A Spork in the Drawer

Who Needs A Compass...

...when you can have a cow?

Go north, young bovine!

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Unable To Distinguish

Former BushCo™ speechwriter Michael Gerson:

For the most part, these accusations are a political ploy -- actually an attempt to shut down political debate. Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science." Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.

From there Gerson goes on to demonstrate that he doesn't know the difference between "science" and "theology" or, for that matter, what "facts" and "evidence" are.

And, yes, Gerson brings Nazis into the mix.

Are there any honest, intelligent Conservatives left?

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ADDED: Kevin: "The disingenuousness here is breathtaking."

Chris Mooney (who literally wrote the book on this subject): "In short, Gerson's oped is a joke. No need for debunking, just laughing."

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Black Is The New Black

Cool:

U.S. researchers said on Tuesday they have made the darkest material on Earth, a substance so black it absorbs more than 99.9 percent of light.

Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness.

And the material is close to the long-sought ideal black, which could absorb all colors of light and reflect none.

[...]

The substance has a total reflective index of 0.045 percent -- which is more than three times darker than the nickel-phosphorous alloy that now holds the record as the world's darkest material.

Basic black paint, by comparison, has a reflective index of 5 percent to 10 percent.

Here's a picture of this new blacker than black substance:

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Proven By Science!

Liberals and conservatives are different:

In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

[...]

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Liberals show higher brain activity. Who would've guessed?

(And, no, I'm not qualified to assess the validity of this study; I pass it along mostly for fun and to restate the obvious.)

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What's That?

BushCo™ playing politics with public health? Heaven forfend!

"Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried," Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as the nation's top doctor from 2002 until 2006, told a House of Representatives committee.

[...]

Carmona said Bush administration political appointees censored his speeches and kept him from talking out publicly about certain issues, including the science on embryonic stem cell research, contraceptives and his misgivings about the administration's embrace of "abstinence-only" sex education.

[...]

Carmona said he was prevented from talking publicly even about the science underpinning [stem cell] research to enable the U.S. public to have a better understanding of a complicated issue. He said most of the public debate over the matter has been driven by political, ideological or theological motivations.

"I was blocked at every turn. I was told the decision had already been made -- stand down, don't talk about it," he said.

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

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Nicely Put

University of Washington evolutionary biologist David P. Barash writes:

The good news is that over time, actual truth wins out. Only scientifically illiterate troglodytes deny the microbial theory of disease, or the reality of atoms, or of evolution. Still, scientists face a constant struggle, a kind of Red Queen dilemma. Recall the scene in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," in which Alice and the Queen run vigorously but get nowhere. The Queen explains, "Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."

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Mass Confusion

This is very revealing:

Two-thirds in the poll said creationism, the idea that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years, is definitely or probably true. More than half, 53%, said evolution, the idea that humans evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, is definitely or probably true. All told, 25% say that both creationism and evolution are definitely or probably true.

PROPOSAL: Beginning at the very earliest stages of education Logic 101 should be taught.

And it should be taught, mandatory-wise, through to the very last level of education.

And for adults, Nancy Pelosi included, it should be a requirement for obtaining a driver's licence.

Ye gods.

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AP

The Associated Press today reports on a new video allegedly showing the so-called Loch Ness Monster.

This jumped out at me:

More recently, there have been more than 4,000 purported Nessie sightings since she was first caught on camera by a surgeon on vacation in the 1930s.

This refers to the infamous "Surgeon's Photo" taken in 1934:

It took 0.30 seconds for me to find a plethora of web pages showing this picture to be a hoax.

Even George W. Bush claims to know how to use The Google.

What does it say that AP reporters aren't as bright as George?

(And as for the video, I haven't seen it. Given all the research done in that enclosed if very deep body of water I very much doubt that any "monster" exists.)

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Things I Didn't Know

Interesting:

We learn that chameleons, for example, change colors not because that serves as a survival mechanism, but “to ‘talk’ to other chameleons, to show off their mood, and to adjust to heat and light.”

Okay, by "interesting" I mean that it's interesting that there are loons that believe this sort of nonsense.

The above is from a NYT review of Ken Ham's Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. We also learn the "true" nature (!) of fossilized remains:

Meanwhile a remarkable fossil of a perch devouring a herring found in Wyoming offers “silent testimony to God’s worldwide judgment,” not because it shows a predator and prey, but because the two perished — somehow getting preserved in stone — during Noah’s flood. Nearly all fossils, the museum asserts, are relics of that divine retribution.

And, of course, besides the remarkably bad "science" we have remarkably bad sociology:

Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled “Millions of Years,” that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.

And here I thought that God invented computers just so we could look at internet porn. The things you learn!

On a more serious note, the problem with things like the Creation "Museum," which Ham believes will get as many as 250,000 visitors in it's first year, is that the ignorant - and I don't mean that as a pejorative; we're all ignorant about most things - will venture in and be taken by the slick presentations designed to appeal to our preconceived cultural assumptions. Witness the concluding paragraph of this review:

But for debates, a visitor goes elsewhere. The Creation Museum offers an alternate world that has its fascinations, even for a skeptic wary of the effect of so many unanswered assertions. He leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.

Here the reporter, rather than calling bullshit, bends over backwards to not offend believers. In it's way, the article gives the stamp of approval to Ham's pre-enlightenment nonsense. And this from the "secular liberal" New York Times.

Prophylactic: As something of a free speech fanatic I'm not arguing that this be shut down. The solution to problems like this is more speech and better formal and informal education.

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Self-Censorship

The Smithsonian buckles under:

The Smithsonian Institution toned down an exhibit on climate change in the Arctic for fear of angering Congress and the Bush administration, says a former administrator at the museum.

Among other things, the script, or official text, of last year's exhibit was rewritten to minimize and inject more uncertainty into the relationship between global warming and humans, said Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Also, officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research and let visitors draw their own conclusions from the data, he said. In addition, graphs were altered "to show that global warming could go either way," Sullivan said.

[...]

Smithsonian officials denied that political concerns influenced the exhibit, saying the changes were made for reasons of objectivity. And some scientists who consulted on the project said nothing major was omitted.

Sullivan said that to his knowledge, no one in the Bush administration pressured the Smithsonian, whose $1.1 billion budget is mostly taxpayer-funded.

There doesn't need to be overt pressure; the mere knowledge that there will be hell to pay (and maybe budget cuts) is enough to spur self-censorship. And when you have an administration, and influential members of Congress, who's intellects haven't progressed past the 15th century this sort of thing is going to happen.

Rather, [Sullivan] said, Smithsonian leaders acted on their own. "The obsession with getting the next allocation and appropriation was so intense that anything that might upset the Congress or the White House was being looked at very carefully," he said.

Precisely.

Amid the oil-drilling debate in 2003, a photo exhibit of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was moved to a less prominent space.

This was an instance of pressure from none other than Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Bridge to Nowhere) though he denied it:

Stevens said the Smithsonian had a right to protect itself from political advocacy. He denied that he had exerted any influence on the Smithsonian on this issue and said he was angry that environmental advocates would use the "Smithsonian as a forum."

And this is where we are: Presenting facts is nothing but "advocacy." Which, I suppose, is true in its way. But when those facts disagree with ideology, they become "advocacy."

We live in a hell of a country.

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Today In Hurricane News

First up, it would appear that NOAA is wasting scads of money:

The federal government is spending millions of dollars on a publicity campaign that could be used to plug budget shortfalls hurricane forecasters are struggling with, the National Hurricane Center's director said Thursday.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is spending up to $4 million to publicize a 200th anniversary celebration while the agency has cut $700,000 from hurricane research, Bill Proenza said. The hurricane center is part of the National Weather Service, which is a NOAA agency.

And then comes this news:

A vital satellite for determining a hurricane's power could soon go kaput.

NASA's QuikSCAT polar satellite is running on borrowed time and may soon leave forecasters — and therefore the general public- without the best, most precise information about how powerful approaching storms might become, a top hurricane official warned.

And there's nothing to replace it.

"We are already on its backup transmitter," Bill Proenza, director of the National Hurricane Center, told a crowd of about 4,000 Wednesday at the first day of the Governor's Hurricane Conference in Fort Lauderdale. "When we lose that, that satellite is gone."

Millions for PR and zero for something that might save lives.

That's BushCo™ in a nutshell.

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Neat!

For no reason whatsoever I find this interesting:

All it takes is a burst of light to make a new class of shape-changing crystals snap into different configurations.

[...]

This light beam made just side of the rod contract, so it bent toward the light, moving about 50 micrometres – enough to move a gold sphere that weighed 90 times as much as the rod itself (pictured). "It's a very beautiful piece of work," says Mark Warner at the University of Cambridge. He foresees many possible applications for these shape-changing crystals, such as microscopic valves, pumps or switches.

Flinging gold!



Nature

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Amazing Picture

From Phil Plait, Saturn:

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