When I post about race, the racists show up and use my blog to spew their hokey science all over the place. There are reasons that I tolerate that to a certain extent, but there are limits. When a student shows up in a classroom and starts asking “innocent” questions of the teacher about “radiocarbon dating” and “transitional fossils” and such the teacher is being played by the student, who was likely trained (as it were) by some crazy yahoo parent or preacher. When AGW denialists show up on a science blog and start quoting from the famous stolen emails … same thing.

If such abuse of blog space or classroom time happens again and again and again, the person to whom it is happening has to be considered, eventually, a bit of a chump. As in “Charlie Brown is such a chump”

And by that, I mean…
Continue reading Don’t be anybody’s Charlie Brown →

Happy New Year and welcome to this new “on-line journal” which will be a collection of essays. It will be sort of a continuation of thoughts from my book, “Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style.” In the essays, which will be roughly twice a week, I will be making reference to parts of the book from time to time.

Check it out