10,000 birds: A tale of misogyny:
It seems that Kathy Sierra, prominent tech blogger, co-creator of the Head First computer books and founder of the JavaRanch programmer site, has placed her blog on what may be permenant hiatus. She’s also afraid to leave her home. The reason is a barrage of vile, sexist threats.
Even aardvarks think Microsoft is Evil:
Dear Reader, have you heard of Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage?… This “genuinely advantageous” little program’s sole purpose is to check if the machine it’s installed on is running pirated Microsoft programs. Yet it is offered to me as if it were something I might find useful. This is exactly like if you have shopped at the same grocery store for decades, and then one day the proprietor starts frisking you for stolen goods every time you leave the store — “for your own safety’s sake”.
Linux, baby, here I come! I know there’s going to be a learning hurdle, but it’ll be worth it to get an operating system that puts my computing power to work for me, not for various large American corporations including the music and movie industry. And not getting called a thief every time I start a machine of mine will be a genuine advantage.
Read it all here. Hey, Martin, let me know if you need any help with Linux. You will be much happier in Linux land.
Yet another post on Egnor:
A professor of neurosurgery at SUNY-Stony Brook, Dr. Egnor has been pontificating on how “Darwinism” has nothing to offer to medicine; and indeed, that evolutionary biology has “hijacked” other fields of study
Read this new tirade here. It’s a good one.
Yours truly is packaged with “Phyllis Schlafly” (sp?) and Bryan Killian, and a bunch of Run Amok Illegal Aliens. I don’t know who Bryan Killian is, but I gotta say, Alasandra, if you don’t start making nice, I’m taking you off my blog roll!!!!
Big Bad Kristine also beats up on Michael Egnor, at Amused Muse.
Oh, and so does Matt at Behavioral Ecology Blog: “Egnor is “a dazzling nincompoop.”
There is an interesting paper out in National Review of Genetics on model organisms in EvoDevo. Coturnix reviews it, and provides links to reviews by Myers and Moran as well.
Consider the One Million Bloggers for Peace movement, described here on Code Pink of Peoria.
Sex differences in personal body temperature comfort level. I knew it! I knew it!
This week’s Casual Friday study attempted to get to the bottom of the age-old thermostat battle. In every office, classroom, and home, it seems, no one can agree on the proper temperature to set the thermostat. While one person is shivering like a wet poodle, their office-mate is sweating like fountain. I’ve talked with a few of my (now over-40) friends about the issue, and several of us agree that we seem to be getting more sensitive to temperature as we age.
A much more common stereotype, however, is that men tend to run hot while women run cold. …
Jason Rosenhouse of Evolutionblog (one word) covers Darwin and Design in Knoxville…
The ID folks put on one of their dog and pony shows in Knoxville, TN this weekend. My curiosity piqued, I decided to check it out.
So I left big bowls of food and water for the cats, piled into the Jason-mobile, pointed it South, and wound up in Knoxville six hours later. …
The conference was held in a ballroom in the Knoxville Convention Center….
I took a seat near the front and the conference got underway. First up was a fellow from the Discovery Institute whose name went by too quickly for me to jot down. After a few words of inroduction he recoutned the origin of his interest in this issue. Apparently he was a crime scene investigator who one day found himself at a crime scene involving a murdered woman in an optometrist’s office. The criminal was still there when our host arrived. He asked the young man why he would kill this woman, a mother of three with eight dollars in her purse. The kid replied, “I’m a juvenile, they’re not going to do anything to me. And number two, it’s survival of the fittest, man.” This started his own quest, said our host, to determine what was going on in our society. Ideas have consequences, he warned us sagely. Food for thought, indeed. I mean, obviously the problem was that gangs of teenage philosophers were thinking too deeply about modern biology.
Read it all in it’s multi part glory here.
Coverage of Francis Collins interview on NPR. I heard it to but I don’t want to write about it.
The Fresh Air interview is heavy on the religion and light on the science so don’t expect anything revealing about the genome revolution. Terry Gross and Dr. Collins only moved on to personalized preventive medicine, stem cell research, and cloning at around the 30 minute mark.
Genetics Health coverts it here.
John Swift, a pretty smart guy for a conservative, takes on the Sanjaya Problem.
Last week millions of nervous Americans gathered around their televisions to see if Sanjaya Malakar, the 17-year-old Indian-American contestant with the face of an angel and the voice of…something else, would finally be kicked off of American Idol. But once again Sanjaya defied all expectations and common sense and survived another round in the contest that defines this country as much as Nascar, the Superbowl, presidential elections and monster trucks. It is finally time to acknowledge that the inexplicable and frightening Sanjaya juggernaut has reached crisis proportions and something must be done about it before it is too late.
Read Sanjaya Must Be Stopped
The Great Back Yard Bird Count results are out … see the links and a nice picture of some robins at Migrations.
It’s still time to plan next weekend … “What do the godless do on Easter?” at Pharyngula.
What is the largest single organism on earth? Michael Egnor? No, not him this time…
It’s a stand of quaking aspen in Utah known as Pando.
From Sandwalk.






No Responses to “Metablog, alphabetically”
Please Wait
Leave a Reply