Have a look at this. Two of my favorite bloggers re in the top ten: Devorah, who is in third, and Danielle who is in eigth. The rest of these people are obviously interlopers, especially this guy Luis who is in first place. Please go and help fix that. Thank you very much…
Daily Archives: August 12, 2009
The Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival
Four Stone Hearth is the Anthropology Blog Carnival. The main page for the carnival is here. The previous carnival was held at A Hot Cup of Joe, and the next edition will be at Natures/Cultures blog.
The current edition of the Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival is ….. HERE, below the fold. Please visit all the sites and enjoy. We are heavy on linguistics this edition, by the way…
Continue reading The Four Stone Hearth Blog Carnival
How To Keep The Swine Flu Away
PZ Posted a link to the BBC version, here’s the YouTube version:
Michele Bachmann Understands the Economy
NOT!
Whack-Job Creationist Running for Mayor in Tulsa
Well, I spent the morning with a wonderful group of Middle and High School teacher committed to doing an excellent job of teaching evolution in their classrooms. Then, I go check my email and I’ve got a similar number of people sending me this story about a person who could be the next mayor of Tulsa Oklahoma, apparently.
Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that also include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets.
“It’s first,” she
said to calls of “hallelujah” at a rally outside the zoo. “If we can’t come to the foundation of faith in this community, those other answers will never come. We need to first of all recognize the fact that God needs to be honored in this city.”Falling, who has founded several Christian nonprofit groups and is a former city councilor, also said the next mayor needs to appoint people to boards, authorities and commissions who will “honor God.”
When asked whether she meant that she would recruit Christians to serve the city, Falling said she was talking about “people committed to their churches.” When asked whether she meant Christian churches, she said, “churches, yes.”
Continue reading Whack-Job Creationist Running for Mayor in Tulsa
What to do with Bible thumping students
…. Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it’s early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about “carbon dating.” This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you’ve gotten to the “evolution module”…
The student is talking about C14 dating and how it “has problems.” But you are a life science teacher and can’t think of a single point in your class that you really touch on C14. Dating in the evolution section does not involve C14. This is for later time periods, more in the area of archaeology, and you know nothing about it. So you brush off the question but are left with an uneasy feeling.
Next class, probably just after class, the same student, again at a moment that gives you zero warning and usually no time to think of how to respond, mentions something about the Laws of Thermodynamics. This question you find more interesting and possibly even useful as the starting point of a “teachable moment…” The nature of life itself includes the fact that life works upstream against entropy. That one utterly mind-blowing aspect of life is really all you need to define life itself. If that was the only thing you used to define life, you would have very few non-life entities or events accidentally included. If you can truly understand … I mean really, really truly at a detailed level understand …. how the heck life works against the gradient of entropy, then you will understand a LOT (like, at the MA level, at least) of what is going on. To get a believable and reasonable level of understanding of this, you must get more than just basic cell function … it is not good enough to just say “The mitochondria are the tiny little powerhouses of the cell” because you have not explained how that works. You need to know about ATP and stuff. Really, you even need to know why cells use ATP as energy but none of the other obvious forms of energy that they could use … the phylogenetic effect at a very
Continue reading What to do with Bible thumping students
Waiting for the Madmen to Speak Freely
Who else is going to have to get shot before this is taken seriously?
Watching the guy from New Hampshire, 9mm Glock-Man, being interviewed on Hardball made me want to throttle Chris Matthews. There are limits and they are being crossed every day. Stephanie Zvan has something you should read at Almost Diamonds: “To My Conservative Friends and Colleagues“