Baba Brinkman is a Canadian rap artist, writer, actor, and tree planter. He is well known for blending rap music and literature and science. He coined the term “lit hop” to describe his literature-based rap music.

Baba Brinkman earned a Master of Arts in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature and he studied human evolution and primatology with the orangutan researcher Biruté Galdikas. His thesis compared modern Hip hop freestyle battling with The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Get all the details about Sunday Morning’s show here.

A private high school in Pennsylvania refuses to admit a 13-year-old honor student who is HIV positive. The student’s lawyer has filed a lawsuit alleging the school “violated multiple anti-discrimination laws.”

Reported here

It is a boarding school founded and financed originally by Hershey, as in Hershey Bar. This school is known for doing good things especially with poor kids. They argue that since it is a boarding school, they can’t guarantee safety for the other children. Others argue that this makes The Hershey School out of step with reality and modern science and medicine.

It is illegal to shoot a cougar in Minnesota unless it is about to eat you. This did not stop Bruce Ihnen and Daniel Hamman from killing one of these beautiful beasts. Ihnen and Hamman need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Continue reading Please do not shoot the endangered animals →

NCSE’s Josh Rosenau and Steve Newton sit down with the West Virginia University freethinking, inquiring, secular humanists, and chat about the rise of science denial, the ongoing battles with creationists, NCSE’s new climate change initiative, and more. Where: Morgantown, West Virginia. When: 4/5/2011

Get out your 3D glasses and have a look at Vesta.

Coolest pictures of dinosaur nest ever.

Best science books of 2011 according to a Science Librarian

Southern Man ….

A small church in Pike County, Kentucky has voted to ban interracial couples from most church activities “to promote greater unity among the church body.”

Melvin Thompson, former pastor of Gulnare Freewill Baptist church, proposed the ban after Stella Harville brought her fiance, Ticha Chikuni, to services in June. Harville, who goes by the name Suzie, played the piano while Chikuni sang.

Before stepping down as pastor in August, Thompson told Harville that her fiance could not sing at the church again. Harville is white and Chikuni, a native of Zimbabwe, is…

guess. read the rest here

Hat Tip, Aseem

Nature’s beauty can be easily missed — but not through Louie Schwartzberg’s lens. His stunning time-lapse photography, accompanied by powerful words from Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, serves as a meditation on being grateful for every day.

Behavioral Biology is not Evolutionary Psychology, but many people, even smart people who should know better, get that confused. One could think of Evolutionary Psychology as a subset of behavioral biology. Or, one could think of Evolutionary Psychology as the deformed misguided freakish evil sibling of behavioral biology that should have been smothered at birth. Not that I have strong feelings about it or anything ….

Anyway, I like to talk about Behavioral Biology but I find too often that the people I’m conversing with think we are discussing Evolutionary Psychology. This is a little like being an astronomer and everyone wants to speak with you about astrology. But worse.

So, I’ve created an annotated bibliography of mainly classic (but some more recent) foundational readings in (mainly human) behavioral biology. It is here: A Tutorial in Human Behavioral Biology

And in related matters, do check out the podcast of the recent conversation with Eric Michale Johnson, Marie-Claire Shanahan, Desiree Schell and Moi: Culture and Tradition

Hat Tip Scott Brophy, who also wrote this great blog post: OMFG. WSJ Gets Loopy. Me, Too.

As you know, my very talented nephew, LeRoy Bell, was (unfairly) voted off the XFactor, which I have now officially stopped watching.

So the XFactor is no more as far as I’m concerned, but LeRoy isn’t. I’ve put together a compilation of some of his work for you to review. Here.

Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles — researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. Call it distributed DIY. And the results? Delicious.

Items from GLB that you don’t want to miss:

First, a rant on a piece of drek published by the Wall Street Journal: So, when did the Wall Street Journal become a disreputable rag?

Second, the Global Warming Denialist Debunking Handbook!

Damon Horowitz teaches philosophy through the Prison University Project, bringing college-level classes to inmates of San Quentin State Prison. In this powerful short talk, he tells the story of an encounter with right and wrong that quickly gets personal.