The NYT
reports
that the religious right is unhappy with the current set of Republican presidential candidates. McCain once called fundies “agents of intolerance”, Mitt Romney is too liberal, and Giuliani has — gasp! — been married three times.
Call me an optimist, but maybe this marks the beginning of an overhaul of the Republican party: perhaps even [...]
I’m guessing that some researcher wondered aloud in the cafeteria, “How come medical researchers don’t talk about the evolution of antibiotic resistance? I mean sure, they talk about it, but they don’t call it evolution.”
This article
in PLoS Biology attempts to measure this observation.
In a nutshell, they found that biology journals say that antibiotic resistance “evolves”, [...]
This story
(from Captain’s Quarters)
was posted at Free Republic last month:
Muslim Taxi Showdown In The Twin Cities (Muslim cabbies to transport people with alcohol in luggage)
The refusal of a large number of Islamic cabbies to transport passengers with alcohol in their luggage or service dogs for the blind and handicapped, and the local fatwa on which [...]
On this day in 1987,
SN1987A,
my favoritest supernova ever, blew up. According to
this diagram at the
University of Virginia,
the star started burning neon in 1971, oxygen in 1983, silicon in 1987, and blew up ten days after that. Let that be a lesson to you, young stars: neon is a gateway drug that leads to inevitable self-destruction.
By default, Emacs’s buffer list truncates lines at the right edge of the screen: if you’re editing a file with a long name, it doesn’t wrap around; you have to use C-x < and C-x > to scroll the viewport left and right.
I’d always wondered how to do that, since it can be useful when [...]
One more thing to be grateful for
if you live in a country with freedom of speech:
CAIRO, Egypt (Reuters) — An Alexandria court convicted an Egyptian blogger on Thursday for insulting both Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced him to four years in jail over his writings on the Internet.
…
One of Suleiman’s articles said [...]
I went to see Flock of Dodos for its Darwin Day showing on Thursday.
At one point, Randy Olson, the filmmaker, points out that the Intelligent Design movement has lots of points that fit on a bumper sticker, such as “no transitionals” (or “not enough transitional fossils”), “teach the controversy”, and so forth, while proponents of [...]
While working on the Dover trial podcast, I think we’ve found one of the most cruel lines one can inflict on an actor:
Their names here, just for a couple of
examples, Moythomasia and Howqualepis. The names are really
unimportant. And on the other side, Psarolepis and Achoania.
Again, the names are unimportant.
By the way, if anyone knows how [...]
Looking through my httpd logs, I ran across this post over at Teleological Blog:
Our friends at The Panda’s Thumb are planning a re-enactment podcast of the
Dover trial and are looking for voice talent. Imagine my surprise when I
received this e-mail today from someone named Lee Bowman:
Are you a voice talent? Andrew Arensburger is looking [...]
I love the Internet.
After PZ
mentioned
this project on Pharyngula, I got replies from several people, from places as far away as Texas and California, and several demos.
I’ve also installed Audacity 1.3. This is, unfortunately, a beta version, but it has an important new feature: the ability to have multiple “clips” per audio track, and slide them [...]