crazy stupid enough, but where he lost my respect completely was in a published rebuttal to my criticisms where he maliciously distorted my point from one advocating the teaching of science as a process based on evidence (which is why ID fails in the classroom) to a false claim that I want to shield kids from critical thinking. Lies and misrepresentation to get ID into the classroom? The Discovery Institute loved it and republished his article.
Now he has published another editorial, one in which he finally realizes the danger of letting pseudoscience into the classroom, and finally he gets it right…but I’m going to be much less charitable than Tara. What finally motivates him to speak out for good science teaching based on reason and evidence is a perceived threat from “New Agers” and the “spiritual Left” with their wacky “mother earth sensibility.”
Some light reading, and otherwise…speak your mind in the comments.
John Lynch doesn’t have a Friday tradition of his own, so he’s trying to start one with a free association game…I’ll join in.
My answers are below the fold. They’re mostly predictable, I think.
Got a myspace page? Then you want to be friends with Prof. Steve Steve.
OK, as several have noticed, there is actually a Pharyngula myspace. It’s there as a placeholder, little more, and I’m not planning to do anything with it…but if anyone wants to be my friend, I’m easy.
Will it worsen or improve my appearance of geekitude if I mention I also have a Facebook entry?
The story of the Australian lungfish has made this week’s issue of Nature. Remember, it’s not too late to keep the pressure on.
Just as a lark and as a little exercise in making HTML tables (and to make clear what one error was in that last post), I threw together this table of the geological time scale, taken from Mayr’s What Evolution Is. I come from that generation of biologists where we were required to memorize the timescale to this level of detail; I’m a bit rusty on the dates now (but these are pretty much the same as what I had to learn in the late 1970s), and I was just realizing that we don’t even mention this stuff in introductory biology anymore.
