This is the closest thing I’ve got to an April Fools joke for you.

There’s been about 90 or so significant nuke accidents. That’s a lot considering that there are only some 400-500 or so facilities involved. But it’s OK. Nuclear power is totally safe. We have backups on backups on backups. Nothing can go wrong. … go wrong … go wrong..

Oh, and Happy Birthday Rachel Maddow! Here’s Rachel now …
Continue reading Happy Anniversary Nuclear Power Core Meltdown at Three Mile Island! →

The first step required to recall Wisconsin Republican Senator D. Kapanke has been completed; A petition with sufficient signatures to require a recall election has been filed. Challenges mus be filed over the next 10 days. If there remain enough valid signatures, the recall election is required.

I don’t really have a link for this but you can try this.

Ralph Langner:

When first discovered in 2010, the Stuxnet computer worm posed a baffling puzzle. Beyond its unusually high level of sophistication loomed a more troubling mystery: its purpose. Ralph Langner and team helped crack the code that revealed this digital warhead’s final target — and its covert origins. In a fascinating look inside cyber-forensics, he explains how.

Continue reading Cracking Stuxnet, a 21st-century cyber weapon →

“The human voice: mysterious, spontaneous, primal.” With these words, soprano Claron McFadden invites us to explore the mysteries of breathing and singing, as she performs the challenging “Aria,” by John Cage.

Continue reading Claron McFadden: Singing the primal mystery →

Watch it now before it gets pulled:

Continue reading The video the Republicans don’t want you to see →

The Anti-Evolution Bills in Tennessee have advanced.

Tennessee’s House Bill 368 was passed by the House Education Committee on March 29, 2011, and referred to the House Calendar and Rules Committee, while its counterpart, Senate Bill 893, is scheduled to be discussed by the Senate Education Committee on March 30, 2011. These bills, if enacted, would require state and local educational authorities to “assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies” and permit teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.” The only examples provided of “controversial” theories are “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”

Read all about it here.

Antievolution bill in New Mexico dies

New Mexico’s House Bill 302 died in committee on March 19, 2011, when the legislative session ended. The bill had been tabled by the Education Commitee of the House of Representatives on a 5-4 vote on February 18, 2011. A version of the currently popular “academic freedom” antievolution strategy, HB 302, if enacted, would have required teachers to be allowed to inform students “about relevant scientific information regarding either the scientific strengths or scientific weaknesses” pertaining to “controversial” scientific topics…

Read all about it here.

“Puppets always have to try to be alive,” says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena’s subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse, who trots (and gallops) convincingly onto the TED stage.

Continue reading The genius puppetry behind War Horse →

I am going to interview Neil deGrasse Tyson this coming Sunday on Minnesota Atheist Talk. Details of the timing and how you can listen to the interview live can be found here. Unlike my recent interview with PZ Myers, in which I literally asked him the very questions you posted on my blog, I’ve got a handful of topics I’d like to bring up with the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium and widely read author. However, I will be happy and honored to pick one or two (or three) questions among those you may post below. So go ahead and suggest a question or two.

below the fold
Continue reading Health Reform Matters →

Ferraro was from Newburgh, New York and served in the US House. She was a progressive Democrat. She ran for Vice President with Walter Mondale. She was the first woman, and the first Italian American (which in those days meant more than it does today) to do so.

The fact that she was a woman was used against the Democratic ticket by a fairly conservative press (never quite forgave Ted Koppel for being a dick about it all) and, of course, by the Repulbicans.

In those days (and still to some extent, today) powerful men attach themselves to women who will not give them too much trouble by having, like, opinions and experience and stuff. That way, all the bad shit the man is into can be more easily hidden from the prying eyes of the press and public. But when a woman ran for office, she would have this husband, and he would have a life, and thus, there would be two people to be scrutinized. This as also considered important, I assume, because of a barely subconscious presumption that a woman in elected office would be influenced by her husband, while a man in elected office would be assisted by his wife.

This worked against Ferraro as Republican dirty tricksters implied that the Italian candidate and her Italian husband were unscrupulous. There were even mob-connection implications, which were absurd. The press and the Republicans screamed when Ferraro’s husband refused to release his own business financial information (it was not required by law) and this became the major issue in the campaign. They were eventually forced to release this information. It was fairly uninteresting.

No one can remember what else happened that year, but women were subsequently excluded form serious consideration in the presidential arena thereafter. I personally feel that this was the basis for what would become a growing commitment on the part of the right wing to this sort of strategy to keep progressives, women, and non-whites out of politics. It was, in essence, a first draft of today’s birther strategy.

The next woman to run on a national ticket was the only other one ever in the US: Sarah Palin. I apologize for uttering that name in a blog post on Geraldine Ferraro.